Call for papers for an ephemera issue on:
Workers, Despite Themselves
Issue Editors: Stevphen Shukaitis and Abe Walker
Deadline for submissions: November 30th, 2012.
Workers’ inquiry is an approach to and practice of knowledge production
that seeks to understand the changing composition of labor and its
potential for revolutionary social transformation. It is the practice of
turning the tools of the social sciences into weapons of class struggle.
Workers’ inquiry seeks to map the continuing imposition of the class
relation, not as a disinterested investigation, but rather to deepen and
intensify social and political antagonisms.
The autonomist political theorist Mario Tronti argues that weapons for
working class revolt have always been taken from the bosses’ arsenal
(1966: 18). But, has not it often been suggested, to use feminist writer
Audre Lorde’s phrasing (1984), that it is not possible to take apart the
master’s house with the master’s tools? While not forgetting Lorde’s
question, it is clear that Tronti said this with good reason, for he was
writing from a context where this is precisely what was taking place.
Italian autonomous politics greatly benefited from borrowing from
sociology and industrial relations – and by using these tools proceeded
to build massive cycles of struggle transforming the grounds of politics
(Wright, 2003; Berardi, 2009).
Of these adaptations the most important for autonomist politics and
class composition analysis is workers’ inquiry. Workers’ inquiry
developed in a context marked by rapid industrialization, mass
migration, and the use industrial sociology to discipline the working
class. Workers’ inquiry was formulated within autonomist movements as a
sort of parallel sociology, one based on a radical re-reading of Marx
(and Weber) against the politics of the communist party and the unions
(Farris, 2011). While the practitioners of workers’ inquiry were often
professionally-trained academics – especially sociologists – its
proponents argued their research differs in important ways from
‘engaged’ social science, and all varieties of industrial sociology,
even if it there are similarities. If bourgeois sociology sought to
smooth over conflicts, and ‘critical’ sociology to expose these same
conflicts, workers’ inquiry takes the contradictions of the labor
process as a starting point and seeks to draw out these antagonisms into
the formation of new radical subjectivities.
This is not to say that workers’ inquiry is an unproblematic endeavor.
We remain skeptical that the weapons of managerial control can be
cleanly re-appropriated without reproducing the very social world they
were designed to take apart. For as Steve Wright argues, “the uncritical
use of such tools has frequently produced a register of subjective
perceptions which do no more than mirror the surface of capitalist
social relations” (2003: 24). As the legacy of analytical Marxism
reveals, imitation is never far removed from flattery, and at its worst
moments, workers’ inquiry risks becoming its object of critique. To be
fair there are disagreements among the proponents of workers’ inquiry
over the limitations of drawing from the social sciences. But to
continue the metaphor, like any potentially dangerous ‘weapon’,
sociological techniques must be carefully examined, and when necessary,
disabled.
Today we find ourselves at a moment when co-research, participatory
action research, and other heterodox methods have been adopted by the
academic mainstream, while managerial styles like TQM carry a faint echo
of workers’ inquiry. In the contemporary firm workers are already
engaged in self-monitoring, peer interviews, and the creation of
quasi-autonomous ‘research’ units, all sanctioned by management
(Boltankski and Chiapello, 2005). Workers’ inquiry is now part of the
accepted social science repertoire: its techniques no longer seem
dangerous, but familiar, at least at the methodological level. The
bosses’ arsenal now includes weapons mimicking the style, if not the
substance, of workers’ inquiry. And as George Steinmetz (2005) has
suggested, while blatantly positivistic research styles have fallen out
of favor, this obscures the ‘positivist unconscious’ that continues to
interpellate even apparently anti-positivist methodologies.
The pioneers of workers’ inquiry argued researchers must work
through/against the ambivalent relations of (social) science; now, there
may be no other option. Wherever there are movements organizing and
addressing the horrors of capitalist exploitation and oppression, the
specter of recuperation is never far behind. The point is not to deny
these risks, but to the degree such dynamics confront all social
movements achieving any measure of success. It is by working against and
through them that recomposing radical politics becomes possible
(Shukaitis, 2009). Today workers’ inquiry remains, as Raniero Panzieri
claimed (2006 [1959]), a permanent reference point for autonomist
politics, one that informs continuing inquiries into class composition.
With this issue we seek to rethink workers’ inquiry as a practice and
perspective, and through that to understand and catalyze emergent
moments of political composition.
Contributors
We invite papers that update the practices of workers’ inquiry for the
present moment of class de-/recomposition. Can we develop, taking up
Matteo Pasquinelli’s suggestion (2008: 138), a form of workers’ inquiry
applied to cognitive and biopolitical production? The very possibility
of a *workers* inquiry begs reconsideration when official unemployment
figures drift toward 50% among sectors of the industrial working class.
This issue picks up themes that developed in previous issues of ephemera
inquiring into affective and immaterial labor (2007), digital labor
(2010), militant research (2005), and the politics of the multitude
(2004). We encourage submissions that draw upon this previous work,
particularly on the politics of social reproduction.
Recently, workers’ inquiry has proven its versatility through new
applications and reconfigurations. Groups like Colectivo Situaciones
(2011) and have used the practice of workers’ inquiry to analyze popular
uprisings. Scholars have drawn from class composition analysis to
explore areas such as cognitive labor (Brophy, 2011; Peters & Bulut,
2011), citizenship and migration (Papadopoulos et al, 2008; Barchiesi,
2011), and finance (Marazzi, 2008; Mezzadra and Fumagalli, 2010).
Militant research collectives such as Kolinko (2002), Team Colors
(2010), and the Precarious Workers Brigade (2011) have employed workers’
inquiry to intervene composition of social movements and labor politics.
We are particularly interested in research that expands and/or
deconstructs the project of workers’ inquiry, or that transposes
workers’ inquiry onto unconventional terrain such as archival research
and cultural studies. Additionally, we encourage contributors to include
a substantial reflection on method, possibly addressing some of the
tensions outlined above and engaging with recent debates about method
and measure.
Deadline for submissions: November 30th, 2012.
Please send your submissions to the editors. All contributions should
follow ephemera guidelines – see
http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/submit.htm. In addition to full
papers, we also invite notes, reviews, and other kinds and media forms
of contributions – please get in touch to discuss how you would like to
contribute. We highly encourage authors to send us abstracts (of 500
words) outlining their plans. The ephemera conference in May 2013 will
focus on a related theme, with contributors for this issue invited to
present their work.
Contacts:
Stevphen Shukaitis: [log in to unmask]
Abe Walker: [log in to unmask]
http://www.ephemeraweb.org/
We're also interested in putting together a panel on this theme for the
Historical Materialism conference in London in November (information
here:
http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/annual9/call-for-papers),
particularly with people who plan to submit a piece for this issue. If
you are interested in this please contact Stevphen by April 20th.
References
Barchiesi, F. (2011) Precarious liberation: workers, the state, and
contested social citizenship in postapartheid South Africa. Albany: SUNY
Press.
Berardi, F. (2009) Precarious rhapsody: semiocapitalism and the
pathologies of the post-alpha generation. London: Minor Compositions.
Boltanski, L. and E. Chiapello (2005) The new spirit of capitalism.
London: Verso.
Brophy, E. (2011) “Language put to work: cognitive capitalism, call
center labor, and workers inquiry,” Journal of Communication Inquiry.
Volume 35 Number 4: 410-416.
Colectivo Situaciones (2011) 19&20: notes on a new social protagonism.
Brooklyn / Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.
Farris, S. (2011) “Workerism’s inimical incursions: on Mario Tronti’s
Weberianism,” Historical Materialism Volume 19 Number 3: 29-62.
Kolinko (2002) Hotlines. Berlin: Kolinko. Available at
www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/lebuk/e_lebuk.htm
Lorde, A. (1984) “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s
house,” Sister outsider: essays and speeches. Berkeley: The Crossing
Press: 110-114.
Marazzi, C. (2008) Capital & language: from new economy to war economy.
New York: Semiotexte.
Mezzadra, S. and A. Fumagalli (Eds.) (2010) Crisis in the global
economy: financial markets, social struggles, and new political
scenarios. Los Angeles: Semiotexte.
Panzieri, R. (2006 [1959]) “Socialist uses of workers’ inquiry.”
Available at http://www.generation-online.org/t/tpanzieri.htm.
Papadopoulos, D., N. Stephenson, and V. Tsianos (2008) Escape routes:
control and subversion in the 21st century. London: Pluto Press.
Pasquinelli, M. (2008) Animal spirits: a bestiary of the commons.
Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.
Peters, M. & E. Bulut, Eds. (2011) Cognitive capitalism, education and
digital labor. New York: Peter Lang.
Precarious Workers Brigade (2011) Surviving internships: a counter guide
to free labor in the arts. London: Hato Press.
Shukaitis, S. (2009) Imaginal machines: autonomy & self-organization in
the revolutions of everyday life. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
Steinmetz, G. (2005) “The genealogy of a positivist haunting: comparing
pre-war and post-war U.S. sociology” boundary 2 Volume 32 Number 2: 109-135
Team Colors (Eds.) (2010) Uses of a whirlwind: movement, movements, and
contemporary radical currents in the United States. Oakland: AK Press.
Tronti, M. (1966) Operai e capitale. Torino: Einaud.
Wright, S. (2003) Storming heaven: class composition and struggle in
Italian autonomist marxism. London: Pluto Press.
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