Affective Economies

On July 13, 2011 the Canadian magazine AdBusters launched a blog post that inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement. Below is an excerpt from the original post.

Alright you 90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals out there,

A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future. The spirit of this fresh tactic, a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain, is captured in this quote:

"The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people." — Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona, Spain

The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.

The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.

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AdBusters, the Canadian anti-consumerist magazine urged U.S. Americans to follow in the steps of their oppressed brethren in Egypt and Spain and demand that their government, our government, recognize the rights of its people.  Certainly, the “problems” in the United States were not the same as the “problems” in Egypt or Spain, but according to AdBusters the root causes of them were the same—flawed government practices that allowed the rich to get richer on the backs of the working class; that is, on the backs of the working class people who actually had jobs. Occupied protestors across the world united under the umbrella of economic oppression. Never before had such large numbers of citizens identified themselves as members of the same group. Indeed, they were NOT members of the same group, or at least not members of the same groups making the same demands. Still Occupy Americans saw themselves wrought with the same financial struggles as the protestors in Egypt and Spain. Easily enough the political corruption by top officials in Egypt was equated with the political power of banks and multinational corporations in the United States. The high unemployment rate in Spain (21% at the protest’s outset) was equivocated with the jobless rate in the U.S. (9%). Their struggles were our struggles, so different yet so much the same.

 

 

The role of affect in uniting what has come to be known as the 99% (in the U.S.) cannot be understated. AdBusters and other groups such as the anarchist collective Anonymous tapped into an affective atmosphere that was filled with fear, anxiety, dissatisfaction, and dread. At a time when many people were losing their jobs, losing their homes, and losing hope for the future, the Occupy Movement offered inspiration, but little else.  Ahmed recognizes that in affective economies, “emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments” (p.119). Emotions circulate through both the psychic and social spheres sticking to some bodies and bypassing others. The affect is not found in a particular body or sign, but in the circulation between these bodies and signs. Over time, some bodies collect more affect and begin to appear to contain it. However, that is not the case. Those bodies that appear affective in themselves have only circulated more than others. It is this failure of affect to be located in a specific body that allows it to continue to produce effects.  In this sense a threat or a fear never dies, it simply changes form. The economic conditions that sparked the Occupy Movement were not new. The United States has gone through several periods of economic strife and recovered from each. However, when the conditions from the past began to be recognized as a threat in the present, emotions changed. Ahmed argues, “Through designating something as already a threat in the present, that very thing becomes installed as ‘the truth,’ which we must fight for in the future, a fight that is retrospectively understood to be a matter of life and death” (p.133).  The threat of losing your job or your home was real. We had to do something or risk falling by the wayside. People needed an emotional outlet and the Occupy Movement was there to help by providing a common enemy for all working class citizens to fight against. Workers of the world, unite!  

 

This global sense of identification of the “working class” was only made possible by the shifts in economic paradigms from agriculture to industrialization to informatization. In agricultural or industrial societies, workers could band together, but not on the large scale that we saw in the Occupy Movement. The passage from industrialization to informatization is “recognized through the migration from industry to service jobs [where service is] characterized by the central role played by knowledge, information, communication and affect” (Hardt, 91). Because of the focus on these characteristics, the “informational economy” necessarily requires a change in the quality of labor and labor practices.  Factory labor becomes dependent on communication from the market to determine when and what will be produced as opposed to producers determining what consumers will buy. In the service industry where no goods are produced, information exchange is even more important in determining what and how services will be provided. Immaterial labor, as Hardt terms it, is “labor that produces an immaterial good, such as services, knowledge, or communication” (p. 94). Within this category of immaterial labor is affective labor, the type of labor that produces no tangible product. It only produces affect—an unquantifiable emotion that is entangled in human interaction. “What affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower” (Hardt, 96). Although Hardt recognizes that affective labor has “achieved a dominant position of the highest value in the contemporary informational economy” (p. 97) and that the U.S. will strive to keep the highest-value immaterial jobs in the country, these are traditionally the jobs that many Americans feel are underpaid and/or underrepresented. Teachers, civil servants, care-takers, and other affective laborers are never ‘paid what they’re worth,’ but how can they be? How do you put a price on affect? How much is it worth?

 

Negri describes the paradox of value and affect in this way: “The more the theory of value loses its reference to the subject (measure was this reference as a basis of mediation and command), the more the value of labor resides in affect, that is, in living labor that is made autonomous in the capital relation, and expresses—through all the pores of singular and collective bodies—its power of self-valorization” (p. 79-80). In other words, the value of labor, and this is not necessarily a monetary value, is not found in the properties of the laborer. Rather, labor value is determined by the interrelationships between producers and consumers. Thus, affective labor generates its own value with no set referent.  The value is circular and again we see the difficulty in determining an affective laborer’s wage, a component of the Occupy Movement’s complaint. The labor is worth what it is worth. It is both outside of and beyond measure.  Although the value is outside of measure, it is still susceptible to biopolitical control because of the productive nature of affect. The “political economy must in every case bring productive force under control, and thus it must organize itself to superimpose over the new figures of valorization (and new subjects that produce it) new figures of exploitation” (Negri, 86). Affect-value must be controlled. Yet, it cannot be contained because it is beyond measure. This is bad news for affective laborers. Their struggles will continue, but not without consequences. “Value-affect opens the way to a revolutionary political economy in which insurrection is a necessary ingredient and which poses the theme of reappropriation of the biopolitical context by the productive subjects” (Negri, 88). The move from industrialization to informatization, from use-value to affect-value made the Occupy Movement possible. It also made it necessary.

The Occupy Movement did a lot of things. It rallied thousands of people to fight for a cause they believed in. It brought global attention to the struggles of the working class in several different countries. It fostered a feeling of belonging to those who felt like they were alone. It illustrated the power of citizens who were tired of feeling exploited. But, the best way to describe the movement is affective.  Perhaps this was all it was meant to be. If Gregg’s description of office life is anywhere close to accurate, it is easy to understand how workers just needed a break. Fed up with email, emoticons, passive aggressive co-workers, and the increasingly alienating nature of the information economy, workers (including unemployed workers) needed a way to break the monotony of everyday life.

 

 The Occupy Movement offered that reprieve from the mundane. Apps (2011) describes the affective nature of the Occupy Movements around the world as a bond centered on feelings of exploitation. “What they all share in common is a feeling that the youth and middle class are paying a high price for mismanagement and malfeasance by an out-of-touch corporate, financial and political elite.” Occupiers banded together to stand-up to corporate bullies who hide behind tax laws when they are caught with clenched fists. Rather than make political demands and risk becoming one of ‘them’, the Occupy Movement “identified the apparatus of the state as merely one of a number of technologies of power which both discipline individuals and solicit socio-cultural energies from populations in the context of contemporary capitalism” (Kiersey, p. 158). In this sense, the movement recognized its involvement with the regime that produced the current situation in which it found itself. To combat this, it had to act in a manner that allowed the individual groups and the larger collective to participate equally in the fight. Occupy employed horizontal forms of decision making “to create the most open and participatory spaces possible” (Sitrin, p. 33). While this was certainly the most democratic way of doing things, it also presented a great deal of difficulty in defining the goals of the group. Not a whole lot got done, but everyone felt good about it. The movement excelled at generating more affect, but failed to accomplish little else.

As important as protestor affect was to the movement, the affect created by the political economy’s backlash to the rebels was even more so. The failure of the Occupy Movement to have any real impact on policy proved (once again) that the common man was no match for the governmental giants. The political economy will control its productive forces regardless of what those forces produce. The biggest problem with the Occupy Movement as I see it was that it attempted to measure that which could not be measured; it took a Marxist approach to a postmodern situation. In an affective economy, there was no concrete solution to their problem. You cannot put a value on affect, no matter how many protests you stage. This conundrum helps to explain why organizers had such difficulty in expressing their demands, why protestors were ultimately unsuccessful in changing policy, and why the government was effective in shutting down the movement.

Argument: In its efforts to fight for recognition of the rights of the working class, the Occupied Movement became its own form of affective labor. It produced no tangible results (policy changes), only more affect. Further, as the Occupy Movement gained populararity and individuals became the collective 99%, the value of their affective labor moved further away from a referent subject which clouded its capacity for measure. In so doing, the movement gained numbers, but lost power. It was doomed from the beginning. The protests would not 'work.' They could not work because built into the system of affective labor is the neseccesity of the political econom to control it. The government had to intervene and remove the threat (by any means necessary) to its identity.

 

Questions: 

1. Ahmed describes how emotions are circulated in affective economies, sticking to some bodies and passing by others. What affects stuck to which bodies through the Occupied Movement? How have you seen these affects at work in present day politics?

2. I argue that the Occupied Movement was ultimately a failure because it did little to effect policy in the United States. In a sense I am looking for a way to measure the affective labor of the movement. Am I commiting the same fallacy that I say was problematic for the movement? Can protests about affective labor ever produce anything other than more affect?

Bibliography

Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective Economies. Social Text 79, 22(2), 117-139.

Apps, P. (2011, October). Wall Street action part of global "Arab Spring"? Retrieved September 24, 2012, from reuters.com: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/11/uk-global-politics-protest-idUSLNE79A03Z20111011

Gregg, M. (2010). On Friday Night Drinks: Workplace Affects in the Age of the Cubicle. In M. Gregg, & G. Seigworth (Eds.), The Affect Theory Reader (pp. 250-269). Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Hardt, M. (1999). Affective Labor. boundary 2, 26(2), 89-100.

Kiersey, N. (2012). Occupy Wall Street as Immanent Critique: Why IR Theory Needs a 'Mic Check!'. Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies(5), 157-160.

Negri, A., & hardt, M. (1999). Value and Affect. boundary 2, 26(2), 77-88.

Sitrin, M. (2012). Horizontalidad and Territory in the Occupy Movements. Tikkun, 32-33, 62-63.