| Moving from the contemporary transformations of labor as form of production, this dissertation tries to question the role that 'knowledge' has, both as element of capitalist production and as its subverting tool. By setting a parallelism between Capital's mechanism and the workings of the Imagination, this study tracks the genealogy of 'Immaterial labor', main figure of this transformation, back to Marx's notion of phantasmagoria and to the reading that Walter Benjamin gave of it (M. Lazzarato). It develops a path still latent in Benjamin's work but already by him indicated---whose importance has been neglected by the critical work of the last twenty years---, of a positive role of the image within the event of phantasmagoria. Such positive role of the image is detected by this study as knowledge that occurs, in contemporaneity, mainly through images. It is so defined a first feature of this knowledge, common to both capital and imagination. By inserting itself within the contemporary attention to the productive aspect of Imagination (studies on Spinoza by E. Balibar, E. Giancotti, P. Cristofolini) and its influence on economy (A. Negri); this study conjugates this 'knowledge in images'---(Grandville's figures) with the 'creative, materialistic' role of the image in contemporary theories of knowledge (U. Fadini, G. Didi-Hubennan, J. L. Nancy). A powerful figure comes out of this reflection: sense , which this study proposes as materialist Concept (Deleuze-Guattari) and opposes to the aconceptual relations established by capital. Product of phantasmagoria and opening to poetics, sense is the concept able to function as bridge to the possibility of a 'practical knowledge'. With these elements, this study proposes to add to the contemporary notion of 'cognitive capitalism' (group of research, Matisse, Paris 1; E. Rullani, M. Lazzarato, T. Negri, Y. Moulier-Boutang, A. Corsani), a notion of 'cognitive materialism' which, by giving justice to a material side of immaterial labor, chooses to give back to poverty the force of potentia, of affirmative activity. |
