Civilized Capitalist Machines: Deleuze and Negri

Abstract

In their most recent collaborations, Empire and Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that the primary effect of informatic, cybernetic and prosthetic technologies is neither the precipitation of absolute chaos (a la Baudrillard) nor the fulfilment of absolute repetition (a la Jameson) in the mode of production. Rather the growth of the ‘immaterial’ forms of labour which has arisen from the global distribution of these technologies has revitalized the flow of revolutionary desire. New forms of praxis arise, the general intellect and aesthetic imagination of the masses are recharged, and the global-technological systems of capitalism conspire to produce a new revolutionary subject — ‘the multitude’ — which will eventually transform the repressive organization of the world economy. Thus for Hardt and Negri it is the symbiotic relationship between capital and the technologies which have precipitated the virtual expansion of debt, exploitation, consumption and productivity which gives rise to the countervailing force/subject which is the inheritor of Marx’s revolutionary demand. This account of the transformative power of technological systems depends upon a very specific reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia: one in which the ‘schizophrenic’ flows of desire that are put into play by techno-scientific capitalism are conceived as cumulative and universal rather than nomadic and contingent.