[iDC] Michael Jackson and the death of macrofame
Christian Fuchs
christian.fuchs at sbg.ac.at
Mon Jul 6 09:58:49 UTC 2009
i agree that class positions become more flexible, but nonetheless think
that a difference between capitalist and proletariat can be maintained.
precarious self-employed persons in one-man companies are also in a way
forced to sell their labour by contract. knowledge workers - control of
means of production: if they work for a wage, then they do not control
the product of their work, the central aspectof exploitation is surplus
value production, not the control of the means of production. if workers
are manipulated, have a right-wing consciousness, or consciousness that
displays mimesis with bourgeois consciousness - then you can doubt that
they are in control of their brains as means of production - their
brains are being controlled by alien forces, ideology is an important
aspect of contemporary production. "knowledge work" as such is not a
class, it just describes a kind of occupation, also most of what factory
owners do is knowledge production. For Marx, work was the production of
use-values and labour the process of value creation (Capital, Volume 1,
chapter 7). Capitalists that produce knowledge create use values that
are necessary for organizing exploitation, they do not create value, but
exploit value, whereas knowledge labour creates surplus value. It most
be possible to make a certain theoretical distinctions between
exploiters and the exploited in the production process, otherwise all
must be considered as one mass of "knowledge workers" and no critical
approach is possible any longer, which then implies that no exploitation
exists today. In my book "Internet and Society", I have reflected on the
relationship of knowledge and class in chapter 7.3. arguing that
knowledge production in one sense is not a process of class formation,
whereas in another sense it is (knowledge work as non-class and class).
Christian
Michael Bauwens schrieb:
> Hi Julian, Christian:
>
> but isn´t that the general condition of an increasing number of ´knowledge workers´? We are salaried workers one day, freelance the other day, then we may decide to launch our own venture, often returning to a salaried position again ...
>
> Any too rigid class definition would fail to see this reality which is furthermore one in which we knowledge workers control a large amount of our own means of production, i.e. our brains, computers and access to the socialized networks ...
>
> Michel
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
>
>> From: Christian Fuchs <christian.fuchs at sbg.ac.at>
>> To: Julian Kücklich <julian at kuecklich.de>; idc <idc at mailman.thing.net>
>> Sent: Friday, June 26, 2009 8:55:58 AM
>> Subject: Re: [iDC] Michael Jackson and the death of macrofame
>>
>> And how is this category of playbour or play-labour connected to Michael
>> Jackson? Was Michael Jackson a playbourer, a capitalist, an immaterial
>> worker, or something else? If there is no theoretical way that allows us
>> to distinguish the class position of Michael Jackson from the class
>> position of a precarious call center agent or a precarious
>> singer/dancer/writer etc, and we consider them all as part of one
>> "class" or describe them all with one category such as "playbour", then
>> such categories do not make sense because they too much intermingle
>> different socio-economic life worlds. So what categories should we use
>> for describing the political economy of Michael Jackson? Is playbour a
>> sufficient category=
>>
>> Christian
>>
>> Julian Kücklich schrieb:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Trebor asked me to write "a succinct, one paragraph definition of
>>> playbour." Okay, here goes:
>>>
>>> If we assume that play is distinct from "ordinary life" (Huizinga),
>>> and that it constitutes an "occasion of pure waste" (Caillois), then
>>> playbour is the re-entry of ordinary life into play, with a
>>> concomitant valorization of play activities. Insofar as life (bios) is
>>> always productive, and be it only in the sense that it produces waste,
>>> the extraction of value from play can be seen as a form of waste
>>> management; and insofar as play can be seen as a waste of time, the
>>> logic of playbour demands that time be wasted efficiently. In this
>>> sense we could also call playbour the Taylorization of leisure. Like
>>> other forms of affective or immaterial labour, playbour is not
>>> productive in the sense of resulting in a product, but it is the
>>> process itself that generates value. The means of production are the
>>> players themselves, but insofar as they only exist within play
>>> environments by virtue of their representations, and their
>>> representations are usually owned by the providers of these
>>> environments, the players cannot be said to be fully in control of
>>> these means. Playbour is suffused with an ideology of play, which
>>> effectively masks labour as play, and disguises the process of
>>> self-expropriation as self-expression. However, exploitation and
>>> empowerment, subjectification and objectification, wastefulness and
>>> efficiency coexist in the ambiguous "third space" of playbour, where
>>> these binary oppositions break down, and thus open up new
>>> possibilities of intersubjectification.
>>>
>>> Hmm, maybe not so succinct, but it'll have to do for now. I'll try to
>>> condense it to 140 characters and tweet it later.
>>>
>>> Julian aka @cucchiaio
>>>
>>> 2009/6/25 Trebor Scholz >
>>>
>>> Hi Julian,
>>> Great, could you re-join the discussion with a succinct, one
>>> paragraph definition of playbour
>>> and a very short argumentation of why neither play nor labor
>>> easily fit the situation?
>>> Cheers,
>>> Trebor
>>>
>>> ----
>>> Written tersely, typed imperfectly, and then sent from my phone
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
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>> --
>> - - -
>> Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christian Fuchs
>> Unified Theory of Information Research Group
>> University of Salzburg
>> Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18
>> 5020 Salzburg
>> Austria
>> christian.fuchs at sbg.ac.at
>> Phone +43 662 8044 4823
>> http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at
>> http;//www.uti.at
>> Editor of
>> tripleC - Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation | Open Access Journal for a
>> Global Sustainable Information Society
>> http://www.triple-c.at
>> Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information
>> Age. New York: Routledge.
>> http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/i&s.html
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
>> (distributedcreativity.org)
>> iDC at mailman.thing.net
>> https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc
>>
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>> http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
>>
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>> RSS feed:
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>>
>> iDC Chat on Facebook:
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>>
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>>
>
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>
>
>
>
--
- - -
Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christian Fuchs
Unified Theory of Information Research Group
University of Salzburg
Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18
5020 Salzburg
Austria
christian.fuchs at sbg.ac.at
Phone +43 662 8044 4823
http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at
http;//www.uti.at
Editor of
tripleC - Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation | Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society
http://www.triple-c.at
Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge.
http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/i&s.html
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