Nothing But Workers: Reading Class Struggle In Diamela Eltit’s Mano de obra

Abstract

In this essay I study the supermarket in Diamela Eltit’s Mano de obra as a site of class struggle. Despite readings that see in the novel a representation of post-work society, several scholars have noted that Mano de obra can be productively read as a novel that explores the centrality of labour in present-day capitalism. In this article I suggest that Eltit’s novel offers, at the level of form, a powerful reflection on labour exploitation as mediated by the sale and purchase of labour-power. I emphasise two processes that the novel registers in relation to the neoliberal working-day: the changes in the inward notation of time brought about by the expansion of the service industry, and the compenetration between the disciplinary practices of the workplace and the affective structures of the household. I conclude the essay by showing how the punctuation of the novel, in particular the overabundance in the use of parentheses, gives formal expression to the fundamental reality hidden behind the sale and purchase of labour-power: the dispossession of the worker from her own living body.