Perm do both – biopower and late-stage capitalism is intrinsically tied – only resistance against both biopolitics and capitalism solve.

Immaterial labour and financialized capitalism. The intensification of biopower resonates with late capitalism’s need for “a social control compatible with democratic societies where order is based on the formalized participation of great masses” (Lucarelli 2010, 120). As capitalism shifts away from Fordist production regimes and toward immaterial labor, the use of biopower increases because it is adept at managing the diverse and heterogeneous populations of late capitalism without recourse to overtly oppressive power relations. As opposed to the industrial or modernist capitalism that preceded it, “postmodern” or late capitalism is characterized by a kind of labor that is dependent upon cooperation (e.g. teamwork), communication (e.g. dialogue), and creativity (e.g. innovation). This is the basis for Lazzarato’s work on immaterial labor that, he rightly claims, requires the magnification of biopower because it not only helps produce material goods, but also seeks to exploit less-tangible human qualities associated with the intellectual work of innovation, dialogue, and teamwork. While an awareness of the relationship between creativity and capitalism is not new, as is clear in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s (2002) famous work on the culture industry, it is now integral to all labor and industries. Considerations of creativity and communication, for example, pervade the workplace and the workforce, as the use of collaborative software, the corporate retreat weekend, the insistence that employees participate in teamwork exercises, and strategies of “creative management” come to the fore. Indeed, this is Richard Florida’s (2004) argument when he describes the rise of a “creative class” which has “evolved economic and social systems that tap human creativity and make use of it as never before” (Florida 2004, xiii [see Dufresne and Sacchetti, chapter 9]). It is not only an explicitly creative “class” that makes use of immaterial labor, for even sectors such as manufacturing and manual labor rely on communications technologies to fulfill orders, to problem solve, or even simply to organize schedules in creative and efficient ways. Immaterial labor is thus ever more present as we labor in our workplaces; but it is also ever more present as we labor in our homes and everywhere else wireless data networks are available. As mentioned, social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are consistent with contemporary biopower as users continually broadcast––and in the process produce and reproduce–– their own personal tastes, relationships, and experiences. Yet the constant stream of user updates, the continuous addition of “friends,” the never-ending “liking” of things around the internet, and the steady insertion and sharing of links does more than produce a unique identity, as corporations cull invaluable information about “user-generated content ... [that] is the very dynamic driving new revenue streams” (Coté and Pybus 2007, 100). The virtual goods and services that users produce through their unpaid labor (of linking, liking, sharing, and uploading) make use of human dialogue, cooperation, and creativity to generate profit; they make, namely, use of immaterial labor. Moreover, because this immaterial labor can take place outside working hours and anywhere a network is available, it renders the distinction between work and leisure obsolete. Late capitalism aims to “put to work the entire lives of workers” by expanding both production and consumption into every aspect of an individual’s life (Marazzi 2008, 50). Concomitant with the shift to immaterial labor is the growth of financialized capitalism. The salient place of finance is linked to the end of the Bretton Woods System in the early 1970s, the subsequent liberalization of financial markets, and the introduction, widespread acceptance, and enormous short-term profitablity of complex financial instruments. Like immaterial labor, financialized capitalism makes use of biopower insofar as it is associated with “the diversion of savings from household economies to stocks and securities” (Marazzi 2008, 21). Personal and communal earnings are increasingly put into the service of complex financial instruments leading to the new “massification of stock market investment” that allow anyone to participate in, say, widely available methods of online trading (Marazzi 2008, 16). This “massification” illustrates an intensification of biopower as private and public economies collapse into each other in the incessant expansion of capitalist profit and gain. But this collapse also speaks to the similarities between immaterial labor and financialized capitalism in their reliance on human communication, cooperation, and creativity. The necessity of communication, in particular, is understood as a crucial component of both financialized capitalism and immaterial labor. Paolo Virno (2001) identifies language itself as a primary component of post-Fordist capitalist production because “the dialogic word is installed at the very heart of capitalist production” and at the very heart of the machinations of labour (Virno 2001). In this way, all labor within late capitalism takes place in what Virno calls the “talkative factory,” as all labor makes use of human language and, by extension, of communication. As a result, financial exchange is only possible through the continual chatter of contemporary life that is spread through communications technologies, media, and social networks. Such chatter is necessary as financiers weigh, consider, and discuss the risks and benefits of potential investments by surveilling global communications. But as Marazzi (2008) points out, financialized capitalism is not merely dependent upon communications technologies because it is coextensive with language. It is its own convention, it is “language itself as means of production and circulation of goods” (Marazzi 2008, 48; author emphasis). Just as all postFordist labor takes place in a talkative environment, financialization also takes place in a talkative environment as investors cooperatively and creatively make investment decisions in the context of an increasingly complex, global economic system. Within late capitalism language thus becomes productive in capitalist terms in that it not only facilitates but also constitutes the interaction, communication, and cooperation that capitalism requires to survive. The quest for never-ending profit and relentless expansionism is foundational to capitalism in general, without which it would quickly falter. As the locales of non-capitalist spaces shrink and opportunities for expansionism decrease, capitalism expands more and more into the interior of human life. Financialization and immaterial labor are illustrative of contemporary capitalism’s quest to turn every aspect of human life, i.e. communication, cooperation, and creativity, into a vehicle for expansion and growth. As capitalism shifts from Fordist labor and manufacturing to immaterial labor and financialization, the application of biopower helps manage every aspect of everyday life. For unlike previous variants of capitalism that relied on mechanization, industrialization, and manufacturing and a fixed sense of place and identity, contemporary capitalism relies on digitization, globalization and communication and a fluid sense of place and identity. As a result, biopower helps produce the heterogeneity, cooperation, and creativity that those shifts require. It is worth repeating: industrial capitalism required a homogeneous workforce to insert into mechanized factories; contemporary practices of financialization and immaterial labor are associated with heterogeneity and workers who creatively problem solve, practice teamwork, and are comfortable with a talkative environment. The intensification of biopower aids in capitalism’s expansionary quest as it regulates and centralizes the human characteristics required by late capitalism. This process of expansion and adaptation is perhaps best described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1984) as a process of deterritorialization through which capitalism works at opening up exterior limits and then ensconcing those limits within its own boundaries. As capitalism expands and shifts, it must continually redefine itself in relation to new limits and challenges. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the concomitant process to deterritorialization is reterritorialization through which capitalism must absorb, and respond to, the limits that it opens up. The intensification of biopower is likewise akin to a deterritorializing practice that seeks to open up the interior limits of human life and reterritorialize the limits it opens up by deploying methods of hierarchically ordering and arranging diverse individuals.