[Hamsini - Core Post 4] - Labor on the Mind

 

I know we’re on to waste this week, but belatedly posting some thoughts from labor week now—some connections bubbling up between Beller and Terranova.

Beller’s chapter on “The Computational Unconscious” and Terranova’s “Free Labor” offer distinct Marxist readings of the relationship between labor, capital, and computation. Beller draws his analysis through psychoanalysis, pointing to that which is repressed in computation and which inevitably returns in its present organization of society: its racist, sexist, colonial history. Terranova works with “the Italian autonomists” and their notion of the society-factory, in which labor has diffused from the material placeness of the industrial factory into society at large. Both are interested in intelligence in relation to the computational economy—specifically, forms of collective intelligence.

Beller extends his notion of the “computational unconscious” to a rather totalizing extent (as Tania pointed out last week): “Our thought is AI (the reader may here place the words our and thought in quotation marks as they see fit). A large part of what ‘we’ are has been conscripted, even as ‘thought’ and other allied metabolic processes are functionalized in lockstep service to the ironclad movements of code” (p. 65). There is a kind of sci-fi, AI hype quality to this statement: all subjective consciousness—socially formed—has been organized by computational logics in this argument. Meanwhile, Terranova considers the relationship between the technoutopian hype of online “collective intelligence” or “hive mind” and the autonomists’ notion of “general intellect.” This collectivity—in other STS terms, assemblage—of humans and machines is what undergirds her discussion of immaterial labor and knowledge production: “The general intellect is an articulation of fixed capital (machines) and living labor (the workers). If we see the Internet, and computer networks in general, as the latest machines—the latest manifestation of fixed capital—then it won’t be difficult to imagine the general intellect as being well and alive today” (pp. 87-88). In Beller’s version, computational thinking has structured our very thoughts; in Terranova’s, we have hybridized with machines in service of the production of capital (through knowledge work) in particular ways in the digital economy.

Something about these discussions brings to mind for me the various metaphors of cognition deployed to discuss artificial intelligence: from AI as literally mimicking neural structure to models of generalized artificial intelligence that seemingly replicate human consciousness. Beller and Terranova’s analyses seem to perhaps invert these discussions, describing instead how computational modes of production structure collective intelligence (variously defined).