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VASSILIS TSIANOS and
DIMITRIS PAPADOPOULOS
PRECARITY:
A SAVAGE JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF EMBODIED CAPITALISM
Vassilis Tsianos [University of Hamburg] and
Dimitris Papadopoulos [Cardiff University]
A. Introduction
There is an underlying assumption to the current
debates about class composition in post-Fordism: this is the assumption that
immaterial work and its corresponding social subjects form the centre of
gravity in the new turbulent cycles of struggles around living labour. This
paper explores the theoretical and political implications of this assumption,
its promises and closures. Is immaterial labour the condition out of which a
radical socio-political transformation of contemporary post-Fordist capitalism
can emerge? Who's afraid of immaterial workers today?
In their attempt to historicize the emergence of
the concept of the general intellect, many theorists (e.g. Hardt & Negri,
2000; Virno, 2004) remind us that the general intellect cannot be conceived
simply as a sociological category. We think that we should apply the same
precaution when using the concept of immaterial labour. This is the case
especially when the studies which acknowledge the sociological evidence of
immaterial work are increasing, such as research in the mainstream sociology of
work which investigates atypical employment and the subjectivisation of labour
(e.g. Lohr & Nickel, 2005; Moldaschl & Voss, 2003), or even
conceptualisations of immaterial labour in the context of knowledge society
(e.g. Gorz, 2004). A mere sociological understanding of the figure of
immaterial labour is restricted to a simplistic description of the spreading of
features such as affective labour, networking, collaboration, knowledge economy
etc. into what mainstream sociology calls network society (Castells, 1996). What
differentiates a mere sociological description from an operative political
conceptualisation of immaterial labour – which is situated in co-research and
political activism (Negri, 2006) – is the quest for understanding the power
dynamics of living labour in post-Fordist societies.
The concept of
immaterial labour is capable of delivering a diagnosis of the present
contradictions of production, but who's afraid of sociological descriptions of
the present, especially when they start becoming common topos in public
discourse and in mainstream social science? In order to avoid just another
apolitical sociological category, we need to focus on the ruptures, blockades,
lines of flight which are immanent in the configuration of immaterial labour.
Instead of assuming that today's emergent social subjectivities are simply
mirroring the proliferation of immaterial labour, we need to conceive of
subjectivity as interplay of value creation in immaterial labour and the
outcome of the inconsistencies, the forms of oppression, the modes of dominance
which are pertinent to it. It is misleading to assert that subjectivity is
constituted by the sociological features of immaterial labour such as
cooperation, creativity, linguistic exchanges, affectivity etc. Rather, the emergent
subjectivities exceed the conditions of production of immaterial labour when
immaterial workers are confronted with the impasses in their life situation,
the micro-oppressions and exploitation. In other words, subjectivity is
produced when the contemporary regime of labour becomes embodied experience.
When subjectivity puts on the shirt of mainstream sociology it corrodes its
flesh and exposes its bones. The subjectivity of the immaterial labourers does
not mirror the production process of immaterial labour; it is the diabolic blow
up of its contingent intensities and fractures. Subjectivity is not a
facticity, it is a departure.
Thus, the new
subjectivities traversing the archipelago of post-Fordist production are not
identical with the conditions of immaterial production; rather, subjectivity of
immaterial labour means experiencing the new order of exploitation of
immaterial labour. Today's composition of living labour is the response to the
risks imposed by immaterial labour. What make the new political subjectivities
happen are not the relations of production pertinent to immaterial labour – as
for example Lazzarato (1996) asserts – but the embodied experience of the new
arrangements of exploitation in post-Fordist societies. Precarity constitutes
this new arrangement of exploitation of living labour in advanced post-Fordism.
Precarity is where
immaterial production meets the crisis of the social systems which were based
on the national social compromise of normal employment. Because work – in order
to become productive – becomes incorporated into non-labour time, the
exploitation of workforce happens beyond the boundaries of work, it is
distributed across the whole time and space of life (Neilson & Rossiter,
2005). Precarity means exploiting the continuum of everyday life, not simply
the workforce. In this sense, precarity is a form of exploitation which
operates primarily on the level of time. Thisbecause it changes the meaning of
what non-productivity is. The regulation of labour in Fordism was secured in an
anticipative way independently of its immediate productivity. The protectionist
function of the welfare system is a time management: it works by anticipating
and securing the periods when someone becomes non-productive (accident and
illness, unemployment, age). In post-Fordism this form of time management
disappears. Not so only because future is not guaranteed, but also because the
future is already appropriated in the present. From the standpoint of the
labourer, work takes place in the present, which is, though, incorporated into
his or her whole lifespan as a worker. And precisely this lifelong scope is
destroyed in precarity: from the standpoint of capital the whole lifespan
continuum of a precarious labourer is dissected into successive exploitable
units of the present. Precarity is this form of exploitation which, by
operating only on the present, exploits simultaneously also the future.
How is this breakdown of
the national compromise of normal employment and the reordering of time in
precarious life conditions experienced by the singular labourer? If we
understand the embodied experience of precarity we can interrupt the
reductionism of mainstream sociological conceptualisations of immaterial
labour. We already said earlier that new social subjectivities do not so much
mirror the characteristics of immaterial production but the precarious modes of
exploitation proliferating in them. Precarity is the embodied experience of the
ambivalences of immaterial productivity in advanced post-Fordism. The embodied
experience of precarity is characterised by: (a) vulnerability: the steadily
experience of flexibility without any form of protection; (b) hyperactivity:
the imperative to accommodate constant availability; (c) simultaneity: the
ability to handle at the same the different tempi and velocities of multiple
activities; (d) recombination: the crossings between various networks, social
spaces, and available resources; (e) post-sexuality: the other as dildo; (f)
fluid intimacies: the bodily production of indeterminate gender relations; (g)
restlessness: being exposed to and trying to cope with the overabundance of
communication, cooperation and interactivity; (h) unsettledness: the continuous
experience of mobility across different spaces and time lines; (i) affective
exhaustion: emotional exploitation, or, emotion as an important element for the
control of employability and multiple dependencies; (j) cunning: able to be
deceitful, persistent, opportunistic, a trickster.
This phenomenology
points to the potentialities for political articulation of the embodied
experience of precarity. We started this text by asking who's afraid of the
immaterial workers? Obviously, it is difficult to imagine that there is
somebody today who is afraid of the immaterial workers. And this has certainly
nothing to do with the difficulties to comprehend the neologism 'immaterial
labour'. We already argued that the new social subjects of immaterial labour
cannot be identical with the conditions in which they find themselves. This
because they create an excess of sociability and subjectivity which is
political and at the same time it does not participate in given political
representation. Now, the logic which grasps subjectivity as identical with the
position of a certain group of people in the production process (here the
immaterial workers) ends up in constructing this subjectivity as pre-existent
to its embodied materialisation. This logic conceives subjectivity as an
already existing but effaced part of society (i.e. as otherness). This
political logic attempts to incorporate this otherness into the totality of
political representation. Subjectivity is reduced to a part which is not yet
included (Rancière, 1998; Stephenson & Papadopoulos, 2006). The inclusion
of subjectivity into the political representation revitalises democratic
politics, but simultaneously it neutralises the political excess of the
subjectivity of immaterial workers and reduces it to a manageable part of
existing political regulation. Being included simply on the basis of a
regulatory or egalitarian principle actually indicates that some parts of the
society really have no role to play in governing. The result is that society
appears to be comprised of completely identifiable, self-evident subjects –
that is, of people who occupy the space that has been allocated to them by
their position in production and no other.
And precisely a subject
which is included as otherness or as a previously excluded part in political
governing is and never was a frightening subject for the given political order.
More than that, it is not only that it is not frightening the given order, it
is also an anxious and afraid subject. And with Spinoza, we know that when the
mob is frightened, it inspires no fear (Balibar, 1994). This leads us to say,
that only when a social subject is not willing to participate in the inclusion
politics is fearsome. And it is fearsome because it participates in the
totality through its singularity and imperceptibility, not as a recognisable
and representable part. That means, it is fright-ening because it is
everywhere, because it is everyone (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). A new social
subject emerging out of the condition of immaterial labour can be only this one
which does not pertain to its own position in the cycle of production, but it
is one which challenges its identity by working on its immanent, situated and
embodied experiences. We already said before: Subjectivity is not a facticity,
it is an imperceptible departure. And the point of departure of the new social
subject is not immaterial production as such but its materialisation in the
subject's flesh (Negri, 2003b).
C. Fear-inspiring subjects
Before exploring the significance of the
embodied experience of precarity for the articulation of a political project of
exodus, we want to recall three alternative forms of fearsome action available
in the social history of subjectivity. Could any of these three forms be a
viable way to transform immaterial workers to a fearsome political actor?
I. The party form. Historically one of the
first occurrences of a frightening political subject in the long history of the
organisation of the worker's subjectivity has been the revolutionary party. The
main feature of this organised subjectivity is its militant character. The
party transforms the workers subjectivity to a war machine. The materialisation
of revolution has as its primary target the extinction of antagonist relations.
The crucial point here is that this extinction happens not only on the level of
the relations of production but also on the level of their institutional
manifestations. The extinction of the antagonistic character of social
relations leads to the extermination of the two particular moments which
regulate liberal nation states, namely rights and representation (for an
extensive discussion of this issue s. Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2006). This
was the first and by far more radical attempt to overcome the liberal political
matrix of western nations. But the crux of this attempt was that the moment of overpowering
the liberal matrix of rights and representation was initiated from above. This
happened because the transcendence of the liberal matrix which was released by
the organisation of worker's subjectivity was appropriated by the vertical
organisation of the party form. The insurgent creativity of worker's
subjectivity which departed from the liberal matrix, ended up in the facticity
of party's domination on society (Negri, 1999). A domination which in a purely
vampiric form absorbs the impulse of worker's subjectivity to disseminate
across society and then transforms it to the building materials of a vertical
organisation imposed from above.
II. The trade union form. A further
frightening form in the history of worker's subjectivity directly starts from
the worker's immediate relation to production. Its difference from the party
form is that the clash with capital was not mediated and facilitated by an
attack on its institutional manifestation which was primarily the capitalist
state as a whole, but directly in the space where class dominance was
experienced, namely in the factory. The genealogy of trade union form shows a
parallel movement to the party form, one which in many historical moments was
in direct contradiction to the party. Unlike the party though, the trade union
form organised workers' subjectivity as a group with common interests according
to its position in the system of production. If the party form engages in
militant politics, the trade union form engages in politics of protection, i.e.
syndicalism. If the party form is characterised by a historically unprecedented
radicalism, the trade union form is characterised by a historically
unprecedented moment of camaraderie and solidarity. The trade union form is
grounded on the principle of syndicalism, i.e. a belligerent sociability –
belligerent towards the capital commando and sociable and protective for its
members. But the protectionist character of the trade union sociability was
invested in the attempt to moderate the asymmetrical relation between capital
and work. This leads the traditional working class movement to restrict its
interventions to the realm of the state and to become encapsulated in a purely
productivist thinking. Reformism become the political logic of the trade union form
because gradually parts of the working class saw their interests aligned with
parts of the state. The trade union form was the form that translated the
surplus of the sociability of worker's subjectivity into institutionalised
forms of state protection. Of course this institutionalisation of sociability
was not equally distributed across the various workers groups. The statism of
the trade union form changed radically the nature of capitalist nation state.
The protection of labour becomes an inseparable moment of the modern state and
gives birth to the triptych: social protectionism, institutionalised
regulation, welfare state.
III. The micropolitical
form. The last and most recent form of a fearsome social subjectivity is
related to the radicalisation of the politics of everyday life. Here we
encounter a departure from a political subjectivity which is primarily defined
from its relation to the production process. The micropolitical form returns to
the immediate level of social life where experience gets under the skin and
materialises, affecting selves and others. There is nothing exceptional to this
functioning of the everyday. As Lefebvre (1991) says, it is the realm where all
extraordinary, specialized activity has been eliminated. Feminism, civil rights
movements, identity politics, urban activism, antiracism, all start from the
embodied experience of exclusion on the level of the everyday and, by doing
that, they intend to rearticulate it and to insert difference as a constitutive
moment of the everyday. It is the moment when everyday experience turns against
the everyday itself, trying to attack it and change it, the moment when
everyday experience becomes its own radical critique (Debord, 1981). The
everyday is not identical with itself, it is the source and the target of
change. Politics of difference. In other words, the micropolitical form
attempted to incorporate new social subjectivities into the established social
compromise of the nation state – which was organised along whiteness, heteronormativity,
waged labour, and property – by engaging in changing the dominant conditions of
representation (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). The micropolitics of difference is
the fight for representation. This political strategy finds its institutional
equivalent in the concept of enlarged citizenship (Honig, 2001). The logic of
the politics of difference is that it operates on a radical externality which
has to be inserted in society's institutionalised system of representations. By
starting from spaces located outside dominant citizenship, the politics of
difference challenge factual forms of representation, and create the conditions
for a transversal representation. Unlike the party form which targets the
militant decomposition of the liberal state as a whole, and the trade union
form which attempts to reduce existing asymmetries in the realm of the state,
the micropolitical form positions itself on the neglected terrain of the
everyday – a terrain which has been traditionally abandoned by the state – and
from this very particular position attacks the established modes of belonging
regulated by state institutions. But by doing this it arrives again at the
state (Stephenson & Papadopoulos, 2006). In this sense, the subjectivity
connected to the event of representation is neither a departure, nor a
facticity, it is an arrival.
The question for us then
is: could any of these political forms become the vehicle for the
transformation of the subjectivity of the precarious workers to a fearsome new
social subject?
D. Excessive sociabilities
The answer is no. This is because, as we will
argue, the subjectivity of precarious workers creates an excess of sociability,
which cannot be accommodated by the three existing political forms without
being neutralised and normalised. And the reason is twofold: Firstly, because
the embodied experience of precarity of the immaterial labourers, as we
described it earlier, is radically different from the experiences which
historically built the ground on which these three forms of political organisation
thrived. Secondly, because the regime of control which has to be challenged by
the fearsome subjectivity of the immaterial workers is radically different from
the regimes which each of the three mentioned forms came to challenge in each
particular historical time. So, why cannot the precarious subjectivity become a
frightening subjectivity in the party, the trade union, or the micropolitical
form?
I. 'I don't have the time...' Perhaps it is
the first time in the history of worker's subjectivity that the expression 'I
don't have the time' becomes an explicit political statement. It is an explicit
political statement which designates a form of collective subjectivity which is
radically different from the overregulated subjectivity in the party form. And
the reason for this is that this expression doesn't refer to an individualised
way for the personal time management but it concentrates in an emblematic way
the collective experience that time is already totally appropriated. The
embodied experience of a restless movement between multiple time axes refers to
the existential condition of precarious living labour which is organised on the
continuous time of life (remember the – in the meantime so widespread – issue
of intermingling production and reproduction, work and non-work, work time and
leisure time, the public and the private). The expression 'I don't have the
time' is the paradigmatic figure for the subjective internalisation of non
disposal over one's own labour power.
If precarious experience
is structured by the dominance of a productive timeline which makes the
expression 'I don't have the time' so obvious, then the liberation from the
dominance of time over the worker's subjectivity in post-Fordist production is
the capacity to tarry with time (Stephenson & Papadopoulos, 2006;
Theunissen, 1991). That is not just simply to go with time, but to insert
various speeds in the embodied experience of time. Tarrying with time
constitutes the moment of the reappropriation of the productive means of immaterial
labour (this because the productive means of immaterial production is the whole
living labour of each individual). In other words, it is the moment where the
immaterial worker's subjectivity is not constituted as a device for
productivity, but it breaks the immediate flow of time, it becomes frightening
because it escapes the dominance of the immaterial linear chronocracy. What is
important for us here is that tarrying with time is purposeless in itself, it
has no object, it is non organisable, it defies regulation. Tarrying with time
is pure potentia, pure departure. In this sense it is the most powerful
way to question the logic of precarity: it implodes the imperative 'be
creative'. If the liberation from production, that is if recovering from the
pressure of simultaneity and restlessness, is constituted as a break with
organisation, then it becomes obvious why the party form which is primary
fixated on an over-determination and overregulation of time becomes obsolete in
contemporary conditions. The liberation from time of the precarious worker and
the programme for liberation in the party form are unfolding along two
incompatible timelines.
II. The trade union form is simply not
applicable on the terrain of the embodied experience of precarity – and here we
mean that it cannot fabricate a frightening social subject – simply because the
constitutive needs of the precarious worker are per definitionem
excluded from the structure of the national compromise on which the trade union
form operates. This is because the crisis of the social welfare systems is
nothing other than the end of a peculiar liaison between normal waged labour
and state interventionism which was nurtured by the trade unions. As we already
know, immaterial work and the embodied experience of precarity is an exodus
from the system of waged labour. At the same time the new neoliberal state
seized this exodus in order to create a forced activation of the individual
labour beyond state regulation. This means that the two foundational moments of
the classical trade union reformism, i.e. statism of labour and interventionism
of the state, are absent in the terrain of precarity.
If we want to spell out
the divergences between the trade union form and the embodied experience of
precarity then we need to start from the basic conditions of immaterial labour.
It has a trans-spatial order. If the trade union form starts from the immediate
space of production and mobilises the workers according to their common
spatialised interests, a classical syndicalism against precarity will find as a
major obstacle the trans-spatial movements of the precarious worker. We
described earlier two of the major characteristics of the embodied experience
of precarity, i.e. hyperactivity and unsettledness. The embodiment of incessant
movement and accountability in multiple locales destroys the possibility of the
classic trade union organisation form based on a single locality.
At the same the exodus
of the subjectivity of the waged labourer into the subjectivity of the neoliberal
entrepreneurial and self-managerial individual establishes a new relation
between the state and living labour. The classical trade unionism is based on
the articulation of a balance between parts of the working class and parts of
the state. For example, consider the state interventionism in protecting the
rights of male workforce and establishing a hierarchical order of labour. On
the lowest level of this hierarchy was female and migrant 'dirty work'
(domestic labour, undocumented labour, unskilled employment, cf. Anderson,
2000). Historically the attempts of the trade unions to reduce the power
asymmetry between labour and capital was organised as a hierarchical order
between various kinds of labour subjectivities. By doing this, the overrepresented
subjectivities of the working class trade unionism operated along a
particularism which de facto fractured the everyday sociability of
living labour into variably important social groups. The neoliberal policies of
the 70s worked on this fragmentation of the social, broke down the traditional
concepts of protectionism, and systematically undermined the role of trade
unions in the national compromise between labour and capital. The neoliberal
project amplified this fracture; in fact it elevated the fragmentation of
living labour into a new regime of primary accumulation. The condition, which
we encounter today, is that the trade union form cannot effectively protect
labour and the neoliberal project no longer wants to protect it. The trade
union form cannot create fearsome subjects in the wake of the neoliberal attack
against living labour.
We find ourselves in a
vacuum of protection. The embodied experience of precarity very much reflects
this vacuum: the almost existential condition of vulnerability felt as constant
state of being in every moment of everyday life. The embodied experience of
precarity calls for a new mode of protection, one which cannot be covered by
classic form of trade union syndicalism. The income of the salaried worker was
measured in relation to the quantification of the individual work force. This
measurement was guaranteed and protected by the collective trade union
negotiations. But this no longer holds. Simply because you cannot protect
through collective bargaining something which is immeasurable. There is no
unified equivalent for the labour productivity of each individual immaterial
labourer. The singular productivity of the immaterial labourer is no longer
quantifiable(Negri, 2003a). This leads us to say that immaterial labourers
living in precarious conditions need a different form of protection, one which
allows them to perform their everyday re-/productive activities and at the same
time guarantees an existential security when they are affected by neoliberal
exploitation. New social movements against precarity (e.g. the EuroMayDay
network, www.euromayday.org) stress this necessity and demand basic income as
the unconditional protection from the precarity of living labour (Fumagalli
& Lucarelli, 2006). The precondition for this demand is the radicalisation
of classic trade unions since these cannot accommodate demands beyond the logic
of waged labour. The logic of waged labour is incompatible with the demand for
basic income because the latter calls for an uncoupling of wage from labour
(i.e. the earning from the executed work). In this sense, there is a new form
of syndicalism needed which, starting form the embodied experience of living
labour, can overcome the limitations of the trade union form: biosyndicalism.
Biosyndicalism as a
possible approach for the organisation of precarious subjectivities could bring
various contemporary experiments of collective organisation (e.g. Precarias a
la Deriva, www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias.htm; cf. also the precarity
map, www.precarity-map.net) together with a new form of unionism.This new form
of unionism operates on a transnational level (it follows the transnational
flows of labour mobility), it is trans-spatial and trans-sectorial (i.e. it
does not represent a particular sector or a particular locale in the cycle of
production), it is non-identitarian (i.e. it questions the predominant
workforce identity as male and native), and finally, and most importantly, it
attends to the life experience of precarity (i.e. it questions the centrality
of work time in the unfolding of the worker's life). A syndicalism of this kind
will preserve the most valuable and irreplaceable merits of the historical
trade union form – i.e. caring, solidarity, and cooperation – and elevate them
into new more complex forms of organisation (cf. Chesters & Welsh, 2006).
In this sense it will be a truly life-oriented syndicalism (biosyndicalism),
as it will operate on the immediate level of common life experiences.
Nevertheless, the question remains whether this new form of experimental
syndicalism can contribute to the creation of a fear inspiring social subject
against precarity. This can be answered by recalling a historical analogy:
today the basic income for precarious workers is what the eight hour day was for
the working class before the turn of the previous century. It was just the
annunciation of fear.
III. We said earlier that
the micropolitical form is primarily concerned with the conditions of
representation; it is the fight against dominant forms of representation and
the fight for the extension of representation. The question then is if this
primary focus of the micropolitical form can address the embodied experience of
precarity. To what extend can the issue of representation contribute to the
generation of a fear inspiring social subject of the immaterial worker? Here we
will assert that this is almost impossible because the embodied experience of
precarity exceeds representationalism, and in this sense it cannot be covered
by the micropolitical form, despite – and this is particularly important here –
the almost 'natural' proximity between the politics of the precarious workers
and the micropolitical form. This proximity results from the common concern
with the trouble of visibility. The embodied experience of precarity is
crucially undermined and suffers a lot by its invisibility. There are three reasons
for this immediate closeness between micropolitics and precarious politics and
their common strategy against invisibility: Firstly, because immaterial labour
and the precarious experience have been effaced from the official agenda of the
working class movement and its institutions. It was doomed to invisibility or
better subsumed under the category of the service sector or it was disparaged
as a synonym for new economy, human capital, and in the best case as knowledge
work. Secondly, because an integral component of the embodied experience of
precarity, dirty work (as we described it earlier), was linked in the public
discourse to the shadow economy and it was denigrated as counterproductive or
at least irrelevant for national economies. It is due to the social struggles
of the migrant and feminist movements that made the issue of dirty work
visible. The common struggles between the precarious movements and the social
movements of the 70s and 80s still remain a crucial and irreplaceable strategic
coalition for any form of activism related to precarity today. Thirdly, the
proximity between the micropolitical form and the embodied experience of
precarity arises out of the common situatedness in the everyday. Both of them,
the micropolitical form and the movements against precarity, start and work on
the immanent terrain of everyday life (and here we should also not forget the
Foucauldian idea of biopolotics which was equally important for both currents).
Despite all these
commonalities and strategic alliances, there is an insurmountable difference
between the two, one which does not allow a micropolitical social movement
against precarity to become a fear inspiring social actor. This difference
refers to the failure of representational politics (Stephenson & Papadopoulos,
2006). The issue of representation today is the matter out of which
post-Fordism enacts its own exodus from the blockade of the existing national
compromise of distributive rights – we call this transformation postliberal
sovereignty (Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2006). In order to reconstruct this
blockade we need to rethink the relation between productivity (as value
creating work) and property (as the accumulation of value) in post-Fordism.
The productivity of
immaterial labour challenges the systems of the distribution of wealth. In
order to be productive immaterial labour needs an unrestricted access to the
immaterial resources of production (that is the netware, e.g. networks,
databases, visual data, health, culture, freedom of circulation). In this sense
immaterial labour becomes productive by blocking the capitalist principle of
property. Of course the productivity of immaterial labour is essential for the
neoliberal project. Therefore another solution was necessary, one which, on the
one hand, does not suppress the productivity, sociability, and creativity of
immaterial labourers, and, one the other hand, reinstalls a new regime of
distribution of wealth – one which is based on the production and
commodification of netware (Moulier-Boutang, 2001). But the property regime of
netware has a peculiar feature: it is not founded on the property of the means
of production but only of its products (patents of intellectual goods, life,
and biodiversity; copyright; restrictions in up/download; privatisation of
health; mobility control etc.). This is because the means of network-based
production and of embodied productivity are the singular creativity,
affectivity, and sociability of the immaterial worker. A new system of property
emerges, one which controls the products of the subjectivities of the
immaterial labourers rather than the tools or production, which is the
subjectivity of the immaterial worker as such (the rise of consumerist
capitalism is to a large extent the outcome of this).
Among the new netware
circulating in post-Fordism are the risks of the living labour as such. The
monetarisation and commodification of the life risk of immaterial workers is an
essential part of the embodied experience of precarity (we described earlier,
the aspects of vulnerability, affective exhaustion, and recombination which
refer exactly to the pressures ensuing from the subjectivisation of risk in
precarious living conditions). The productive subjectivity of the immaterial
labourer is reloaded as precarious subjectivity. The precarisation of life
reveals the limits of the national compromise of distributive rights. Precarity
means imposing restrictions on the rights for participation in the established
national compromise. Simultaneously, this partial exclusion creates the
constitutive condition for performing the politics of representation. The
micropolitical enterprise (e.g. governmentality studies) attempts to understand
how the neoliberal project activates multiple social actors and attempts to
initiate their inclusion in a new system of rights. This is the micropolitical
New Deal of neoliberal societies. It is obvious, that despite the centrality of
micropolitics in the contemporary movements against precarity, there is not
very much here which could point out to a fear inspiring social subjectivity.
This because the subjectivity of micropolitics is itself anxious and afraid.
The codification of the
micropolitical New Deal in the neoliberal state takes the form of citizenship.
In particular, the idea of flexible citizenship captures the moment where
politics are confronted with the crisis of national sovereignty and the
national compromise between labour and property as described in the previous
paragraphs. Flexible citizenship shifts the gaze from a hermetically and
exclusively structured form of national belonging to a form of a residual
belonging beyond the destabilised dominance of national identity (e.g. Sassen,
2004) and opts for a new extended foundation of democracy (e.g. Honig, 2001).
It accounts for new social actors working on transnational, post-welfare
representations of participative rights (e.g. Mezzandra, 2001). But the problem
with this understanding of political representation and flexible citizenship –
despite its enormous importance for the political constitution of the present –
is that it is inherently defensive. It is defensive because it cannot act
beyond the already given ambiguous dynamics of the globalised neoliberal
project. Of course the new politics of transnational representation and flexible
citizenship are crucial for today's social movements because they de facto
establishe the right to escape dominant nationalist representations and the
national compromise between labour and capital. But by being defensive these
movements are merely fixated on arrival, they attempt to establish a new
compromise between immaterial labour and postnational capitalism in the form of
flexisecurity. Representational politics and the demand for flexisecurity are
necessary responses to the concerns of the embodied experience of precarity,
but they reterritorialise the subjectivity of the precarious workers in the
matrix of a new postliberal statism.
E. Imperceptible politics
Our starting question was why immaterial workers
cannot constitute a subjectivity which frightens the existing political order
today. In a second move we tried to reconstruct immaterial labour from the
standpoint of the worker's subjectivity that is how the intensities and
ruptures of immaterial production are experienced on the terrain of the
everyday life. This allowed developing a different take on the concept of
immaterial labour: not only as a constitutive moment of a new cycle of class
composition in post-Fordism, but as a conceptual moment to understand the
history of our late capitalist present. We argued that we cannot extract an
understanding of the contemporary class composition from the characteristics of
immaterial labour. We understand immaterial labour as a condition which
corroborates the transition form Fordism to post-Fordism, in a way that it
prevents us of understanding the present (post-Fordism) by simply applying
categories of the past (Fordism) to it. But at the same time, it does not offer
enough conceptual means to think possible developments of the future, or, in other
words, to think the conditions of a departure from the present. One the one
hand, immaterial labour reveals the impossibility to return to a Fordist
regulation of labour; it is the institutionalised manifestation of an
irreversible movement to a system of production which becomes crucial to the
realisation of a transnational system of domination (i.e. postliberal
sovereignty, cf. Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2006). On the other hand,
immaterial labour cannot be conceived as a possibility for delineating a line
of flight out of this system of domination. The question then is how to think
of deterritorialisation and exodus beyond the concept of immaterial labour.
Deterritorialisation in
post-Fordism cannot be conceived in relation to immaterial labour itself but in
relation to the imperceptible experiences of the possibilities and oppressions
pertinent to living labour. We called this the embodied experience of
precarity. We suggest that this must be the starting point in order to
understand (a) possibilities for exodus as well as (b) the constitution of the
present. We will proceed with a description of the latter and at the end of
this text we will move to the discussion of the politics of exodus. The
paradigm of cognitive capitalism conceptualises the constitution of the present
transformation of production by highlighting the centrality of knowledge as the
main resource for the creation of value. We think that despite the importance
of the concept of cognitive capitalism, there is much more which we need to consider
in order to understand the contemporary formation of capitalism in its
post-Fordist phase. The figure of cognitive capitalism delivers a persuasive
conceptualisation of the 'post' in post-Fordism. But we want to assert that
there are more efforts needed to understand the complexity of post-Fordism and
the conditions which post-Fordism itself creates for its own overcoming. We
assert that we need to turn here to the problem of the body and materiality in
order to grasp this complexity – a turn which is mainly inform by research in
feminism (e.g. Boudry, Kuster, & Lorenz, 2000; Braidotti, 2006; e.g. Grosz,
1994), Science and Technology Studies (e.g. Barad, 2003; Haraway, 1997), and
migration & border studies (e.g. De Genova, 2005; Papastergiadis, 2000).
The constitutive moment
of the contemporary system of production is not primarily its cognitive
quality, but its embodied realisation. In an attempt to overcome the
somatophobia of the cognitive capitalist approaches we want to discuss the
composition of living labour as an excess of sociability of human bodies. The
third capitalism (pre-industrialism, industrialism, post-Fordism) is not
cognitive, it is embodied: the regime of embodied capitalism. This is primarily
characterised by: (a) Sociability: productivity is not the result of pure
exchange of information and knowledge based interaction, but of the creation of
an indeterminate excess in informal, affective, world making connections.
Embodied capitalism feeds on what is not yet commodified. (b) Affectivity: the
making of bodies capable of work. Bodies are made through their ability to
literally transform their state of existence through affecting others and being
affected by others, not through mere linguistic or verbal communication.
Embodied capitalism operates with bodies, not minds. (c) Volatility: the power
of the body to act in space and to transform the localities in which it dwells,
not just the mobility between spaces. The regime of embodied capitalism
capitalises on the migrants' bodies as naked labour power, not as mobile
subjects of rights. (d) Materiality: Embodied capitalism is concerned with the
production of matter, not knowledge. Knowledge is nothing more than one
attribute of material assemblages among others, it is enfleshed technoscience.
Materiality is neither pre-existent to our knowledge of it nor an objective
facticity. Productivity in embodied capitalism is not the outcome of the
'cooperation between brains' but of the cooperation between human bodies,
machines, and things. (e) Recombination: The primary productive force of
embodied capitalism is not information, but the capacity to recombine nature in
unfixed and limitless ways. The process of value creating productive labour
today is based on the making of matter and the denaturalisation of nature, not
the making of knowledge. Embodied capitalism is a mega 'apparatus of bodily
production', a compound of biotechnologies and information technologies.
The embodied experience
of precarity is how the regime of embodied capitalism becomes inscribed on the
flesh of living labour, that is the individual worker's body. Thus, if
precarity is the core mode of exploitation of living labour in the regime of
embodied capitalism, then the embodied experience of precarity is the point of
departure and the condition for thinking the quest for exodus. And precisely
because the embodied experience of precarity is the terrain on which
exploitation as well as value creation takes place, it allows us to understand
the dynamics of the third capitalism beyond the productivist model prevalent in
contemporary theories of class composition and immaterial labour. According to
this productivist model the subjectivity of exodus is identical with the cycles
of production, be it immaterial labour or cognitive capitalism. This model is
passé, it is the model which wants the exploited class to transform to a class
for itself as a total expressivity. But dialectics has proved fatal for any
project of exodus. Dialectics resembles a black box, you can insert anything
and await resurrection. A new model of subjectivity is needed which is neither
effect of production nor is it identical with the conditions of its
exploitation, a concept which drifts constantly away from its social
determinants. We believe that the embodied experience of precarity does
precisely this.
In the embodied
experience of precarity we see a tension between value creation and
exploitation, i.e. between capital and living labour, a tension which is less a
dialectical process between opposites, than a steadily move of
deterritorialisation away from its own conditions of existence. This move
changes both the composition of capital as well as the composition of labour
subjectivities. In this game there in no fixed rule. There is only drift,
departure, sliding which becomes constantly re-inscribed on the participating
bodies, creating always new singular social actors. This is the power of
change; this is the power to change. This is social transformation after
representation. This kind of transformation does not construct precarious
workers as a scared subject which needs to be included and protected by
becoming part of the post-Fordist social compromise. In this moment experience
ceases to create social subjects, ceases to be subjectivity, and becomes
materiality. It de facto changes social reality. And this is an
imperceptible change, a non-dialectical change. This is the cunning of
precarity.
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We would like to thank Amanda Ehrenstein, Ed Emery,
and Niamh Stephenson for their helpful support and insightful comments. Some of
the empirical and theoretical research discussed in this paper was funded by
the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and by the Federal Cultural Foundation of
Germany. Much of the work we present here hinges on the debates and
mobilisations of the activist networks EuroMayDay, precarity-map.net, and
Frassanito. If we believed in intellectual property we would want to see it
returned to them.
Emails: [email protected]