Tiziana Terranova

Bio

Tiziana Terranova is currently associate professor in the Sociology of Communications at the Dipartimento di Studi Americani, Culturali e Linguistici, Università degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale'. Her research interests lie in the area of the culture, science, technology and the political economy of new media.
She is the author of Corpi Nella Rete (Costa e Nolan 1996), Network Culture: politics for the information age (Pluto Press, 2004) and numerous essays on new media published in journals such as Derive e Approdi, New Formations, Ctheory, Angelaki, Social Text, Theory Culture and Society, and Trasnversal. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Studi Culturali (Il Mulino); a regular participant to the grassroots seminars of the Italian nomadic university 'uninomade'; and occasionally also a writer on matters of new media for the Italian newspaper Il manifesto. She is also currently a member of the research network ATACD (www.atacd.net, A Topological Approach to Cultural Dynamics) funded by the 6th European Framework. At the moment she is co-editing, together with Couze Venn, a special issue on Michel Foucault for the journal Theory, Culture and Society on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his death.

Conference Abstract

Labor, networks, markets: the crisis of neoliberal economics and the challenge of social cooperation

Both the financial crisis of 2008 and the sudden, concurrent explosion of the social web seem to have opened in different ways new spaces for a re-thinking of economic categories and ways of thinking. On the one hand, they call into question some fundamentals of ‘free market’ economics in ways that can be fruitfully reconsidered in the light of Michel Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberal governmentality. On the other hand, the Marxist notion of living labor is also reconfigured by the peculiar features of a phenomenon such as the social web that problematizes the relation between cultural expression, social cooperation and economic exploitation. How can these double perspective help to clarify the value and meaning to be accorded to the notion of ‘labor’, and specifically to ‘digital labor’? Is there a challenge inherent in new forms of social cooperation in digital networks to classical and neoclassical economics and its cultural and social vision?