Work, Bodies, and the Emerging Politics of Alienation - PhD thesis

Paul McFadden

252 Pages              https://tinyurl.com/y794vwxj

Labour in the “post-industrial” society alienates bodies’ political capacities; the embodied character of alienation renders the labour process and the sphere of reproduction as critical spaces for anticapitalist politics. The labour process of these emergent forms of labour is a political space in which bodies’ potential for praxis directly collides with the domination of value. The capacities and potentialities of bodies to engage in praxis – the properties of bodies with which humans express their Being as political Being – has become the social form of the domination of labour by capital. The social-fixing of indeterminate labour-power links and decouples the inner relations between power, consumption, reproduction, value, and subjectivity that constitute the emerging politics of alienation. My jumping-off points to these relations are concepts that purportedly describe “new” and “hegemonic” forms of labour in the post-industrial economy: ‘aesthetic labour’, ‘emotional labour’ and the triadic conception of ‘affective/immaterial/biopolitical labour’. I resolve the one-sidedness of these abstractions – their contending characterisations of the labour process, its relations, and their representations of the politics of emergent forms of labour – with an empirically-informed dialectical reconfiguration of the concept of body work. The factors of alienated body work are reciprocally related across productive and reproductive spheres and therein they bind articulations of capitalist politics together with the production of political subjectivities. This form of the organisation of labour creates a contradictory inner connection between the politics of production and modes of reproduction. This deepening connection between spheres of production and reproduction results in the potential for a capitalistic transformation of the body, foreclosing on the subversive potential of indeterminate labour-power, and simultaneously brings embodied political capacities into direct confrontation with the logic of value at the very centre of production.