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This chapter turns to an analysis of one of the most influential thinkers of reification critique, Georg Lukács who explored the crucial role that subjectivity played in the processes of the capitalist mode of production. This chapter argues that Lukács’s analysis of the subject’s reified stance in capitalism is crucial for reconnecting a critique of political economy with lived experiences and subjective perceptions of capitalist society.

This chapter opens with a discussion of Gilles Deleuze’s theorization of control societies and its relation to concepts of post-Fordism, neoclassical economics, immaterial labor, and attention economies. Following this, the chapter traces the historical relationship between the conceptual structure of control and the fundamental logic of the capitalist mode of production. This historical examination passes through three major stages: an analysis of Marx’s work on capital, labor, and abstraction; a discussion of Charles Babbage’s work on computing machines, political economy, factories, and theology; and a close reading of the automation of essentialism that undergirds Herman Hollerith’s late-nineteenth century work on machine tabulation.

The middle-aged male worker, bridling at the demands of the contemporary workplace has become a recurrent character type in recent French feature films and novels. Often, this male protagonist’s problems at work are mirrored by his difficulties at home retaining his authority as a paterfamilias. These films and novels hence offer a proliferation of narratives featuring middle-aged men struggling to modulate their professional identities and masculine roles in accordance with the demands of the contemporary workplace. As such, these narratives may also reflect the centrality of the male breadwinner and the patriarchal nuclear family to the French social model and hence may represent a series of conservative responses to perceived crises of masculinity and the nuclear family. The chapter shows that this kind of conservative response is epitomised by the novels of Houellebecq, in which laments at the loss of patriarchy are articulated to a critique of contemporary forms of immaterial labour in a particularly insistent fashion. The chapter then turns to a selection of films and novels that offer more nuanced representations of middle-aged male workers and their difficulties with work and family.

This chapter responds to arguments that Agamben’s work contributes little to the analysis of contemporary capitalism by reading his genealogy of government in the context of Guy Debord’s analysis of spectacular capitalism and the analysis of immaterial labour developed by post-operaismo thinkers. The chapter shows how Agamben’s analysis of glorification in The Kingdom and the Glory builds upon his earlier work on sacrifice to describe an estranged practice that masks the social foundations of governmental power. McLoughlin then argues that Agamben extends on this analysis in The Highest Poverty, which describes a monastic labour that that occupies the totality of life, and which simultaneously enacts and glorifies the divine order. This monastic paradigm can, the chapter claims, be usefully deployed in understanding contemporary capitalism, which has integrated language into both the process of exchange (the spectacle) and the process of production (Post-Fordism).

This chapter considers the surprising parallels between Richard Florida's arguments about the creative class and neo-Marxist theories of immaterial labor. It argues that they share a fundamentally ahistorical conception of creativity as the natural expression of an innate opposition to routine and to management. The chapter then suggests that historically grounded accounts of the history of cultural production, which attend to the position of the producer within the marketplace and within a broader field of social relations, provide an alternative. It outlines two particularly relevant tributaries within this history: the development via bohemian enclaves of the contradictory relationship between artists and the markets for their work; and the mainstreaming of the figure of the artist as valorized mental laborer.

This chapter examines the pre-history of what is now called “cloud computing”: the idea that computer power and software could be ‘piped’ into a user’s home, like electricity or other utilities. This vision came out of a 1960s technology called time-sharing, which allowed the million-dollar cost of a computer to be shared and the computer multi-tasked. Time-sharing not only invented the modern idea of a user as a personal subject, but also positioned that user within a political economy that makes a user synonymous with his or her usage. The freedom that results, however, is a deeply ambiguous one, for the virtualization technologies that allow files and user accounts to be made private in the cloud also represent a subtle form of control.

This chapter brings together the book’s argument about the category “women’s work” in the context of post-Fordism. The narrative basis for the chapter is offered by Ulrich Seidl’s Import/Export (2007), a film that documents the labor of a Ukrainian nurse in Austria, where she is employed as a cleaning lady in a middle class home and a geriatric ward. The chapter revisits the second-wave feminist debate on housework, especially the work of Silvia Federici, Pat Mainardi, and Ellen Malos, locating “women’s work” within Fordist economy. It juxtaposes to this history the analysis of contemporary work offered by Italian autonomist neo-Marxists, especially the work of Maurizio Lazzarato and Paolo Virno, who often take the figure of the housewife as exemplary of the post-Fordist worker. What happens, the chapter asks, if we consider the Ukrainian cleaning lady as a new housewife figure and consider her work to be exemplary of post-Fordist “immaterial labor”? The chapter ends by pointing to a European linguistic hierarchy, arguing that the calculated failure of translation is an important ingredient in the traffic in women.

This chapter examines contemporary art and the practice and anti-dialectical thought of a so-called anartist, suggesting that contemporary art can be considered as constituting a new expanded field which utilises and critiques the sensations produced by cognitive immaterial labour. It explains that, in this sense, contemporary art does not signify the disappearance of hand-work or physical labour, but the constitution of another assemblage in which manual labour and intellectual labour are caught up in a machinic process, which can be found not only in the actions of the broader public.

This chapter focuses on the relation between contemporary European dance and the new kinds of immaterial working practices of the postindustrial economy, drawing on critiques by post-Fordist theorists. In this new economy, artists are the model employees of the new work ethic due to their creativity, versatility, and skill at exploiting new opportunities. This raises questions about the extent to which dance artists’ virtuosity is being captured by the new economy or whether they have developed strategies for resisting it. The chapter therefore looks at examples where dance material has been circulating on the Internet, and in other forms of media, in the form of artists’ projects and as part of corporate advertising and promotion.

The tannery produces leather; the International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR) produces webpages, U.N. documents, and other representations of the Buraku situation. As much as these processes produce objects central to the contemporary Buraku situation, they also demand certain practices from the people who produce these objects. Following the jobs of Tanimoto-san in the tannery and Malaya-san at IMADR, this chapter provides an ethnographic description of the work, the people, and the institutions involved in the day-to-day operations of the current Buraku situation. It revisits linguistic anthropology’s contention that signification is an achievement, discussed in the introduction, to examine how people and objects, as much as words, are also achieved in concrete interaction. It explores the uneven dynamic between these two types of labor—the labor of representation and the labor represented. This chapter contends that the work entailed in this split between narrating and narrated creates not only commodities or information but also a relationship between kinds of subjects, who are recognizable as either political actors or as evidence of discrimination.

Chapter 4 (keyword: time-shifting) outlines industrial users’ contributions to the development of videocassettes before “the” format wars between VHS and Betamax. It argues that the key terms for cassettes were not simply “Whatever. Whenever,” but “Whenever. Whomever. Wherever.” Rather than promise freedom from the broadcast schedule, this triadic promise of flexibility responded to industrial concerns with employee management in an era when the temporal demands on worker time were becoming more complex (whenever), when workforces were becoming more diverse (whomever), and when companies were growing more expansive (wherever). Tracing the pursuit of whenever-whomever-wherever as a management strategy through a series of three case studies—8mm cartridge projectors (1961–1970s), CBS’s EVR (1960–1971), and Sony’s U-matic (1961–1980s)—this chapter also reveals how businesses drew on workers’ pleasurable associations with domestic television and transformed the home into an exhibition site for corporate communications—in both instances, intensifying claims to employees’ nonworking time.

This chapter continues a concern with the immaterial working practices of the postindustrial economy, and considers critiques of this by post-Fordist theorists. It presents extended readings of two works, BADco.’s dance performance 1 Poor and One 0 and Natalie Bookchin’s video installation Mass Ornament. It argues that both pieces trouble preconceptions about the meaning of leisure in post-Fordist times in a way that allows beholders to imagine possibilities for renewing the common space for social and political relations. Through their use of dance material, both works touch on the ways in which working conditions have changed since the early twentieth century, revealing how, in the twenty-first century, workers’ alienation and isolation are taking different, less easily recognisable forms.