This is part five (and the last of the introductory chapter), of the new ‘Book of the Week’ experiment, where we will publish excerpts of new books. Adam Arvidsson’s book on the Ethical Economy is a draft, to which you are strongly invited to contribute. You may do so in the form of comments, separate blog entries, or by using the discussion page at the Wiki version.
Part 4, 3, 2, and 1 were published each day earlier this week.
and the full chapter of the Ethical Economy Book Project
Adam Arvidsson concludes his introductory chapter:
To conclude. The ethical economy is based on a real subsumtion of the ethical productivity of human communication and interaction: its ability to produce and ethical surplus that can be appropriated and valorized in different ways. This ability consists in media enhanced networks of communication and interaction which are essentially autonomous. They have become more powerful by means of the infusion of everyday life with media and communication technologies which itself is a result of the capitalist subsumtion of the social. The core of the ethical economy is this a productive potentiality which has developed within capital itself, but which can not be entirely controlled by capital, which always transcends its attempts at control: which is, for the time being, beyond measure. (Indeed, it is this capacity for transcendence that constitutes the value of ethical productivity: You are only interested to trend-scouts when you go against and resist the cannons of the fashion industry, not when you follow them.) Therefore cognitive capitalism tends to rely increasingly on a productive externality that it can not control in its entirety. That is the deep cause of the contemporary crisis of value that marks cognitive capitalism. It also constitutes a strategic opportunity for the overcoming of that system. Basically this situation can go two ways. Either the ethical productivity of media-empowered interaction becomes incorporated within the capitalist logic of measure and command. This would entail a continued diffusion of surveillance technologies and quantifying strategies similar to bench-marking, TQM and the inferno of petty documentation that now faces British and US academics. Or this ethical productivity is able to transcend capitalism and establish viable networks of valorization outside it. This would entail the establishment of different yet robust and sustainable forms of measurement. At any rate, the question of measure is the focal point where these struggles will be determined. I will come back to that problem in future instalment, but first, in the next instalment, I would like to give more detailed attention the history, phenomenology and potential of ethical production, or, to use another term: immaterial labour.
and the full chapter of the Ethical Economy Book Project