Paolo Do

In this essay we analyse the category of co-research, which comes from the method and style of Italian Operaismo, in order to evidence its difference with respect to other forms of research, first of all the sociological and academic ones, but also the workers’ inquiry. Said difference is purely political. In fact,
the traditional inquiries within the labour movement are mainly concerned with the production of knowledge understood as a neutral activity, to be used by an external representative subject, whether the party or the trade union. The co-research, on the contrary, tries to knock down the separation between
production of knowledge and subjectivity, and the development of political organisation. Nevertheless, with respect to the 1960s and 1970s, the decades of operaista co-research, the framework is today deeply transformed. The space and time of work, and of the sociality and struggles of living labour in the Fordist era, are changed. We therefore have to re-think the co-research method, style and tool in the new spacetime coordinates of ‘cognitive capitalism’, in the productive metropolis, and with the subjects of
contemporary precarious labour. As the catoptrical anamorphosis refers to images that, when viewed normally, display indecipherable borders and look like monstrous and distorted ‘optical depravities’, we have to change our point of view, to recompose what seems the monster of the struggles of the multitude.