Tracing the means of individual labor’s disfiguration and reconstitution as an appendage within industrial capitalism is one of Marx’s tasks in The Grundisse. In this present moment questions about the role of the worker in relation to technology are once again pressing. Industrial machines have been existent long enough to deteriorate into a Rust Belt and cybernetic machines have been powerful enough to accelerate, if not spark, so many new “revolutions.” Together they produce a radically transformed landscape where sites of production are largely invisible for those in the consumerist nations while the classic forms of labor have been metabolized rapidly as to be unrecognizable, scattered across intensified economies of service and information. The Grundisse and particularly its passages on “machines” offers needed tools for scholars, theorists and activists attempting to understand contemporary capitalism.

In Marx’s analysis, labor is divided into simplified tasks under regimes of technological efficiency and once subordinated, is absorbed within the social framework of production. Here labor constitutes the mass—a biopower and commodity resource generated as a necessary condition by and for industrialized capitalism (Foucault 1976, 139; Harvey 2003)—and yet the individual worker finds her own labor to evaporate as “almost every piece of work done by a single individual is part of a whole, having no value or utility of itself” (Marx 1973, 288). Social labor, or the massification of labor, thus equals suspended individual labor, enclosing the labor-power of all workers within the terms of fluid value established by capital under resulting in the devalorization of labor.

While we are familiar with the basic premise of alienated labor, a brief recitation may be helpful: under capitalism, where the means of production are owned and controlled by the wealthy, the workers possess only their bodies to bring to market. It is not their lives that they hope to sell, per se, because then they would be slaves, but an expendable and renewable aspect of the body—their ability to work. Marx terms this labor-power and it is this single property that is of interest to capital because as the worker creates products with the materials and machines provided by the owner, they are creating objects of value not for themselves but for the owners. The wages received are compensation for the labor—the actual activity of working—that the worker expended as time and energy which are forever lost to the worker and now live on inside the material objects created as the worker toiled away at the weaving loom, the sawmill, or the Cheez Whiz or iPhone factory. If wages-for-labor is the rope, then the knots are double-bound: by working on the material world, or “sensuous nature” the worker’s efforts no longer engage with the world to create the possibility for more fulfilling labor since the Twinkie or iPhone components belong to a material reality of monotony and endless non-completion. The more basic knot is: the worker’s labor does not directly generate sustenance or “means of life” but instead an abstract valuation of labor in the form of money. The worker experiences a kind of out-of-body transaction, the familiar feeling of being the walking dead at a shit job, simply performing narrowly defined tasks for a set period of time—that’s alienated labor. Work is assigned an abstract value along with the commodity just produced and the worker in turn is reduced to just that—a worker, no longer anything more. Everything has been reversed, inverted, distorted. Marx provides the sharp kick in the shins: “…the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker…” (Marx 1973, 73). The act of laboring—the worker’s life force—invested into products “confronts him (the worker) as something hostile and alien” (Ibid., 72).  This relation is not limited, Marx argues, to the dyad of worker and commodity-object but also in the relation of worker to worker, as each encounters the life of the other transformed in the distorted reflection cast back by the alienated object of their labor.

This accelerating cycle of devaluation of work is in fact not strict devaluation, but a appears as a kind of technological alchemy, albeit one includes the worker as a critical ingredient. The worker is able to produce more, not through longer hours alone or stimulants like caffeine or amphetamines, but through the increased mechanization of the workplace. Marx is especially interested in the way the means of labor, as the machine, absorb, expand, and intensify the energy of the worker while also becoming repositories of value themselves, termed fixed capital. An “automatic system of machinery” emerges which inverts the relation of worker to the means of labor, or the traditional tools we might imagine, like hammers, chisels, needles, rolling pins, and scythes. With these tools a worker shapes the material but with machines the worker’s virtuosity is displaced onto the technological process and the workers now find themselves acting to ensure the machines operate smoothly and uninterrupted (Marx 1973, 279). Under industrialized capitalism, human labor is “…a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system…as itself [labor] only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism” (Ibid., 279). This automatic system, while it subjugates labor to the action of machinery, is not a complete technological dystopia, devoid of human input, but the world remade through the forces of capital does conjure sci-fi motifs of disembodied thought, distortions of time and space, and alien energies. Marx writes of “numerous mechanical and intellectual organs” within the automatic system and underscores the transformation of scientific and mechanical knowledge into an “alien power” acting upon the worker through its rationalized inventions of efficiency—human knowledge turned towards reducing the worker to a mere appendage is masked “as the power of the machine itself” (Ibid.).

The mechanization and “rationalization” of labor has allowed capitalism to reduce the worker to the most isolated and ineffective aspect of production, such that living labor can become the cheapest aspect in the many costs of manufacturing. This is not to say that simple because the technological capacity of machines have been advanced that capital will not also be ever alert to discover locations where human labor can be had more cheaply than machines. If those populations are not already eager to subject themselves to the lowest market wages, the agents of capital are quite willing to collude with state forces to create the conditions that will make these otherwise disinterested or resistant populations into ready workers. And what is most critical to understand in the above is that “the automatic system” also comprises humans and is shaped by humans as integral components of the forces of production. There is a consciousness to human work that infuses the scale, power, and temporal control exercised by industrial machines, even though this consciousness may be reflected back as an alien force. It is an important reminder so that we do not fall under the hypnotic charm of technological determinism that orthodox Marxism occasionally seemed inclined.

Mackenzie in his close analysis of Marx’s writings on technology reminds us: “The inclusion of labor power in the forces of production thus admits conscious human agency as a determinant of history: it is people, as much as more than the machine, that make history” (Mackenzie 1984, 477). Not only is labor power central to Marx’s understanding of changes within capital, but labor is first and foremost a social formation that defines capitalism. As workers are subordinated to a wage system and lose control of the means of production, owners seize hold of social relations—technical innovation is not responsible for these shifts but critically facilitates the ability of owners to extract greater surplus value from given inputs and serves as a powerful weapon against workers’ resistance. Workers divided into specialized tasks suffer the monotony of reductive labor while they are also further disadvantaged in their social condition: the intellect and skill necessary to produce a commodity is now distributed across the entirety of a factory floor leaving each individual worker dependent on the automatic system of cooperation and mechanization controlled by the owner (Ibid., 485).  Intellectual power, concentrated in the organization and operation of machines, confronts the isolated and marginalized worker.

What Marx is sketching out is a radical transformation: the marginalization of conventional labor by highly sophisticated machines altering the social forms and bodily engagements of production. At the same time, intellectual power takes on increased significance as it is required to imagine, develop and apply the machines themselves and the larger social modes the machines are intended to serve. In this shift direct labor is displaced by intellectual work as the primary force of production. However, Paolo Virno in his brief, but influential analysis of Marx’s Grundisse points out a significant oversight: in Marx’s formulation, scientific knowledge becomes fixed capital as it is objectified in machinery but this “neglects the way in which the general intellect manifests itself as living labour” (Virno 2007, 7). What is crucial for us to understand in our present moment is the way social knowledges have proliferated and increased in importance such that these knowledges exceed the discrete exchangeability of information (coded as numerical quantifications and statistical data for predicative modeling).

This brief tracing of Marx’s work on labor, machines, and the intellect serves as a foundation for us to examine changes in the conception of labor under contemporary capitalism, particularly the term “immaterial labor,” and to consider how this broad term applies to the social and economic landscape inhabited by young people in Japan. First, we do well to approach this examination slowly, with a small degree of suspicion for that proclaimed as “new” particularly when it comes bearing down upon us imperiously on the fiber-optic chariots of digital technologies. In this moment no single term sufficiently captures all the “newness” of capitalism even as the gyre turns round in many familiar contradictions, constant in its instabilities and crises. Certainly capitalism has undergone intense shape-shifting since the mid-70s, including restructuring, off-shoring of major manufacturing from declining centers in Western Europe and North America to tertiary sites within the orbit of developing capital. “Post-Fordism” succinctly describes the dismantling of the traditional assembly-line systems in industrial heartlands along with the defanging of unions while also pointing us towards changes in politics, consumption, media culture, and social life. Pursuing capitalism’s revolutionary effects across this period reminds us of “the dynamic, tumultuous, and experimental nature of capitalist development that was salient in Marx’s own writings but often forgotten” by those seeking out patterns in the “cycle of the market” (Dyer-Witherford 1999, 59).

First, it is crucial for us to understand Takashi and his colleagues as part of a fluid network of labor interlaced with intense social practices. Amid rapid changes in the modes of global capitalism of the 1970s, ghostly forms of new labor proliferated in the dust left as Fordist models of production collapsed in Western industrial heart(less)lands and were replaced with dark archipelagos of new techno-factories concomitant with expanding zones of cheap labor. Once tethered to firm institutional hierarchies, the
“The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labor, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper” (Marx 1973, 280). The concept of the knowledge worker enlivens this initial framing of intellectual ability within the extractive mobilizations of capital.

We might productively understand Takashi and his fellow immaterial laborers as participating in a dynamic “scape” in Appadurai’s description. His concept poses a challenge to the area studies as a primary device to conjure subjects into relations and being for the purpose of analysis: “Regions are best viewed as initial contexts for themes that generate variable geographies, rather than as fixed geographies, marked by pre-given themes” (Appadurai 2000, 7).  Bordieu’s conception of a field offers another layer of complexity. Though he refused the concept of an imaginary in arguing for a very real state of ideological practice and durable, a socialized subjectivity always contingent on the larger texture of relations to inform and shape the self. However, as Liu points out, when information critically constitutes the social field, the imaginary reasserts itself in its relation to bodily practice (Liu 2004, 28). So symbolic is the stylist’s role in this network of immaterial labor that a group of precarious fashion workers in Milan created a fictitious Anglo-Japanese stylist, Serpica Naro, to stage a radical action to creatively expose the tentative conditions of their labor.  By crafting an “edgy and allegedly controversial profile” the workers were able to trick the organizers of the Milanese fashion showcase into including the “stylist” only to have the runway taken over by “models” from Milan’s squatter community and “Serpica Naro” revealed as an anagram for “San Precario,” “the radical patron of the Italian precarious and temporary workers” (Deseriis 2011, 87).

In critiquing the naturalized fit between advertising and cultural specificity in his study of a Bombay ad agency, William Mazzarella calls out “the critically disabling affinity between structuralist analyses and marketing dogma” (Mazzarella 2003, 25).  “Advertising,” he writes of culture’s reification in the service of capital, “makes sense because culture makes sense” and “[t]hus, questions of ideology, power, and agency are elided” (Ibid.). Advertising is a mode of communication, a folding over of sight and sound, moved into being by peristaltic action through complex networks of creators assembled into cultural co-efficiencies of “productive units.” Advertising and the broader space of image creation, circulation and consumption, is concrete and abstract, local and global; operating across many strata in what Guattari calls an assemblage.

This meeting was precisely the site where Takashi could “read” us to determine our suitability, our value, in creating a photographic commodity rich in “informational and cultural content.” His ability to appraise us came from having been trained or habituated in a certain set of tastes and aesthetics. In this sense, Takashi becomes an interpreter and passing point of global flows, a living mechanism embodying Lazzarato’s claim that “The role of immaterial labor is to promote continual innovation in the forms and conditions of communication” (Lazzarato 1996, 5). These innovations require a praxis of cultural and commodity scale—the familiar binary of local and global—where communication industries, particularly images, flourish with their excess of signifying power. Takashi was operating at the precarious fold where the abstract of the market encounters the fleshy materiality of bodies and their habitus.

The precarious fold is a model intended to allow us to think with and through the binaries of global/local, but other persistent pairs: adult/child, urban/rural, government/market, public/private, man/woman, human/non-human, etc. I use the fold borrowed from Deleuze’s writings on Foucault and Leibniz to intentionally provide a wrinkle in the familiar procedures of dialectics at the very level of our shared endeavor of knowing: “To think is to fold, to double the outside with a coextensive inside” (Deleuze 2006, 97).  And if thinking itself doubles over, in a fit of laughter, in a paroxysm of grief or vomiting, so too does subjectivity, suffering under neo-liberal regimes where it is “highly internalized, individualized, and isolated.” The fold, as a doubling, is proliferation, one where subjectivity is never a discrete state to be achieved but drifts across the environment with which it interacts and generatively combines. The fold is also a space of misrecognition and risk, where difference is recoded into the circuits of failure insofar as global youth turns around imaginaries of desire and embodied realities. The immaterialized labor flows out of a body that evades or fails at formal subjectivities of biopolitical cohesion. In effect, the boundary between Takashi, his history, and his environment(s) are blurred such that in the indeterminism between him and his worlds relations are immanently emergent to which his innovation, mutability, and translating capacities are intimately linked.


Offhandedly Takashi mentioned he had hung out with skaters and surfers in LA when he was younger. This bit of personal information given as a way to smooth our conversation into shared terrain of tastes and subcultural history put me on immediate alert.  I asked further about his background.  He told us he was a kikokushijo, having lived in London as a teen, and then had spent a semester abroad studying design in California when in college. Despite Takashi’s humble tone, it was clear that he had been chosen as stylist for this shoot because he brought not just English skills but a particular cosmopolitan élan shaped particularly, if only briefly, by Southern California street culture. Takashi had an unquantifiable extra—a surplus—in this cultural fluency gained through his kikokushijo identity. This surplus was now put to work, contributing to the current project as he assessed us as skater-boy props. The liminal identity becomes capable of discerning the codes that produce a legibly “authentic” body/style/comportment. Through an improvisational, experiential, and globalized subjectivity that combines aesthetic sensitivity and friendships based on shared practices and language (surfing, skateboarding), the kikokushijo stylist is able to pull real bodies into the matrix of the Japanese fashion shoot. The habitus may have been provisional and localized, never conferring a fully-realized identity recognizable from the “inside” of the category and always dependent on being bounded by the outside. Precisely because of this failure to be fully Japanese, Takashi was situated as the most legitimate authority on translation because he was presumed to already carry the codes of cultural decryption in his “lack” of monolithic Japaneseness.

The capacity for young people like Takashi to translate, to reorganize and communicate meanings as a living membrane is a form of crucial difference that is recognized as a commodity value by the owners of K.A, the Japanese state, and most certainly by the parents of kikokushijo. How to discipline this unruly and slippery capacity for decoding and living-between is another story.

Begin this path

1. Immaterial, Again, and Zones of Affect
2. Tokyo as Neo-Techno-Future and Material Bodies as Counter-Affect
3. Erina and Creative Work at the Margins

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