Affective labour and alienation: Spinoza's materialism and the sad passions of post-Fordist work

Abstract

This paper examines the alienation entailed in contemporary emotional and affective labour and the ways this might be overcome. I identify the shifts in the nature and function of this labour since it first received attention by feminist and other scholars in the 1970s and '80s. And I point towards the emergence of contemporary struggles to limit the emotional intensity of the working day, similar in some ways to those Karl Marx once described around its length. My primary wager is that overcoming the forms of alienation at stake in the putting to work of personality, subjectivity, and self, need not be understood as a largely idealist question of ‘de-alienation’ or ‘de-reification’. Rather, drawing on Benedict de Spinoza's work on the body, mind, and affects, I suggest it is one of organising material encounters between bodies and their joining together through the construction of ‘common notions’, reason, and a more ‘real’ understanding of the social world as well as one’s location within it. I argue that, in approaching such a project, feminist and other methods of ‘consciousness-raising’ may prove of greater use than many traditional approaches to developing and delivering ‘class consciousness’.