Empire by Antonio Negri, Professor Michael Hardt

manage to articu-
    late it only superficially and ephemerally, as a chaotic, indeterminate
    horizon marked by the ungraspable event.15
    We can better grasp the relationship between social production
    and biopower in the work ofa group ofcontemporary Italian
    Marxist authors who recognize the biopolitical dimension in terms
    ofthe new nature ofproductive labor and its living development
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    in society, using terms such as ‘‘mass intellectuality,’’ ‘‘immaterial
    labor,’’ and the Marxian concept of‘‘general intellect.’’16 These
    analyses set off from two coordinated research projects. The first
    consists in the analysis ofthe recent transformations ofproductive
    labor and its tendency to become increasingly immaterial. The
    central role previously occupied by the labor power ofmass factory
    workers in the production ofsurplus value is today increasingly
    filled by intellectual, immaterial, and communicative labor power.
    It is thus necessary to develop a new political theory ofvalue that
    can pose the problem ofthis new capitalist accumulation ofvalue
    at the center ofthe mechanism ofexploitation (and thus, perhaps,
    at the center ofpotential revolt). The second, and consequent,
    research project developed by this school consists in the analysis of
    the immediately social and communicative dimension ofliving labor
    in contemporary capitalist society, and thus poses insistently the
    problem ofthe new figures ofsubjectivity, in both their exploitation
    and their revolutionary potential. The immediately social dimension
    ofthe exploitation ofliving immaterial labor immerses labor in all
    the relational elements that define the social but also at the same
    time activate the critical elements that develop the potential of
    insubordination and revolt through the entire set oflaboring prac-
    tices. After a new theory ofvalue, then, a new theory ofsubjectivity
    must be formulated that operates primarily through knowledge,
    communication, and language.
    These analyses have thus reestablished the importance ofpro-
    duction within the biopolitical process ofthe social constitution,
    but they have also in certain respects isolated it—by grasping it in
    a pure form, refining it on the ideal plane. They have acted as if
    discovering the new forms of productive forces—immaterial labor,
    massified intellectual labor, the labor of‘‘general intellect’’—were
    enough to grasp concretely the dynamic and creative relationship
    between material production and social reproduction. When they
    reinsert production into the biopolitical context, they present it
    almost exclusively on the horizon oflanguage and communication.
    One ofthe most serious shortcomings has thus been the tendency
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    T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S T I T U T I O N O F T H E P R E S E N T
    among these authors to treat the new laboring practices in biopoliti-
    cal society only in their intellectual and incorporeal aspects. The productivity ofbodies and the value ofaffect, however, are absolutely central in this context. We will elaborate the three primary
    aspects ofimmaterial labor in the contemporary economy: the
    communicative labor ofindustrial production that has newly be-
    come linked in informational networks, the interactive labor of
    symbolic analysis and problem solving, and the labor ofthe produc-
    tion and manipulation of affects (see Section 3.4). This third aspect,
    with its focus on the productivity of the corporeal, the somatic, is
    an extremely important element in the contemporary networks of
    biopolitical production. The work ofthis school and its analysis
    ofgeneral intellect, then, certainly marks a step forward, but its
    conceptual framework remains too pure, almost angelic. In the final
    analysis, these new conceptions too only scratch the surface of the
    productive dynamic ofthe new theoretical f
    ramework ofbio-
    power.17
    Our task, then, is to build on these partially