<nettime> ephemera "Immaterial and affective labor: explored" issue released

[stevphen shukaitis <stevphen@autonomedia.org>]

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


See details of how to be regularly informed about new ephemera issues  
at: http://www.ephemeraweb.org/emailalerts

--
Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://slash.interactivist.net

"Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is  
created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political  
practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and  
compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied  
practices of welcoming difference... Becoming autonomous is a  
political position for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary  
knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social  
and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of  
skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with  
others creates a common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts  
the domination and hegemony of the master's rule." - subRosa Collective


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