PROJECTS N1 How to be a good witness
  N2 Networks of surrender
 


Virtuosity becomes labor for the masses with the onset of a culture industry. It is here that the virtuoso begins to punch a time card. Within the sphere of the culture industry in fact, activity without end product, that is to say, communicative activity which has itself as an end, is a distinctive, central and necessary element. But, exactly for this reason, it is above all within the culture industry that the structure of wage labor has overlapped with political action.

Within the sectors where communication is produced by means of communication, responsibilities and roles are, at the same time, “virtuosic” and “political”...

If the entirety of post-fordist labor is productive (of surplus-value) labor precisely because it functions in a political-virtuosic manner, then the question to ask is this: what is the score which the virtuosos-workers perform? What is the script of their linguisitic-communicative performances?

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude