The Time of Money by Adkins Lisa

Author:Adkins, Lisa [Adkins, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2018-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Out of Work

One of the central arguments of this book is that the expansion and reconfiguration of finance from the 1970s onward has involved not only an intensification of the productivity in finance in terms of the generation of surplus from the movements and flows of money, but also the emergence of distinctive social forms. These forms are concerned not with equilibrium states or stasis but with disequilibrium and asymmetry. I have pointed, for example, to a postprobabilistic reworking of the relationship between credit-debt and wages such that credit-debt outruns working and lived lives and if indexed against income can never be repaid; a nonchronological temporal universe that binds everyday practices to the indeterminate movements of money; and modes of practice that are attuned not to the reproduction of labor but to the optimization of the possibles of payment. While for many social theorists such disequilibrium states are cause for alarm and a sign of a dysfunctional and degenerating social order, I have stressed that they constitute the very social fabric of the time of money, not least because they afford modes of practice and activate capacities that attune populations to the logic of speculation.

In this chapter, I turn to a further instance of the activation of such capacities, and especially to how a logic of speculation guides and organizes the composition and organization of labor. My interest in labor is certainly not to recuperate its status as the foundational or fundamental value underlying exchange. Instead it is in how, in the time of money, labor has been restructured in terms of the unpredictable event. The restructuring of the probables of Fordist wage labor into a range of contingencies has been made explicit by a number of writers, as have the sociolegal devices, infrastructures, and practices that have enabled this reworking (see, e.g., Cooper 2012; Peck and Theodore 2012; Rafferty and Yu 2010). The latter include zero hours and other forms of employment contracting that have uncertainty and the shouldering of risk at their very core. They also include outsourcing and subcontracting chains, contingent work strategies, tendering and procurement practices, and employment policy regimes that seek to optimize the working capacities and employability of whole populations, as well as to maximize such capacities across whole lifetimes. Also at issue are a range of sociotechnical devices and institutional mechanisms that have transformed the certainties of the Fordist wage into the necessarily unknowns of what money might put in motion. Such devices, practices, and infrastructures must be recognized as central to the transformation of the Fordist into the post-Fordist labor market and the establishment, as Melinda Cooper (2012) has framed it, of contingency not as a marginal or peripheral principle in the organization and realities of wage labor but as a necessity and a standard.

In this chapter I situate—perhaps at first sight paradoxically—the labor of the unemployed in these terms. I am concerned with that labor which is the subject and object of regimes of activation, that is, of a range

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