Information and the Knowledge Economy

"Knowledge labour is inherently collective, it is always the results of a collective and social production of knowledge. Capital's problem is how to extract as much value as possible out of this abundant, and yet slightly untractable terrain." (Terranova 88)

Is the information economy pure capitalism, as Hayles cites Jameson as claiming, in which bodies "can be not only sold but fundamentally reconstituted in response to market pressures" (42)? In the techniques that capitalists have adopted to combat the free distribution of information content we see medium-adaptive techniques like making for themselves a presence of the Internet; legal structuring of capitalism in the push for intellectual property rights protection and in the global TRIPS agreement; and perhaps the beginnings of a reconceptualization of capitalism or at least its workings in free labour, Gates's notion of "creative capitalism," and the kinds of (interdisciplinary-communication-facilitating! self-directed! fun!) work environments espoused by companies like Google. The first two of these are essentially reactive measures that do not fundamentally alter the landscape of capitalism; but is the third something different? And across all, what is the interplay between producer/consumer, information, control, and society?

To investigate this I would like to firstly examine, in light of the many different conceptions that have surfaced in cybernetics, the precise nature of information. Although this seems like an implicit assumption on the part of many thinkers, is it really even something for which we can provide a single cross-disciplinary definition? Specifically I will be looking also at the way information functions in a knowledge-based capitalistic economy. The emphasis that many thinkers in defining information have placed on layers and relational dynamics, but necessarily mediated through some kind of physical corporeality or (re?)embodiment will be investigated in its relation to where and how or whether it fits into conventional conceptions of goods and labour and in the structures of market economies. Soft control will be examined as it is relevant specifically to trends, ideas, and behaviour in the knowledge economy (and not in terms of any politics outright); likewise my analysis of subjectivity will be on the subject as consumer/producer, and whether this is the only kind of subject about which we can speak.

CLASS TEXTS USED:
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
Terranova, Network Culture