> Something that might be a stumbling block for such a research effort is
> figuring out what would _count_ as evidence for Virno's thesis. I think
> this is why anecdotes are brought up quite often in this kind of
> discussion - the immaterialisation of labour is a qualitative, not a
> quantitative change. So pointing to numbers won't prove anything either
> way; the fact that there are more truck drivers than computer
> programmers is irrelevant if the computer programmers' work is changing
> supply chains in such a way that the truck drivers' conditions of work
> are being radically altered (as the anecdotal evidence of a truck
> driver
> I used to share a house with suggests).
>
> I'm broadly sympathetic to the Hardt and Negri, Virno, etc claims about
> immaterial labour, but I would like to see some stronger empirical
> evidence for them. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what sort of
> empirical evidence we should be looking for?
This is a rather complex question. First of all, much if not all of what folks like Virno are doing is philosophy, which doesn't rest directly on any empirical evidence, but by that very fact is not directly relevant to reality. (It can be helpful for conceptual analysis, but to my taste, at any rate, English-language philosophers are much more useful for that purpose than most of these European folks, whose thinking, or at least writing, seems to me excessively muddy.)
Social science should, at least, be more directly related to the reality of social life, but as you say it deals a lot in qualitative, rather than quantitative, matters, so it suffers from a considerable disadvantage compared to physical sciences, where quantitative evidence is sufficient for answering the questions that are raised. When we are studying societies, we are sometimes satisfied with quantitative evidence, but the questions that often matter most to us can't be quantified very well, so we have to use some sort of non-quantitative empirical evidence.
The immaterial-labor theorists may be at least moving in the direction of framing questions that can be tested by non-quantitative evidence (I confess that I can't understand what they are trying to say well enough to be sure), but at some point I think that quantitative evidence (e.g., numbers of truck drivers vs. programmers) will need to be brought in as well.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________ "...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men." -- Voltaire