Strategies of the Political Entrepreneur
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When Silvio Berlusconi won the elections in 1994, the international press unleashed an avalanche of not particularly well-meaning commentary, while the left and the democrats expressed their own quite understandable indignation. But all this chatter threatened only to titillate the new forms of power, even in the best of cases. The truth that then had to be asserted and now has to be repeated, beyond the various electoral results, is that a critique of Berlusconi's politics is impossible without a critique of the new forms of capitalist accumulation. More generally, a critique of "communication" (of which many continue to speak, àpropos of Berlusconi) is impossible without going against the grain of all the theories that, in the 1980s, were constructed precisely on the more or less explicit presupposition of the overcoming of capitalism and its laws by the various paradigms of communication.
But this is exactly the opposite of what happened. The social machine, the productive machine, the communicative machine, and the political machine are tending to become articulations of a single process: the capitalist domination of the real, of the whole of the real. The different machines all function on the same plane of immanence, on the "body without organs" of money-Capital, of which they are only "modes and attributes." The relative autonomy of the communicative machine, as we once used to say to account for its relationship with capitalism (a relative autonomy that permitted forms of despotic, and thus not specifically capitalist, subordination like "propaganda"), has given way to the complete "deterritorialization" (decoding) of the flows of communication, their semantic contents and their traditional speakers, by the logic of the market. Berlusconi's enterprise is a mechanism [dispositivo]1 that actually allows us to observe how the enterprise has become the "soul" of those forms of communication that once followed indirectly from it: journalism, ("independent" or state-run) news, cinema, sports, game shows, etc.2 Italy, they say, is a political laboratory, but it must immediately be added that it is a laboratory in which the forms of governability of this new capitalist configuration are being tested. In fact, in the figure of Berlusconi one can no longer distinguish the entrepreneur (who assures the production of surplus-value), the media [End Page 87] boss (who produces public opinion), and the politician (who organizes public space). Instead of being hierarchically arranged, these functions reciprocally presuppose one another.
Benetton and Flows
If Berlusconi continues to obtain a strong political and electoral consensus, this should not be attributed to his ownership of television networks, but to the fact that he represents in an emblematic and even material fashion the new figure of the entrepreneur that we have called the "political entrepreneur."3 In other words, his electoral success is not due to a manipulation of the media, but to a real and profound complicity in a new mode of production, within which he swims like a fish in water. The fact that this new entrepreneur uses communication as a strategic mode of command and organization can only lead us to understand that we have entered into a new paradigm, in which the relationship between the economic, the social and the political is turned upside down. In order to comprehend this passage and to eliminate any misunderstanding, therefore, it is useful to refer to another Italian entrepreneurial experiment—one that, far from controlling the media, establishes itself over the control of flows: flows of labor, flows of consumption, flows of communication, flows of desires. We are referring to that entrepreneurial "anomaly" that bears the name Benetton.
Benetton, in fact, is a very strange entrepreneur in many ways that are inexplicable within the traditional framework of economic theory: it has no workers, and it lacks factories and distribution networks.4 In order to avoid confusing the mental habits of leftists too much, one could say that Benetton has established a new relation to production, distribution and consumption. For it, the extraction of surplus-value is no longer the result of the direct exploitation of labor; on the contrary, exploitation is organized by the small and medium...
