Immaterial, Again, and Zones of Affect
This section is explicitly concerned with youth and affect in new spaces and modes of work (including unpaid, or the most exquisitely bizarre of all, paying to work as education), particularly those of communication, media, and image and content production. These fields partially comprise the larger terrain of immaterial labor as originally defined by Lazzarato as “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (1996, 1).
The complement to immaterial labor is the realm of the affective. The energy and flows of care, emotion, desire, social and physical contact—a complex striation running through the more fixed lines of laboring zones. In Akemi’s intricate unfolding of circumstances and possibilities, relations and failures, we encounter the specific way affect is hard at work. It flows through the specific cultural dispositions required to get by at school, with family members, and in a difficult job where the self is transposed onto a ritual communication forms both familiar and alien. Multiple stories are unfolding simultaneously. They are divergent, even as they are unified through Akemi’s singular experience. No single future offers itself, nor is there any given path or trajectory. Horizons fail as reliable convergence points for fixing the future. Instead, there is an erratic pulsation, fits and fevers, shifts and sudden propulsions followed by becalmed moments. She is performing badly and never quite able to stabilize any single circuitry of communication or affect. Time flows in disjuncted series and reroutes between school, the endless persistence of melancholy, and flares of forced energy at the club. Her attempts to exercise her learning and her skills fail her when she uses them in conversation with the men in the club. Her cultural sensitivities are off, she’s not perceiving the signals correctly and can’t deploy the requisite technique. Something hasn’t been possessed sufficiently by gendered scripts and affective codes for her to be released seamlessly into the flow of this kind of labor.
A few difficult months pass and Akemi quits the club, lasting longer than she thought. She withdrew from school and transferred to a university in another city.
Akemi’s shifts, fluctuations, decisiveness, and pained persistence give convoluted, convulsed shape to how affect infuses the everyday life and in this instance, how it comes to work within the space of immaterialized labor. The signs are all there, but I am too close at first, too hesitant, to say that the outside world of what is happening, that fogged in feeling of research running blind on bumps, bruising collisions, echolocation that places me always in the center of things but for not knowing anything at all, I’m on the edges. Which is exactly where my researching self breaks down on instinct. I am metabolizing my own questions. They are becoming me. I am becoming the questions sitting among the flimsy debris of Akemi’s cramped room. The sluggish pain is scattered all around me. What is happening is not carelessness. Or apathy. Or parasitical convenience. There is a violent cleaving with a thousand dull blades at once but maybe not. I think it’s over minutes and days and long evening shifts with mascara tugging the eyelids down and sips of alcohol keeping just enough burn to be alert. Classes missed and appointments cancelled, rescheduled, gone to, but naggingly unsatisfactory. “Positions are taken, habits loved and hated, dreams launched and wounded. And just about everyone is part of the secret conspiracy of everyday life to get what you can out of it” (Stewart, 2007, 41). The tension of multiple surfaces stretched taut and rippling with the demands, desires, discontents blistering and receding. The micro-effects resemble, crudely perhaps, a Deleuzean series, with each act, fact, experience, joined in spiraling chains of meaning and nonsense. They feel “absolutely divergent in the sense that the point or horizon of convergence lies in a chaos or is constantly displaced within that chaos” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 123).
If there is crisis, it is in the reductive act of quarantine around a discourse, a single authorizing event or period (the postwar, the Bubble collapse, the Lost Decade) or a series of sites and figures, panic sites and folk devils (collapsing classrooms, strange youth, hikikimori, bad girls), or the infections of static being (precarious, hopeless, dreamless, socially detached and simultaneously parasitical). There is a luster to all of these fetish objects, so frequently are they handled. They are burnished bright by anxiety and they are attractive when posed as a troupe frozen in the static performance of crisis. The tableaux vivants of crisis is an altar to ward off the chaos of the becoming we live within and to confirm the social histories designed to always lead back to a series of points of convergence. Chaos drifts all around in the cacophonous tangle of lines of meaning, relation, action, changing bodies, and experience. They refuse to reenact the ideologically antiseptic event of conjoined and cordoned crisis.
The concept of immaterial labor refers to two different aspects of labor. On the one hand, as regards the "informational content" of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers' labor processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication). On the other hand, as regards the activity that produces the "cultural content" of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as "work"—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion. (Ibid.)Immaterial labor as a conceptual frame was developed in response to the changing character and formation of class structures within a post-Fordist capitalism increasingly intent on infusing the intellectual and social capacity of workers into commodities. Within this frame there is frequently an essentialized assumed linkage between this work and technological change cast in the techno-imaging-info worlds of “new media,” intimate relations between human and machinic software, and surfaces in motion and as interfacing portals. Work such as Akemi’s might seem outside the parameters of new kinds of communication work because, plainly put, its analog and only needs the old cultural tools of alcohol and mood lighting in the company of pretty and accommodating young women. It’s an old recipe and while the social relays enacted are deeply enmeshed into spaces of capital production, they might seem too, well, threadbare and old-fashioned. Before technology, in the form of “the computerization of productive processes and of social communication” can arrive to exert “a molecular domination upon the collective nervous network” there must already be the conditions for shaping cognitive, emotional, linguistic, and aesthetic forms of becoming into modes of labor (Berardi 2009, 188).
The complement to immaterial labor is the realm of the affective. The energy and flows of care, emotion, desire, social and physical contact—a complex striation running through the more fixed lines of laboring zones. In Akemi’s intricate unfolding of circumstances and possibilities, relations and failures, we encounter the specific way affect is hard at work. It flows through the specific cultural dispositions required to get by at school, with family members, and in a difficult job where the self is transposed onto a ritual communication forms both familiar and alien. Multiple stories are unfolding simultaneously. They are divergent, even as they are unified through Akemi’s singular experience. No single future offers itself, nor is there any given path or trajectory. Horizons fail as reliable convergence points for fixing the future. Instead, there is an erratic pulsation, fits and fevers, shifts and sudden propulsions followed by becalmed moments. She is performing badly and never quite able to stabilize any single circuitry of communication or affect. Time flows in disjuncted series and reroutes between school, the endless persistence of melancholy, and flares of forced energy at the club. Her attempts to exercise her learning and her skills fail her when she uses them in conversation with the men in the club. Her cultural sensitivities are off, she’s not perceiving the signals correctly and can’t deploy the requisite technique. Something hasn’t been possessed sufficiently by gendered scripts and affective codes for her to be released seamlessly into the flow of this kind of labor.
A few difficult months pass and Akemi quits the club, lasting longer than she thought. She withdrew from school and transferred to a university in another city.
Akemi’s shifts, fluctuations, decisiveness, and pained persistence give convoluted, convulsed shape to how affect infuses the everyday life and in this instance, how it comes to work within the space of immaterialized labor. The signs are all there, but I am too close at first, too hesitant, to say that the outside world of what is happening, that fogged in feeling of research running blind on bumps, bruising collisions, echolocation that places me always in the center of things but for not knowing anything at all, I’m on the edges. Which is exactly where my researching self breaks down on instinct. I am metabolizing my own questions. They are becoming me. I am becoming the questions sitting among the flimsy debris of Akemi’s cramped room. The sluggish pain is scattered all around me. What is happening is not carelessness. Or apathy. Or parasitical convenience. There is a violent cleaving with a thousand dull blades at once but maybe not. I think it’s over minutes and days and long evening shifts with mascara tugging the eyelids down and sips of alcohol keeping just enough burn to be alert. Classes missed and appointments cancelled, rescheduled, gone to, but naggingly unsatisfactory. “Positions are taken, habits loved and hated, dreams launched and wounded. And just about everyone is part of the secret conspiracy of everyday life to get what you can out of it” (Stewart, 2007, 41). The tension of multiple surfaces stretched taut and rippling with the demands, desires, discontents blistering and receding. The micro-effects resemble, crudely perhaps, a Deleuzean series, with each act, fact, experience, joined in spiraling chains of meaning and nonsense. They feel “absolutely divergent in the sense that the point or horizon of convergence lies in a chaos or is constantly displaced within that chaos” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 123).
If there is crisis, it is in the reductive act of quarantine around a discourse, a single authorizing event or period (the postwar, the Bubble collapse, the Lost Decade) or a series of sites and figures, panic sites and folk devils (collapsing classrooms, strange youth, hikikimori, bad girls), or the infections of static being (precarious, hopeless, dreamless, socially detached and simultaneously parasitical). There is a luster to all of these fetish objects, so frequently are they handled. They are burnished bright by anxiety and they are attractive when posed as a troupe frozen in the static performance of crisis. The tableaux vivants of crisis is an altar to ward off the chaos of the becoming we live within and to confirm the social histories designed to always lead back to a series of points of convergence. Chaos drifts all around in the cacophonous tangle of lines of meaning, relation, action, changing bodies, and experience. They refuse to reenact the ideologically antiseptic event of conjoined and cordoned crisis.
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