ephemera "Immaterial and affective labor: explored" issue released

The new issue (7.1) of ephemera: theory & politics in organization, entitled "immaterial and affective labor: explored," has just been published at  http://www.ephemeraweb.org. This latest special issue offers a critical engagement with the conceptual and political territory animated by the deployment of such ideas in the work of Hardt, Negri, Lazzarato, Virno and others, and follows previous explorations of class composition and politics in ephemera (for instance in the issues on 'the theory of the multitude' and 'writing: labour').


That it refers to both a conceptual and a political territory means two things: on the one hand, that the critical engagements herein are not aimed at theoretical clarification alone, but seek to address directly the questions and practices of politics and organisation thrown up by debates on immaterial and affective labour; on the other, that the form of the engagement is not reduced to the field of (post-)Operaismo, but aims at bringing together empirical insights into the present forms of organisation of labour, and is open to inflections coming from other disciplines and areas, such as organisation studies and labour process theory.


As our guest editors suggest, the space in which these debates take place is defined by a 'double ambivalence' deriving from, on the one hand, the excess that labour always produces and that capital always necessarily needs to recuperate, and, on the other, the particular novelty of contemporary cycles of struggle, that is, their capacity to intercommunicate and the heightened attention to the composition of difference they require. It is this ambivalence that makes questions of flight and capture, 'victory' and 'defeat', impossible to pose and foreclose within a general theoretical framework. This is what necessitates an analysis of resistance and struggle, class composition as well as political organization, as an enquiry placed alongside the actual practices of those who work and struggle today: theory as an element in organisation, rather than as an end in itself.




editorial
Emma Dowling, Rodrigo Nunes and Ben Trott
Immaterial and Affective Labour: Explored


articles
Adam Arvidsson
Creative Class or Administrative Class? On Advertising and the 'Underground'


George Caffentzis
Crystals and Analytical Engines: Historical and Conceptual Preliminaries to a New Theory of Machines


Kristin Carls
Affective Labour in Milanese Large Scale Retailing: Labour Control and E mp loyees' Coping Strategies


Patricia Ticineto Clough, Greg Goldberg, Rachel Schiff, Aaron Weeks and Craig Willse
Notes Towards a Theory of Affect-Itself


Antonio Conti, Anna Curcio, Alberto De Nicola, Paolo Do, Serena Fredda, Margherita Emiletti, Serena Orazi, Gigi Roggero, Davide Sacco, Giuliana Visco
The Anamorphosis of Living Labour


Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus
Learning to Immaterial Labour 2.0


Mariarosa Dalla Costa
Rustic and Ethical


Emma Dowling
Producing the Dining Experience: Measure, Subjectivity and the Affective Worker


Experimental Chair on the Production of Subjectivity
Call Center : The Art of Virtual Control


Leopoldina Fortunati
Immaterial Labor and Its Machinization


Max Henninger
Doing the Math: Reflections on the Alleged Obsolescence of the Law of Value under Post-Fordism


Rodrigo Nunes
'Forward How? Forward Where?' I: (Post-) Operaismo Beyond the Immaterial Labour Thesis


Ben Trott
Immaterial Labour and World Order: An Evaluation of a Thesis


Kathi Weeks
Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics


Elizabeth Wissinger
Modelling a Way of Life: Immaterial and Affective Labour in the Fashion Modelling Industry


Steve Wright
Back to the Future: Italian Workerists Reflect Upon The Operaista Project




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