"[T]he concept of immaterial labour was filled with ambiguities. Shortly after writing those articles I decided to abandon the idea and haven’t used it since. One of the ambiguities it created had to do with the concept of immateriality. Distinguishing between the material and the immaterial was a theoretical complication we were never able to resolve. Though Marx obviously talks about material production all the time, he talks about immaterial production too. In The Theory of Surplus Value, for example, he mentions a change in the form of production with reference to education. No sooner had we borrowed the concept than we were faced with ambiguities. People interpreted material and immaterial as opposites: there was immaterial work on the one hand — the work of artists or architects for example — and traditional work on the other. We couldn’t seem to escape this polarity between the two terms and that was a constant source of confusion. The concept was intended to be political in nature but it was recast in a socio-economic light as soon as it was published. I think that did it a disservice. People started saying that such-and-such a worker was an immaterial worker and such-and-such an industry was an immaterial industry. People applied the concept to the Internet. This wasn’t at all what I had intended, I wasn’t interested in putting things into separate categories. So I abandoned the concept altogether and worked on subjectivity production instead."
Lazzarato (2010)
http://www.tkh-generator.net/.../2014/04/tkh-17eng-web.pdf
Stolen shamelessly from Ross Wolfe's facebook.
