mesmerism’s afterlife helped shape the understanding of mass media in the
twentieth century as agents of mass persuasion that somehow, via their repe-
tition, ubiquity, or subliminally iniquitous techniques, bypassed the vigilant
conscience of citizens and directly accessed the archaic phobias (or ignorance
and sloth) of the beast within.
(Peters 1999: 9 4 )The second school of thought is Italian workerist (operaismo) Marxism. Such a
variant of Marxism is often associated with the name of Antonio Negri and his
gradual journey from a Marxism that was still faithful to the Grundrisse(and most
especially to that small part of the Grundrissewhich expounded the idea of general
intellect) to a Marxism that seems to be more faithful to Spinoza (cf. Negri 1988;
Wright 2002). However, arguably more interesting developments have occurred
in the work of Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato who both started from some
of the same ideas as Negri but have diverged subsequently, increasingly taking
on neo-vitalist ideas as they track from capital-labour to capital-life in which capital
takes on all the powers of the transindividual general intellect – ‘knowledge,
the subjective spirit of invention, invention-power’ (Virno 2005: 21) – by tapping
in to the full range of powers of the human body rather than just labour; ‘abstract
expenditure of psychophysic energy’ (Virno 2005: 21) and making it into a pre-
individual thing that can be operated on.^17 ‘In a way, labour is today truly
productive (of surplus value and profit) only if it coincides with the human abilities
that previously explicated themselves in non-labour’ (Virno 2006: 38). So ‘labour
power has become invention-power’ (Virno 2006: 3 7 ). In other words, the whole
of human praxis, all of the generically human gifts, come to be included in the
productive process, all those aspects of forms of life that exist outside its stringent
rationality and that allow this expanded praxis to both produce, hasten and adapt
to a nonlinear productive fluctuation. ‘Contemporary capitalist production
mobilizes to its advantage all the attitudes characterizing our species, putting to
work lifeas such’ (Virno 2005: 35, author’s emphasis).
In particular, Lazzarato (2002a, 2005a, 2006b) has taken up the gauntlet of
Tarde’s work on the power of invention, concentrating on the modes of produc-
tion of communication and knowledge that lead beyond economy, as well as
Foucault’s work on biopower as a new political economy of forces that act and
react against each other, in order to forge a new synthesis. This synthesis constitutes
a description of the new modes of extracting a surplus of power from living beings,
modes of extraction which harness ‘freedom’ to the production and government
of new forms of life that are based on relationships of differentiation, creation,
and innovation. This Tardean-Foucauldian synthesis which uses the presence of
others as a transindividual resource underlines the existence of strategic relations
that can escape (or at least minimize) domination by being based on sympathy
and not just on asymmetry (and therefore domination-resistance):
A prominent sociologist recently defined social relations, in a way that is so
narrow and far removed from the truth, by claiming that the principalTurbulent passions 233