The Corporation and Neomonadology

In Lazzarato’s neomondology we have a world of differing, multiple monads, whose coherence is not guaranteed by God like in Gottfried Leibniz, but rather by the cooperation among the monads themselves. This is Lazzarato’s answer to Hardt and Negri’s theory of the multitude and other current theorizations of the common: for Lazzarato (and Tarde) the process of the constitution of a socius is an act of cooperation among differing whatever singularities wherein the functioning of society is “similar to the functioning of the brain, a social brain.” In this chapter, Lazzarato develops this idea of a social brain into a full-fledged theory of contemporary capitalism offering neomonadological redefinitions of labor, value, and production in terms of Tarde’s theory of cooperation.