The Exploitation of Individuation: Notes on Informatized Production

Nigel Stevens

may 2011 · University of Southern Maine

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 This project develops out of the simple question: how does information function within today’s so-called Information Age? In contemporary critical theory, specifically in the thought of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, the answer has been posed in terms of immaterial labor and a new mode of “informatized production.” Though this project is not meant as a total critique of Negri and Hardt’s work, it is meant as a particular critical intervention: one proposing that their understanding of this new, “informatized” process of valorization functions via a reified understanding of information. In positing information as always-already complete, value-rich pieces of wealth, Negri, Hardt, and perhaps others of the Autonomist tradition are rendered unable to provide an adequate account of the exploitation of living labor (instead offering only the strange hypothesis that “informational accumulation” immediately appropriates what amounts to fixed capital in the form of information-products).

So instead we begin with Gilbert Simondon’s innovative understanding of information. Following his methodological maxim, that “the notion of form must be replaced by that of information,” we analyze information as a productive process of psychosocial individuation wherein the psyche, the collective, and the epistemic are constituted in the same movement (rather than analyzing the form of informatized production, wherein information appears as a fully-constituted collection of facts). This account of information-as-production provides a base to study the exploitation of psychosocial individuation, where the living labor of information-power, our basic human capacity to in-form, is employed to produce the very schemas that subject us.

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2010 graduate of the Philosophy program at the University of Southern Maine.