Session 5- Immaterial and Neoliberal Labour

G. Deleuze, Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59, 3-7, 1992.

M. Lazzarato, Immaterial labour. In: Virno P and Hardt M (eds) Radical Thought in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 133-150.

M. Hardt, Affective labour. boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 89-100.

Ilana Gershon, Neoliberal agency. Current Anthropology 52 (4): 537-555, 2011.

Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta, Intimate encounters: Affective labor in call centers . positions ,2016.

- C.A.  

Theorizing the ‘Immaterial’

From Societies of Sovereignty to Foucault’s Disciplinary society, Deleuze experiments with thinking about the societies of control.  Prison, hospital, factory, school, family- places of exposure that characterized disciplinary society are in crises and its only a matter of time when these institutions and their disciplinary structure will give way to the societies of control.  This is not to say that discipline was devoid of control but it is to say that control is not longer tied to the discipline or the concrete, enclosed disciplinary structures. While containment and ordering characterized the function of discipline, control in societies of control is continuous and without limits, and hence immaterial. This thought experiment sounds linear, with one form giving way to another. However, It makes more sense if one thinks about all three in simultaneity. Change here is not in terms of A replacing B, rather it is about A- whatever one may chose to call it- expanding.  Deleuze’s paper is a thought experiment to figure the form of capitalist structure that each one of us is being made to serve.  

Societies of control give way to different modes of serving i.e. it gives way to forms of activities  that were not normally recognized as work i.e.  Immaterial labour defined as “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (Lazzarato 1997) or “that produces an immaterial good such as a service, knowledge, or communication (Hardt 94). Affective labor- managing and production of emotions then becomes a necessary part of the Immaterial labor production and the commodity produced therein. Affective labor, is to be understood as one face of “Immaterial labor” (Hardt 90).  Hardt however, goes on to theorize about affective labor from below – that produces subjectivity and produces society.

Mankekar & Gupta (2011), via their ethnographic field study of call centers in Bangalore, document the process with which Affective Labor at one point produces a kind of social death but at the same time, via their encounter of numerous sexual liaisons between call center agents that are disliked by the managers, they are able to argue for the coimplication of both alienation and intimacy in affective labor. This could be one example to think of biopolitics from below that Hardt envisions. – where affective labor produces society and life itself.

Gershon(2011) looks at the flattening of scale in formalization of neoliberal subject. Each entity within neoliberal imagination is a business entity- a set of assets that need to be managed (a characterization of subjectivity that runs through almost all the readings). However, her concern is to think about the ground from anthropological imagination can critique this scalar deficiency inherent in the neoliberal imagination. A focus on social organization and epistemological difference, it is argued, can help anthropologists to counter neoliberalsims’ misrecognition of scale and its adequacy as a set of moral guidelines.    

Gershon’s thesis and its location in anthropology speaks to all three theorization of the society of control, Immaterial Labor and affective labor by bringing in question of scale. The theorizations of society of control, affective labor and immaterial labor though make sense to an extent. However, these authors, in their attempt to theorize change and transformation, continue to reproduce the hegemonic violence of capitalist market system in their work  whereby everything is colored using only one lens.   The theorization cannot be looked in isolation or as absolute.  Gershon (2011) tries to counter this by looking for tools that can help (anthropological) research to produce something different. Indeed, questions of scale, space and time are needed to “understand the impossibility of neoliberal demands” (Gershon 546).