Communication as work: we have recently experienced a profound transformation in the
processes of production. While the assembly line (invented by Henry Ford at the beginning
of the last century) excluded any form of linguistic productivity, today, there is no
production without communication. The new technologies are linguistic machines. This
revolution has produced a new kind of worker who is not a specialist but is versatile and
infinitely adaptable. If standardized mass production was dominant in the past, today we
produce an array of different goods corresponding to specific consumer niches. This is the
post-Fordist model described by Christian Marazzi in Capital and Affects (first published
in 1994 as Il posto dei calzini [The place for the socks]). Tracing the development of
this new model of labor from Toyota plants in Japan to the most recent innovations,
Marazzi's critique goes beyond political economy to encompass issues related to
social life, political engagement, democratic institutions, interpersonal relations, and
the role of language in liberal democracies.This translation at long last makes Marazzi's
first book available to English readers. Capital and Affects stands not only as the
foundation to Marazzi's subsequent work, but as foundational work in post-Fordist
literature, with an analysis startlingly relevant to today's troubled economic times.This
Semiotext(e) edition includes the afterword Marazzi wrote for the 1999 Italian edition.
Christian Marazzi was born in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1951. He
obtained a degree in Political Science at the University of Padova, a master's degree at
the London School of Economics and a doctoral degree in Economics at the City University
of London. He has taught at the University of Padova, the State University of New York,
and at the University of Lausanne. He is currently Director of Socio-Economic Research at
the Scuola Universitaria della Svizzera Italiana.
160 pages, Paperback