Interesting discussion in an interview with Paolo Virno....
On how 'collective' work can 'be' today... How it differs from what that was in the Fordist era in the developed areas of Europe and North America, and what the features of the Post-Fordist era are today ... How we are all entrepeneurs (privatized, in essence), and yet when we work together on art projects, on research projects, etc. which are not strictly commercial in their focus and aim, ---something else is happening then the 'norm' in this current political-economic structure of Post-Fordism.... This something else, this surplus, is in some ways fragile and ambivalent, as well...
extracts:
Micro-collectives, workgroups, research teams, etc. are half-productive, half-political structures. If we want, they are the no man’s land in which social cooperation stops being exclusively an economic resource and starts appearing as a public, non-stately sphere.
We are all entrepreneurs, even if an intermittent, occasional, contingent way. But, as I was saying, micro-collectives have an ambivalent character: apart from being productive structures, they are also germs of political organization. What is the importance of such ambivalence? What can it suggest in terms of the theory of the organization? In my opinion, this is the crucial issue: nowadays the subversion of the capitalistic relations of production can manifest itself through the institution of a public, non-stately sphere, of a political community oriented towards the general intellect.
...features of post-Fordist production (the valorization of its own faculty of language, a fundamental relation with the presence of the other, etc.) demand a radically new form of democracy. Micro-collectives are the symptom—as fragile and contradictory as they may be—of an exodus, of an enterprising subtraction of the rules of wage labor.
...'the whole is less than the sum of the parts'... It is a formula that correctly expresses the copiousness of social cooperation regarding its economical-productive finality. We are currently witnessing a phenomenon in collective intelligence that is identical to what happened thirty years ago in Italy, with the Sicilian oranges, when tons of fruit were destroyed in order to keep prices high. But this comparison only works to a certain extent. Nowadays, the quota of collective intelligence that is thrown away in the production of goods is not physically destroyed, but somehow remains there, as a ghost, as a non-used resource that is still available. The power that is freed by the sum of the parts, even if not expressed in its whole, meet a very different destiny. Sometimes it becomes frustration and melancholic inertia, or it generates pitiless competition and hysterical ambition. In other cases, it can be used as a propeller for subversive political action...Also, here we need to bear in mind an essential ambivalence: the same phenomenon can become both a danger and a salvation. The copiousness of collective intelligence is, altogether, heimlich—familiar and propitious—and unheimlich—disturb-ing and extraneous.
...today’s collective practices are connected to the decentered and heterogeneous net that composes post-Fordist social cooperation....Co-authorship is an attempt to correct on an aesthetic level the reality of a production in which “the whole is less than the sum of the parts.” It is an attempt to exhibit what would be the sum of the parts if it was not reduced to that whole....
from The Soviets of the Multitude: On Collectivity and Collective Work (Paolo Virno and Alexei Penzin)
download a copy of the full interview here
more works by Paolo Virno at arg under his name in the Library section
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