Conference Presentations by Paul McFadden
Marx’s theory of alienation is the ontological theory that lies beneath his critical analysis of ... more Marx’s theory of alienation is the ontological theory that lies beneath his critical analysis of capitalist production. This ontological theory opens up spaces for praxis in the contemporary form of the social domination of capital over labour and reproduction because it shows how bodies link and decouple these three relations (capital/labour/reproduction) rendering them a unitary relation. I explain some of the relevant dimensions of the ontology of alienation in the context of this problematic. I explore how private property produces a system of second-order mediations that shatters the relation between “humanity”, “nature”, and “industry”. These second-order mediations constitute an ontological fissure – a complex of alienations predicates the character of relations of domination and servitude, and negates the central category of the humanity/nature/industry relation, i.e., praxis. Alienated labour is at the centre of this complex of alienations. Transformations in the organisation of labour – to the preponderance of what I call emergent forms of labour – indicate a transition in the period of capitalism. There has been an attendant transformation in the character of alienated labour that is constituted by: the instrumentalisation of bodies’ potential for praxis; the rendering of bodies themselves as the object of labour processes; and the modes by which these two processes constitute the dimensions of the ‘dual-contradiction inherent in the reproduction of labour-power.’ These transformations produce reproduction and the labour process as an alienated unity in which subjects of praxis re-emerge politically within the second-order mediated relation humanity/nature/industry. These transformations therefore produce the labour process and reproduction as fronts of anticapitalist struggle with radically new contours; this alienated unity is the social form of domination but, with it, bodies’ potential for praxis directly confronts the logic of value.
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Hardt and Negri’s suspect speculations regarding the usurpation of the hegemony of industrial lab... more Hardt and Negri’s suspect speculations regarding the usurpation of the hegemony of industrial labour by immaterial and affective labour notwithstanding, it is possible for us to state clearly and with confidence that processes of capitalist accumulation have increasingly turned toward the exploitation of affect . This paper explores what it might mean to the integrity of the subject to sell one’s affective abilities . Considering tendencies toward the blurring of the boundary between labour-time and non-labour time, the biopolitical functions of the precariousness of labour, and the ontological consequences of the exaltations of information-awareness in light of ideological proclamations of the social world as one of ‘all-against-all’, some talk of a kairόs
of the multitude, a becoming of the time of a class of workers whose labour process is autonomous from capitalist control. Considering these same tendencies, I demonstrate instead that affective labour is subsumed under capitalist power-relations and that the affective labour-process offers insight into new qualities of the content of articulations of affect in contemporary societies. We have always been producers and consumers of affect, but a key consequence of the affective turn of production is that we are, to whatever lesser or greater extent, producers and consumers of affects that have been subject to capitalist power relations at the point of production . We should regard affective production in wage-labour as a process of the alienation of affect and affective labour as a state of being alienated from our own affective productions . The norms of capitalist accumulation require a contingent value-producing form of affect, therefore our affective productions under wage-labour are shaped and directed according to those norms. By examining the blurring of the boundaries of labour-time and considering precariousness we can point to emergent dispositifs extending beyond the point of production of commodities to the production of life itself.
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This paper examines the role of affect in the production and reproduction of contemporary social... more This paper examines the role of affect in the production and reproduction of contemporary social relations. In light of changes in political economy, and the demise (and rise?) of political projects that propose alternatives to the current neoliberal constitutions of capitalism, the humanities and social
sciences are turning more and more towards the notions of “affect” and its role in the formation of political subjectivity. I briefly examine and define affect, and go on to explore the power relations at play in contemporary labour which seek to produce, shape, and articulate affect in ways that contribute to the
production of economic value. I go on to explore some of the political questions that arise from the manipulation of affect under the conditions of wage-labour and ask whether capitalist command over affect is a process for the destruction of ‘authentic’ subjectivities or if new modes of the articulation of affect represent new spaces of resistance.
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This paper addresses itself to literature on aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour... more This paper addresses itself to literature on aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour and immaterial labour in order to extend understanding of the determinate and determinant relationships that occur between the processes of the production of economic value and the processes of the formation of subjectivities. I argue for a theoretical re-evaluation of the importance of labour in analysis of the ‘modes of life’ of contemporary society by examining these forms of labour in the context of the Autonomist Marxist thesis of the ‘General Intellect’. Labour under capitalism is the site of the production of subjectivity and the activity of the production of economic value and these forms of labour are preponderant over other labours in the knowledge-based, service-oriented economy. My analysis presents the specific importance of work in the processes of the production of contemporary life.
Although the concepts of these forms of labour present qualitative difference, they also exhibit confluence. I seek to extend the usefulness of the concepts of aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour and immaterial labour as analytical categories by operationalising them in a new stage of the division of labour with reference to previous ethnographic studies and to the Marxist extension of Smith’s concept. Analysis of these labours show that the site of intellectual control over the labour process has shifted from capital to labour, as in Marx’s formal subsumption of labour under capital. New regimes of control extend previous capitalist systems of surveillance and discipline over workers’ bodies, as in Fordist modes of labour, toward a commodification of workers’ subjectivities. Worker subjectivity is utilised as an economic value-producing and value-realizing resource by the direction of the worker-subjectivity upon the consumer- or social-subjectivity.
I identify the determinate relationships between worker- and social-subjectivities and the significance of reproduction of labour by these social subjectivities to the production of modes of life and the formation of social values. Subjectivity is alienated from the subject and commodified in the activity of these forms of labour and is then consumed by social-subjects whose subjectivities are in turn transformed in the act of consumption. My analysis of the operation of these forms of labour in post-modern economy explores how processes in capitalist social organisation act in such a way that economic-value producing labour-activity produces human subjectivity and how subjectivity determines modes of life. The production of economic value is a determinate factor in the production of social values.
In contrast to the Autonomist Marxists, this paper proposes that the activity of these forms of wage-labour in the post-modern economy effects a tendency toward the creation of capitalistic subjectivities. Capital annexes the outside’ of capital, the sphere of non-work, and the production of subjectivity reveals a tendency for the production of a capitalistic mode of life. Thus what appears to be a new form of life in which workers are free to act autonomously in capitalism is actually a new form of alienation. However, many thinkers in the field of post-modern political economy underplay the real extent of the Fordist organisation of labour in the West, the Fordist nature of the power-relations that occur in aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour and immaterial labour, in which the worker is not always individualized and often exhibits acts of rebellion.
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Papers by Paul McFadden
ions of extension and of historical general ity generate vantage points from which holistic under... more ions of extension and of historical general ity generate vantage points from which holistic understandings of social processes and ins titutions can be produced. Vantage points are deployed in order to view the same relation ‘from d ifferent sides or [view] the same process from different moments.’ 4 Abstractions of vantage point are, as noted, inher ently and intrinsically linked to the character of abstractio ns of historical generality and to abstractions of extension. A more narrow abstraction of extension b ri gs fewer relations into view and offers fewer vantage points from which to examine them. A more broad abstraction of extension not only does the opposite but also allows us to unders tand the system at a more general level. Marx’s abstractions always view the relations revea led by abstractions of extension and of 1 Marx Capital vol. I 145-153 2 Marx Capital vol. I 151 3 Marx Capital vol. I 151 4 Ollman Dance of the Dialectic 100 Work, Bodies, and the Emerging Politics of...
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Global Society, 2014
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http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13600826.2014.974513#.VG3QF8keqLE Open access
This... more http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13600826.2014.974513#.VG3QF8keqLE Open access
This article utilises an examination of the labour process of call centre work as a jumping-off point towards understanding the production of politics, arguing that the properties by which bodies are capable of praxis are becoming central to commodity production. As such, this article contributes to the project of understanding bodies under capitalism and to research on call centres and service work. To read call centre work politically, the article isolates and qualifies “the elementary factors of the labour process” as discussed by Marx in Capital, Vol. I. In light of research on purportedly new forms of labour, this analysis of the labour process points towards the need for a reconfiguration of the concept of body work, which is subsequently deployed in an analysis of the production of politics in service work. By emphasising the reciprocal relationality of processes of the production of bodies, this conceptualisation of body work breaches binary understandings of work/life and therefore has significance beyond labour studies. The article concludes that service work forestalls and limits the potential for politics. Nonetheless, the instrumentalisation of the capacities by which bodies are political can also represent opportunities for the resistance of the pernicious ontological consequences of work.
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Thesis Chapters by Paul McFadden
Labour in the “post-industrial” society alienates bodies’ political capacities; the embodied char... more Labour in the “post-industrial” society alienates bodies’ political capacities; the embodied character of alienation renders the labour process and the sphere of reproduction as critical spaces for anticapitalist politics. The labour process of these emergent forms of labour is a political space in which bodies’ potential for praxis directly collides with the domination of value. The capacities and potentialities of bodies to engage in praxis – the properties of bodies with which humans express their Being as political Being – has become the social form of the domination of labour by capital. The social-fixing of indeterminate labour-power links and decouples the inner relations between power, consumption, reproduction, value, and subjectivity that constitute the emerging politics of alienation. My jumping-off points to these relations are concepts that purportedly describe “new” and “hegemonic” forms of labour in the post-industrial economy: ‘aesthetic labour’, ‘emotional labour’ and the triadic conception of ‘affective/immaterial/biopolitical labour’. I resolve the one-sidedness of these abstractions – their contending characterisations of the labour process, its relations, and their representations of the politics of emergent forms of labour – with an empirically-informed dialectical reconfiguration of the concept of body work. The factors of alienated body work are reciprocally related across productive and reproductive spheres and therein they bind articulations of capitalist politics together with the production of political subjectivities. This form of the organisation of labour creates a contradictory inner connection between the politics of production and modes of reproduction. This deepening connection between spheres of production and reproduction results in the potential for a capitalistic transformation of the body, foreclosing on the subversive potential of indeterminate labour-power, and simultaneously brings embodied political capacities into direct confrontation with the logic of value at the very centre of production.
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Conference Presentations by Paul McFadden
of the multitude, a becoming of the time of a class of workers whose labour process is autonomous from capitalist control. Considering these same tendencies, I demonstrate instead that affective labour is subsumed under capitalist power-relations and that the affective labour-process offers insight into new qualities of the content of articulations of affect in contemporary societies. We have always been producers and consumers of affect, but a key consequence of the affective turn of production is that we are, to whatever lesser or greater extent, producers and consumers of affects that have been subject to capitalist power relations at the point of production . We should regard affective production in wage-labour as a process of the alienation of affect and affective labour as a state of being alienated from our own affective productions . The norms of capitalist accumulation require a contingent value-producing form of affect, therefore our affective productions under wage-labour are shaped and directed according to those norms. By examining the blurring of the boundaries of labour-time and considering precariousness we can point to emergent dispositifs extending beyond the point of production of commodities to the production of life itself.
sciences are turning more and more towards the notions of “affect” and its role in the formation of political subjectivity. I briefly examine and define affect, and go on to explore the power relations at play in contemporary labour which seek to produce, shape, and articulate affect in ways that contribute to the
production of economic value. I go on to explore some of the political questions that arise from the manipulation of affect under the conditions of wage-labour and ask whether capitalist command over affect is a process for the destruction of ‘authentic’ subjectivities or if new modes of the articulation of affect represent new spaces of resistance.
Although the concepts of these forms of labour present qualitative difference, they also exhibit confluence. I seek to extend the usefulness of the concepts of aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour and immaterial labour as analytical categories by operationalising them in a new stage of the division of labour with reference to previous ethnographic studies and to the Marxist extension of Smith’s concept. Analysis of these labours show that the site of intellectual control over the labour process has shifted from capital to labour, as in Marx’s formal subsumption of labour under capital. New regimes of control extend previous capitalist systems of surveillance and discipline over workers’ bodies, as in Fordist modes of labour, toward a commodification of workers’ subjectivities. Worker subjectivity is utilised as an economic value-producing and value-realizing resource by the direction of the worker-subjectivity upon the consumer- or social-subjectivity.
I identify the determinate relationships between worker- and social-subjectivities and the significance of reproduction of labour by these social subjectivities to the production of modes of life and the formation of social values. Subjectivity is alienated from the subject and commodified in the activity of these forms of labour and is then consumed by social-subjects whose subjectivities are in turn transformed in the act of consumption. My analysis of the operation of these forms of labour in post-modern economy explores how processes in capitalist social organisation act in such a way that economic-value producing labour-activity produces human subjectivity and how subjectivity determines modes of life. The production of economic value is a determinate factor in the production of social values.
In contrast to the Autonomist Marxists, this paper proposes that the activity of these forms of wage-labour in the post-modern economy effects a tendency toward the creation of capitalistic subjectivities. Capital annexes the outside’ of capital, the sphere of non-work, and the production of subjectivity reveals a tendency for the production of a capitalistic mode of life. Thus what appears to be a new form of life in which workers are free to act autonomously in capitalism is actually a new form of alienation. However, many thinkers in the field of post-modern political economy underplay the real extent of the Fordist organisation of labour in the West, the Fordist nature of the power-relations that occur in aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour and immaterial labour, in which the worker is not always individualized and often exhibits acts of rebellion.
Papers by Paul McFadden
This article utilises an examination of the labour process of call centre work as a jumping-off point towards understanding the production of politics, arguing that the properties by which bodies are capable of praxis are becoming central to commodity production. As such, this article contributes to the project of understanding bodies under capitalism and to research on call centres and service work. To read call centre work politically, the article isolates and qualifies “the elementary factors of the labour process” as discussed by Marx in Capital, Vol. I. In light of research on purportedly new forms of labour, this analysis of the labour process points towards the need for a reconfiguration of the concept of body work, which is subsequently deployed in an analysis of the production of politics in service work. By emphasising the reciprocal relationality of processes of the production of bodies, this conceptualisation of body work breaches binary understandings of work/life and therefore has significance beyond labour studies. The article concludes that service work forestalls and limits the potential for politics. Nonetheless, the instrumentalisation of the capacities by which bodies are political can also represent opportunities for the resistance of the pernicious ontological consequences of work.
Thesis Chapters by Paul McFadden
of the multitude, a becoming of the time of a class of workers whose labour process is autonomous from capitalist control. Considering these same tendencies, I demonstrate instead that affective labour is subsumed under capitalist power-relations and that the affective labour-process offers insight into new qualities of the content of articulations of affect in contemporary societies. We have always been producers and consumers of affect, but a key consequence of the affective turn of production is that we are, to whatever lesser or greater extent, producers and consumers of affects that have been subject to capitalist power relations at the point of production . We should regard affective production in wage-labour as a process of the alienation of affect and affective labour as a state of being alienated from our own affective productions . The norms of capitalist accumulation require a contingent value-producing form of affect, therefore our affective productions under wage-labour are shaped and directed according to those norms. By examining the blurring of the boundaries of labour-time and considering precariousness we can point to emergent dispositifs extending beyond the point of production of commodities to the production of life itself.
sciences are turning more and more towards the notions of “affect” and its role in the formation of political subjectivity. I briefly examine and define affect, and go on to explore the power relations at play in contemporary labour which seek to produce, shape, and articulate affect in ways that contribute to the
production of economic value. I go on to explore some of the political questions that arise from the manipulation of affect under the conditions of wage-labour and ask whether capitalist command over affect is a process for the destruction of ‘authentic’ subjectivities or if new modes of the articulation of affect represent new spaces of resistance.
Although the concepts of these forms of labour present qualitative difference, they also exhibit confluence. I seek to extend the usefulness of the concepts of aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour and immaterial labour as analytical categories by operationalising them in a new stage of the division of labour with reference to previous ethnographic studies and to the Marxist extension of Smith’s concept. Analysis of these labours show that the site of intellectual control over the labour process has shifted from capital to labour, as in Marx’s formal subsumption of labour under capital. New regimes of control extend previous capitalist systems of surveillance and discipline over workers’ bodies, as in Fordist modes of labour, toward a commodification of workers’ subjectivities. Worker subjectivity is utilised as an economic value-producing and value-realizing resource by the direction of the worker-subjectivity upon the consumer- or social-subjectivity.
I identify the determinate relationships between worker- and social-subjectivities and the significance of reproduction of labour by these social subjectivities to the production of modes of life and the formation of social values. Subjectivity is alienated from the subject and commodified in the activity of these forms of labour and is then consumed by social-subjects whose subjectivities are in turn transformed in the act of consumption. My analysis of the operation of these forms of labour in post-modern economy explores how processes in capitalist social organisation act in such a way that economic-value producing labour-activity produces human subjectivity and how subjectivity determines modes of life. The production of economic value is a determinate factor in the production of social values.
In contrast to the Autonomist Marxists, this paper proposes that the activity of these forms of wage-labour in the post-modern economy effects a tendency toward the creation of capitalistic subjectivities. Capital annexes the outside’ of capital, the sphere of non-work, and the production of subjectivity reveals a tendency for the production of a capitalistic mode of life. Thus what appears to be a new form of life in which workers are free to act autonomously in capitalism is actually a new form of alienation. However, many thinkers in the field of post-modern political economy underplay the real extent of the Fordist organisation of labour in the West, the Fordist nature of the power-relations that occur in aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour and immaterial labour, in which the worker is not always individualized and often exhibits acts of rebellion.
This article utilises an examination of the labour process of call centre work as a jumping-off point towards understanding the production of politics, arguing that the properties by which bodies are capable of praxis are becoming central to commodity production. As such, this article contributes to the project of understanding bodies under capitalism and to research on call centres and service work. To read call centre work politically, the article isolates and qualifies “the elementary factors of the labour process” as discussed by Marx in Capital, Vol. I. In light of research on purportedly new forms of labour, this analysis of the labour process points towards the need for a reconfiguration of the concept of body work, which is subsequently deployed in an analysis of the production of politics in service work. By emphasising the reciprocal relationality of processes of the production of bodies, this conceptualisation of body work breaches binary understandings of work/life and therefore has significance beyond labour studies. The article concludes that service work forestalls and limits the potential for politics. Nonetheless, the instrumentalisation of the capacities by which bodies are political can also represent opportunities for the resistance of the pernicious ontological consequences of work.