> Something that might be a stumbling block for such a research effort is
> figuring out what would _count_ as evidence for Virno's thesis.
For anyone committed to dismissing the thesis tout court nothing would count as evidence or, rather, anything wouldn't count.
> Does anyone have any suggestions as to what sort of
> empirical evidence we should be looking for?
Yes, I think so if you consider the arguments in their totality and if you look at in-depth discussion of statistical evidence, I'm thinking specifically of some good Stats Canada work from the mid-1990s on the polarization of time and the polarization of incomes. I think what you find is that changing occupational structures are reflected in changing work patterns and those new work patterns spread into older occupations. What we're not going to find is a "9 out of 10 doctors smoke Camels" or "the GDP increased by 3% last year" type of statistic because you only get that kind of fact (or pseudo-fact) either when there is already a consensus about something or when somebody is determined to fabricate a case out of whole cloth. Often when people demand measurement to back up an argument they seem to be indifferent to the qualitative issues that underlie the production and validation of statistical measures. Nor is there a number that can counter straw-man arguments.
Doug Henwood wrote,
>the immateriality story overlooks
>how many workers spend their days dealing with things, often very
>mundane things - unloading trucks, washing dishes, stacking shelves,
>inserting catheters,
Well, no. In fact, the immateriality story doesn't "overlook" that at all. I don't know about Hardt and Negri but Virno talks about the simultaneity of all previous modes of work, including the return of some that had become obsolete. And besides a major part of Virno's analysis is that what jobs people do now is a less important part of their socialization, their commonality, than what they do when their not working I know jokes are several steps down the evidentiary ladder from even anecdotes but here's an old Mondo Bizarro from the 1980s: a fast food "assistant manager" is introducing a new employee to the staff, "Bart and Donna are writers, Tom's a painter, Matt's a composer, David's a sculptor and Kalin's an actress..... Everybody? This is Jerry, he's a film maker." Then there's the seemingly trivial matter of nominclature, what do you call a shelf stacker at Walmart? Aren't they "associates".
As long as there seems to be a somewhat engaged thread developing on this multitude business, I'll mention my own misgivings about Virno. I had a hard time at first putting my finger on where the airy abstraction comes from that constitutes the filler between his occasional very constructive and clear insights. I'm too charitable to just dismiss such abstrusenss out of hand as either the writer's arrogance or my own lack of culture. My crickets finally gave me a clue. I breed and raise crickets to feed to my son's gecko. Friday night, the first of the current cohort of crickets began to chirp. Crickets specialize it two activities: feeding and breeding. Chirping is associated with the latter.
Now, Virno is writing about emotions and about socialization outside of work but nowhere in the two essays and a book that I've read does he address the (Freudian) theme of eros and its repression and sublimation. This absence of eros is even more remarkable when one considers that Marcuse's _Eros and Civilization_ had already half a century ago raised the spectre of "repressive desublimation", easily a counterpart for Virno's "communism of capital" and Eros and Civilization prospectively posed many of the same questions about the "future" of work that Virno is examining retrospectively.
The Sandwichman