Disaffection in the Post-Fordist Workplace: Figurations of ‘Immaterial Labour’ in Recent French Theory and Literature

Abstract

Between them, André Gorz and Yann Moulier Boutang have offered some of the most persuasive theorisations of what is at stake in the shift from a Fordist to a Post-Fordist regime of accumulation. Despite the various theoretical and political differences between Gorz and Moulier Boutang, both share the assumption that the affective, cognitive, and immaterial forms of labour on which Post-Fordism depends constitute, by their very nature, a fundamental challenge to the labour theory of value and hence may yet herald the advent of a new era of genuinely cooperative and creative labour. This article seeks to question that shared assumption. In the first instance, it focuses on a corpus of recent French representations of the realities of Post-Fordist labour to suggest that the dominant experience of affective, cognitive, and immaterial labour, far from being one of creative cooperation, is one of disaffection and refusal. Secondly, the article moves on to question the theoretical assumptions behind Gorz's and Moulier Boutang's accounts. It proposes that rather than being taken to be natural, inherently human characteristics, external and hence resistant to the workings of the market, the cooperative, affective capacities exploited under Post-Fordism might be better understood as the products of that economic conjuncture, the expressions of the specific mode of subjectivity Post-Fordism works to produce.