Autonomous production? On Negri's 'new synthesis'

This article takes the suggestions by Jameson and Zizek that Hardt and Negri's recent Empire is an important 'new theoretical synthesis' and a challenge to a politically complacent Cultural Studies as its starting point to explore Negri's understanding of 'production'. It opens out Negri's apparent synthesis to consider the formative elements of his work: operaismo's 'social factory', Marx's 'Fragment on Machines' and Deleuze's figure of 'control society'. The article argues that whilst Negri develops the important analytic categories of socialized and affective labour, he breaks with operaismo's and Deleuze's 'cramped' and 'minor' interrogation of the intricacies of capitalized production to develop a problematic understanding of an emerging autonomy-in-production. In this Negri makes a strange return to the orthodox Marxian and - in an inverted way - neo-Gramscian positions which operaismo had sought to undermine; so making Empire less a synthesis of, than a break with some of the core theoretical principles of operaismo, Marx and Deleuze.