Typing here, now, is a moment of immaterial labor in an economy of affects. so, the conversations around affective labor would say. I’ve been reading some of this work, and wanted to try out some thoughts about affect. But by affect, here, I do not mean emotion, nor even a property particular to bodies or living being, but more abstractly as the “power to act”. Moreover, this “power to act” is not a given property, but is emergent and evoked in complex, dynamic, historically specific assemblages/relations. The affect, as the power to act, is the power to respond to power. Or put slightly differently, the capacity to respond to capacity.
While I don’t find the overgeneralizing and epochal thinking of Hart and Negri’s Empire and Multitudes particularly compelling, I do want to take seriously the notions of affect and value Negri offers, passing through Deleuze and Guatarri’s sense of affect, and into a recent edited collection by Patricia Ticineto Clough. The basic argument is that the labor theory of value was predicated on labor existing outside of capital formations, and then brought into capital. Today, labor is only inside, and has become a force of production. And moreover, Negri argues, no single logos of value can measured. Value is beyond measure. Or, I would say value is multiply determined, historicizable, and thus beyond measure. Negri argues (and many follow along) that today it is “affect” that is both outside and inside capital. affect replaces labor as the generative ingrediate of capital, affect is in the “nonplace” of everywhere, human and nonhuman forms, preindividuated, individuated, or aggregated. Society and “life itself”, its affect, its power to act, is productive of the “outside” or the change for capital to modulate and reterritorialize.
On the question of reproduction, Negri suggests that social reproduction is no longer a nonwaged labor that underwrites labor’s value. Social reproduce is the site of affective labor generative of subsumable value in a affect economy. Thus, production and reproduction became coextensive.
So, there is much to run with here. But what I don’t want to take from this discussion of affect is the epochal narrative: then it was this way, now it is another way. Affect value might well be one axis in the coupling of reproduction into capital formations, but I’d like to take seriously my claim that capital has multiple ontologies in our present moment, and reproduction is multiply coupled with capital along historically specific, non-identical modes.
Nonetheless, this work on affect gets very close to the historical ontology of not only qualities, capacities, and relations, but also at what I’ve thinking lately as “generation,” which is not only the power to act, but the making and unmaking in the acting within assemblages.
In other words, while in earlier work I’ve talked about “materialization” in similar ways, this term emphasizes questions of existence, and thingness. Does generation get at something like doing, or process, which is how I want to conceptualize reproduction?
I know this connects to the “new vitalism” scholarship. But what I am hesitant about in some of that is the (over?) emphasis on turbulence and lack of historicizing.
Okay, now that I’ve given a does of free immaterial labor to a blog no one reads. I’ll sign off.
