'The "becoming of the time of the multitude": alienated affect alienating affect'
Abstract
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.
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.