richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

146 Gramsci is Deadintellectual activities, Lazzarato claims that the division betweenmental and manual labour is becoming less stark, that there is more‘brain’ in manual production, and less autonomy, or more ‘brawn’, inthose sectors that are commonly associated with mental work. Frommy own experience as an academic, I can certainly attest to the manyways in which teaching and research are turning into assembly-lineactivities: hundreds of students are crammed into lecture theatreswhere they are force-fed ‘points’ from a computerized display, whilethe very topics that we research are increasingly circumscribed bylocal and national prerogatives based on ‘social relevance’ definedas state policy applicability or potential for commercialization.Undoubtedly, state bureaucrats and capitalist managers now haveas much or more to say about what artists and intellectuals do andhow they do it, at the same time as every job seems to require somefamiliarity with a computer or with computerized equipment.At the same time as it highlights certain commonalities amongworkers today, however, the concept of immaterial labour also suffersfrom a tendency to flatten out a mountainous field of difference. Itis clear that the maquiladora worker in Mexico and the chip designerin California both partake of immaterial labour. But while the latteris among the highest-paid employees in the world, works in pristineconditions, and either has or doesn’t need union protection, theformer is subject to dehumanizing conditions both physically andemotionally and faces death or dismissal if she tries to change hersituation. When we think beyond the G8 countries, and especiallywhen we think about relations between G8 countries and those thatsupply them with cheap labour, the claim that the division betweenmental/material labour is being blurred also appears suspect. Theassembly-line worker in the ‘special economic zone’ never gets todesign anything, but merely implements the commands of theengineer, who for his part does no menial labour of any sort. Itseems that the globalizing information economy is in fact preciselydesigned to reinforce and exploit the mental/manual division of labour,in a sense to export the worst effects of capitalist alienation andimmiseration to people of colour—and especially women of colour—living outside the walls of fortress G8. All of this to say that whilethe concept of immaterial labour clearly has analytic value, it needsto be subjected to feminist/postcolonial critique.With this caveat in mind, I want to explore the links betweenimmaterial labour/mass intellectuality and the concept of generalintellect. According to Nick Dyer-Witheford, mass intellectuality