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people into agents of emerging cognitive capitalism: crowds of hyperactive semi-literates whose cyber-connectivity re-routes their tactical craftsmanship potential towards the sole space of digital representation. The prospects for labor emancipation in this context are detached from any notion of crafts. As John Roberts points out,
It is not the distended labour of the crafts that is able to drive the wider dynamic of labour emancipation. What is of greater importance is the control and disposal of time as such (...) The emancipation of labour is not about winning back for the labour process the “unalienated” labour of the medieval craftsman, but about winning control over the labour process itself (...) and correspondingly, in the interests of expanding freely determined leisure time (...) There is nothing to presuppose that the autonomous labours of the industrious artist will be the only model of emancipated labour developed outside of the “unalienated” labour and necessary labour of the labour process. Outside of the labour process, human activities may have no charge and ambition other than the cultivation of laziness or one’s garden or the development of life skills: of caring for others, of talking and listening, of noting and taking pleasure from nature.33
Organizing the city as a factory line was a major element in the conceptualization of urbanism developed by the Radical Architecture movement in the 1970s (with leading figures such as Friedman and Pettena, alongside Andrea Branzi or Mario Tronti), a vision that still relied on the assumption that all employees are workers in mechanical industries.34 That premise is not only untenable under conditions of cognitive capitalism, but should also lead us to question the fate of material/manual labor under semiocratic regimes of represented or virtual reality. Work in the traditional sense of the term, what might be called construction work, is today seen as marginal – not so much with regard to society in general, but rather in terms of the cognitive sphere in particular, where new types of proletariat already exist (e.g. call-center workers, click-farm workers, etc.). In this context, public blindness about the city’s workings may be seen to have increased in step with the scattering and virtualization of the forces that kept it alive.
33 John Roberts, “Labor, Emancipation and the Critique of Craft-Skill,” in Kozpowski, Kurant, et. al., Joy Forever London: Mayfly Books, 2014,
pp. 112-14.
34 See, for example, Pablo Martínez Capdevila, “The Interior City. Infinity and Concavity in the No-Stop City (1970-1971)” in Cuadernos de Proyectos Arquitectónicos, no. 4, 2013, p. 131.
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