This came over the wire on Aut-op-sy recently. Someone asked after a quote.
“If during the period of “classical politics” intellectuals were totally outside the labor process, and their activities were restricted to an epistemological or ethical function, the “disciplinary” period minimizes their exteriority with respect to the labor processes. During this latter phase, intellectuals are already forced to political commitment (in any direction: Benda is no less committed than Sartre). Political commitment is a position of critical tension which, in a positive or a negative way, contributes to create the dominion of one class over another. Today, however, in the period inwhich immaterial work is qualitatively generalized and tendentially hegemonic, intellectuals are totally inside the productive process.”
The quote appears in an article, “What is to be done?”, by Viano and Binetti in the collection Marxism Beyond Marxism and is attributed to Negri and Lazzarato. Someone posted part of it and said “where’s this from?” Someone else replied saying it’s from a book the two wrote together called Immaterial Labor and Subjectivity. The chapter this quote appears in is online in French here and the whole book is online in Spanish here. It exemplifies the problem I’ve got with Negri now, which is, put simply, that he has a bad picture of history prior to the present. His “if” was not the case. Maybe I’ll take my print out of this book with to read on the plane.