[csaa-forum] CCR Public Lecture: Cognitive Labour in the Knowledge Economy

[Centre for Cultural Research]

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Centre for Cultural Research Public Lecture
COGNITIVE LABOUR IN THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
Franco Berardi (Bifo)
Leading Italian Cultural Theorist and Media Activist
Respondent:Ida Dominijanni
Universita' di Roma Tre and _Il Manifesto_ newspaper


Wednesday 8 September 2004 3.00-5.00pm
University of Western Sydney
Parramatta Campus
BLD EZ, Female Orphan School, Gallery Floor
Map and directions available at
http://www.uws.edu.au/about/locations/parramatta

RSVP by Monday 6 September 3.00pm to: (02) 9685 9600 or
mailto:ccr at uws.edu.au


We needed to go through the dotcom purgatory, through the illusion of a
fusion between labour and capitalist enterprise, and then through the hell
of recession and endless war, in order to see the problem emerge in clear
terms. On the one hand, the useless obsessive system of financial
accumulation and a privatisation of public knowledge, the heritage of the
old industrial economy. On the other hand, productive labour increasingly
inscribed in the cognitive functions of society: cognitive labour is
starting to see itself as a cognitariat, building institutions of
knowledge, of creation, of care, of invention and of education that are
autonomous from capital.

Franco Berardi (Bifo) from 'The Meaning of Autonomy Today'


Franco BERARDI (Bifo) has been a cultural theorist and media activist since
the days of autonomia and Radio Alice. His thought and life from this time
has been focused on the relations between information and communication
technologies and social movements. He was forced to flee Bologna in 1977:
in Paris, he met and collaborated with Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault.
His most recent works include _Il Sapiente, il mercante, il guerriero: Dal
rifiuto del lavoro all' emegere del cognitariato_ (2004)  and _Telestreet:
Macchina immaginativa non omologata_ (2003), on the experiment of
Telestreet, a communication network spread across Italy working against the
hegemony of the major media outlets. He is co-founder of Rekombinant, an
Italian website dedicated to new media activism
(http://www.rekombinant.org/).

Ida DOMINIJANNI teaches politics at the Universita' di Roma 3 and is an
editor at the Italian national newspaper _Il Manifesto_
(http://www.ilmanifesto.it). An active participant in the Diotima community
of feminist philosophers (http://www.diotimafilosofe.it/index.html), she
has published extensively on current politics and political theory as well
as on the place of feminism in past and current radical cultural theory.
Her most recent works include an edited volume, _Motivi della liberta'_
(2001), a forthcoming book on politics after September 11, and (in English)
an essay on the crisis of Italian politics in the 1990s, 'Lost in
Transition' in Susanna Scarparo and Rita Wilson (ed.) _Crossing Genres,
Generations and Borders: Italian Women Writing Lives_, University of
Delaware Press.


For more information on the speakers visit the conference website for 'The
Italian Effect: Radical Thought, Biopolitics, and Cultural Subversion',
9-11 September 2004, The University of Sydney
(http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/rihss/IEkeynotes.html).