Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor”

Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor” boundary 2 26.2. (1999).

“The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the process of capitalist valorization” (89).

“Affective labor is one face of what I will call ‘immaterial labor,’ which has assumed a dominant position with respect to the other forms of labor in the global capitalist economy” (90).

“We might call the passage from the second paradigm to the third, from the domination of industry to that of services and information, a process of economic postmodernization, or rather informatization” (90).

“The processes of modernization and industrialization transformed and redefined all elements of the social plane” (90).

“Humanity and its soul are produced in the very processes of economic production. The processes of becoming human and the nature of the human itself were fundamentality transformed in the qualitative shift of modernization” (91).

“The jobs, for the most part, are highly mobile and involve flexible skills. More importantly, they are characterized in general by the central role played by knowledge, information communication, and affect” (91).

“Most services ineed are based on the continual exchange of information and knowledge” (94).

“Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves” (95).

“The other face of immaterial labor is the affective labor of human contact and interaction (95).

“To one degree or another, this affective labor plays a certain role throughout the service industries, from fast-food servers to providers of financial services, embedded in the moments of human interaction and communication” (96).

“Categories such as ‘in-person’ services or services of proximity are often used to identify this kind of labor, but what is essential to it, its in-person aspect, is really the creation and manipulation of affects” (96).

“What affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower” (96).

“Whereas in a first moment, in the comperterization of industry, for example, one might say that communicative action, human relations, and culture have been instrumentalized, reified, and ‘degraded’ to the level of economic interactions, one should add quickly that through a reciprocal process in this second moment, production has become communicative, affective, de-instrmentalized, and ‘elevated’ to the level of human relations—but of course, a level of human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital” (96).

“Where the production of soul is concerned, as Musil might say, we should no longer look to the soil and organic development, nor to the factory and mechanical development, but rather to today’s dominant economic forms, that is, to the production defined by a combination of cybernetics and affect” (97).

“Biopower is the power of the creation of life; it is the production of collective subjectivities, sociality, and society itself” (98).

“What is created in the networks of affective labor is a form-of-life” (98).

“More important, biopower is the power of the emerging forces of governmentality to create, manage, and control populations—the power to manage life” (98).