I just read an interesting piece by Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleischer of the Piratbyran in Sweden that the latter sent to the Nettime mailing list (as well as posting here). In it, Eriksson and Fleischer reiterate their call for an end to the debate on copyright as we know it, but more interestingly they lay out their vision of the music industry as it stands. While reading their perspective, I couldn't help but think of the similarities between what they are describing and the shifts in the labor economy that Paolo Virno describes in A Grammar of the Multitude.

"Let's try to define what a live performance is: Something that happens in real-time, a specific time and place. Something establishing an [sic] relation between different people sharing a similar taste for something. An experience you are part of creating. These features can also be observed in the actual uses of recorded music; in the domains where people share music, meta-data, tags, ratings and stories."

This focus on the production of affect over any physical entity - though metadata, tags, etc. all blur these distinctions to a large degree - is similar to Virno's description of praxis replacing poesis; virtuosity becoming the central element of production. In these situations, presence, experience, and narrative supersede the physical commodity in economic importance.

The example Eriksson and Fleischer use to illustrate this also highlights the role of metadata as a means to convey affect:

"Think about sharing musical taste with Last.fm. The most significant effect it has on us, is that it suddenly makes listening to MP3's a two-way activity: While music is streaming from our loudspeakers, metadata are sent back to a central server, continually building on your personal profile, which you know will be used not only by the system for calibrating you personal radio, but also by other humans to judge you. In short, that makes listening to MP3's a performative act. Listening overtakes traits from artistic performance, to some extent."

Metadata has become the medium for virtuosic labor in this circumstance. Performative consumption is conveyed in the layering of data upon data that is then translated into a social environment. It doesn't take the place of affect, then, which is produced through the act of listening, but it signifies affect in an archived state. In other words, it shifts the temporality of affective production from singular presentness to repeated, multiple presents.

Temporality is an important distinction to make when discussing affective or virtuosic labor in archival contexts. Much of the concept of virtuosic production relies on singular experience, but within these new environments, what conceptual changes must we make?