Ned Rossiter on Fri, 30 Apr 2004 17:20:27 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Report on Creative Labour Workshop |
Report: What's to be Done? Activism Today workshop & screenings Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne, 10 December 2003 http://www.fibreculture.org/arte.html By Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter In Florian Schneider's documentary The Unorganisables (2002),[1] Raj Jayadev of the DE-BUG worker's collective in Silicon Valley (http://www.siliconvalleydebug.com/about.html) identifies the central problem of temporary labour as one of time. Jayadev recounts the story of "Edward", a staff-writer for the Debug magazine: 'My Mondays roll into my Tuesdays, my Tuesdays roll into my Wednesdays without me knowing it. And I lose track of time and I lose hope with what tomorrow's going to be'. What concerns temp workers the most is not so much a $2 an hour pay raise or safer working conditions. Rather, they want the ability to create, to look forward to something new, and to reclaim the time of life. How does this desire to create intersect with the experiences of other workers who engage in precarious forms of labour? With the emergence of new forms of labour made possible by contemporary information technologies, there has arisen a proliferation of terms to describe the commonly experienced yet largely undocumented transformations within work practices. Creative labour, network labour, cognitive labour, service labour, affective labour, linguistic labour, immaterial labour; these categories often substitute for each other, but in their very multiplication they point to diverse qualities of experience that are not simply reducible to each other. On the one hand these kinds of labour practices are the oppressive face of post-Fordist capitalism, yet they also contain potentialities that spring from workers' demands for flexibility. Demands that in many ways precipitate capital's own accession to interminable restructuring and rescaling, and in so doing condition capital's own techniques and regimes of control. The complexity of these inter-relationships has amounted to a crisis within modes of organisation based around the paranoid triad: union, state, firm. Time and again, across the 1990s, we heard proclamations of the end of the state, its loss of control or subordination to new more globally extensive forms of sovereignty. Equally, we are by now overfamiliar with claims for the decline of trade unions; their weakening before transnational flows of capital, the erosion of salaried labour, or the media spin of neoliberal politicians. More recently, the firm itself is not looking so good, riddled with internal instability and corruption for which the names Enron, Worldcom, and Parmalat provide only the barest index. But it is not these tendencies themselves as much as their mutual implications that have led to the radical recasting of labour organisation and its concomitant processes of bargaining and arbitration. The ::fibreculture:: workshop held on 10 December 2003 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, sought to ask whether organising the unorganisables was the right or only strategy to address capital's insatiable hunger for values appropriated from the labours of care, connection and creativity. Academics, students, and political activists met to discuss the themes of autonomists, multitudes, youth labour, the new media industries, the role of unions, and local possibilities of political organisation in relation to the Net. Panel speakers included Alex Kelly, Angela Mitropoulos, Brett Neilson, Steve Wright, Petra Andits, Camille Barbagallo, and Ned Rossiter. Following brief introductions of the 25 or so participants, Schneider's A World to Invent (2002) was screened. This documentary interlaces politico-philosophical meditations by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Saskia Sassen and Franco "Bifo" Berardi on the Leninist problematic "What is to be done?" with snapshots of activists doing what they do. The documentary sets up a dialectical tension between these thinkers conceptualising the multitudes, networks of multiple connections between organisations and places, the invention of unforseen possibilities within auto-organisation, and the creation of relations of friendship with the pragmatic undertakings by activists in their local communities. We see the inspiring work of educators at the Saria media lab in Delhi, the community and business development projects in Macolvio Rojas (a land squat of 10,000 people on the outskirts of Tijuana), and activists in New York and Seattle offering free health tests and mobile education to non-unionised migrant day labourers. In Negri's terms, the capacity to create is interior to the multitudes, 'a quality of individuals that become common'. The common is a singularity with the potential for transformation. As Hardt notes, its political logic is not one of coalition or solidarity but rather one of networks that allow for the transformation of groups working in common. In this light, the provocation "what is to be done" raises the question of how to make the common emerge - a problematic that demands both an interrogation of potentiality (as intrinsically linked to action - the Aristotelian problematic on which Giorgio Agamben and Paolo Virno have eloquently written [2]) and corporeality (understood as the very capacity to speak, communicate, or labour). As Bifo explains in Schneider's film, the work of creation (or the unforeseen capacity to invent) remains outside of the capitalist disaster and its incessant demand for innovation (really just a code word for more of the same). This is to say that capital feeds upon the common capacity to invent but cannot control or contain it, neither in the practical nor the ontological sense. For Sassen, this is evident in the dependence of global capital upon specific geographical places and the dense patterns of human cooperation that cluster around them. She suggests that a new political architecture will emerge from the production of narratives and images that make legible this dependence of capital on place and connect in networks the diverse struggles that unfold in place. Common to these positions is a backing away from modes of labour organisation built upon relations of hierarchy and delegation (the shadow of top-down corporate management) and an emphasis on principles of networking, autonomy, and self-organisation that make real the common capacity for creation. This involves a movement between potential and act that in no way replicates calendar time (or the tired plod of innovation) but itself founds the temporal order-the reclamation of the time of life through the express desire of the multitudes. Thus Hardt provides a provocative response to the "what is to be done" question: 'Do what you want! Follow your desire!' The panel discussion that followed the screening comprised responses from Steve Wright, Angela Mitropoulos, and Brett Neilson. Through a careful mapping of the history of Italian operaismo, Wright situated Schneider's talking heads within a larger political-intellectual formation. [3] Stressing issues of class composition, he asked whether the emphasis on the creative, cognitive, or semiotic dimension of contemporary labour truly delineates a space of the common or merely highlights a privileged stratum of labour (what might be called the cognitariat). Wright's response was marked by a distinct preference for the maverick theorisations of Bifo and others (such as Ferrucio Gambino) over the more globally enthused interventions of Hardt and Negri. Above all, he suggested that attention to other forms of labour (such as the "unemployed" sellers of the Australian street newspaper The Big Issue) might interrupt the seamless talk of auto-opposition through networked cognition. Mitropoulos stressed the link between the growing precariousness of labour and the global mobility of labour power in the form of undocumented migration (a theme she has explored extensively on the x-border site: http://antimedia.net/xborder). Her comments joined the issue of freedom of mobility (or what Italian theorist Sandro Mezzadra has called il diritto di fuga, the right to escape [4]) to the creative capacities of the common. In this sense, Mitropoulos's emphasis on labour power (as a form of potential) articulated strongly to a discussion of contemporary forms of border control - the efforts of states (and supra-states) to contain mobile subjectivities within the cages of identity and locality. This lead to an analysis of Australia's migration detention and excision policies (the exclusion of island territories to the north from the national migration zone) in terms of the state of exception and the changing forms of state sovereignty in an era of permanent global war. Neilson extended on these themes, emphasising first that all forms of labour (even the most menial forms of physical exertion) involve cognition. This means that semiotic-linguistic-communicational dimensions of the new forms of networked or cognitive labour can by no means be opposed to manual work by virtue of some mind/body dualism. At stake in the informatisation of labour is not a qualitative difference in the act of labour as such (the ascendance of symbolic analysis or the "creative class") but a different set of social-political technologies for actualising the potential of labour power (whether this involves bodily exertion or linguistic mediation). In other words, what has changed about labour in the information age is not merely the kind of tasks that workers are asked to perform (marked most dramatically by the expansion of the service sector) but the general shift from salaried to precarious forms of employment, including the new forms of indenture imposed upon undocumented migrants. This poses challenges for labour organisation, not least because the demand for the restitution of salaried security can brush against workers' own demands for flexibility and mobility. Indeed, the unprecedented mobility of precarious labour in the era of globalisation points to difficulties with place-based notions of resistance or interruption. The subjective urge to get out-of-place (which cannot be reduced to economic push-pull factors) relates intimately to the struggle to reclaim the time of life. And, for this reason, the notion of the common must be dissociated from any retreat to local municipality, as sometimes implied by the Italian word comune. Petra Andits' documentary, Globalize it!, was then screened. Globalize it! sets out to document the heterogeneity of people and their opinions at the European Social Forum held in Firenze, 2002. With the camera meandering through the crowds, the video adopts a vox-pop style, allowing the protestors to speak relatively unhinged from the interests of Andits, who holds a kind of naïve faith in the genre's capacity for objectivity. This was picked up in question time, with various participants objecting to the way Andits sets up the participants as a horde of freaks and whackos. As unfashionable as it's become, disputes of this sort are about the problem and challenge of representation, or what Alex Kelly referred to as strategies of articulation - which involve both modes of expression and fields of association. Drawing on the legacy and conventions of mainstream journalism, Globalize it! shows what has for a long time been the lite establishment view of protestors-colourful, marginal, faintly exotic, vague enough to be harmless, and in need of spokespeople if their message is to have any purchase as a sound byte. But, in so doing, it also picks up on a much-commented point about the contemporary global movement-that is, the way it rests upon a contamination of biology, lifestyle, language, and action. While this interpenetration can be toyed with to reduce political activity (whether conceived as exodus or voice) to just another consumer choice, it is also the source of the movement's strength-the precondition of action that avoids the depoliticising split between violence and non-violence, a flexible means of struggle (commonality without unity) that moves beyond the models of the party, the faction, or the vanguard. Schneider's The Unorganizeables (2002) nicely complements the intellectual-as-spokeperson, as seen in A World to Invent. Charting the strategies of organisation undertaken by migrant garment workers in California, the Justice for Janitors movement and temporary labourers in Silicon Valley, The Unorganizeables is a tribute to precarious, non-unionised forms of labour and their creative capacity to address their political situation-one that holds little interest for established labour unions. Education and training, collaborative publishing, mobile workshops on political campaigning, business development, and health services were some of the key initiatives undertaken by these movements. These are all fairly unremarkable activities, but they point to the importance of basic infrastructures for the development of social life. As the impressive Raj Jayadev puts it, the concern here is not so much with political ideology but rather 'a faith in a capacity' and the 'ability to create, to look forward to something new'. Kelly continued this theme on life in her presentation, noting the enabling force that friendship plays amongst activists. Media and cultural theory has still not really grasped the force of affective communication in shaping socio-political relations and cultural practices. Kelly also stressed the need to develop new ways of communicating beyond the frequently self-valorising ghetto of activism. This, of course, is not exclusively a problem for activists. But given their default location on the margins, it is one that campaigners for political justice have to address if their message is to have purchase on the mainstream. Focussing on the common experiences of precarious labour is one obvious starting point. Rossiter spoke about a recently completed study of the role that IP plays in organising creative labour. [5] One thing that was clear from that study is that unions hold little appeal for young people (around 20-35) whose use of new communications media is integral to their work (understood as a creative activity that may or may not attract a wage). Intellectual property, for the most part, was accepted as something one signs away or manages in a precarious manner. While IP was generally opposed, outright militancy against IP - particularly copyright law - was the exception rather than the norm. Payment for work frequently occurred as a one-off commission, resulting in the alienation of labour from its creative capacities. It would seem that such a common experience of IP as a restrictive architecture could become a basis from which to organise new political forms within the creative and new media industries. Yet various obstacles undermine the possibility of organised networks amongst creative workers. The abstraction of IP from labour and the accompanying legalistic discourse diminishes the sense of engagement many workers have with a system that shapes the economic value of their labour. Then there are all sorts of internal divisions within the new media industries that make the formation of a common experience a difficult one. Rossiter referred to the comparative research in Europe by Rosalind Gill, [6] noting how the politics of gender has reproduced inequality within the new media industries. Class, ethnicity, age and geography are also going to be key factors of incommunicability amongst creative workers. These are all issues of scale that result in workers becoming situated in vastly different ways within the economies of creativity. How, then, might these sort of factors be overcome if labour is to become organised in meaningful ways? And how might self-organisation through the use of ICTs and affective networks traverse the diversity of creative labour in such a way that exclusion and emphemerality are minimised? Barbagallo completed the presentations with a discussion of her work as "youth" network co-ordinator at the Victorian Trades Hall Council. She emphasised the need to interrogate the category of youth - typically "youth" consists of an age bracket (e.g. 15-25) conditioned by industrial interests associated with wage rates and conditions. Unions frequently adopt a reactive position once these stakes have been established and differences of class, age, ethnicity and gender are extricated from what is assumed to be a common situation. For many young people in the hospitality and service industries the question of the role of unions is premature and more often undesired. Barbagallo expressed scepticism toward translating the "organisation model" of labour action promoted in The Unorganizables into the Australian context. As an example she explored the recent UNITE campaign on Brunswick St. (one of Melbourne's principal service industry arteries, located in inner-city Fitzroy and a magnet for precarious youth labour). The UNITE campaign invited Brunswick St. business owners to sign a pledge agreeing to comply with workplace laws (guaranteeing payment of award wages, maintenance of health and safety standards, etc.) in return for the issue of a window sticker identifying them as a "good employer". At the same time, interviews with precarious service workers would reveal employers who did not abide workplace laws and these would be issued with yellow (questionable) and red (grub list) cards, before being "outed" in parade up Brunswick St. itself. As a result of this exercise, a variety of "illegal" employment practices were (unsurprisingly) discovered: unpaid employment trials, payment in cash (to avoid tax), payment in drugs, unsafe conditions, and the employment of undocumented migrants. The problem with these tactics, which sought to bring employment practices under the surveillance of the law, was that they ignored what might be called a "demand for flexibility" from the workers themselves. Many of the service workers on Brunswick St., for example, are also students and thus under-the-table payments allow them to earn without endangering payments they may receive from the government. Similarly, the "outing" of undocumented workers could make Brunswick St. a target for DIMIA (the federal Department of Immigration, Multicultural, and Indigenous Affairs), resulting in the imprisonment of these people in detention centres. As an alternative, Barbagallo suggested strategies that would create a site on Brunswick St. for workers to interact before and after work, exchanging knowledge and tactics, and organising autonomously to act in their common interests, which are not necessary congruent to work practices sanctioned by the law (and upheld by unions and the state alike). Overall, the workshop affirmed the possibility of a relationship between people with considerably different backgrounds. Yet the temporality of the occasion also signalled the fleeting tendency of some coalitions. Ongoing exchange is most likely to occur through common projects and debates. The relationship between politics and communications media such as the Internet is one that is perhaps best realised around particular events and issues - the no-border campaigns of activists and the anti-corporatism rallies assembled in various global cities are testament to that. The documentaries by Schneider and others demonstrate that sustained organisation requires quite a different approach. Certainly communications media play an important role in facilitating organisation, but it would be a mistake to focus exclusively on the technological form itself. More vital are the sort of questions, interests and desires that are expressed as constituent power and which have the capacity to organise socio-political relations in a sustained manner. As Hardt and Negri have noted, the activity of labour is a cooperative one that is underpinned not by the force of capital - at least not in any exclusive sense - but rather by 'linguistic, communicational and affective networks'. [7] Thus the potential for organisation is common to the instantiation of cooperation. The extent to which labour is able to express itself as a creative force will invariably determine the strength of cooperative relations. In order for creativity to be unleashed, resources are required and part of this involves the invention of new institutional forms. But this is not a project that should be taken as an end in itself. Rather it is a fluid process of repositioning, a point of departure and relation that must resist the iron-cage logic of institutionalisation (and the attendant modern fetish of political representation). In as much as the multitudes are an emergent, mutable socio-technical expression of life, such a renegotiation of the relations between the social and the political must be central to the ongoing potential and manifestation of life as a creative force. Notes [1] For more information on the What is to be Done? series and related media projects, see http://www.wastun.org [2] Giorgio Agamben, 'On Potentiality', in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999; Paolo Virno, Il ricordo del presente: Saggio sul tempo strorico, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999. [3] For a more extended version of this history see Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomous Marxism, London: Pluto, 2002. [4] Sandro Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga: Migrazione, cittadinanza, globalizzazione, Verona: Ombre Corte, 2001. See also Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, 'Né qui, né altrove - Migration, Detention, Desertion: A Dialogue', Borderlands Journal 2.1 (2003), http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol2no1_2003/mezzadra_neilson.html [5] Ned Rossiter, 'Report: Creative Labour and the role of Intellectual Property', Fibreculture Journal 1 (2003), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue1/issue1_rossiter.html [6] See Rosalind Gill, 'Cool, Creative and Egalitarian? Exploring Gender in Project-based New Media Work in Europe', Information, Communication & Society 5.1 (2002): 70-89. [7] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 294. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net