Revitalising labour process theory: a prolegomenon to fatal writing

Abstract

This article attempts a revitalisation of labour process study by way of an oblique entry and transversal movement through the writing of contemporary labour process theory. Making use of a relatively novel and experimental mode of reading and writing, including ‘signature effects’ and homophonic and homonymic play, the paper proposes ways of escape from the double‐binds, infinite regress, and solipsism inherent to the labour process. Tracing the set of idiomatic marks that forms the signature effect of core labour process theory, the paper discovers the absent‐present play of the motor car in labour process writing forming a ‘crypt’ that gives rise to all manner of world‐text effects. In an attempt to subvert this repression we use the model of the motor car as an explicit mode of transport for our thinking that takes us out of labour process theory in ways that might delimit its boundaries and conditions of possibility/impossibility. In so doing we begin to exercise a very different form of organisation studies.