Introduction to Christian Marazzi's "Rules for The Incommensurable"
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Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Introduction to Christian Marazzi's “Rules for The Incommensurable”
This is the second chapter of the book Il posto dei calzini. La svolta linguistica dell'economia e i suoi effetti nella politica [The Place for the Socks: The Linguistic Turn of the Economy and its Effects on Politics], first published in Switzerland by Casagrande Editore (1994) and later in Italy by Bollati Boringhieri (1999). The book is a small, early classic of "immaterial labor" theories, and it is in fact quite inexplicable that such an important reflection should still not be available in English. Not only has this work been quoted by Negri and Hardt in Empire, but it continues to be referenced by a large number of scholars working in the field of "cognitive capitalism."
Christian Marazzi, who is also active on the European social and political scene, particularly in the ongoing struggle for an unconditional universal income, is a professor of political economy at the Scuola Universitaria della Svizzera in Lugano, Switzerland. Following Il posto dei calzini, he has published two other books, E il denaro va. Esodo e rivoluzione dei mercati finanziari (Bellinzona: Casagrande, 1998) [And the Money Goes. Exodus and revolution of the Financial Markets] and Capitale e linguaggio. Dalla new economy all'economia di Guerra (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2002) [Capital and Language. From the New Economy to the War Economy]. Neither of these later books has yet been translated.
In the following essay, Marazzi argues that traditional economical notions and indicators are inadequate for fully comprehending the change undergone by the process of production during the last decades of capitalist development. Marazzi considers the recession of the early 1990s as the first crisis clearly attributable to the economics of the "post-Fordist" mode of production. The nature both of the objects produced and of the worker who produces them has been transformed: capitalism is increasingly involved in the production of social relations, and the worker participates in production primarily as a social subject, independently from his actual "working hours" or even his salaried performance. In this respect, Marazzi finds that work has been "feminized" by cognitive capitalism because, much like the domestic labor represented in this essay by doing laundry, it involves forms of knowledge and communication not reducible to classical economic notions of valorization or the simple law of supply and demand.
For Marazzi, these changes in the actual functioning of our economy have to be accompanied by a renewal of political references and goals: [End Page 10] capitalist exploitation of the new forms of labor can only be fought if we fully understand how the socio-political field of struggle is now configured and what the new power relations in it are.
Giuseppina Mecchia is Associate Professor of French and Italian at the University, where she also directs the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies. She has published essays on French writers and intellectuals in the context of 19th- and 20th Century politics. She is currently working on a book about late 20th-Century Italian and French leftist political thought.
