Convention and Materialism: Uniqueness Without Aura by Paolo Virno

Author:Paolo Virno [Virno, Paolo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: philosophy, Political, political science, History & Theory, Social Science, sociology, Social Theory
ISBN: 9780262045803
Google: 2uo2EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2021-08-03T00:26:05.389551+00:00

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In conclusion, we can sketch an answer, albeit brief, to the question we asked previously concerning the unchanged validity of a monistic concept of production. By now there should be no doubt that it is a negative answer.

While the empirical analysis of the very new configurations of the material labor process and of the contemporary quality of what Marx called “simple labor” appears to be fundamental in every respect (including the econometric), as soon as finalism is gone such an analysis no longer enjoys a unitary point of view. Notably, the quality of “qualified labor” eludes the rhythm of a uniform and universal action-with-purpose, since it is rather determined by specific scientific paradigms and different models of communication. It is precisely the epistemic depth of production that obliges us to fragment analysis, to distinguish and highlight incommensurability where what seemed to prevail was at least analogy and conformity of kind, if not identity. The existence of several models of knowledge and communication prevents us from thinking one production, “production in general.”

When “the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect,” and hence an epistemological analysis of the labor process becomes mandatory, it becomes necessary to circumscribe and investigate one by one the different constellations of knowledge/production/communication, which are never equivalent. In a word, we need to replace the void generality of “purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values” with a differentiated set of epistemic formations—and what I mean by this phrase is a unit of measurement that includes the particular qualitative relationship entertained by different sections of social labor with the procedures and formalisms of the general intellect or autonomous abstract intellect. The analysis of social labor, from the specific angle of the epistemic formations within which it is inserted, does not seem to be entirely superfluous for a materialism that ceases to glance timidly or with distaste at the power of productive forces.

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