Immaterial Labour Research Articles

Language and value: the philosophy of language in the post-Operaist critique of contemporary capitalism

This paper offers a discussion of the role played by the philosophy of language in the post-Operaist critique of contemporary capitalism, focussing specifically on the relation between language and questions of labour and value. It argues that the post-Operaist philosophy of language is a philosophy of immaterial labour which enables us to make new diagnoses concerning the contradictions and antagonisms of late, cognitive, financialized capitalism. The first part of the article broadly outlines post-Operaist thinking about language in the context of contemporary Italian philosophy of language. In this part, the argument is made for a shift from using the term ‘philosophy of language’ to the notion of a ‘philosophy of the linguistic faculty’. Part two is devoted to the main aspects of the post-Operaist critique of contemporary capitalism. The third presents an analysis of this post-Operaist philosophy of the linguistic faculty as a philosophy of living, immaterial labour, by examining the post-Operaist view of language within the wider context of Marxist theory, stressing the political character of the post-Operaist approach.

“Cool” Workings: Glamour Labor and Identity Issues in Fashion Branding

As Japanese retailer Uniqlo expands across the USA, it has been building its brand identity in a multitude of ways. Flagship store experiences, athlete sponsorships, online videos, and sponsored articles have worked to raise Uniqlo’s name recognition and promote its simple, trendy designs. This paper explores Uniqlo from the human aspect, specifically how consumers engage with and help shape the brand. Scholars have noted that consumers and workers play a role in establishing, promoting and personifying retail brands. Recently, discussions of immaterial and aesthetic labor have been extended with the idea of “glamour labor”—the actions individuals undertake to seem “cool.” Glamour labor helps celebrities, models and individual consumers build a personal image in everyday life and through social media. This paper applies the idea of glamour labor to a case study of Uniqlo shoppers and consumers. Drawing from a series of in-depth interviews and “shopper observation”, it is possible to see how the brand is extended and altered through consumers’ glamour labor. Consumers who engage in this process are helping to extend the brand while also burnishing their own cool credentials.

Towards a Psychoanalytic Concept of Affective-Digital Labour

This article draws on the argument that users on corporate social media conduct labour through the sharing of user-generated content. Critical political economists argue that such acts contribute to value creation on social media and are therefore to be seen as labour. Following a brief introduction of this paradigm, I relate it to the notion of affective labour which has been popularised by the Marxist thinkers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. To them, affective labour (as a sub-category of immaterial labour) denotes embodied forms of labour that are about passion, well-being, feelings of ease, immaterial products and generally a kind of communicative relationality between individuals. I point to some problems with a lack of clarity in their conceptualisation of affective labour and argue that the Freudian model of affect can help in theorising affective labour further through a focus on social media. According to Freud, affect can be understood as a subjective, bodily experience which is in tension with the discursive and denotes a momentary feeling of bodily dispossession. In order to illustrate those points, I draw on some data from a research project which featured interviews with social media users who have facial disfigurements about their affective experiences online. The narratives attempt to turn embodied experiences into discourse.

New Peredvizhniki, Or Artists On The Move

Abstract In 2013 Honorata Martin, a young artist from Gdańsk travelled about six hundred kilometres on foot. No other work than the journey itself was created apart from the scrapbook with her notes and a short video. By putting herself in the precarious position of a nomad/migrant, the artist achieved multiple goals. One of them was to put an end to the alienation of work. The result is a work that is deprived of a “labour force,” and as such, it cannot be exploited. Martin adopted the strategy of a “passive subject” (as opposed to the “active subject” of Lazzarato). She followed the instructions, fitted the image that was being proposed to her by people she encountered, and this was exactly the move that triggered emancipatory power. Her perverse answer to the danger pointed out by Lazzarato was the creation of a subject without a soul who cannot be put to use in the economic structure based on immaterial labour. Her project “Setting off for Poland” contributes to decades-long discussions about the role and function of art institutions.

‘Articulating value’ for clients in a global engineering consulting firm: ‘immaterial’ activity and its implications for post-knowledge economy expertise

ABSTRACTMoulier Boutang’s book Cognitive Capitalism introduces a radically different conception of the key resources – ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘capture of externalities’ – for economic activity, compared with the argument in the knowledge economy discourse that professionals manipulate ‘symbols’. The paper explores this claim by firstly, outlining the tenets of Moulier Boutang’s argument and explaining why it introduces a new conception of value compared with how that concept is normally defined in neo-classic and Marxist economics. Secondly, explaining why client-facing project teams constitute a paradigmatic example of immaterial activity. Thirdly, makes visible the modes of activity which facilitate the capture of externalities by supplementing Moulier Boutang’s concept with Boltanski and Thevénot’s ideas about different economies or conceptions of worth. Case study evidence of a global engineering consulting company is then used to identify three expressions of immaterial activity – educative’, ‘experimental’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ – that assist engineers to articulate their value to clients. The paper concludes by arguing immaterial activity: (i) constitutes a form of expertise that is very different from the prevailing knowledge economy wisdom that knowledge workers manipulate symbols explicitly or tacitly; and, (ii) problematises the sui generis nature of the global ‘employability’ skills discourse.

Cognitive capitalism, free labor, and financial communication: A critical discourse analysis of social media IPO registration statements

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to analyze the intersection among cognitive capitalism, free labor, and financial communication through a critical discourse analysis of social media companies’ initial public offering (IPO) registration statements. In so doing, it first sets up a theoretical framework by synthesizing cognitive capitalism and cultural political economy. Cultural political economy helps analyze critically the role financial communication plays in serving the interests of cognitive capitalism, the use of unremunerated immaterial labor to rescue the stationary capitalist accumulation regime. Then, a critical discourse analysis of social media IPOs, as a form of financial communication, aims to unravel how social media companies appropriate such notions as economic growth, innovation, connectivity, and community to advance their financial interests. Findings reveal that IPO statements deploy social media as an autonomous agent of economic growth and a virtuous venue for self-expression and community building, while at the same time effectively concealing the dual foundations of the social media economy, the wide use of free labor and the extraction of value via user data.

Trabalho material e imaterial e transferência de expertises do trabalhador à maquinaria tecnológica

Este artigo analisa imbricações do trabalho material e imaterial e sua relação com os processos de racionalização do trabalho com a finalidade de refletir sobre características e contradições das forças produtivas da atualidade. A discussão da reestruturação produtiva da forma de acumulação flexível é fundamental para esclarecer as novas formas de envolvimento, da “captura” da subjetividade e da transferência de expertises dos trabalhadores para o capital. Esta investigação objetiva examinar criticamente tais processos e desmistificar a suposta aura superior e sublime do trabalho cognitivo e intelectual, principalmente aquele empregado nos setores de tecnologia avançada. Assim, apesar de suas singularidades, o trabalho imaterial apresenta-se como um conjunto de conhecimentos e atividades humanas também reféns do processo de exploração e submetidos à lógica do valor.

The Powers of the Exploited and the Social Ontology of Praxis

This contribution is the first part of a debate between Michael Hardt/Toni Negri and David Harvey on the occasion of Marx’s bicentenary. The discussion focuses on the question of what capitalism looks like today and how it can best be challenged. This contribution asks: In what type of capitalist society are we living today? And what is the Marxian praxis that we need to challenge it? First, this paper analyses capitalism in respect to the extraction of value from the common, immaterial labour, digitisation, automation, and finance capital. The greatest abstraction in the productive process of value, in its implementation of languages, codes, immaterial articulations of being together, cooperation, affective elements, and so forth presents also in the multitude the virtuality of an extraordinary potential of resistance and autonomy from capital. Second, the paper discusses what forms of praxis are needed today. Marxian ontology is constituted and always renewed by class struggle, by the material antagonism that distributes the elements of real being and by the continuous excess of value that living labour expresses. Today, we discuss Marxian praxis in a society where intelligence is put to work at the centre of the productive process. Here emerges with great force the theme of the liberation of humans from work, on the basis of the transformations of work. Marx demonstrates how much cognitive and intellectual activity is central to production, and how much fixed capital is mixed with cognitive labour. In this context, the notion of the appropriation of fixed capital is of key importance for class struggles.

YouTube Beauty Gurus and the emotional labour of tribal entrepreneurship

Tribal entrepreneurship valorises emotional bonds between consumers and entrepreneurs, yet this emotional dimension is little understood. Drawing from a netnographic study of YouTube Beauty Gurus as tribal entrepreneurs, and uniting the concept of emotional labour with theories of moral emotions, we demonstrate the importance of emotional labour to tribal entrepreneurship's success. We observe novel forms of emotional labour performed by tribal entrepreneurs, relating to the expression of self-conscious and other-praising moral emotions, in addition to new technology-enabled forms of emotional censorship that silence the expression of other-condemning moral emotions in central tribal gathering spaces. Furthermore, we highlight the emotional labour performed by the broader tribe as their compassion for the entrepreneur stimulates tribal defense via the suppression of other-condemning emotions. We extend theories of tribal entrepreneurship by theorising the role and importance of emotional labour. Our findings also extend broader theories of emotions and contribute to discussions of immaterial labour.

Laundering women's history: A feminist critique of the social factory

Studies of digital labour are closely connected to the concept of immaterial labour and how this has been critically interpreted by Autonomist Marxists who draw upon the concept of the social factory in explaining its wider impacts. The extension of labour and capitalist logics outside factory walls that constitutes the social factory is typically described as a novel feature of contemporary capitalism and particularly the digital economy. This paper critiques this assumption by utilising feminist theories of domestic work and examples of women’s labour history. Using the particular case of Magdalene Laundries in the Irish Free State (1922–1937), it demonstrates that the social factory has a longer history than is usually presumed. It then describes the implications for analysis of digital labour that arise from rejecting the novelty of immaterial labour’s incorporation into capitalism.

Agency in non-professional manga translation in Iran

The present study addresses the phenomenon of online non-professional translation of manga in the context of Iran from the perspective of agency. It focuses on the people involved in decision-making in non-professional translation production, the non-professional translators’ motivations for their free immaterial labor as well as the factors that can constrain or increase their willingness or ability to translate manga into Persian. These questions were answered based on the activities of AnimWorld, the largest Iranian community of non-professional translators. The results suggest that non-professional translations differ from professional translations in terms of decision-making processes, motivations of the individuals involved as well as the contexts where they practice.

Paradoxical Empowerment and Exploitation: Virtual Ethnography on Internet Immaterial Labour in Macao

Recently, the research topic of immaterial labour had become one of the most significant discussions about the changing nature of capitalism. But the previous studies mainly regard immaterial labour as a unidirectional process of capitalist exploitation in abstract sense, rather than a paradoxical dynamics of exploitation and empowerment in specific context. This article, therefore, investigates immaterial labour in digital capitalism, with a specific case study of the local practices of Internet immaterial labour in Macao, exploring the paradoxical dynamics of exploitation and empowerment through concrete case studies, rather than through abstractive and reductive theoretical discussion. This study has found that the alternative media created by Internet users’ immaterial labour helps them to resist the traditional mainstream media and the government; the affective community founded based on their immaterial labour gives them the collective sentiment of ‘family and belonging’; the individual feelings derived during their immaterial labour not only offer them positive personal feelings, but also a new way of ‘being-in-the-world’ in the age of social media.

O comum como linguagem política

Este artigo parte da contradição posta pela
 consolidação do trabalho imaterial: ao mesmo tempo
 em que é indispensável à expansão do capitalismo
 tardio, abre possibilidades de fuga aos seus ditames.
 Ao explorar o comum, o capital é infectado por ele,
 abrigando relações sociais que solapam a lógica
 economicista liberal e tornam-se foco de resistência à
 mercantilização das esferas da vida. Visto como uma
 linguagem política, o comum dá ensejo a um repertório
 de práticas e a um vocabulário que, ao recolocar
 o pensamento sobre nossos hábitos de criação
 e compartilhamento em um universo relacional,
 convida a uma ética da proximidade, oposta à ética da
 propriedade que jaz na base do Direito atual.

Byproductive labor

My aim in this paper is to introduce a theory of affective labor as byproductive, a concept I develop through analysis of the phenomenology of various affective labor practices in dialog with feminist scholarship, both on gendered and racialized labor, and on affect and emotion. I motivate my theory in the context of literature on affective and emotional labor in philosophy and the social sciences, engaging the post-Marxist literature on affective and immaterial labor and emphasizing feminist critiques. I argue that affective labor is not only the work of producing affects for others to consume or the reproductive work that rejuvenates and sustains labor power and social life, but also the work of metabolizing waste affects and affective byproducts. Thus, byproductive labor is a neologism I develop to bring into view an affective economy and indeed a political economy of affects to the side of the distinction between productive and reproductive labor in its paid and unpaid variants. I make three central claims: (1) affective labor invariably creates byproducts in the embodied subjectivity of the worker; (2) the unique kind of affective expenditure I call “byproductive” (metabolizing affective surplus, containing affective waste, and producing depleted affective agency) is a defining feature of affective labor not circumscribed by the productive–reproductive distinction; and (3) the marginalized forms of subjectivity and depleted agency constituted through the intersections of this labor with hierarchies of gender, race, and migrant status or global class are themselves byproducts of affective labor. Thus, theorizing affective labor as byproductive captures the uniqueness of affective labor and the forms of exploitation unique to it, but also explains the interaction of affective labor with forms of power that operate through subjection and marginalization.

Creative work and affect: Social, political and fantasmatic dynamics in the labour of musicians

How can we understand contradictory identifications within work to which one is passionately attached? This article explores how seemingly competing accounts of the self at work can not only appear side by side within the self-presentation of creative workers, but also how dominant patterns within the daily socio-economic realities of creative work are reproduced through faux-contestations of them. Following Glynos and Howarth, I will argue that such transgressive notions often recall earlier historical arrangements that have been displaced by current dominant social grammars, or were vital components of the institution of current social hegemony. In a study of musicians, I analyse how alongside dominant logics of employability and virtuosity, traditional notions of artists’ craft and autonomy drive counter-identifications that allow dominant social logics to fill the gaps in the indeterminacy and ambiguity of everyday lived experience. By applying an understanding of discursive logics to creative work, this article seeks to contribute to literatures spanning work in the cultural industries, identification, affect and transgression at work, and commons and immaterial labour.

Ubuntu Linux in Zimbabwe: the digital unhu in open source practices

In this article, I argue for an alternative history of open source told from the perspective of the Southern African nation of Zimbabwe. This perspective on open source deviates from standard histories in that it reveals a more comprehensive relationship to technologies and its political possibilities by including the understudied region of Zimbabwe. I premise this analysis based on the concept of ‘digital unhu’, a concept that sketches out a Zimbabwean inflection of immaterial labor and contains three components of the fusion of new technologies with older traditions, an emphasis on collaborative practices, and a prominence placed on mobility. Examining this framework and these concepts through the aid of the case studies, Zim.doc, and the website Wild Forest Ranch, I provide evidence of the ways that open source practices are articulated to the local, historical, and political nuances of the region. I argue that the effort to disseminate information and skills to populations required to maneuver around the conditions of food scarcity, high levels of unemployment, and violent political repression existing under Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe particularly highlights digital unhu’s characteristic of mobility.

In LeBron James’ promotional skin: Self-branded athletes and fans’ immaterial labour

Using the LeBron James brand as a case study, this article adds insight into the phenomenon of self-branding by demonstrating that sports fans play an essential role in building the value of athletes’ personal brands. Drawing on Hearn’s theory of self-branding and Arvidsson’s concept of ‘ethical surplus’, it argues that audience members participated in the immaterial labour required to build (and re-build) the value of the LeBron James and Nike brands. By considering this immaterial labour within the neo-liberal context in which it occurs, this article highlights a central tension between the individual and the group that lies at the heart of athletes’ self-branding practices.

Living Labour and Social Movements: A Dialogue with Antonio Negri

In this interview, Antonio Negri first focuses on the possibility of defining the concept of ‘social movement’. By mobilizing a spectrum of references that goes from Carl Schmitt to the Weberian sociology of religion, he insists on the necessity, not to sociologically crystallize the concept, but, instead, to think about it in a historical manner. Social movements would then be attempts at activating ‘liberation processes’, which nowadays can only be thought of within the conditions of financial capitalism. Negri then proceeds to examine the relation between the concept of social movement and those of class and class struggle: he suggests a dynamic and relational interpretation of the Marxian concept of ‘living labour’ as a bridge between a class analysis of society and the study of social movements, movements which in the contemporary landscape are ready to take an ‘entrepreneurial’ connotation. The political and intellectual experience of Italian Workerism in the 1960s is then recalled as a fertile example of the application of this method of social analysis, but also as an exemplification of the principle of ‘unrepeatability’ of social movements. The author finally claims to be a ‘theorist of immaterial labour’ in order to then develop a radical critique of the idea of so-called ‘post-materialist’ movements and of the effects that such a notion has had on the sociology of social movements.

Youthfulness and immaterial labour in the new economy

The focus of this article is youth and youthfulness in the contemporary economy. Drawing on theories of immaterial labour, the article moves beyond an existing focus on ‘young people’ as capital accumulating subjects to theorize the production of youthfulness as a quality that circulates through immaterial economies and that is mobilized to confer a particular form of value on consumer goods, service interactions and labouring subjectivities. The production of youthfulness is made possible through relations between the micro-level production and consumption that take place within youth cultures and modes of sociality, the production practices and marketing activities of firms, and young people whose capacities for embodiment, sociability and youthful consumption cultivated both within and outside of paid employment contribute to their constitution as labouring subjects. Within this network of relations, youthfulness is mobilized to distribute playful affects, offer the possibility of hedonistic leisure/pleasure and confer symbolic distinctions of cutting edge style. These economies of youthfulness constitute a specific means by which production, consumption, labour and leisure intersect in the labouring subjectivities and immaterial products of the contemporary service economy, and contribute to the formation of valorized and devalorized youth subjectivities in relation to the new economy.

The Information Process and the Labour Process in the Information Age

This paper examines how information fundamentally influences the labour process in the information age. The process of becoming human in the labour process brings to the fore the notion of information and our dialectical interactions with our natural environment as organisms-in-the-environment. These insights lead the authors to posit that information/ideas are material. Information/ideas are not ethereal/immaterial, as is commonly believed, which does not negate that information/ideas may be abstract. Taking a fundamental approach serves to discard the concept of immaterial labour and products, to posit an undeniable materialist basis for the labour theory of value. More importantly, it serves to point to the immanence of information and labour in the labour theory of value.