Neurocapitalismo. From real subsumption to vital subsumption.

By Giovanni Iozzoli
Translated by Jason Francis Mc Gimsey

Giorgio Griziotti, Neurocapitalismo. Mediazioni tecnologiche e linee di fuga.

Mimesis, MilanUdine, 2016, 260 pages, 20,00

Over the last 30 years the Marxist category of real subsumption has often been used
as the litmus test to materially interpret the many profound changes that the
technological revolution and globalization have enacted. In his rich volume
Neurocapitalism,

Giorgio

Griziotti

argues,

with

great

effectiveness,

the

realization/surpassing of that category itself: the transition from real subsumption to

vital subsumption. That is to say when capitalist valorization is able to valorize not
only the forms of labor and social cooperation, but life itself, including its
intelligence, relational potential, capacity for desire and hope, all the way to its bare
essence.
Neurocapitalism is the bio-cognitive phase of valorization: the connection between
mind, body, device and network becomes inextricable and defines the omnipervasiveness of technological mediation. The subject, along with its desires and
potentialities,

is

integrally

valorized

within

the

dimension

of

global

hyperconnectivity and where all of humanity, from the Savannah to the metropolis, in
varying degrees, is today fully immersed.
In order to write such a book, two conditions were necessary: a rigorous scientific
outlook on the technological revolutions that have been underway over the last 30
years and a deep slant towards the perspective of anticapitalist liberation; the authors

biography an autonomous activist in Milano of the 1970s and an engineer for

communication multinationals satisfies both of these conditions (if only there were
more red experts today when there seems to be a lack of both).
Griziotti starts from classic Marxist categories real subsumption, general intellect,
science as a central productive force and the law of labor-value as a continually
challenged horizon. This is the Marx found in the Gundrisse and in Fragments on
machines (that, like all prophetic texts, has been used for every kind of interpretation
over the last century). He uses these concepts to connect Marxist macro-categories to
the concrete, technological changes that have marked the hegemony of the digital
meta-machine. Furthermore (and not to be taken for granted), he illustrates how all
these technological thresholds have marked the great political-economic events over
the last two centuries: the end of Bretton Woods, the beginning of the liberalist
revolution, the hegemony of financial capital, the defeat of the labor movements in
the west and the gigantic dislocation of the international division of labor that
thanks precisely to the technological revolution allows for the cohabitation of the
antiquated means of mass production in the periphery of the world (there have never
been so many laborers in history) with the new forms of cognitive exploitation
where the modern base of the extraction of surplus value is constituted by not
physical labor but intelligence, cooperative attitudes and social knowledge
consolidated inside the singular human experience.
Griziotti narrates, in an accessible way, how this long historical chain of events brings
cognitive capitalism to appropriate the free software movement and the innovation
that socially diffused intelligence is only able to produce if it is free. This
appropriative dynamic starts with the seed of Unix, the first widespread operative
system developed by grassroots, basement programmers, and continues up unto the

persistent and refined capacity of large corporations like that of Steve Jobs to
capture value and to continue to enclose and valorize what is born as common
knowledge.
The history of capitalism, Griziotti reminds us, has always been the attempt to
subsume knowledges and the qualities of living labor inside the Machine, ever since
steam looms: with electronics, in the 60s-70s, this passage makes a qualitative leap
(symbolized by the digitally controlled machine and the first automated assembly
lines), when we cede a part of out knowledge to the machine and we move to the
sidelines of the productive process, with a function of surveillance and control. From
there, spurred by labor conflicts, the formidable revolution of digital communications
will begin: a quantitative leap in the valorization of knowledge, languages, the senses
and even the emotional sphere.
The authors thesis is that new technologies in their devastating ability to affect
humans go beyond the historical dialectic of machine/living labor and define an
anthropologic revolution where the very essence of the subject is demolished,
refounded and redefined as bios, or bare life. In this epoch, not only does the
traditional distinction between work and free time, productive and non-productive
spheres dissolve not only is the workday diluted in a continuum in which we are
perfectly productive even while we peruse social networks, feeding the colossal of big
data that influence our desires and transform them into compulsive input, but it is the
very line between human and machine that is blurred: where does our
mind/consciousness begin and end when it is immersed in the flux of continual
biohyperconnectivity? Is there any distinct someone inside this flux? And what can
be properly called human in this post-human scenario?

Terrible questions. The author tires to avoid the usual line-up of apocalyptic visions
and integralists: on one hand, the optimists who have seen the potential for liberation
in the technological revolution for the past 20 years (when the machines will work for
us and we will develop our human faculties free from the confines of labor) and, on
the other, those who fear an irreversible and totalizing digital dictatorship that may
already be underway. For the author, the battlefield is cognitive capitalism, as it
presents itself historically and, even if cybertime and cyberspace are continually
changed by power, we cannot give up this terrain and need to find ever new escape
routes where cooperative and constitutive knowledge is able to withdraw from
capitalist control and valorization. Evident signs are not, for the moment, to be seen,
with only a few potentialities lurking on the horizon. The old 70s activist remembers
the devastating impact of heroin on social movements and compares it to the
alienating effect of continual connectivity that gives and illusion of global opening
but instead isolates the individual from reality and, in the most brutal form of
alienation, from human contact.
The last part of the book, the most problematic, is therefore dedicated to organizing:
do paths and real processes through which the common and widespread cooperation
can reclaim their autonomy currently exist? The current scenario is desolate.
Existential nomadisms, perennial crossings to nowhere that refuse identities (or that
take refuge in those most ephemeral) draw an anchorless individual in the biohypermediatic sphere, with continually saturated senses inside a space-time that is
constantly redefined by algorithms and systemic automatisms created to classify and
valorize millions of singularities and their practices.
The author knows very well that, without conflict, the potentialities of the common
(above all regarding the central themes of energy and communication) will never be

emancipated, despite what the prophet Rifkin says about soft transitions and the
inevitable advent of a new world of plenty, a sharing economy and a common
consciousness. But what is the situation today, how can wage labor be organized
today, while the old methods of controlling it still exist? The Fordist worker
performed an entire cycle of emancipation and hegemonized a wide range of figures:
political program and class composition went hand in hand, but today, which sector of
the cognitive proletariat is able to retrace the modern chain of value from laborer
to programmer? This is the question for today: the definition of a new cartography of
real subjects who get their hands dirty, beyond the systemic macro-narrations.
Decades the classic operaista technique of con-research, passion for activism and
real

world experience make Griziottis work rich, dense

and useful.

Neurocapitalism is a powerful book that opens up new visions and, at the same time,
produces a correct synthesis of what has now become an infinite range of writings on
cognitive capitalism.
While most of Europe is frightened about the possible submission to Houellebecq
(the Moloch knowingly agitated to terrorize European peoples), we worry little about
the real submission (synonym for subsumption) of our existence to the market and
profit, now totally deployed in every area of our daily lives and in our space-time. No
Sharia Law could condition us more brutally. More than a theocratically centralized
future, we can already glimpse an effective, hyperproductive and desperate
technological nihilism on the horizon.