frederic neyrat on Tue, 28 May 2013 16:17:38 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Driverless cars, pilotless planes -- will there be jobs left for a human beings / intellectuality


Dear Brian,

I was thinking about your expression, "constituent forces": they
already exist, they already work, they already produce, and they can
do that until the "end". So, for me, the real problem is not only to
know where is the constituent power, the center of the value, etc, not
only the battle around the production of the value, but also: how to
pass from immanent constitution to political change. The failure of
the whole thought linked with post-operaism is the belief in the fact
that political change will automatically (sic) follow the power of the
general intellect. It failed. Last political Springs were not
ecological; nobody cares about ecology anylonger; climate change is
going one; the Russians left their basis in North Pole last week,
kindof The Day Before Tomorrow. When everything is immanent,
everything follows the way be which things are produced. I do not call
for a Transcendence, but for this minimum amount of separation without
which we will continue to constitute and produce the same way. That is
to say: we have to rethink intellectuality as something neither
immanent (Virno) nor transcendent (say Sartre).

Best,

Frederic

2013/5/26 Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>:

> On 05/24/2013 04:50 AM, nettime's avid reader wrote:
>
>> Larry Summers, former US treasury secretary, thinks that
>> the challenge of the decades ahead is not debt or competition from
>> China but the dramatic transformations that technology is bringing
>> ...  a world of what Summers calls automated "doers".
>> They will do everything for us, eliminating the need for much work.
>> The only jobs will be in writing the software and building the
>> "doers", creating a bifurcation of the labour market that is already
>> discernible.
>
> Summers is just as dead wrong as Will Hutton, the author of this article.
> Summers assumes that production is the only job that counts, therefore,
> automation can only produce massive unemployment. Meanwhile Hutton, with the
> utopian visions of his conclusion, assumes that heightened production will
> free people for human development: care for the ageing, the solution of
> ecological problems, the explosion of creative professions. Neither will
> admit that the maintenance of a social order requires a very large number of
> professional educators, ideologists artists and thinkers. That is exactly
> the case of society today, whose predatory form of financial capitalism is
> maintained and developed by an oversized management sector, including
> politicians and technocrats alongside bankers, CEOs, strategists,
> advertisers, designers, human-resource psychologists, union bosses,
> entertainers, etc. We live under the grip of *that* professional universe,
> whose expansion and accumulation of power has marked the entire neoliberal
> era. If there is no counter-project, their power will only grow in the
> course of this crisis.
 <...>


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