Ontology, composition & affect: the political limits of postworkerist thought

Abstract

This thesis contributes to contemporary debates around the changing nature of work through a critical engagement with postoperaista (workerist) thought. The categories and concepts of affective labour and immaterial production, particularly as developed in recent postworkerist research, have been important in progressing analyses of contemporary shifts in the arrangements of work and reproduction. The focus upon the affective, emotional and cognitive has contributed to an innovative reconsideration of the growth of service work, cognitive labour, and complex demarcations of production and reproduction. Ultimately, however, this thesis argues that postworkerism reaches a political impasse by grounding labour in an ontology of affect and reinscribing a substantialist account of value. The thesis identifies three key limitations to the existing postworkerist analyses of immaterial and affective labour: historical, intensive and extensive. Each of these limits is a result of the particular way in which postworkerist thought entwines a Spinozist ontology of affect with the category of labour. The thesis develops a critique of the historical construction of affective labour to address the first limit. It addresses the second limit by looking at the mobilisation of affect as a technique of management, and thus as an intensive mechanism in the control of labour. And it encounters the final limit in a discussion of affective technologies and their role in the extensive measurement of work. Having addressed these limits, I show that an analysis of affect in terms of class composition makes it possible to engage the question of affective labour without recapitulating the ontological and political impasse of postworkerism. This latter point is explored through the prism of affective composition.