"Immaterial Civil War

Prototypes of Conflict within Cognitive Capitalism"

Matteo Pasquinelli

We are implicit, here, all of us, in a vast
physical construct of artificially linked
nervous systems. Invisible. We cannot touch it.
— William Gibson, "In the visegrips of Dr. Satan"

Conflict is not a commodity. On the contrary,
commodity is above all conflict.
— guerrigliamarketing.it

1. A revival of the Creative Industries

In early 2006 the term Creative Industries (CI) pops up in the
mailboxes and mailing lists of many cultural workers, artists,
activists and researchers across Europe, as well as in the calls for
seminars and events. An old question spins back: curiously, for the
first time, a term is picked up from institutional jargon and brought
unchanged into alt culture, used so far to debate other keywords
(that may deserve an acronym as well!) and other post-structures like
network culture (NC), knowledge economy (KE), immaterial labour (IL),
general intellect (GI) and of course Free Software (FS), Creative
Commons (CC) etc. The original 1998 definition adopted by the
Creative Industries Task Force set up by Tony Blair stated: "Those
industries that have their origin in individual creativity, skill and
talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through
the generation and exploitation of intellectual property".1 As you
can see, social creativity remains largely left out of that
definition: after many years Tony Blair is still stealing your ideas.
Let's try to do another backstory.First, there is a European genealogy. Adorno and Horkheimer in 1944
shaped the concept of "cultural industry" as a form of "mass
deception" in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. In the early 90's the
Italian post-Operaism (in exile or not) introduced the concepts of
immaterial labour, general intellect, cognitive capitalism,
cognitariat as the emerging forms of the autonomous power of the
multitudes (authors like Negri, Lazzarato, Virno, Marazzi, Berardi).
In the same period Pierre Levy was talking of collective
intelligence. Later, since 2001, the transnational mobilisation of
the Euro May Day has linked precarious workers and cognitive workers
under the holy protection of San Precario. Second, there is an Anglo-
American genealogy. During the golden age of net culture the debate
around ICT and new economy was often linked to the knowledge economy
(conceptualised by Peter Drucker in the 60's). In 2001 the copyleft
debate escaped the boundaries of Free Software and established the
Creative Commons licences. In 2002 the best seller The Rise of the
Creative Class by Richard Florida (based on controversial statistical
evidences) pushed trendy concepts like creative economy.

After years of fetishising precarious labour and abstract gift
economy, a Copernican turn is taking place (hopefully): attention
shifts to autonomous labour and autonomous production. A new
consciousness arises around the creation of meaning, that is creation
of value and — consequently — creation of conflict. It is the
political re-engagement of a generation of creative workers (before
getting mixed up with chain workers) and at the same time the
"economic" engagement of a generation of activists (as the Seattle
movement was more concerned about global issues than their own
income). My creativity = my value = my conflict. And backwards.

2. The most part of the value (and of the conflict)

In this essay I try to frame a missing part of the debate around
"creative" labour. First, I point out the collective dimension of
value creation: it is an investigation of the social processes behind
creativity, the creative power of collective desire and the political
nature of any cognitive product (idea, brand, media, artefact,
event). Question: what or who produces the value? Answer: the "social
factory" produces the greatest portion of the value (and of the
conflict). Second, I spotlight the political space of cognitive
competition. I do not focus on labour conditions or neoliberal
policies within Creative Industries, but on the public life of
immaterial objects. I put cognitive products in a space of forces,
framing such objects from outside rather than inside. I am trying to
answer another question: if production goes creative and cognitive,
collective and social, what are the spaces and the forms of conflict?
As a conclusion I introduce the scenario of an "immaterial civil
war", a semiotic space that Creative Industries are only a small part
of.

So far it seems a linear scenario, but there is also a grey zone to
take in consideration: the massification of the "creative" attitude.
"Everyone is a creative" is a common slogan today. Many years after
Benjamin's artwork, the mass artist enters the age of his social
reproducibility and "creativity" is sold as a status symbol. The
social base of Creative Industries is getting bigger (at least in the
Western world) and unveils new scenarios. In a first period, Creative
Industries become hegemonic (as a fact and as an concept). In a
second one, they face an entropy of meaning and producers. Thanks to
the internet and the digital revolution, everyday we witness the
conflicts of the latter stage.

All the different schools previously introduced focus each on a
different perspective. To clarify the subject we have to explode the
question in its components. The "creative thing" could be dismantled
in: creative labour (as autonomous or dependent work), creativity as
faculty and production, the creative product (with all its layers:
hardware, software, knoware, brand, etc.), the free reproducibility
of the cognitive object, the intellectual property on the product
itself, the social creativity behind it, the process of collective
valorisation around it. Moreover, the social group of creative
workers (the "creative class" or "cognitariat"), the "creative
economy" and the "creative city" represent further and broader contexts.

The original definition of Creative Industries focus on the
intellectual property exploitation. Richard Florida's concepts of
creative class and creative economy are based on (controversial)
statistics only and on the idea of a political agenda for CI fuelled
by local governments. On another level, Creative Commons is about
open licences, a formal solution to handle the free reproduction and
sharing triggered by the digital revolution on a mass scale
("building a layer of reasonable copyright"2 as they put it). Coming
from a different (Latin) background, the post-Operaism and the
precarious workers movement point out the social and distributed form
of production (Tronti's "social factory"3) and ask for a guaranteed
minimum income. Geographically close to the last ones, Enzo Rullani
(initiator of the term 'cognitive capitalism') suggests to focus on
the autonomous power of producers rather than on the dimension of
dependent labour, as public welfare is a solution that transfers
knowledge, risk and innovation capital to institutions. Such a
disambiguation of political views around CI is needed to clarify what
the present essay is not covering. I will not focus on the labour
conditions of (precarious) cognitive workers, on the exploitation of
intellectual property an on the legal protection of the public
domain, but on the collective production of value and the strong
competition cognitive producers face in the "immaterial" domain.

3. Lazzarato reading Tarde: the public dimension of value

Contemporary criticism does not have a clear perspective of the
public life of cognitive products: it is largely dominated by the
metaphors stolen from Creative Commons and Free Software, which
support quite a flat vision with no notion of value and valorisation.
For this reason, I want to introduce a more dynamic scenario
following Maurizio Lazzarato and Gabriel Tarde that explain how value
is produced by an accumulation of social desire and collective
imitation. Lazzarato has re-introduced the thought of the French
sociologist Tarde in his book Puissances de l'invention4 [Powers of
invention] and in his article "La psychologie économique contre
l'economie politique"5.

To sum up in few lines, Tarde's philosophy challenges the
contemporary political economy because it: 1) dissolves the
opposition of material and immaterial labour and consider the
"cooperation between brains" a main force in the traditional pre-
capitalist societies not only in postfordism; 2) puts innovation as
the driving force instead of monetary accumulation only (Smith, Marx
and Schumpter did not really understand innovation as an internal
force of capitalism, a vision more concerned about re-production
rather than production); 3) develops a new theory of value no more
based on use-value only, but also on other kinds of value, like truth-
value and beauty-value (Lazzarato: "The economic psychology is a
theory of the creation and constitution of values, whereas political
economy and Marxism are theories to measure values"6).

Tarde's crucial insight for the present work is about the relation
between science and public opinion. As Lazzarato put it: "According
to Tarde, an invention (of science or not) that is not imitated is not
socially existent: to be imitated an invention needs to draw
attention, to produce a force of 'mental attraction' on other brains,
to mobilise their desires and beliefs through a process of social
communication. [...] Tarde figures out an issue crossing all his
work: the constituent power of the public."7 We could say: any
creative idea that is not imitated is not socially existent and has
no value. In Tarde the Public is the "social group of the future",
integrating for the first time mass media as an apparatus of
valorisation in a sort of anticipation of postfordism. Moreover Tarde
considers the working class itself as a kind of "public opinion" that
is unified on the base of common beliefs and affects rather than
common interests.

The Tarde-Lazzarato connection introduces a dynamic or better
competitive model, where immaterial objects have to face the laws of
the noosphere — innovation and imitation — in quite a Darwinistic
environment. Tarde is also famous for introducing the S-shaped curve
to describe the process of dissemination of innovation, another good
suggestion for all the digital planners that believe in a free and
flat space.

However a dissemination process is never as linear and peaceful as a
mathematical graph might suggest. On a collective scale a cognitive
product always "fights" against other products to attain a natural
leadership. The destiny of an idea is always hegemonic, even in the
"cooperation between brains" and in the digital domain of free
multiplication. The natural environment of ideas is similar to the
state of nature in Hobbes. The motto Homo homini lupus [the man is a
wolf to man] could be applied to media, brands, signs and any kind of
"semiotic machines" of the knowledge economy. It is an immaterial but
not often silent "war of all ideas against all ideas." If Lazzarato
and Tarde track back the collective making of value, such a
competitive nature is more transparent reading Enzo Rullani.

4. Enzo Rullani and the "law of diffusion"

Rullani was among the first to introduce the term cognitive
capitalism8. Unlike most, he does not point out the process of
knowledge sharing, but above all the process of cognitive
valorisation. He is quite clear about the fact that competition still
exists (is perhaps even stronger) in the realm of "immaterial"
economy. Rullani is one of few people that try to measure how much
value knowledge produces and as a seasoned economist he gives
mathematical formulas as well — like in his book Economia della
conoscenza [Economy of Knowledge]9. Rullani says that the value of
knowledge is multiplied by its diffusion, and that you have to learn
how to manage this kind of circulation. As Rullani puts it, in the
interview with Antonella Corsani published on Multitudes in 200010:

"An economy based on knowledge is structurally anchored to sharing:
knowledge produces value if it is adopted, and the adoption (in that
format and the consequent standards) makes interdependency."

The value of immaterial objects is produced by dissemination and
interdependency: there is the same process behind the popularity of a
pop star and behind the success of a software. The digital revolution
made the reproduction of immaterial objects easier, faster,
ubiquitous and almost free. However, as Rullani points out,
"proprietary logic does not disappear but has to subordinate itself
to the law of diffusion"11: proprietary logic is no longer based on
space and objects, but on time and speed.

"There are three ways that a producer of knowledge can distribute its
uses, still keeping a part of the advantage under the form of: 1) a
speed differential in the production of new knowledge or in the
exploitation of its uses; 2) a control of the context stronger than
others; 3) a network of alliances and cooperation capable of
contracting and controlling modalities of usage of knowledge within
the whole circuit of sharing."

A speed differential means: "I got this idea and I can handle it
better than others: while they are still becoming familiar with it, I
develop it further". A better understanding of the context is
something not easy to duplicate: it is about the genealogy of the
idea, the cultural and social history of a place, the confidential
information accumulated in years. The network of alliances is called
sometimes "social capital" and is implemented as "social networks" on
the web: it is about your contacts, your PR, your street and web
credibility.

Here it is clear that a given idea produces value in a dynamic
environment challenged by other forces and other products. Any idea
lives in a jungle — in a constant guerrilla warfare — and cognitive
workers follow often the destiny of their brainchildren. In the
capitalism of digital networks time is a more and more crucial
dimension: a time advantage is measured in seconds. Moreover, in the
society of white noise the rarest commodity is attention. An economy
of scarcity exists even in the cognitive capitalism as a scarcity of
attention and related attention economy. When everything can be
duplicated everywhere, time becomes more important than space.

An example of the competition advantage in the digital domain is the
Wired CD included with the November 2004 issue under the Creative
Commons licences. Music tracks were donated by Beastie Boys, David
Byrne, Gilberto Gil, etc. for free copying, sharing and sampling
(see: www.creativecommons.org/wired). The neoliberal agenda of Wired
magazine provides the clear coordinates for understanding that
operation. Indeed, there are more examples of musicians and brain
workers that associate their activity with copyleft, Creative Commons
or file sharing on P2P networks. We only heard about the first
runners, as it is no longer a novelty for those who came second.
Anyway, there never is a total adherence to the Creative Commons
crusade, it is always a hybrid strategy: I release part of my work as
open and free to gain visibility and credibility, but not the whole
work. Another strategy is that you can copy and distribute all this
content, but not now, only in four months. And there are also people
complaining about Creative Commons and Free Software being hijacked
by corporations and majors — the point is that the world out there is
full of bad music which is free to copy and distribute. No scandal,
we have always suspected it was a race.

Rullani shows how competition is still present in the knowledge
economy, even in the parallel enclave of digital commons. Competition
is a field radical thought never attempted to enter: because it is
not politically correct to admit such a competition and because any
political solution is controversial. It is impossible to reconstruct
any unified political subject (as at the times of proletariat)
starting from such a balkanised scenario of "social factories" and
molecular biopolitical production. However, if individual surplus-
value is difficult to measure and reclaim, the collective
accumulation is still something visible and tangible.

5. David Harvey and the collective symbolic capital

If Tarde, Lazzarato and Rullani are useful for framing the
competitive habitat of ideas (dissemination, imitation, competition,
hegemony), David Harvey's essay "The Art of Rent"12 introduces a
clearer description of the political dimension of symbolic
production. He manages to link intangible production and real money
not through intellectual property but by tracking the parasitic
exploitation of the immaterial domain by the material one.

The key example is Barcelona, where there is the clearest connection
between real estate economy and the production of culture as social
capital. The success of Barcelona as an international brand has been
created by its cultural and social roots and is continuously fuelled
today by a cosmopolitan and alternative culture: in fact, that
collective product is exploited first and foremost by real estate
speculators. The kinds of gentrification processes are well known.
Bottom-up: outsiders attract artists that attract gentry. Or, on the
contrary, top-down: open-minded and futuristic art institutions built
in a ghetto (like the MACBA in the Raval in Barcelona) raise rents
and force people to move. However, Harvey wants to point out a more
general process.

Harvey applies the concept of monopoly rent to culture: "All rent is
based on the monopoly power of private owners of certain portions of
the globe." There are two kinds of rent: you can exploit the unique
quality of a wine or you can see the vineyard producing that
extraordinary wine. You can put a hotel in a very charming city, or
selling the land where to put hotels like that. Capitalism is always
looking for marks of distinction. According to Harvey culture
produces today the marks of distinction that capitalism can exploit
selling material goods. On a city scale, real estate business is the
biggest business triggered by knowledge economy. Any immaterial space
has its material parasites. Think about files sharing and iPods.

If the degree of dissemination makes the value of a cognitive
product, as Rullani points out, Harney put a limit to that
valorisation. Dissemination that goes too far can dissolve the marks
of distinction into a mass product. There is an entropic ending in
any idea after its hegemonic period. Harvey highlights the first
contradiction: the entropy of the marks of distinction:

"The contradiction here is that the more easily marketable such items
become the less unique and special they appear. In some instances the
marketing itself tends to destroy the unique qualities (particularly
if these depend on qualities such as wilderness, remoteness, the
purity of some aesthetic experience, and the like). More generally,
to the degree that such items or events are easily marketable (and
subject to replication by forgeries, fakes, imitations or simulacra)
the less they provide a basis for monopoly rent. [...] therefore,
some way has to be found to keep some commodities or places unique
and particular enough (and I will later reflect on what this might
mean) to maintain a monopolistic edge in an otherwise commodified and
often fiercely competitive economy."

A second contradiction connected to the first is the tendency towards
monopoly: if the value inflates, the only way to preserve the rent is
to set up monopolies and avoid competition. For example, the digital
and network revolution has attacked traditional monopoly rents (used
to quite stable 'territories') and forced them to reinvent their
strategies. The common reaction was to reclaim a stronger regime of
intellectual property. On another level, capitals were forced to find
new material and immaterial territories to exploit. Harvey notices
that capitalism rediscovers local cultures to preserve monopolies:
the collective and immaterial sphere of culture is a crucial
dimension to maintain marks of distinction in a postfordist economy.

"They have particular relevance to understanding how local cultural
developments and traditions get absorbed within the calculi of
political economy through attempts to garner monopoly rents. It also
poses the question of how much the current interest in local cultural
innovation and the resurrection and invention of local traditions
attaches to the desire to extract and appropriate such rents."

The cultural layer of Barcelona and its unique local characters are a
key component in the marketing of any Barcelona-based product, first
of all the real estate business. But the third and most important
contradiction discovered by Harvey is that global capital feeds local
resistance to promote mark of distinction.

"Since capitalists of all sorts (including the most exuberant of
international financiers) are easily seduced by the lucrative
prospects of monopoly powers, we immediately discern a third
contradiction: that the most avid globalizers will support local
developments that have the potential to yield monopoly rents even if
the effect of such support is to produce a local political climate
antagonistic to globalization!"

Again it is the case of Barcelona, quite a social-democratic model of
business that is not so easy to apply to other contexts. At this
point Harvey introduces the concept of collective symbolic capital
(taken from Bourdieu) to explain how culture is exploited by
capitalism. The layer of cultural production attached to a specific
territory produces a fertile habitat for monopoly rents.

"If claims to uniqueness, authenticity, particularity and speciality
underlie the ability to capture monopoly rents, then on what better
terrain is it possible to make such claims than in the field of
historically constituted cultural artefacts and practices and special
environmental characteristics (including, of course, the built,
social and cultural environments)? [...] The most obvious example is
contemporary tourism, but I think it would be a mistake to let the
matter rest there. For what is at stake here is the power of
collective symbolic capital, of special marks of distinction that
attach to some place, which have a significant drawing power upon the
flows of capital more generally."

The collective symbolic capital of Barcelona is shaped more clearly
now. The brand of Barcelona is a "consensual hallucination" produced
by many but exploited by few. The condition of the creative workers
(and of the whole society) is a vicious circle: they produce symbolic
value for the real estate economy that squeeze them (as they suffer
the housing price of Barcelona). Furthermore, Harvey helps to
understand better Florida: the so-called "creative class" is nothing
but a simulacrum of the collective symbolic capital to raise the
marks of distinction of a given city. The "creative class" is the
collective symbolic capital transformed into an anthropomorphic brand
and a monopoly rent applied to distinctive parts of the society
("creative class"), of the territory ("creative city"), of the city
itself ("creative district"). The "creative class" is a parasitic
simulacrum of the social creativity that is detached from the
precariat and attached to the upper class.

"The rise of Barcelona to prominence within the European system of
cities has in part been based on its steady amassing of symbolic
capital and its accumulating marks of distinction. In this the
excavation of a distinctively Catalan history and tradition, the
marketing of its strong artistic accomplishments and architectural
heritage (Gaudi of course) and its distinctive marks of lifestyle and
literary traditions, have loomed large, backed by a deluge of books,
exhibitions, and cultural events that celebrate distinctiveness.
[...] This contradiction is marked by questions and resistance. Whose
collective memory is to be celebrated here (the anarchists like the
Icarians who played such an important role in Barcelona's history,
the republicans who fought so fiercely against Franco, the Catalan
nationalists, immigrants from Andalusia, or a long-time Franco ally
like Samaranch)?"

Harvey tries to sketch out a political response questioning which
parts of society are exploiting symbolic capital and which kinds of
collective memory and imaginary are at stake. Symbolic capital is not
unitary but a multiple space of forces, and can be continuously
negotiate by the multitude that produced it.

"It is a matter of determining which segments of the population are
to benefit most from the collective symbolic capital to which
everyone has, in their own distinctive ways, contributed both now and
in the past. Why let the monopoly rent attached to that symbolic
capital be captured only by the multinationals or by a small powerful
segment of the local bourgeoisie? [...] The struggle to accumulate
marks of distinction and collective symbolic capital in a highly
competitive world is on. But this entrains in its wake all of the
localized questions about whose collective memory, whose aesthetics,
and who benefits. [...]. The question then arises as to how these
cultural interventions can themselves become a potent weapon of class
struggle."

The crucial question is: how to develop a symbolic capital of
resistance that can not be exploited as another mark of distinction?
As Harvey points this kind of vicious circle works even better in the
case of local resistance. Global capitals need anti-global resistance
to improve the monopoly rent. Especially in the case of creative
workers resistance is always well-educated and well-designed: and in
the case of Barcelona it produces a titillating and never dangerous
environment for the global middle-class. Inspired by the history of
Barcelona, we introduce an immaterial civil war into the space of
symbolic capital.

6. Immaterial civil war

We suggest the term 'civil war' as conflicts within cognitive
capitalism have no clear class composition and share the same media
space. Moreover, if it is true that "there is no more outside" (as
Negri and Hardt state in Empire 13) and that "there are no longer
social classes, but just a single planetary petty bourgeoisie, in
which all the old social classes are dissolved" (as Agamben puts it
in The Coming Community14), conflicts can only take the form of an
internal struggle. The multitude has always been turbulent and
fragmented. If Florida dreams of a "creative class struggle" (where
fashion victims are the first casualties, we guess), we push for a
civil war within that comfortable "class" (and within a comfortable
notion of multitude). Moreover 'civil war' ties into the glorious
resistance of Barcelona (a political background that interestingly
fuels its current social capital) and is also a reminder of the
internal fights of any avant-garde group (anarchists and communists
started to shot each other then).

On the other hand, "immaterial" is the constant struggle on the stage
of the society of the spectacle: a cruel Ballardian jungle of brands,
pop stars, gadgets, devices, data, protocols, simulacra. Immaterial
exploitation is the everyday life of precarious workers, in
particular of the younger generations, quite aware of the symbolic
capital produced by their lives "put to work" (new trends and
lifestyles generated by what post-Operaism calls biopolitical
production). The immaterial civil war is the explosion of the social
relations enclosed in the commodities. In his book Les révolutions du
capitalisme15 Lazzarato says that "capitalism is not a mode of
production, but a production of modes and worlds" (engineered by
corporations and sold to the people) and that the "planetary economic
war" is an "aesthetic war" between different worlds.

Immaterial civil war is also the usual conflicts between brain
workers despite all the rhetoric of knowledge sharing and digital
commons. It is the joke "a friend of mine stole me my idea for a book
on Creative Commons". It is the well known rivalry within academia
and the art world, the economy of references, the deadline race, the
competition for festivals, the envy and suspicion among activists.
Cooperation is structurally difficult among creative workers, where a
prestige economy operates the same way as in any star system (not to
mention political philosophers!), and where new ideas have to
confront each other, often involving their creators in a fight. As
Rullani points out, there is almost more competition in the realm of
the knowledge economy, where reproducibility is free and what matters
is speed.

7. Facing the parasite

The parasite is the parallel exploitation of social creativity. There
are indeed modes of exploitation of creative work that are not based
on intellectual property and produce more value and conflict. As we
have seen, Harvey introduces the framework of "collective symbolic
capital" and suggests that "cultural interventions can themselves
become a potent weapon of class struggle". Political activism in the
cultural sector, creative industries and new economy have always
remained within these fictional enclosures, making local protests and
demanding more cultural welfare or stable contracts. Recently, a more
radical demand to counter the exploitation of social creativity
involves a basic income for all (see www.euromayday.org). Conversely,
Rullani notes that a welfare system transfers both innovation and
risk to the state apparatus reinforcing it. However, what Harvey
suggests is to take action not only on the level of collective
symbolic capital, but also on the level of the parasite exploiting
the cultural domain. A difficult point difficult for the radical
thought to grasp is that all the immaterial (and gift) economy has a
material, parallel and dirty counterpart where the big money is
exchanged. See Mp3 and iPod, P2P and ADSL, free music and live
concerts, Barcelona lifestyle and real estate speculation, art world
and gentrification, global brands and sweatshops.

A form of resistance suggested by Harvey in the case of Barcelona is
an assault on the myth of the "creative city" rather than wanna-be-
radical reactions that can contribute to making it even more
exclusive. If the people want to reclaim that symbolic surplus-value
vandalised by a few speculators, all we can imagine is a re-
negotiation of the collective symbolic capital. Here comes the option
of a grassroots rebranding campaign to undermine the accumulation of
symbolic capital and alter the flows of money, tourists and new
residents attracted by specific marks of distinction (Barcelona as a
tolerant, alternative, open-minded city, etc.). Moreover another
field of action suggested here are the specific areas where the "art
of rent" plays (particular districts like the Raval or Poblenou),
where the symbolic accumulation could be reset by a less symbolic
sabotage. In the case of Barcelona the "parasite" to spotlight is
real estate speculation, but we could apply that insight to a broader
scale.

Recent forms of resistance have almost always been quite
representative and media-oriented, dreaming of the rise of a new
cognitariat or of a repoliticization of the collective imagery and
its producers, like in the golden 60's. Many activists and artists —
like Harvey — are aware of the risk of overcoding of their messages
and practices. In the end many protest actions merely succeeded in
focusing the attention economy around their target. Traditional
boycotts of big brands sometimes turn into free advertisement in
their favour. What recent activism and critical thought have never
attempted to explore is the material (and economic) dimension
connected to the symbolic. Creative workers should start to recognize
the surplus-value of imagery they produce beyond their immaterial
objects and all the remote political effects of any sign. Leaving the
symbolic, entering the economy of the symbolic. We are waiting for a
generation of cognitive workers able to mobilise out of the imagery.

Matteo Pasquinelli
Barcelona, September 2006

Notes

1 Source: www.wikipedia.org/Creative_industries. The DCMS category
list consists of production in the following sectors: Advertising,
Architecture, Art and Antiques Market, Crafts, Design, Designer
Fashion, Film and Video, Interactive Leisure Software, Music,
Performing Arts, Publishing, Software and Computer Services,
Television and Radio.

2 Source: www.creativecommons.org/about/history

3 M. Tronti, Operai e capitale, Torino: Einaudi, 1971.

4 M. Lazzarato, Puissances de l'invention: La Psychologie économique
de Gabriel Tarde contre l'économie politique, Paris: Les empêcheurs
de penser en rond, 2002.

5 M. Lazzarato, "La psychologie économique contre l'Economie
politique", in Multitudes n. 7, 2001, Paris. Extentended Italian
version "Invenzione e lavoro nella cooperazione tra cervelli" in Y.
Moulier Boutang (ed.), L'età del capitalismo cognitivo, Verona: Ombre
Corte, 2002.
Web: multitudes.samizdat.net/La-Psychologie-economique-contre-l.html

6 [translation mine] M. Lazzarato, "Invenzione e lavoro nella
cooperazione tra cervelli" in Y. Moulier Boutang (ed.), L'età del
capitalismo cognitivo, op. cit.

7 Ibid.

8 E. Rullani, L. Romano, Il postfordismo. Idee per il capitalismo
prossimo venturo, Milano: Etaslibri, 1998; E. Rullani, "La conoscenza
come forza produttiva: autonomia del post-fordismo", in Capitalismo e
conoscenza, Cillario L., Finelli R. (eds), Roma, Manifesto libri,
1998; E. Rullani, "Le capitalisme cognitif: du déjà vu?", Multitudes
n. 2, 2000, Paris,.

9 E. Rullani, Economia della conoscenza: Creatività e valore nel
capitalismo delle reti, Milano: Carocci, 2004.

10 [translation mine] A. Corsani, E. Rullani, "Production de
connaissance et valeur dans le postfordisme", Multitudes, n. 2, May
2000. Paris. Original Italian version in Y. Moulier Boutang (ed.),
L'età del capitalismo cognitivo, op. cit.
Web: multitudes.samizdat.net/Production-de-connaissance-et.html
Spanish version: www.sindominio.net/arkitzean/xmultitudes/multitudes2

11 Ibid.

12 D. Harvey, "The art of rent: globabalization and the
commodification of culture", chapter, in Spaces of Capital, New York:
Routledge, 2001. And as "The Art of Rent: Globalization, Monopoly,
and the Commodification of Culture" in A World of Contradictions:
Socialist Register 2002, London: Merlin Press, November 2001.
Web: www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001966.php

13 A. Negri, M. Hardt, Empire, Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 186.

14 G. Agamben, The Coming Community (Michael Hardt, trans.),
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 65.

15 [translation mine] M. Lazzarato, Les révolutions du capitalisme, Paris: Empêcheurs de Penser en rond, 2004.