Politics of Workers’ Inquiry Conference Call
May 2-3, 2013 @ University of Essex
http://ephemeraweb.org/conference/index.htm
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.
Mario Tronti argues that weapons for working class revolt have
always been taken from the bosses’ arsenal. But, has not it often
been suggested, to use Audre Lorde’s phrasing, 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.
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 of 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. 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 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.” 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. 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 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. Today workers’ inquiry remains, as
Raniero Panzieri argues, 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.
Keynotes from:
Anna Curcio, University of Messina
Matteo Mandarini, Queen Mary, University of London
Gigi Roggero, University of Bologna
Contributors
We invite presentations and interventions that update the practices
of workers’ inquiry for the present moment of class
de-/recomposition. Can we develop, taking up Matteo Pasquinelli’s
suggestion, 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.
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.
Please send proposals of no more then 500 words
[log in to unmask] by February 28th, 2013.
Attempts will be made to keep registration costs low, particularly
for those without funding, and will be run on a sliding scale basis.
The conference will be preceded by PhD workshop on workers’ inquiry
that will take place on May 1st (and will be free for PhD students
to attend). For more information on this e-mail [log in to unmask].
Sponsored by ephemera and the Essex Centre for Work, Organization,
and Society