Technology, New Humanities, And The Materiality Of 'immaterial Labor
(Rob Wilkie)
Technology, New Humanities, and The Materiality of 'Immaterial Labor
This paper examines the deep influence of Antonio Negri's theory of labor and Technology (Labor of Dionysus) on contemporary cultural theory by focusing on his concept of "immaterial" labor and its impact on understanding the relation between technology and the humanities.
The notion of "immaterial labor" is grounded in the assumption that the old economy of labor has been replaced by the weightless "new economy" of knowledge, a "cyber" capitalism in which it is no longer production but the consumption of goods that shapes people's everyday, contingent and immediate identity (Paul du Gay, ed. Production of Culture/Cultures of Production; David Morley et. al, ed. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies).
Analyzing Negri's concept in some detail, I will argue that any understanding of the Humanities and their relation to technology in the emerging global culture must take the social relations of labor into account and that Negri's concept of "immaterial labor" obscures these relations. I re-read Negri along such texts of Marx as Grundrisse and Capital and propose that contrary to the assumptions of an "immaterial" economy of consumption there has not been a structural change in capitalism and that a new materialist cultural theory that is grounded in what Marx calls, "social metabolism" (Capital 1, 207) is necessary to theorize the relation of technology and the humanities. The humanities, I argue, should become a space of resistance to the alienation of labor and act as pedagogies of social and cultural transformation.
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