Capital and Affects

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"Working by communicating." Our time has witnessed a profound transformation of production processes. While the assembly line excluded any form of language as a directly productive factor, today there is no production without communication: indeed, work and information necessarily overlap to ensure maximum effect in the shortest possible time. This is the advent of new technologies as true linguistic machines. This revolution has imposed a new model of worker, no longer specialized, but versatile, capable of adapting to new needs. While in the past standardized mass production triumphed (it was Henry Ford at the beginning of the century who organized the so-called assembly line in the United States), today differentiated and varied products according to consumer tastes prevail. This is the post-Fordist model that Christian Marazzi focuses on, tracing its developments from Japanese origins to innovations in relation to the political and administrative spheres increasingly directly involved in determining the production process and its consequences.