[NetBehaviour] ephemera "Immaterial and affective labor: explored".

[marc]

ephemera "Immaterial and affective labor: explored".

The new issue (7.1) of ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 
entitled "immaterial and affective labor: explored," has just been 
published at http://www.ephemeraweb.org

This latest special issue offers a critical engagement with the 
conceptual and political territory animated by the deployment of such 
ideas in the work of Hardt, Negri, Lazzarato, Virno and others, and 
follows previous explorations of class composition and politics in 
ephemera (for instance in the issues on 'the theory of the multitude' 
and 'writing: labour'). That it refers to both a conceptual and a 
political territory means two things: on the one hand, that the critical 
engagements herein are not aimed at theoretical clarification alone, but 
seek to address directly the questions and practices of politics and 
organisation thrown up by debates on immaterial and affective labour; on 
the other, that the form of the engagement is not reduced to the field 
of (post-)Operaismo, but aims at bringing together empirical insights 
into the present forms of organisation of labour, and is open to 
inflections coming from other disciplines and areas, such as 
organisation studies and labour process theory.

As our guest editors suggest, the space in which these debates take 
place is defined by a 'double ambivalence' deriving from, on the one 
hand, the excess that labour always produces and that capital always 
necessarily needs to recuperate, and, on the other, the particular 
novelty of contemporary cycles of struggle, that is, their capacity to 
intercommunicate and the heightened attention to the composition of 
difference they require. It is this ambivalence that makes questions of 
flight and capture, 'victory' and 'defeat', impossible to pose and 
foreclose within a general theoretical framework. This is what 
necessitates an analysis of resistance and struggle, class composition 
as well as political organization, as an enquiry placed alongside the 
actual practices of those who work and struggle today: theory as an 
element in organisation, rather than as an end in itself.