Genre: Opinion/Argumentation

@Saelan- Its a straight phone pic of the light around 8:30 this morning, full-frame. I use Squaready app to make borders, then I instagrammed it. No filter, if I remember correctly. I almost never use photoshop beyond basic wee adjustments -- -straightening, color correction, etc. I'm currently in love with this shot. And the ikebana pic from Kyoto a few posts back. We were at the art museum for the Chagall exhibit and stumbled on a big calligraphy and ikebana exhibition upstairs. More interestingly, on the 6th floor, there was a calligraphy workshop for monks. Alex is great! I wrote about his work last year in BlackFlash 28.2 . Unfortunately the text isn't online but I'm working on setting up a proper site for myself with all my writing archived. Stay tuned. We should point out before moving on that in each of these forms of immaterial labor, cooperation is completely inherent in the labor itself. Immaterial labor immediately involves social interaction and cooperation. In other words, the cooperative aspect of immaterial labor is not imposed or organized from the outside, as it was in previous forms of labor, but rather, cooperation is completely immanent to the laboring activity itself . This fact calls into question the old notion (common to classical and Marxian political economics) by which labor power is conceived as "variable capital," that is, a force that is activated and made coherent only by capital, because the cooperative powers of labor power (particularly immaterial labor power) afford labor the possibility of valorizing itself. Brains and bodies still need others to produce value, but the others they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to orchestrate production. Today productivity, wealth and the creation of social surpluses take the form of cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective networks. In the expression of its own creative energies, immaterial labor thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism.