Cognitive capitalism ¿ sometimes referred to as ¿third capitalism,¿ after mercantilism and industrial capitalism ¿ is an increasingly significant theory, given its focus on the socio-economic changes caused by Internet and Web 2.0 technologies that have transformed the mode of production and the nature of labor. The theory of cognitive capitalism has its origins in French and Italian thinkers, particularly Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari¿sCapitalism and Schizophrenia, Michel Foucault¿s work on the birth of biopower and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri¿s Empire and Multitude, as well as the Italian Autonomist Marxist movement that had its origins in the Italian operaismo (workerism) of the 1960s. In this collection, leading international scholars explore the significance of cognitive capitalism for education, especially focusing on the question of digital labor.
Michael A. Peters is Professor of Education at the University of Waikato (New Zealand) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the executive editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory and editor of two international e-journals, Policy Futures in Education and E-Learning. His interests are in education, philosophy and social policy and he has written over fifty books, including Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy (Lang, 2009) (with Simon Marginson and Peter Murphy).
Ergin Bulut is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is interested in political economy of labor and its intersection with education, communication and culture.
Contents: Antonio Negri: Foreword ¿ Michael A. Peters/Ergin Bulut: Introduction ¿ Timothy Brennan: Intellectual Labor ¿ George Caffentzis: A Critique of «Cognitive Capitalism» ¿ Silvia Federici: On Affective Labor ¿ Christian Fuchs: Cognitive Capitalism or Informational Capitalism? The Role of Class in the Information Economy ¿ Jonathan Beller: Cognitive Capitalist Pedagogy and Its Discontents ¿ Ergin Bulut: Creative Economy: Seeds of Social Collaboration or Capital¿s Hunt for General Intellect and Imagination? ¿ Mark Coté/Jennifer Pybus: Learning to Immaterial Labour 2.0: Facebook and Social Networks ¿ Emma Dowling: Pedagogies of Cognitive Capitalism - Challenging the Critical Subject ¿ Alex Means: Creativity as an Educational Problematic within the Biopolitical Economy ¿ Toby Miller: For Fun, For Profit, For Empire: The University and Electronic Games ¿ Michael A. Peters: Algorithmic Capitalism and Educational Futures ¿ Alberto Toscano: The Limits of Autonomy: Cognitive Capitalism and University Struggles ¿ Nick Dyer-Witheford: In the Ruined Laboratory of Futuristic Accumulation: Immaterial Labour and the University Crisis ¿ Tahir Wood: The Confinement of Academic Freedom and Critical Thinking in a Changing Corporate World: South African Universities ¿ Cameron McCarthy: Afterword. The Unmaking of Education in the Age of Globalization, Neoliberalism and Information.