This post is a little crazy and in need of revision, but I wanted to get it in before class.
The Bowring essay makes some pretty incisive criticisms of Hardt and Negri's theoretical apparatus. I'd like to reserve my right to disagree with these criticisms until I've read some more Hardt and Negri, but as for now they seem pretty on the mark. There were several sections of the Hardt essay that were so vague as to be almost nonsensical. For instance, he says: "On the one hand, affective labor, the production and reproduction of life, has become firmly embedded as a necessary foundation for capitalist accumulation and patriarchal order. On the other hand, however, the production of affects, subjectivities, and forms of life present an enormous potential for autonomous circuits of valorization, and perhaps for liberation" (100). This is one of those statements which asserts so little one that cannot even disagree with it. He defines "biopolitical power" on p.99 as "labor involved in the creation of life...in the production and reproduction of affects." The only thing he excludes from these processes is procreation. On 96: "What affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower." So, what we can gather from this is that affective labor consists of anything that produces something we might recognize as a social relation.
I'm trying to think of a way to make this concept useful. One thing that might work is to think of affective labor in terms of a shift in the ways that power is deployed. If the aim of the era of industrial labor was to deploy disciplinary apparatuses that control the worker's time and space, then the aim of the era of affective labor is to deploy mechanisms that control the non-material aspects of being (without giving up the material ones). Bowring writes that Hardt and Negri characterize Empire "in Foucauldian terms as the replacement of the 'disciplinary society' with the 'society of control.' This distinction conveys the way power is no longer exercised via the prescriptive, normalizing and compartmentalizing efforts of the modern state and its disciplinary institutions, but instead seeks to mobilize and direct, from the inside, and without institutional obstruction, the vitality and productive energies of the population" (125). Hardt and Negri say "Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior" (Bowring 125). What does it mean to work "from the inside" or "interior"? Maybe the answer to this question is obvious, but I do not think it is clearly articulated in any of the materials we read for today. I think Gilles Deleuze gives a pretty succinct description of this idea in his "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1990): http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/netzkritik/societyofcontrol.html
Deleuze writes: "We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons." The important distinction here is between "enclosures" and "controls." Enclosures are the apparatuses of the state and controls are the affective mobilizations of "productive energies." As Deleuze writes, "Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point." While his analogies are perhaps not the clearest, he does, unlike Hardt and Negri, give some lucid examples:
"This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation....In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation."
I believe that these remarks may go some way in addressing what Mark describes as "an implicit denigration of material labor" in Hardt and Negri: if the apparatuses of domination no longer operate at the level of material labor, then can it still be feasible to formulate a program of resistance in this realm? Are the streets dead capital? When I say "no longer operate" I don't mean that they don't exist, but rather that they have been fully automatitized, off-loaded into a system that operates independently of any individual actors. A simpler formula: the man with the stopwatch is no longer behind you, he is inside you--you are your own stopwatch. The move is from material submission to immaterial cathexis. This is the effect of increased efforts to harness the affective energies of the worker--libidinal investment in the production process. Let's take the example of "sabotage": who is being addressed in an act of sabotage today? Only yourself, your affective investment in the corporate body. It would seem that the basic prerequisites of material resistance (like sabotage) are some degree of worker solidarity and a definable target (someone to shoot).
How can a system like this sustain itself? Only very precariously. Zizek's reformulation of Marx's famous quip "for they know not what they do" is instructive: "they know fully what they do, but they do it anyway." Part of biopolitical power is to allow the worker to retain a cynical distance from his or her own exploitation. This may not be too far from Deleuze's concept of metastability--instead of cynical distance, he would say that the worker is able to move, or surf, between different (apparently antagonistic) nodes in a network. We are "undulatory," as he says. It is also why things like The Office and Office Space are so funny. In the corporation today there is an absurd tension between fostering agonism (see Deleuze above) and a drive to inclusiveness, cooperation, teamwork, etc. This tension is evidence that the production of human affect has become a much larger part of the production process. The agonistic spirit dismantles collective action on behalf of the workers which is compensated for by collective action on behalf of the corporation: this is why any act at the level of material resistance is self-addressed. In summation: The production of affect (libidinal cathexis in the production cycle) militates against material action against the system in its dual production of agonism (aggression) and the corporate ethos (love). Affective labor allows the antagonistic systems of industrial labor to be apparently dissolved.
If you missed the first episode, you must watch Kid Nation, CBS' new show about 40 kids who get dropped off in an old west-style town .
Best part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4GEbi7EtD4
Full episode: http://www.cbs.com/primetime/kid_nation/video.php?mode=episodes&episode=1&autostart=1
The narrative is so great--watch as they move through the stage of primitive accumulation in which they prospect for petroleum! Watch as they are divided into social classes based on how well they succeeded of extracting value from their property! Watch as a female member of the labor class reinvents prostitution! Hopefully some monopolists will emerge in the next episode.
No comments:
Post a Comment