common knowledge

Despite being raised repeatedly (and in an articulate and pointed manner), the question of how so-called superfluous populations fit into the logic of cognitive capitalism went unanswered in the q&a of a talk given recently by Gigi Reggero in introduction of his new book, The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America  (Temple UP 2011). I would like to dwell on some of the implications of the impossibility of answering this question, because I think that although several answers were given, by Reggero and others, in response, the point of these questions remains obscured by the answers given (however satisfying these answers were). ``Cognitive capitalism`` is Gigi Roggero`s term for what in other arenas has been called the post-Fordist mode of production, referring more generally to the production of knowledge within the capitalist system, and thus to the mode of production that marked the last three decades of the twentieth century.

So the question, as it was initially asked, was about whether, given that there is increased important of categories such as superfluous or surplus populations, the term ``proletariat`` was at all useful as a concept. This was followed up by a question about whether the system that was being proposed could support an idea of the common, when there are so clearly groups of people that fall outside of terms of the common developed in the project (the example was given of the Foxconn suicides). And finally, this was followed up by a question about where material production was in the discussion of knowledge production (the example phrased here as ``where are the miners?``). The questions were kind of refuted, for example, in what was most interesting to me, as a kind of opposition between material and knowledge production, and although it was eventually agreed upon by some that there is a differentiation to be made between classes in terms of the way that labor enters into the capitalist system, based on a distinction between whether or not your labor can be objectified (yes, in the case of material, no in the case of non-material (knowledge) and then off the table in the case of those who do not enter the so-called workforce). For those there and involved in the discussion, the point seemed to be about class composition vs. the common (in which, as Roggero argues, the distinction does not pertain).

As in other discussions that posit a common subject, or the common as subject, this question is actually an extension of a more fundamental assumption about the way that the individual figures as a ``problem`` for Marxist discourse. My observation is that this is related to the way in which the limit of the common is thinking about surplus populations. As Roggero was careful to explain, self-organization was a problematic term, even as it described forms of organizing the common that are production. Its problematic nature arises from the use of the term ``self,`` which, Roggero explained, employs the rhetoric of neoliberalization. It brought to mind a phrase that I had recently thought about--the idea of debt being a ``collective phenomenon suffered individually,`` in which the individual remains a really central category through which to think about forms of subjectivity, but also about how the experience of debt can be turned around. It seemed to me that Roggero`s argument, too, seemed to assume that the project of refusing  the ``moral regime of financial capital`` was the single most important cornerstone of a political anti-capital project. Hence, the return to seeing the very mention of the ``self`` as a problem.  And it seemed that the intolerance of some of the individuals in the room of the very idea of material production outside in opposition to knowledge production was really related to this situation.

What I am getting at is the distinction between ``collective phenomenon suffered individually`` and ``collective phenomenon suffered collectively.`` It seems that the questions that could not be answered were all about how we can think about ``collective phenomenon suffered collectively.`` In other words, about individuals who do not experience the moral regime of financial capital as their most acute form of suffering. In contrast to the way that this discussion seemed to take place, that is, from the perspective of the system (of capital as totality), this difference and tension articulates not only the continuities and discontinuities within capitalism, but also proposes that qualitative differences in suffering can determine the very terms in which this suffering is described.

To return to within the system, to the common, to everything being ``inside,`` internalized, interiorized, integrated, anticipated--to the idea that everyone is included, to the beyond public/private--seems to be this kind of ontological hallucination whose blinding insight misses the very weight of the examples that are proposed. In not being able to think about the problem of the individual, expect as an instance of neoliberal rhetoric, for example, the common is not able to articulate any real idea about a morality that would defy the moral regime of financial capital, or to think as profoundly about the production of morality as it thinks about the production of surplus value. The apparent surpassing of the distinction between the public and the private is one of the more severe consequences, since it does away with the potential for a notion of the private lives of individuals that are not touched by the market, and with the possibility of individuals being able to conceive of the potential of their own radical activity. This seems relevant to ideas developed in ``Before the Revolution`` about the function of ``concrete possibility`` in radical thought that posits this as an alternative to having constructed the reality of the centrist liberal capitalist system, but this would require more working out.  Even if this subjective experence is only a illusion, it seems that it is one of the most important ones to maintain. Even though ideology acts here, even though it can, it seems, in the end, that this is not the place of mystification, even though it is the place of illusion.