ephemera "Immaterial and affective labour: explored" issue released

www.ephemeraweb.org

The new issue (7.1) of ephemera: theory & politics in organization,
entitled "immaterial and affective labor: explored," has just been
published at http://www.ephemeraweb.org. This latest special issue
offers a critical engagement with the conceptual and political
territory animated by the deployment of such ideas in the work of
Hardt, Negri, Lazzarato, Virno and others, and follows previous
explorations of class composition and politics in ephemera (for
instance in the issues on 'the theory of the multitude' and 'writing:
labour').

That it refers to both a conceptual and a political territory means
two things: on the one hand, that the critical engagements herein are
not aimed at theoretical clarification alone, but seek to address
directly the questions and practices of politics and organisation
thrown up by debates on immaterial and affective labour; on the other,
that the form of the engagement is not reduced to the field of
(post-)Operaismo, but aims at bringing together empirical insights
into the present forms of organisation of labour, and is open to
inflections coming from other disciplines and areas, such as
organisation studies and labour process theory.

As our guest editors suggest, the space in which these debates take
place is defined by a 'double ambivalence' deriving from, on the one
hand, the excess that labour always produces and that capital always
necessarily needs to recuperate, and, on the other, the particular
novelty of contemporary cycles of struggle, that is, their capacity to
intercommunicate and the heightened attention to the composition of
difference they require. It is this ambivalence that makes questions
of flight and capture, 'victory' and 'defeat', impossible to pose and
foreclose within a general theoretical framework. This is what
necessitates an analysis of resistance and struggle, class composition
as well as political organization, as an enquiry placed alongside the
actual practices of those who work and struggle today: theory as an
element in organisation, rather than as an end in itself.


editorial
Emma Dowling, Rodrigo Nunes and Ben Trott
Immaterial and Affective Labour: Explored

articles
Adam Arvidsson
Creative Class or Administrative Class? On Advertising and the 'Underground'

George Caffentzis
Crystals and Analytical Engines: Historical and Conceptual
Preliminaries to a New Theory of Machines

Kristin Carls
Affective Labour in Milanese Large Scale Retailing: Labour Control and
E mp loyees' Coping Strategies

Patricia Ticineto Clough, Greg Goldberg, Rachel Schiff, Aaron Weeks
and Craig Willse
Notes Towards a Theory of Affect-Itself

Antonio Conti, Anna Curcio, Alberto De Nicola, Paolo Do, Serena
Fredda, Margherita Emiletti, Serena Orazi, Gigi Roggero, Davide Sacco,
Giuliana Visco
The Anamorphosis of Living Labour

Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus
Learning to Immaterial Labour 2.0

Mariarosa Dalla Costa
Rustic and Ethical

Emma Dowling
Producing the Dining Experience: Measure, Subjectivity and the Affective Worker

Experimental Chair on the Production of Subjectivity
Call Center : The Art of Virtual Control

Leopoldina Fortunati
Immaterial Labor and Its Machinization

Max Henninger
Doing the Math: Reflections on the Alleged Obsolescence of the Law of
Value under Post-Fordism

Rodrigo Nunes
'Forward How? Forward Where?' I: (Post-) Operaismo Beyond the
Immaterial Labour Thesis

Ben Trott
Immaterial Labour and World Order: An Evaluation of a Thesis

Kathi Weeks
Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and
Post-Fordist Politics

Elizabeth Wissinger
Modelling a Way of Life: Immaterial and Affective Labour in the
Fashion Modelling Industry

Steve Wright
Back to the Future: Italian Workerists Reflect Upon The Operaista Project


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