Tiziana Terranova

Tiziana Terranova in Ina Blom ed. Rethinking Social Memory. University of Amsterdam Press, 2016

Is there a neo-Leibnizian architecture of subjectivity at work in social media and if so what are its implications for theories of social production and cooperation?
A neomonadology of social (memory) production

This introduction frames the articles collected in the special section as the outcome of a process of ‘self-education’ taking place in the Italian free university network UniNomade 2.0 between 2010 and 2013. The open seminars and conferences orga- nized by UniNomade 2.0 took as their object of inquiry the concept of the Common, while the articles selected focus in particular on the sovereign debt crisis of the European Union (Eurocrisis) following the global financial crisis of 2008. The intro- duction thus summarizes the overall approach of contemporary ‘post-operaist’ authors such as Toni Negri, Christian Marazzi, Maurizio Lazzarato, Andrea Fumagalli and Stefano Lucarelli, and Carlo Vercellone to the new role of financial capital, the transformation of money, the material constitution of Europe, the role played by the relationship between debtors and creditors, and the possibilities opened by the concept of Commonfare for struggles against austerity.

The article focuses on the relation established by Foucault in the two lecture courses Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics between life, nature and political economy. It explores the ways in which liberalism constructs a notion of economic nature as a phenomenon of circulation of
aleatory series of events and poses the latter as an internal limit to sovereign power. It argues that the entwinement of vital and economic processes provides the means of internal redefinition of the raison d’État and uses such an explanation to understand the emergence of the network topos as a technology of regulation of the unstable co-causality of milieus of circulation.
The article also follows Foucault’s argument that the neoliberal
market is significantly different from the liberal market inasmuch as, unlike the latter, it is not defined as an abstract logic of exchange among equals but as an ideal logic of competition between formal inequalities. Finally it asks whether new theories of social production and sympathetic cooperation, in the work of authors such as Yochai Benkler and Maurizio Lazzarato,
can offer an alternative to the neoliberal logic of market-based competition as the basis for the production of new forms of life.

... It is necessary because we have to ask who is participating in the digital economy before we can pass a judgment on it. ... their energy into the experi-mental, nomadic, and antiproductive life-styles which in Britain have been so savagely attacked by the Criminal Justice Act in the ...