Be Creative by Angela McRobbie

Author:Angela McRobbie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

Affective Labour

When we shift registers away from the antagonisms of capital and labour brought about by the ascendance of the general intellect, downwards to the actual field of struggle, examples are relatively few and far between. Lazzarato follows the actions of Les Intermittents Du Spectacle in France, but we would find it hard to locate comparable struggles by women in the creative sectors fighting for either union recognition and hence better social security, or indeed for entitlements for freelance workers or for the self-employed, let us say in regard to maternity leave or for childcare provision such as access to employer-run creches. And, as I suggested above, there have been few recent labour campaigns within the fashion retail sector, where women predominate, for the right to union recognition. In the context of campaigns such as UK Uncut and Occupy, these have been orchestrated largely by people, such as students, working outside the sector not inside. A further difficulty appears when some of the abstract concepts from Hardt and Negri that envisage moments of liberatory joy or communistic impulses within the communicative communities that come together within the new fields of work, are taken rather too literally, resulting in a celebratory account of agency in unlikely locations, as in the case of upscale fashion modelling (Wissinger 2007, 2009). With the exception of writing emerging directly from a theoretical dialogue with figures like Hardt and Negri such as that by Lorey (see also Raunig 2013) who makes a direct connection between the potenza of the General Intellect and the uprisings dating back to the EuroMayDay 2000 rallies by precarious workers in western Europe, the possible politics of affective labour can indeed be misconstrued, yielding to an untenable notion of radicalism, even taking into account the emphasis on spontaneous actions and deliberately short-lived events (Lorey 2015; Raunig 2013). For this reason my own focus for the remainder of this chapter and in its conclusion will be on the management of female affect as a requirement for ‘pleasure in work’ such that not to find and express such enjoyment becomes a mark of personal failure or of being the wrong person for the job. The tool for achieving this contemporary affect is ‘passionate work’.

Discussing the concept of affective labour, Michael Hardt maintains the potenza emphasis of the autonomist Marxist tradition, by seeing possibilities for subversion and for the creation of new forms of sociality, in effect glimpsing an alternative to capitalist rationality, through this kind of work (Hardt 1999). He acknowledges the fact that affective labour is, and has been, significantly gendered and associated with women's activities. Hardt defines the idea of immaterial labour as part of the ‘production of services that result in no material and durable good’, but instead ‘immaterial goods such as knowledge or communication’ (Hardt 1999, p. 10). While he uses immaterial labour interchangeably with affective labour, it is the latter that leads him to consider the realm of ‘maternal activities’. Hardt comments that increasingly forms of labour entail elements

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