Capital and Affects

Communication as work: we have recently experienced a profound transformation in theprocesses of production. While the assembly line (invented by Henry Ford at the beginning of thelast century) excluded any form of linguistic productivity, today, there is no production withoutcommunication. The new technologies are linguistic machines. This revolution has produced a new kindof worker who is not a specialist but is versatile and infinitely adaptable. If standardized massproduction was dominant in the past, today we produce an array of different goods corresponding tospecific consumer niches. This is the post-Fordist model described by Christian Marazzi in Capitaland Affects (first published in 1994 as Il posto dei calzini [The place for the socks]). Tracing thedevelopment 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 inliberal democracies.This translation at long last makes Marazzi's first book available to Englishreaders. Capital and Affects stands not only as the foundation to Marazzi's subsequent work, but asfoundational work in post-Fordist literature, with an analysis startlingly relevant to today'stroubled economic times.This Semiotext(e) edition includes the afterword Marazzi wrote for the 1999Italian 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.