Abstract
Work’s Intimacy and Capital and Affects explore the effects of new technologies and more generally ‘communicative capitalism’ (Dean, 2009) on work, domestic life and politics.
Work’s Intimacy makes for uncomfortable reading, as I felt my life was being described; I frequently work from home, work evenings and weekends, using my laptop in bed (like the cover photograph). The book’s significance lies in how it calls on us to implicate ourselves, and in its rich empirical detail.
Countering hype about the advantages of remote working and the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in boosting productivity, Work’s Intimacy explores the consequences of home working via ICTs for lives and relationships. The focus is on white collar professionals: IT workers and arts freelancers, but also public sector employees including academics and a librarian (highlighting the extension of working practices associated with freelancing into more conventional jobs). Gregg draws on classic studies of white collar work such as William F Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), particularly of descriptions of executives who work 50–60 hour weeks, making use of communications technologies to enable evening and weekend working:
In one company, the top executives have set up a pool of Dictaphones to service executives who want to take them home, the better to do more night and weekend work. In almost all companies the five-day week is pure fiction. (Whyte, cited in Gregg, pp. 8-9)
For Whyte, the executive was a driven individual, working not as a service to the company but ‘because his ego demands it’ (Whyte, cited in Gregg, p. 9). According to Gregg, the working habits and dispositions of executives have now been adopted by ordinary workers – but without the pay, status or job security.
Some of Gregg’s interviewees worked from home because demands for productivity exceeded the nine-to-five workday. They felt they could be more productive at home than at the office (which was too distracting), and ‘caught up’ on unanswered emails or other duties they could not complete at work (p. 49). This had particular consequences for domestic life, as couples and families negotiated working and living space (as work becomes intimate, other intimacies suffer). Home working was the most awkward for the low paid and precarious (p. 44), who, lacking the dedicated office space of the better-off, contended with cramped living spaces, relationship tensions and anxieties over childcare (pp. 120–30). This was illustrated through photographs of home offices, in which office furniture and equipment mingled with domestic objects. Despite these difficulties, Gregg’s interviewees, particularly those with small children, felt privileged to work from home (p. 51).
Gregg’s interviewees were faced with an uncertain climate of continually chasing contracts, and where career progression was no longer guaranteed. Citing Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool (2004), Gregg sees the experience of her interviewees as constituting the ‘foundationless suspense, the perpetual anxiety of knowledge work which involves a combination of self-auditing, lifelong learning and the successful performance of corporate “cool”’ (p. 10).
In response to the isolation of home working and the pressures of job insecurity, social media provide much needed continuity and interpersonal contact; Gregg also points out that despite its association with youth, Facebook has been popular with white collar professionals (p. 88). It is also a space where people negotiate ‘presence bleed’, in which the boundaries between professional and personal identities have blurred (p. 96). Class anxieties are played out, as in a Facebook application called ‘bogan gifts’ (‘bogan’ being Australian slang for white, working-class suburbanites) in which players exchange presents which are both stereotypical icons but also familiar objects from childhood (p. 92). The game, with its ironic recuperation of objects of bad taste, possibly reassures its participants that they are now middle class, in ways that their jobs cannot (p. 93).
There were few signs of resistance to exploitation amongst Gregg’s interviewees, because they ‘love what they do’, investing their work with ambition, passion, and self-exploitation, intensified by their use of ICTs. Gregg ends by calling for a ‘labour politics of love to fight this corporatization of intimacy’ (p. 172), but does not elaborate on what this might mean, although she suggests that ICTs may play a role. Unions are barely discussed, other than in a passing reference to their decline. Is this because unions have very little presence in the freelance world (although, as mentioned, not all her interviewees are freelancers) or because unions are seen as so irrelevant as not to be worth mentioning? This raises methodological questions: does one reflect the views of interviewees (for whom resistance is inconceivable) or should one actively seek out resistance?
Christian Marazzi’s Capital and Affects (here translated by Giuseppina Mecchia) was originally published in Italian in 1994, as Il posto dei calzini, or ‘the place for the socks’ (the original title will be discussed later). It was written in the context of the early internet, and the election of Clinton and Berlusconi. Writing in the Italian post-autonomist tradition, Marazzi also critiques liberal democracy from a post-structuralist perspective. The significance of the book is its exploration of the effects of post-Fordist production on social relations and politics.
The first section outlines the development of post-Fordism, through its beginnings in the Toyota factories, to the use of just-in-time production, to adoption of techniques and models of ‘total quality management’. It is a history with which the readers of Work, Employment and Society will be familiar, and does not require repeating. Marazzi argues that, within post-Fordist capitalism, language has become a productive force, causing a crisis for both communication and also governance, as there is no longer any objective space for consolidating lasting compromises and agreements (p. 42). This makes it difficult to negotiate workplace protections and rights, including collective bargaining (p. 45).
In the second section, entitled ‘Rules for the incommensurable’, Marazzi explores the disjunction between language and lived experience in the context of interpersonal relationships, particularly heterosexual couples. ‘The place for the socks’ refers to the idea that women know the proper place to put the socks, which men will never know; Marazzi also mentions a study showing that women are more likely than men to do the laundry when their partners are away (p. 76). This highlights the persistence of traditional gender roles through cultural habits, and tacit knowledge and behavioural codes, which will always pose a challenge to campaigns for gender equality (p. 77).
This essentialist, fatalist conception of gender is the most problematic aspect of the book. These ingrained cultural habits have long been sites for feminist struggle; the famous slogan of ‘the personal is political’ and activities such as consciousness-raising challenged the divisions between public and private, exposing inequalities in domestic life. However, from Marazzi’s perspective, these cultural habits are unchangeable and an equal division of domestic labour is inconceivable as a norm. Where this argument might be justified would be in drawing attention to neoliberalism’s entrenching of pre-existing social hierarchies, similar to what Lisa Adkins has termed the ‘retraditionalization of gender’ (2002), as well as the informalization of the economy under neoliberalism, but Marazzi does not explore these issues.
The final section focuses on politics, particularly the election of the Clinton and Berlusconi administrations. Marazzi discusses Clinton’s political and industrial strategy in relation to Robert Reich’s theories on the knowledge economy, in which ‘it is the fruits of intellectual labour that are truly important for a nation’ (p. 109). The task is thus to secure comparative advantage for the USA (p. 110) and also to protect the interests of the intellectual/professional elites, who are increasingly segregated from the poor. Marazzi explains Clinton’s punitive welfare reforms and law-and-order rhetoric as both defending the interests of elite knowledge workers and speaking to their anxieties (p. 114).
Knowledge workers are not synonymous with the Fordist middle class, as their income and social status are unstable; processes of neoliberal individualization and privatization have also led them to share little common ground (especially political party identification). However, the desire for belonging still persists, producing right populist politics (p. 122). In Italy, this has led to the election of Berlusconi (p. 136). Other symptoms include localist NIMBYism and ‘racist hatred for any marginal existence hindering the administrative just-in-time’ (p. 141).
Marazzi concludes by calling for spaces where conflicts and a plurality of perspectives can be negotiated in ways that will ‘ultimately lead us towards more equitable ways of living together’. This resembles Habermas’s public sphere, but involves a broader definition of communication beyond the rational/linguistic – and sees ICTs as enabling freer forms of communication (p. 147).
For Gregg, ICTs have produced work intensification, insecurity and isolation; for Marazzi, post-Fordism has produced a communications crisis which has legitimated inequality and right populist politics. For both authors, ICTs also potentially play a role in resistance. I am left wondering whether technological development is seen as an inevitable historical process, and if technology is seen to drive social change. Despite this, both books offer thoughtful and original reflections on work, everyday life and politics under communicative capitalism (Dean, 2009).