Lazz puts the social back in the factory

Where Virno's version of immaterial labor reinforced how I was already thinking of the term (social factory-ing outside the factory walls), Lazz's bit about the restructured worker stopped me in my tracks.

Of course, I thought to myself, why wouldn't this team paradigm business be another mediatizing ploy? Okay, that was where I ended up, but the idea that one aspect of immaterial labor being the work of making people feel like people again caught me by surprise and sent me spiralling into a doubt-ridden, soul-searching weekend.

Illusions of empowerment...

I spent the last five years teaching at a community college and the two years before that teaching at the research university across the street. The courses I taught were the standard Gen Ed "you need this to get and keep a job" comm courses. The community college's mission included the phrase "workforce development" and they held annual workforce development "summits" with New Mexico's business leaders who spent the whole day complaining about the incoming workforce's dearth of communication skills.

Thus, the community college was split in two, organizationally and politically: a myriad of vocational tracks on one side, and the track I worked in on the other which would lead students across the street to the university. Since we were a "Hispanic-Serving Institution," (quotes intended) there was a great deal of effort (clearly misdirected) to corral hundreds of Hispanic women into the secretarial track (where they would be grammar-abused) so our campus could claim their numbers for our retention and completion rates. Those who went through the track I taught in and across the street were counted in the university's numbers. Regardless, it was not uncommon for many of these women to be attending school in secret -- as soon as they finished their degrees, they'd leave their abusive husbands (this was true of women in both tracks). This puts a domestic spin on the idea about the "choice" between the sweatshop or death, eh?

Anyway, I'd always "sell" the course on the first day in the terms Lazz lays out -- one HAS to communicate, etc., though I knew we'd do more. But I now have this nagging feeling that many of my students (particularly those who were not at-risk) may have only walked away with passing grades in Worker Bee 101.

While there was much that was corrupt and dysfunctional in my school (a long and separate story), I clung to the idea that I might be doing some good inside my classroom. At the end of the day, I thought I was teaching people about being humane. We had major service-learning projects. Students wrote me letters about how their relationships with estranged spouses/children/family were reconciled, they'd finally left abusive relationships, they'd reached out to a bullied kid, they stayed on as volunteers after the service project was over, they sought out the services of the organization from their project...

So I guess my question is: Is this really a zero-sum game? If I buy Lazz and Virno's arguments, which I am inclined to, do I have to let go of of the good work that I know I did? Is life-enriching communication in the workplace (or anywhere else) an illusion or somehow worthless if it is also productive?