richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

... and Now 147should be seen as ‘the subjective component’ (1999: 222) of generalintellect, as the ‘variable’, or human side of ‘a labour of networksand communicative discourse’ (Vincent in Dyer-Witheford 1999:227). But human beings cannot carry out their functions withinthis system without the help of its ‘objective, fixed, machine side’(227), that is, the computer networks and modes of organization ofwork that are characteristic of multinational corporations and statebureaucracies. Thus Hardt and Negri explicitly link general intellect,biopower and the societies of control, arguing that Empire establishesa ‘new relationship between production and life’ (2000: 365). Theyclaim to take previous work on general intellect a step further, byconsidering its embodied, experiential aspects, instead of focusing‘almost exclusively on the horizon of language and communication’(29). With this observation, it becomes possible, or perhaps necessary,to consider bodies, symbolic forms, and mechanical/informationalsystems—our entire being as postmodern subjects—as intimatelyenmeshed in a ‘vast machine that dominates society’ (Negri in Dyer-Witheford 1999: 227).In a sense this is not an entirely new argument; it may be read,for example, as an updated version of Herbert Marcuse’s analysisin One Dimensional Man (1964). But autonomist theory has refusedto wallow in the kind of quietistic cynicism that is characteristic ofthe Frankfurt School, insisting instead that while general intellectmight be immersed in the biopolitical systems of control uponwhich Empire relies, it also has the potential to undermine thesevery systems. The examples that can be cited here are legion, from theadroit manipulation of image-hungry television news outlets by earlyGreenpeace activists, to the use of email and the web to link activistsof all stripes, most commonly evoked in the proliferation of theZapatista’s so-called ‘netwar’ (Cleaver 1998). Thus, the autonomistsargue, general intellect not only enslaves us, but also offers the toolsof our liberation. Capitalism, they claim, is once again producingits own gravediggers, but this time they are going to use keyboardsrather than shovels.Indeed, the defining characteristics of autonomist theory is itsinsistence that it is the workers (in the factories, homes and seasidecottages equipped with satellite internet connections) who havecreated and sustained capitalism/Empire, not only by allowing theirproductivity to be captured and exploited, as in the standard marxistanalysis, but also through their efforts to ‘rupture this recuperativemovement, unspring the dialectical spiral, and speed the circulation