This w/end, A and I reflected a little on Virno's thesis of postfordism as "the communism of capital." In other words, while it seems that many have a perfectly good critique of the fordist regularity, there's not a lot of consideration given to 'postfordist enjoyment': the injunction to consume, circulate, be a subject that Lazzarato talks about, but also Virno, where he talks about the cynicism of the multitude. The blind indifference to content that commodification gives rise to, the domination of a particular form of sociality, communication, etc as exchange and so on.

This reminded me of a wierd moment during my time at Uni, where people calling themselves 'Foucauldians' -- as if Foucault himself would have felt comfortable with such a systematisation -- engaged in what can only be described as the injunction to speak about sex, all the time. What was peculiar about this, of course, is that this injunction to speak, confess, this exhibitionism of the body and 'the soul' is precisely what Foucault argued was the new form of control, subjectivation. So, these self-declared 'Foucauldians' were not so much readers of Foucault but instances of what he set out to analyse the emergence of. And it's not like reading Foucault -- assuming they did read rather than carry it around under their arms as a badge of belonging -- actually managed to interrupt that gleeful membership of the society of control.

The only way I can explain this is that the dull compulsion of 'economic' relations -- which are clearly not confined to a space called 'the economy' -- are so great. Nothing new there, I guess. But I still find myself amazed at the inversion of politics that this is capable of producing. Like the small bunch of people who recently called an event 'Precari-Us?'. Unlike the article I wrote of the same name before this, the answer they give is a fairly clear 'yes', given the speakers, for one. In other words, an instance of those processes which I set out to analyse the emergence of, not give licence to. So, I guess I feel inclined to disassociate myself from that particular 'activist' niche market, whose indifference to content (to politics) has become so predictable I shouldn't be surprised.