That said, it’s clear that the more ecstatic claims about worker empowerment through “Talk! Network!” management ring particularly hollow. For a great critique of post-Fordism boosters, see Vallas, “Rethinking Post-Fordism:The Meaning of Workplace Flexibility.” Sociological Theory 17.1 (1999), p. 68-101. But I don’t think either Hardt and Negri or Virno are boosters. Rather, where Vallas critiques the organizational theory claims by demonstrating that the effects don’t really happen, Virno takes it in the other direction, showing how terrifying they are even if they do happen. H&N follow a similar line, but try to demonstrate real potential for transformation beyond the empirical “empowerment” discourse. That’s why the charges equating H&N with such boosterism seem particularly obnoxious to me.

I just want to follow up on your final point about the immeasurability of value and the new mantra “network! talk! you’re at work!” that has replaced the old mantra “quiet! you’re at work.” (Though, just a parenthetical remark — one could say that what you’ve schematized as “new” and “old” could also be schematized as “white collar” and “blue collar” — because in the video clips I’ve seen of sweatshops today, talking is still prohibited, and organizing could get you killed. And this reminds me of the other critique of Negri, that he has so little to say about the reality of labor and struggle in the third world, including the bits of the third world inside the first.) In what you’ve described, one of the key points is immeasurable time, because it’s now also hard to tell when one is work and when is not work, and as Zizek has pointed out a million times, today’s (American) society perversely demands that we enjoy… this is kind of what I hoped to indicate by emphasizing the football game scene in Pursuit of Happyness — the scene of play where the single father’s most productive work actually happens. Or, if one wanted to continue to rip on Habermas, this is the scene of the private sphere and autonomous, pastoral family time which is perhaps the most public moment in the movie. What seems important here in this social economy is the necessitiy of privation (or deprivation) in order to be a good networker — the logic of the college frat — which is why the single parent is the perfect image of the new “network-from-home” economic order. For instance, the TV show Weeds and the marajuana dealing single mom who is innovative, entrepreneurial, and whose networking talent (i.e., her sexiness) reveals how the outside (illegal drugs and blackness) is at the center of white, bourgeois society.

Meanwhile, those pictures of babygirl are incredibly cute.