The Italian Effect | Program 6A

An INTERESTING MEETING:
THE ITALIAN EFFECT
Radical Thought, Biopolitics and Cultural Subversion
9th-11th September 2004, The University of Sydney & UTS
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"COMMON PLACES"
The Italian Effect | Program 6A
Jussi Vähämäki (University of Tampere, Finland): The Concept of

Common Places and their Role in Societies of Control
The paper analyses the 'materiality' of language in cognitive capitalism or in 'bio-linguisitic capitalism'. Instead of focusing on the postive side of the concept of the commonplace as a common resourse to "the many" or " the homeless", I would like to concentrate on the concept of commonplace as a model fora new, emerging dispositive of control proper to the societies of control. From the necessary starting point to action, production or discussion, commonplaces as user-friendly interfaces have transformed into a goal and end of production. They form the basic model for the new controls of spatially boundless and temporally endless immaterial labour. The paper analyses commonplaces under their different aspects in cognitive capitalism and their role in the construction of the new dispositive of control:

1. They are without identity and without source. They not need any institution or instance of sovereignty to legitimate themselves. They are self-sufficient.
2. They are undeniable.
3. They have an important organizing function in ordinary communication. Without a commonplace to start with communication would regress into a communication about communication.
4. They save time.
5. They never manifests themselves as such. They are real and function on level of real but they are not actual, like the dispositives of Foucault and Deleuze.

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