Open Access World

Miller, Toby; University of California, Riverside

Cognitariat Vol. 1 (2013) 
The Cognitariat 
 
By Toby Miller 
 
The right-wing futurist Alvin Toffler invented the useful concept, “the 
cognitariat” a quarter of a century ago (1983). Sometimes those people get 
something right. The idea has since been taken up and redisposed by the left. 
Antonio Negri (2007), for example, applies the term to people mired in contingent 
media work who have educational qualifications and facility with cultural 
technologies and genres. The cognitariat plays key roles in the production and 
circulation of goods and services, through both creation and coordination. This 
“culturalisation of production” enables these intellectuals, by placing them at the 
center of world economies, but it simultaneously disables them, because it does so 
under conditions of flexible production and ideologies of “freedom.” What used 
to be the fate of artists and musicians—where “making cool stuff” and working 
with relative autonomy was meant to outweigh ongoing employment—has 
become a norm. The outcome is contingent labor as a way of life. This new 
proletariat is not defined in terms of location (factories), tasks (manufacturing), or 
politics (moderation of ruling-class power and ideology), and it is formed from 
those whose immediate forebears, with similar or less cultural capital, were 
confident of secure health care and retirement income. It lacks both the 
organization of the traditional working class and the political entrée of the old 
middle class. 
The U.S. media lost 200,000 full-time jobs in the decade after the 2000 
dot-com bubble, more than half of them in newspapers (“Media Jobs?” 2008). 
The Bureau of Labor Statistics warns that “a large number of jobseekers” remains 
“attracted by the glamour of this industry” (2008), even though projections for 
employment are dismal. Consider television. For decades, employment in TV 
expanded above U.S. national averages, with cable a particular source of job 
growth (Toto 2000). But television companies are now producing, distributing, 
and exhibiting texts through a wide array of platforms, mechanisms, and funding 
systems. This proliferation, alongside technological, regulatory, and wider 
macroeconomic changes, has dramatically altered the landscape and experience of 
media work. Before the recession was officially decreed, in 2007, screen writers’ 
employment was at its lowest ebb for eleven years (Writers Guild 2008). There 
are fewer jobs than before in U.S. broadcast TV, although cable continues to 
grow. 
This disparity is partially due to the change in viewing numbers, and 
partly to the fact that cable is a largely un-unionized sector by comparison with 
Toby Miller 
broadcast, so wages, security, and health insurance decline while profit margins 
increase. In 2008, the weakness of the advertising economy was hidden by two 
gigantic stimuli—the Olympic Games and the Presidential election. The key 
difference emerging last year was the collapse of non-media firms that paid huge 
sums of money for national television coverage, such as car companies and big-
box or high-street retail stores (“Most Media” 2008; Consoli 2008). 
At the same time as “good,” ongoing jobs in TV diminish, cable networks 
continue to emerge—13 percent more in 2004 by contrast with the year before—
and gain profitability, with each year of the past decade bringing advertising 
growth due to the discounts available by comparison with the old networks. But 
this is no index of an open market. Rather, it signals additional ownership 
concentration: 90 percent of the major cable networks are owned by five 
conglomerates, which also run many of the companies that make the shows they 
buy. Before deregulation in 1995, networks had to abide by an anti-trust logic. 
Instead of screening shows they had produced, they bought the right to put on 
programs made by others; as a consequence, independent houses proliferated—
there were forty major independents. But when these rules were rescinded, many 
small businesses fell apart. Big TV corporations moved production in-house so 
that they could sell texts on through infinite other territories and media. The 
people who made the creative decisions about everything from story lines to 
wallpaper were overridden again and again by men in suits who lacked relevant 
expertise. Today, these desk-bound businesspeople want to prevent the web from 
being subject to the same wage conditions as television (“Most Media” 2008; 
Richardson and Figueroa 2005; Herskovitz 2007; Dobuzinskis 2009). 
Cultural work is subject to local, national, regional, and international fetishization 
of each component, matching the way that the labor undertaken is largely 
fetishized away from the final text. Business leeches want flexibility in the 
numbers they employ, the technology they use, the place where they produce, and 
the amount they pay—and inflexibility of ownership and control. The orthodoxies 
that created this economy, the neoclassical doxa preached by neoliberal chorines, 
favor an economy where competition and opportunity cost are in the litany and 
dissent is unforgiveable, as crazed as collective industrial organization. Hence the 
success of Mindworks Global Media, a company outside New Delhi that provides 
Indian-based journalists and copyeditors who work long-distance for newspapers 
whose reporters are supposedly in the U.S. and Europe. There are 35-40 percent 
cost savings (Lakshman 2009). 
How to respond? Progressives need to account for the post-industrial 
standing of these cultural workers, and reject a neoliberal embrace of casualized 
labor: 
Cognitariat Vol. 1 (2013) 
for those who can keep a job in the post-Fordist labour market, decent and 
meaningful work opportunities are reducing at a phenomenal pace in the 
sense that, for a high proportion of low- and middle-skilled workers, full-
time, lifelong employment is unlikely. (Orsi 2009, 35) 
The discourse of neoliberal knowledge work needs serious reconceptualization, 
because grotesque inequality is the stalking horse of romantic deregulation. For 
while there is a sweetly-engaging quality to the amateur discourse of peer-to-peer 
exchanges that claims to elude corporate and state dominance, it relies on a series 
of anecdotes in place of an analysis of the structural obstacles to an egalitarian 
social system that would give all people time and space for leisure regardless of 
class and other axes of subjectivity. 
 
References:  
“Media Jobs? Depressing,” (2008, 19 December), Advertising Age. 
“Most Media to Suffer Retrenchment in 2009,” (2008, 30 December), Center for  
 Media Research.  
Dobuzinskis, A. (2009, 19 February).  “Hollywood Struggles to Find Wealth on  
 the Web,” Reuters. 
M. Herskovitz (2007, 7 November), “Are the Suits Ruining TV?” Los Angeles 
 Times: A21  
N. Lakshman (2009, 8 July), “Copyediting? Ship the Work Out to India,”  
 Business Week. 
A. Negri (2007), goodbye mister socialism, Paris: Seuil. 
C. Orsi (2009), “Knowledge-Based Society, Peer Production and the Common 
 Good,” Capital & Class 33: 31-51. 
D. Richardson and M. C. Figueroa (2005), Basic Cable Television Industry 
 Research and Corporate Profiles, Industrial & Labor Relations, Cornell 
University for the Writers Guild of America, East. 
A. Toffler (1983), Previews and Premises, New York: William Morrow. 
D. Toto (2000, August), “Job Growth in Television: Cable Versus Broadcast,  
 1958-99,” Monthly Labor Review: 3-14. 
Writers Guild of America (2008), Who We Are: The Marketplace for Writing. 
  
(Source link for previous publication: 
http://anticap.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/the-cognitariat/) 
 


The Cognitariat

Raja, Masood Ashraf; University of North Texas

Cognitariat Vol. 1 (2013) 
The Cognitariat and the Precarity of Speaking 
 
By Masood Ashraf Raja 
 
Having just launched the journal, few of us sat together and talked till late 
night about this new and fascinating project. What came across through our 
conversation was the very essence of our project: the unacknowledged anxiety of 
invoking the very experiences that this journal hopes to record and materialize. 
One of us was worried that if he shared a story, it could not only harm his 
current work situation, it might also affect the life and livelihood of another friend 
from the past. Another colleague had so much to say about a part time teaching 
job but was not yet ready to publicly share this for fear of reprisals. Each one of 
us, it seems, was suddenly made aware of our own precarity exactly at the 
moment of launching a journal that hopes to foreground this precarity, this 
insecurity. 
Though I am not in a precarious work situation, I have also had moments 
when I had to weigh my words for fear of some form of consequences. We all 
have experienced this feeling: and this feeling, this anxiety is the very narrative of 
current state of capital. The so-called cognitive capital has a mode of production 
that relies heavily on a mass of contingent, precarious work force spread all across 
the globe. This precariat, this cognitariat, however, is absolutely essential to this 
new economic order. For the current neoliberal capital can only maintain the 
hierarchical division of labor by fixing labor in its precarious, contingent status: 
that is how labor is kept cheap! 
So, why launch this journal? Especially since because of my own 
privilege, I am not subject to the systemic ignominies that my brothers and sisters 
working under precarious conditions have to swallow just to keep their jobs. My 
answer simply is that if I cannot change the status quo, I must, at least, stand in 
solidarity with all those who suffer under the current regime of capital. 
This project has been long in the making: over the years in the academia, I 
have constantly observed the nature of division of labor particular to the 
universities. Not only are the universities organized hierarchically with 
administrators on the top and the faculty below, the faculty are also organized 
along a stratified horizontal but uneven plane. And while those of us privileged to 
have tenure-track jobs are enabled by the toil and labor of those who make our 
Masood Ashraf Raja 
privilege possible1, we never stop to acknowledge their contributions. We 
internalize the idea that we are, somehow, better than the lecturers, the adjuncts, 
and the teaching assistants. 
This cognitariat in the state of precarity is crucial to the corporatized 
university model. These are also the "objects" upon whose bodies the 
administrative power inscribes the recognizable marks of its effects to shape 
human bodies and souls. In an interesting faculty meeting a few years ago, one of 
our deans came to speak to the faculty. Only the tenured or tenure-track faculty 
members were included in this meeting. During the meeting, the dean, a former 
scientist-turned-administrator, broached the subject of undergraduate performance 
and its connection to university funding. His remedy to improve retention: make a 
chart of drop out rates for every class a lecturer teaches and if one of them has 
more attrition than the others, then call her in your office, show her the charts, and 
tell her that she needs to improve the statistics or lose her job.  
There was a certain irony in this explanation. The university’s future was 
dependent upon the labors of the most unacknowledged and the most precarious 
group of workers: the lecturers, the adjuncts, and the graduate teaching assistants. 
But the solution to the attrition problem was simply punitive. The solution also 
did not take into account that most of the times the college drop out rates in 
freshman year are not really related to the quality of teaching but mostly to the 
level of preparation of the incoming class and their own particular conditions of 
existence. This solution could only be proposed because the workers in question 
had no job security, no union, and no voice. 
When asked as to why the solution was only punitive or why could we not 
provide incentives for better performance, the dean had no clear answer but a very 
pronounced scowl. Even more disheartening was that none of my other, mostly 
liberal and progressive, colleagues saw it fit to join me in this line of questioning. 
This is a great example of general apathy that this divided, unjust system 
creates. Yes, we are divided and these divisions are partially inscribed in the 
system that we all work within, and maybe our voices are silenced simply by the 	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  	  1	  According	  to	  a	  recent	  report	  by	  MLA	  on	  state	  of	  the	  profession	  “Part-time 
faculty members now make up 40 percent of the faculty teaching English in four-
year institutions and 68 percent in two-year institutions.” For details read: Jaschik, 
Scott. “The Adjunctification of English.” 
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/11/english. Accessed March 3, 
2013. 
 
 	  
Cognitariat Vol. 1 (2013) 
general apathy that has become the norm in treatment of labor, but we must 
continue attempting to speak and to point out the every-day humiliations that are 
offered to our peers as the norm, as natural. For as Deleuze once taught us, in 
another lifetime, it is in the nature of power to totalize itself. Resistance to any 
form of totalization or naturalization must come, then, as a form of constant 
murmur, constant critique (as Foucault insists) so that for every new act of 
appropriation, the system is forced to rethink itself instead of just marching on, 
plowing forward on its task of exploiting differences and mobilizing us against 
each other. 
So, here we are. We have launched this platform to speak truth to power, 
but to also enable all of us from across the globe to create our own truths, to 
publish a body of diverse, rich, and incisive critique of power. To work as 
gadflies. We may not, in the end, change the world but, as they say in my native 
language, sometimes the intention to accomplish something is more important 
than the act itself.  
So, in the name of all that makes us decent, compassionate, and caring let 
us act. Let us speak! 


The Cognitariat and the Precarity of Speaking

Bernico, Matt; Greenville College

After the Future â€“ Franco â€œBifoâ€ Berardi

SÃ¼tzl, Wolfgang; Institute for New Culture Technologies

Cognitariat Vol. 1 (2013) 
Net Culture, New Media And the Social Body: An 
Interview with Franco Beradi Bifo* 
 
By Wolfgang Sützl 
 
Wolfgang Sützl: Bifo, one of the terms that have come to be associated with your 
work is the concept of the “cognitariat“. Does this concept refer to a danger, a 
new form of oppression? And if so, which possibilities of emancipation does it 
allow? What is the social perspective that the idea of the cognitariat holds? 
Franco Berardi Bifo: The idea of the cognitariat, and of the “cognitarian“ as a 
member of the cognitariat, is connected to the idea that during the last years, 
perhaps the last decade, we lost touch with our body - with our social body, and 
our physical, erotic body. Net culture and all the new forms of digital production 
and new media have erased our relationship with our social body. But at the time 
of social and economic crises we are forced to take account of the fact that we do 
have a body, that in fact we do have a social and a physical body. Cognitarians are 
the workers of the virtual production. There is a moment when they can become 
aware of the fact that they are not purely virtual, they are not purely economic, 
that they also are physical bodies. 
 
Wolfgang Sützl: How is the concept of the cognitarian related to the proletarian 
in the Marxian sense? In Marxist theory, too, estrangement of the body occurs 
because of an enslavement to the machine, and becoming conscious of this is a 
prerequisite of emancipation. 
Franco Berardi Bifo: Of course the concept of the cognitariat has something to 
do with cognition, with the activity of knowledge, intellectual production, let’s 
say of collective intelligence, but it also contains the idea of proletarian in the 
Marxian sense. Who are proletarians? They are the people who have nothing to 
lose, because they have no property. The cognitarians have only their intellectual 
work force, and in the present crisis of the New Economy we will discover our 
social nature, our social relationships with each other. 
 
Wolfgang Sützl: In Marxism, such a discovery leads to the proletarians 
emancipating themselves by taking power in the form of a revolutionary struggle. 
Nowadays few would find the perspective of a revolutionary overthrow 
convincing. How does the cognitariat liberate itself? 
Franco Berardi Bifo: I don’t know. Nobody knows, because we are at the 
beginning of a process. At the beginning of the last decade, maybe in the last two 
Wolfgang Sützl 
decades, we have witnessed the formation of a completely new kind of 
relationship between human beings and their technical environment, and the 
productive processes changed rapidly in that period. So far, we have been 
deluded. We have been convinced by neo-liberal ideology that the end of the 
enterprise and labor are the same thing, that capital and labor are the same thing, 
and that intellectual labor is completely different from previous forms of labor. So 
far we have had a distorted perception of our reality, a kind of trompe d’oeil. I 
think that the process of emancipation has not yet begun. It is only in the course 
of the crisis of the New Economy that we can start to understand what this 
process could be like. You are right, the age of the revolution is over, probably for 
the cognitive labor, for cognitarians the process of emancipation is the same thing 
as the discovery of a new epistemological form, of the connections within the 
collective intelligence. 
 
Wolfgang Sützl: There are many people around, especially in Internet culture, 
who would say that the Internet and ICTs offer a kind of a post-revolutionary 
space for emancipatory processes by making it possible to distribute and share 
knowledge before it can be appropriated by capital. Do you think that this is too 
optimistic a perspective? 
Franco Berardi Bifo: There are people like Pierre Lévy, Derrick de Kerckhove 
and others, thinkers that I appreciate very much and I consider very important in 
developing a new social point of view, who have reflected on the rise of a new 
social force, the collective intelligence. But they have not seen – probably they 
have forgotten – the fact that this social force is not only intellectual, it has also a 
body – a socio-economic body ... If we lose our jobs, we lose everything. In the 
present crisis, investment tends to be channeled in to military technology, 
reducing the scope of innovation. But we have a social and a physical body, 
which is erased in the virtual economy. This is the point of departure of a new 
social thought. We have seen nothing so far. 
 
Wolfgang Sützl: So for the cognitariat, emancipatory thought cannot work 
without the physical body. Street protests etc. still have a significance, even in the 
sight of virtualization and informatization. How do you assess the activities of the 
so-called anti-globalist movement, which seems to have one of its points of 
gravity in Italy? 
Franco Berardi Bifo: The anti-globalist movement is in reality the global 
movement - it is the only global movement that exists nowadays, because capital 
has left the global arena and has re-assumed nationalistic forms, for example in 
the policies of the George Bush Administration. 
 
Cognitariat Vol. 1 (2013) 
Wolfgang Sützl: So capital is no longer organized in a globalizing fashion? 
Franco Berardi Bifo: I think so, I think that the crisis of neo-liberal ideology is 
leading us towards a kind of resurgence of nationalism. During the next years we 
are going to see a destruction of the globalization process. The crash between 
America and Europe is really going to destroy it. 
 
Wolfgang Sützl: So the anti-globalization movement is more global than 
globalization itself? 
Franco Berardi Bifo: We really have the task of launching a new globalization, a 
globalization from below, a globalization of rights. You know, so far the anti-
global or global movement has been largely an ethical movement. People have 
been protesting for ethical reasons. I sympathize a lot with the ethical revolt, but I 
think that ethical revolt is ineffective. And the revolt of the movement has been 
ineffective so far. In the present crisis this movement is going to become not only 
an ethical revolt, but also a social one. And this will change things. Because we 
will be involved in the movement not only through our ethical sentiment, but also 
socially, in our daily time, in our labor, in our social relationships, in our 
possibility of creation of understanding, of scientific research, and so on. The 
movement from Seattle to Genoa has been an ethical movement, in the future we 
are going to see a social movement of globalization from below. 
 
* Interview conducted in Vienna in 2002 during the Dark Markets Conference. 
 
(Source: http://future-nonstop.org/c/3234b5df726db2899b21c6127dea4470) 


Net Culture, New Media And the Social Body: An Interview with Franco Beradi Bifo

Cognitariat Vol. 1 (2013) 
Cognitive Capitalism, Education, and Digital Labor 
 
Reviewed by Masood Ashraf Raja 
 
Michael A. Peters and Ergin Bulut, eds. Cognitive Capitalism, Education and 
Digital Labor. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Paperback, 341 pages. $38.95. 
 
I became aware of this book while compiling a collected volume of essays on 
world literature and critical pedagogy. To say that reading this book was 
indispensible in enhancing the conceptual depth of my own work would be an 
understatement. This book, without a doubt, has not only augmented my 
understanding of the current state of capital but has also provided me with certain 
new lines of thought and lines of flight in imagining and materializing future 
solidarities with others like me who hope to do critical work in this new age of 
capital. 
The editors of this book have not only provided us, in one volume, a 
sophisticated, comprehensible, and wide-ranging understanding of the conceptual 
varieties of the terms invoked in their title but also the originary and revisionary 
narratives that construct, transform, and, at times, mask these terms for us. 
While the preface by Antonio Negri provides a conceptual grounding for a better 
understanding of biopoltics, the subsumptive power of capital, and the rise of the 
new multitude, the opening chapter by Timothy Brennan gives the volume the 
very self-reflexive and critical tone that other chapters only enhance further.  
Brennan poses the most important question about the nature of our work 
and explores the “intellectual’s role in the [current] division of labor” (1) by 
suggesting that the realm of intellectual work is divided between the 
prolegomenous theorists” and the “situated theorists” (14). While the situated 
scholars are perpetually in contest with the changing realties of the world, the 
prolegomenous critics can take their field of work as stable without worrying 
much about the exigencies of life, busy producing complex works for the sake of 
complexity while the world, increasingly, becomes a more intolerant and 
inhabitable place for majority of its denizens. This chapter, an opening salvo, 
prepares the reader to expect more than just a pastiche of leftist critique and opens 
the book to a layered and reflective reading. 
In the second chapter George Caffentzis places the very concept of 
cognitive labor under erasure. Plotted along the trajectory of Marx ‘s own 
theorization of “piece work” and later appropriation of the “putting out” system 
by the industrial capitalism, Caffentzis asks the most pertinent questions about the 
very arrival or potential of something called the cognitariat. The conclusion is 
Masood Ashraf Raja 
enlightening as by the time one finishes the chapter, one realizes that offering the 
cognitariat as the ultimate revolutionary class of the modern capital fails to 
acknowledge that it is not the knowledge workers but the “indigenous people, the 
campesinos, the unemployed. . . and the immigrant workers . . .” (54) who are 
actually challenging the current appropriative drive of global capital. 
In another brilliant chapter, Christian Fuchs not only discusses as to why, 
in his view, “informational capitalism” is a better term than Cognitive capitalism, 
but during his discussion we also get a focused discussion of the works of all the 
major post-Fordist Marxists including Franco Beradi, Christian Marazzi, and 
Paulo Virno. Thus the book, besides offering new insights about various aspects 
of cognitive capital also becomes a didactic tool in informing the reader about the 
major debates of this interesting subject and the main variants and conceptual 
contours this new form of capitalism. Throughout the book, in chapters written by 
prominent scholars in the fields of digital labor, humanities, and education 
concepts and material realties are discussed in a nuanced and comprehensive 
manner. Resultantly, one does not only get a surface introduction to all these 
important concepts: one gets a grainy and textured genealogy and archeology of 
concepts such as the cognitariat, digital labor, precarity, cognitive capital and their 
relationship to critical pedagogy. 
There is not enough space here to discuss all the chapters, and the reader 
would probably benefit more without a summary provided in this review, but over 
all the book offers in one volume debates not only about the nature of cognitive 
capital but also the details about how it is constructed, constituted, and sold to us 
and how, increasingly, education and modes of pedagogy are “reformed” or 
tweaked to create the kind of subjectivities that would be most ideal for the 
economic superstructure that shapes our souls and trains our bodies. In this regard 
Michael Peters's chapter is exceptionally important as it connects the 
dubmbifiction of education with the “Googalization of Education” (255) 
producing a  kind of knowledge that, in Peters’s words “works on the basis of 
arrhythmic logics to expand a universe of information accessibility while . . . 
creating giant global info-utilities that make their profits off the back of the 
creative endeavors of others. . .” (257). 
In this changing world where capital and those who own the new modes of 
production, new modes of subjectivization, governmentality, and disciplinarity 
there is constantly a need to attempt to create new modes of flight and resistance 
and to also question the new knowledge and the signs that attempt to carry them 
and Cognitive Capital does that. It is a book that deals with today's realities but 
without taking the terms of its own discourse as granted or natural. Thus, while it 
constantly educates us about the new vocabularies of a different mode of 
production, it also questions the very vocabularies that it employs in the process. 
Cognitariat Vol. 1 (2013) 
Resultantly, it teaches us that while the world order might appear to have changed 
and while the cognitariat might be a new class, it does not necessarily mean that 
our struggles are over or that there is no material labor. What it teaches us is that 
those of us who might be engaged in what is now being termed immaterial labor 
or the cognitariat must also remember that while we buy in to these seductive 
concepts, the global proletariat continues to increase and that we all still thrive on 
the labors of those whose job in this so called cognitive capital has now been 
reduced to producing cheap commodities so that capital can exploit on both 
levels: the cognitive and the material. 
