THEORY OF P.VIRNO: COMMUNICATION, NEW PUBLICITY, DEMOCRACY

Abstract

The article is about the key moments of the theory of post-operaist philosopher Paolo Virno in connection with the concepts of nonmaterial economy and general intellect. The theory of post-operaism is based on the judgment that, from the one hand, communication becomes the leading mean of production and increment of capital in the frame of Post-Fordist capitalism; from the other hand, communication as the mode of production of «common» can be the foundation for the labor autonomy from capital and emergence the new types of democracy. The borders between labor (poesis), political activity (praxis) and intellect (life of Mind) blur in the frame nonmaterial economy functioning. As a result, we have deal with the situation of politization of labor and highlighting the phenomenon of virtuosity as a key competence in the new type of capitalism. Connection between labor and politics moves the labor activity in to category of public action that build new understanding of publicity based on the mastery of language and communication. Marх’s sustained division of labor on productive and unproductive, where the last isn’t able to create surplus value, gets the new conceptualization in the frame of post-operaist theory. Contemporary communicative capitalism has shown that the intellectual worker-virtuoso can make surplus value in the frame of cultural industry development, the «life» labor serves the capital in such situation. But, at the same time, the virtuoso linguistic activity as the basis of nonmaterial economy can become the foundation for the new types of democracy, which differ from the project of neoliberal democracy, where labor gets the characteristics of political action and receives the autonomy from capital. The concept of labor as virtuoso political action based on the idea of interactive and communicative foundation of politics which can to create the new space of publicity using the communicative technologies. These technologies empower the realization of participatory democratic processes for the citizens in the frame of political life and provide type of political interaction which sets out the continuity of the process of production of common knowledge, ideas, communications, relationships and finance as the basis for the new type of democracy. All of that promote the manifestation of communist (production of «common») tendencies in cooperative functioning of knowledge, communication and capital.