Debt and autonomy Maurizio Lazzarato and the constituent powers of the social in http://thenewreader.org/Issues/1/DebtAndAutonomy december 2013 Tiziana Terranova Reading Maurizio Lazzarato’s books and essays over the years, one cannot help but being struck by the methodical movement which characterises his thinking. Concepts are picked up from a series of key authors (Marx, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Pasolini, Bakhtin, Tarde, Nietzsche, Bergson, James), unfolded within a recurring set of questions (relating to the transformations of capitalism and new modes of political struggle), giving rise to concepts (immaterial labour, the politics of the event, noopolitics, sympathetic cooperation, the indebted man), which are then pushed aside in order to start again. 1 Lazzarato is an independent researcher – a sociologist, philosopher and political theorist – with a history of militancy and exile, writing in French and Italian, who recently also turned to artistic practice through a collaboration with artist Angela Melitopoulos. 2 The Making of the Indebted Man, originally published in French in 2011, is his first book to be translated into English, but Anglophone readers will be familiar with a number of his texts, in particular his essay on ‘Immaterial Labour’. Together with the writings of Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Christian Marazzi and Franco Berardi, this essay has contributed to the articulation of an original Marxist ‘post- workerist’ approach to what mainstream sociologists and economists call the post-industrial, post-Fordist, or even ‘knowledge’ economy. 3 Those who associate Lazzarato’s name with the concept of immaterial labour are likely to be startled by a series of statements scattered throughout The Making of the Indebted Man. The theorist of immaterial labour, in fact, argues that notions such as cognitive capitalism, information society and the knowledge economy are just ‘decoys’ from the point of view of class struggle. Instead, Lazzarato maintains here that knowledge exercises no hegemony over the cycle of value, but that it is subject to the command of financial capital. Hence the most generalised power relationship today is that between debtor and creditor, which extends to every subject of the contemporary capitalist economy. As boldly stated in the opening pages of the book, ‘the debtor/creditor relationship intensifies mechanisms of domination and exploitation at every level of society, for within it no distinction exists between workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers, working and not-working population, retirees and welfare recipients. Everyone is a “debtor” accountable to and guilty before capital. Capital has become the Great Creditor, the Universal Creditor.’ 4 Referring to Michel Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism, Lazzarato argues that the concepts of ‘human capital’ and the ‘entrepreneur of the self’, which were for Foucault core components of neoliberal governmentality, need to be rethought on the basis of an acknowledgment of the centrality of the debtor-creditor relationship. It is true, as Foucault said , that neoliberalism constructs subjects which will tend to see themselves primarily as ‘enterprises’ rather than workers, but what he neglected, according to Lazzarato, was that becoming entrepreneur in this way means becoming subjected to a whole new kind of power. ‘In the debt economy, to become human capital or an entrepreneur of the self means assuming the costs as well as the risks of a flexible and financialised economy, costs and risks which are not only – far from it – those of innovation, but also and especially those of precariousness, poverty, unemployment, a failing health system, housing shortages, etcetera.’ 5 Foucault thus missed out on the financialisation of existence, that is the rising centrality of a whole apparatus of evaluative metrics (credit reports, assessments, databases etcetera) through which the entrepreneur of the