1. +
Care Work,
Affective Labor, & Affect
Digital Labor
The New School
February 25, 2014

2. +
Care Work in the City

―….Considering the long and rich history of the psychic reader
in the city, we can say that she has always been a member of
the city‘s ―support staff,‖ offering reassurance and comfort to
urban dwellers, but in today‘s market the psychic has also
become the very model of entrepreneurial affective labor‖

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/mediums-of-exchange/

3. +
The Who or What of Care

Take five minutes to jot down a reflection on the question:
Who or what ―takes care‖ of you?

4. +
Interstices of a Shifting Political
Economy

Care Work (Domestic Work, Caring Labor)

Affective Labor (―Immaterial‖ Labor; Cognitive Capitalism)

Affect Itself (Human and Non-Human Actors)

Shifts:

Who is laboring?

What of the body?

What of the labor contract/wage?

What role does technology/biomedia play?

How do we understand the production of value?

5. +
―Women‘s Work‖

Marxist and Socialist Feminist analysis of the home, domestic and
reproductive labor.
―It is impertant to recognise that when we speak of housework we are not
speaking of a job as other jobs, but we are speaking of the most pervasive
manipulation, the most subtle and mystified violence that capitalism has
ever perpetrated against any section of the working class.‖
― To have a wage means to be part of a social contract, and there is no doubt
concerning its meaning: you work, not because you like it, or because it
comes naturally to you, but because it is the only condition under which you
are allowed to live. But exploited as you might be,You are not that work.
Today you are a postman, tomorrow a cabdriver. All that matters is how
much of that work you have to do and how much of that money you can
get.”
Silvia Federici, ―Wages for Housework‖ (1974)

6. +
The Gender & Patriarchy of
Unwaged Work
―Some women say: how is wages for housework going to change the
attitudes of our husbands towards us? Won't our husbands still
expect the same duties as before and even more than before once
we are paid for them? But these women do not see that they can
expect so much from us precisely because we are not paid for our
work, because they assume that it is 'a woman's thing' which does
not cost us much effort. Men are able to accept our services and
take pleasure in them because they presume that housework is
easy for us, that we enjoy it because we do it for their love. They
actually expect us to be grateful because by marrying us or living
with us they have given us the opportunity to express ourselves as
women (I.e. to serve them), 'You are lucky you have found a man
like me'. Only when men see our work as work-our love as workand most important our determination to refuse both, will they
change their attitude towards us.” – Silvia Federici

7. +
Care as…

A raced, gendered, and classed social relation

As invisible (or made invisible), yet necessary to Liberalism
(separate spheres of public/private)

A subjectifying practice or set of relations

A site of oppression (and resistance?)

As as site of analysis

A ―way of knowing‖ (Ethic of Care)

Care as an ontological ―formation‖, a making of bodies and
things

8. +
Globalization, Flexibility or
From Discipline to Control

―The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of
enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We
have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the
serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our
manner of living and in our relations with others. The
disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but
the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous
network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older
sports. ―– Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control

9. +
The Feminization of Work

Guy Standing, The Feminization of Work (―Women‖ entering
work force, causalization of work, lower wages, precarity)

Barbara Ehrenreich, Global Woman (Migration and
Immigration, ―Crisis‖ of Care)

Melissa Gregg, The Normalization of Female Flexible Labor
―The circumstances in which individuals find themselves
regarding their location in homes, communities and work are
being transformed through the development of increasingly
flexible arrangements, personal wants, and ways of talking
about these. . . In many situations today, there is no choice but
to make a choice. ― Gregg quoting Silva & Bennett

10. +
New Labor Studies:
Emotion Management

―The Managed Heart‖, Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983)

The related term emotion work (also called "emotion
management") refers to "these same acts done in a private
context," such as within the private sphere of one‘s home.
Three types of emotion management: Cognitive, bodily, and
expressive.

Gave rise to numerous studies of ―care‖ work, its demands, and
its production of value.

11. +
Autonomist Marxist: Operaismo
(Workerism)

Workers‘ Struggle, pushing forward capitalist development/new
forms of resistance

―The processes of modernization and industrialization
transformed and redefined all the elements of the social
plane. When agriculture was modernized as industry the farm
progressively became a factory, with all of the factory's
discipline, technology, wage-relations, and so forth. More
generally, society itself was gradually industrialized even to the
point of transforming human relations and human
nature. Society became a factory.‖ – Michael Hardt, Affective
Labor

12. +
Affective/Immaterial Labor

Hardt, ―Affective Labor‖
―Affective labor is itself and directly the constitution of communities
and collective subjectivities. The productive circuit of affect and
value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit
for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the processes of
capitalist valorization.
Theoretical frameworks that have brought together Marx and Freud
have conceived of affective labor using terms such as desiring
production and more significantly numerous feminist investigations
analyzing the potentials within what has been designated
traditionally as women's work have grasped affective labor with
terms such as kin work and caring labor. Each of these analyses
reveal the processes whereby our laboring practices produce
collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce
society itself.‖

13. +
What is Immaterial?

―The passage toward an informational economy involves
necessarily a change in the quality of labor and the nature of
laboring processes. This is the most immediate sociological and
anthropological implication of the passage of economic
paradigms. Information, communication, knowledge, and affect
come to play a foundational role in the production process.‖

―Most services indeed are based on the continual exchange of
information and knowledges. Since the production of services
results in no material and durable good, we might define the labor
involved in this production as immaterial labor—that is, labor that
produces an immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or
communication. One face of immaterial labor can be recognized in
analogy to the functioning of a computer. ‖

14. +
Wither the feminist analysis?

The other face of immaterial labor is the affective labor of human
contact and interaction. This is the aspect of immaterial labor that
economists like Reich are less likely to talk about, but that seems
to me the more important aspect, the binding element. Health
services, for example, rely centrally on caring and affective labor,
and the entertainment industry and the various culture industries
are likewise focused on the creation and manipulation of
affects. To one degree or another this affective labor plays a
certain role throughout the service industries, from fast food
servers to providers of financial services, embedded in the
moments of human interaction and communication. This labor is
immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its
products are intangible: a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction,
excitement, passion—even a sense of connectedness or
community.

15. +
Cognitive Capitalism:
―The Soul at Work‖

―Capital has managed to overcome the dualism of body and
soul by establishing a workforce in which everything we mean
by the Soul—language, creativity, affects—is mobilized for its
own benefit. Industrial production put to work bodies, muscles,
and arms. Now, in the sphere of digital technology and
cyberculture, exploitation involves the mind, language, and
emotions in order to generate value—while our bodies
disappear in front of our computer screens....‖

―Find your passion‖ takes on a new hue.

Care of the ―self‖ (Foucault) tension w/ entrepreneurial project.

16. +
Affect

Patricia Clough, The Affective Turn
―Yet, many of the critics and theorists who turned to affect often
focused on the circuit from affect to emotion, ending up with
subjectively felt states of emotion – a return to the subject as the
subject of emotion. I want to turn attention instead to those critics
and theorists who, indebted to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson, conceptualize affect as preindividual bodily forces augmenting or diminishing a body‘s
capacity to act and who critically engage those technologies that
are making it possible to grasp and to manipulate the
imperceptible dynamism of affect. I want to argue that focusing on
affect – without following the circuit from affect to subjectively felt
emotional states – makes clear how the turn to affect is a
harbinger of and a discursive accompaniment to the forging of a
new body, what I am calling the biomediated body.‖

17. +
Affective Facts: Brian Massumi

―We have witnessed the birth of the affective fact as a key political
operator.‖

―So what is an affective fact? The mechanism is quite simple:
Threat triggers fear. The fear is of disruption. The fear is a
disruption.”

―It is facile to accuse Bush of stupidity, and his administration of
factual deception. The reality is much more complex – and far
more frightening – than that. What has been described here is not
a simple lack of logic or thick-skulled misrecognition of the facts.
Quite the contrary, it is a positive thinking machine effectively
producing its own facts of affective passage by the way in which
its beginningless and endless series of partial subjects and partial
objects caught up in the self-effecting of the event dynamically
interpret its signs‖

18. +
Spatial Politics of Affect

Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Capitalism as ―rent seeking‖ in
an ―expressive infrastructure‖
― What I have particularly tried to suggest is that the underlying model of
what constitutes ‗economy‘ is changing to what might be termed a ‗natural‘
model. This is not a natural economy from which money has been
banished. Rather, it is a natural economy because it resembles the
process of terraforming in that it drives practices of worlding that are
concerned with producing environments (or rather, as I have tried to make
clear, proto-environments), which do not just provide support for a way of
life in the way of infrastructure, but are a way of life: infrastructure cannot
be separated out since it too has become expressive.
In these worlds, every fibre of being is bent to producing landscapes that
confirm each and every moment as what will happen. This is an economy that has gone beyond ideology or hegemony in their stricter senses in
that it is pre-emptive and makes its moves before the event has
completely unfolded.– Thrift, The insubstantial pageant: producing an
untoward land

19. +
The who or the what of affect

What do we make of ―care‖ in light of the move toward affect
itself? Who or what may be involved in

How can we consider the digital itself in light of care and affect?

How can we take into account the laboring body at different
levels of scale?

What becomes of ―materialist‖ analysis as a basis for labor
demands?

20. +
Further Reading

Digital Labor Working Group:
http://digitallabor.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

Caring Labor

http://caringlabor.wordpress.com/about/