Some processes of cognitive capitalism

Matteo Pasquinelli has an extremely jargon-rich (familiarity with French and Italian theory required) essay, ‘Immaterial Civil War’, that focus on the competitive processes within the sphere of immaterial production. Not an easy read, but it has some interesting nuggets. Some excerpts below.

The 3 competitive advantages within immaterial production

Enzo Rullani and the "law of diffusion’: "There are three ways that a producer of knowledge can distribute its uses, still keeping a part of the advantage under the form of: 1) a speed differential in the production of new knowledge or in the exploitation of its uses; 2) a control of the context stronger than others; 3) a network of alliances and cooperation capable of contracting and controlling modalities of usage of knowledge within the whole circuit of sharing."

A speed differential means: "I got this idea and I can handle it better than others: while they are still becoming familiar with it, I develop it further". A better understanding of the context is something not easy to duplicate: it is about the genealogy of the idea, the cultural and social history of a place, the confidential information accumulated in years. The network of alliances is called sometimes "social capital" and is implemented as "social networks" on the web: it is about your contacts, your PR, your street and web credibility."

The parasitic exploitation of the immaterial domain by the material one

David Harvey: "The cultural layer of Barcelona and its unique local characters are a key component in the marketing of any Barcelona-based product, first of all the real estate business. But the third and most important contradiction discovered by Harvey is that global capital feeds local resistance to promote mark of distinction.

"Since capitalists of all sorts (including the most exuberant of international financiers) are easily seduced by the lucrative prospects of monopoly powers, we immediately discern a third contradiction: that the most avid globalizers will support local developments that have the potential to yield monopoly rents even if the effect of such support is to produce a local political climate antagonistic to globalization!"

Again it is the case of Barcelona, quite a social-democratic model of business that is not so easy to apply to other contexts. At this point Harvey introduces the concept of collective symbolic capital (taken from Bourdieu) to explain how culture is exploited by capitalism. The layer of cultural production attached to a specific territory produces a fertile habitat for monopoly rents.

"If claims to uniqueness, authenticity, particularity and speciality underlie the ability to capture monopoly rents, then on what better terrain is it possible to make such claims than in the field of historically constituted cultural artefacts and practices and special environmental characteristics (including, of course, the built, social and cultural environments)? […] The most obvious example is contemporary tourism, but I think it would be a mistake to let the matter rest there. For what is at stake here is the power of collective symbolic capital, of special marks of distinction that attach to some place, which have a significant drawing power upon the flows of capital more generally."

What the author means by Immaterial Civil War

"Cooperation is structurally difficult among creative workers, where a prestige economy operates the same way as in any star system (not to mention political philosophers!), and where new ideas have to confront each other, often involving their creators in a fight. As Rullani points out, there is almost more competition in the realm of the knowledge economy, where reproducibility is free and what matters is speed."