Digital Resistances - Digital Culture - page 147

ist production is necessarily a collective endeavour and requires
social co-operation. Thus they consider the rise of immaterial
labour and the 'social worker' brings about the conditions for
communism, largely because such 'social work' requires communi-
cation that comes before entrepreneurship. All that capitalism can
hope to do is stimulate the creativity and communication required
for immaterial labour and to control and exploit it from outside.
Negri has continued to produce powerful exegeses of such ideas,
while remaining in prison in Italy. Most recently he has collaborated
with Michael Hardt to write Empire , 41 which has become an impor-
tant text for the Anti-capitalist Movement.
In the early to mid- s, while Negri was collaborating with

Guattari, new conceptions of the machinic and possible new rela-
tions with technology began to be articulated within feminist
discourse. In the late '

1980

s a number of feminist writers and thinkers
began to question the relationship between women and such tech-
nology, and to propose new forms of possible engagement. The
sociologist Sherry Turkle undertook an important study of com-
puter culture and its relation to perceptions of selfhood, which was
published in

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as The Second Self: Computers and the Human
Spirit . 42 At around the same time Constance Penley, who had already
developed a reputation in film studies, began to look at science
fiction and at the culture of technology. This resulted, in the first
case, in the special edition of the feminist film journal Camera
Obscura , which was later published as a topic, co-edited with
Elisabeth Lyon and Lynne Spigel, entitled Close Encounters: Film,
Feminism and Science Fiction , 43 and in the second in a topic,
co-edited with Andrew Ross, called Technoculture . 44 Penley and other
feminists' interest in science fiction reflected, in part at least, the
degree to which Feminism had empowered women to make their
mark in a previously male-dominated genre. The '

1988

s saw a genera-
tion of female SF writers come to prominence, including Ursula K.
LeGuin, Anne McCaffrey, Joanna Russ, Kate Wilhelm, C. J. Cherryh,

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