Law, Labour and the Humanities: Contemporary European Perspectives 2019025773, 2019025774, 9780367077174, 9780429022302

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of figures
Notes on contributors
Introduction: I work, therefore I am?
1 Revisiting the Cartesian consequentiality
2 Work in Europe, today: a transdisciplinary perspective
Acknowledgements
PART I: Law and Philosophy
1. Migrants, Marx, Descartes, Fichte and Hegel: On working and being
1. Being and working: from causality to substantiality
2. Being and working: from necessity to contingency
3. Descartes or the primacy of productive being above being-at-rest
4. Fichte or the citizen as labourer
5. Hegel
6. Concluding remarks
Bibliography
2. Work, pensions and transgenerational justice
1. Labor market 4.0
2. What is transgenerationality?
Bibliography
3. The disclosure of humanity: Challenges of the digital turn
1. (Mis)Understanding
2. Indeterminate subjectivities: no time, no space, no clear task
3. Disclosure of humanity
4. The blurred boundaries between means and ends
5. The blurred boundaries between action and contemplation
6. Free time is not freedom: legal ontology of the workforce
Bibliography
4. How the future of work can work for the workers
1. Technology and Work 4.0
2. Career law
3. Work quality law
4. Talent law
5. Protection beyond status
6. Embracing the future
Bibliography
5. Europe and the construction of a worker mentality: Human rights as an instrument of neoliberal government? The case of Dutch labour activation programmes for welfare recipients
1. Introduction
2. Governing the good worker
3. Welfare-to-work policies in the Netherlands
4. Case studies and methods
5. Sanctions policies and worker mentalities in municipalities A and B
6. Role-playing worker
7. Fulfilled worker
8. Social human rights: an instrument for incentivizing or
punishing recipients?
Bibliography
6. From work to mobilization
1. Revelation
2. Transformation
3. Repression
4. Transvaluation
5. Mobilization
Bibliography
7. On working and being: The legal metaphysics of labour and the constitutional errors of Social Europe
1. Introduction: a legal metaphysics of work
2. The ontology of normativity and the deep constitutional
role of law
3. The crisis of labour law and the mistakes of the good European
4. Constituting economic reality and the forgotten influence of ordoliberal constitutional theory
5. The European Union’s constitution of the worker: between mobility and nowhere
6. Small developments in the legal constitution of the worker and the (limited) potential of the Social Pillar
Bibliography
8. Irregular migrants at work and the groundless legal subject
Introduction
1. The law and irregular migrants at work
2. Groundlessness and the legal subject
3. Groundless legal subjects
Bibliography
9. The ontology of labor
Introduction
1. The framework
2. The three dimensions of labor
3. The varieties of labor
4. Why labor?
Bibliography
10. Objectivity, repetition, and the search for satisfaction
1. Introduction
2. Kant and the object: from (Cartesian) deducibility to structural heterogeneity
3. Freud’s Wiederholungszwang, Lacan’s Jouissance
4. Conclusion: “not about them, but not without them”
Bibliography
PART II: Literature and Cinema
11. From text to work: Or, operation without production
Bibliography
12. Works by Vitaliano Trevisan and the representation of work in the neo-liberal age
Introduction
1. A methodological note
2. Case-study: Works by Vitaliano Trevisan
3. Final considerations
Bibliography
13. I can quit whenever I want The academic precariat in Italian cinema
Introduction
1. The neoliberal paradigm
2. Italian cinema and the revenge of the precarious researcher
Bibliography
14. Refusal of work in Italian literature: From Vogliamo tutto by Balestrini to Works by Trevisan
Bibliography
15. Labour and identity in documentary web series on new Italian emigrants
Introduction
1. Migration as expulsion: brain drain, gain or waste?
2. The diaspora of Italians abroad in documentary web series
3. Labour, identity and the condition of post-migration
Bibliography
16. Deux jours, une nuit and La loi du marché: The tactical withdrawal of government and capital
Introduction
1. Neoliberalism
2. Deux jours, une nuit
3. La loi du marché
4. Human capital, private government, evaluation
5. Affect and fantasy
6. Symbolic authority
Bibliography
17. When The Flash said: “We were all struck by that lightning”: Work and contemporary superhero TV shows
Introduction
1. Realism of an unreal world
2. The superhero goes to work
3. Work-related themes
4. Europe
Bibliography
18. ‘A new name and a new job, that’s what he’d like’: Identity, labour and precarity, 1915–2015
Bibliography
19. In the name of a loss: Work and the contradictions of contemporary literary imaginary
Introduction
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Law, Labour and the Humanities

The ontology of work and the economics of value underpin the legal institution, with the existence of modern law predicated upon the subject as labourer. In contemporary Europe, labour is more than a mere economic relationship. Indeed, labour occupies a central position in human existence: since the industrial revolution, it has been the principal criterion of reciprocal recognition and of universal mobilization. This multi-disciplinary volume analyses labour and its depictions in their interaction with the latest legal, socio-economic, political and artistic tendencies. Addressing such issues as deregulation, flexibility, de-industrialization, the pervasive enlargement of markets, digitization and virtual relationships, social polarisation and migratory fluxes, this volume engages with the existential role played by labour in our lives at the conjunction of law and the humanities. This volume will be of interest to law students, legal philosophers, theoretical philosophers, political philosophers, social and political theorists, labour studies scholars, and literature and film scholars. Tiziano Toracca is a literary scholar, Visiting Professor at the Department of Literary Studies, Gent University and Research Fellow at the University of Torino. Angela Condello is a legal philosopher, Adjunct Professor and Research Fellow at the University of Torino, the Principal Investigator of a Jean Monnet Module and the Director of LabOnt Law.

Discourses of Law Series editors Peter Goodrich, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, USA Michel Rosenfeld, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, USA Arthur Jacobsen, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, USA

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Jacob Burns Institute for Advanced Legal Studies of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law to the series Discourses of Law. A GlassHouse Book

For information about the series and details of previous and forthcoming titles, see https://www.routledge.com/Discourses-of-Law/book-series/SE1036

Law, Labour and the Humanities

Contemporary European Perspectives

Edited by Tiziano Toracca and Angela Condello

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 A Glasshouse Book Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Tiziano Toracca and Angela Condello; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Tiziano Toracca and Angela Condello to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Condello, Angela, 1984- editor. | Toracca, Tiziano, editor. Title: Law, labour and the humanities : contemporary European perspectives / edited by Angela Condello and Tiziano Toracca. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Discourses of law | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019025773 (print) | LCCN 2019025774 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367077174 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429022302 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Labor laws and legislation--Europe--Philosophy. | Labor laws and legislation--Fiction. | Law in literature. Classification: LCC KJC2855 .L39 2019 (print) | LCC KJC2855 (ebook) | DDC 344.401--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025773 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025774 ISBN: 978-0-367-07717-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-02230-2 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of figures Notes on contributors Introduction: I work, therefore I am?

viii ix 1

ANGELA CONDELLO AND TIZIANO TORACCA

PART I

Law and Philosophy 1 Migrants, Marx, Descartes, Fichte and Hegel: On working and being

5 7

EMILIANO ACOSTA

2 Work, pensions and transgenerational justice

19

TIZIANA ANDINA

3 The disclosure of humanity: Challenges of the digital turn

32

ANGELA CONDELLO

4 How the future of work can work for the workers

46

MARC DE VOS

5 Europe and the construction of a worker mentality: Human rights as an instrument of neoliberal government? The case of Dutch labour activation programmes for welfare recipients

62

ANJA ELEVELD

6 From work to mobilization MAURIZIO FERRARIS

74

vi Contents

7 On working and being: The legal metaphysics of labour and the constitutional errors of Social Europe

111

LUKE MASON

8 Irregular migrants at work and the groundless legal subject

133

ANASTASIA TATARYN

9 The ontology of labor

145

ENRICO TERRONE

10 Objectivity, repetition, and the search for satisfaction

158

GERTRUDIS VAN DE VIJVER

PART II

Literature and Cinema

169

11 From text to work: Or, operation without production

171

DAVID AYERS

12 Works by Vitaliano Trevisan and the representation of work in the neo-liberal age

183

CARLO BAGHETTI

13 I can quit whenever I want: The academic precariat in Italian cinema

199

ALBERTO BARACCO

14 Refusal of work in Italian literature: From Vogliamo tutto by Balestrini to Works by Trevisan

211

SILVIA CONTARINI

15 Labour and identity in documentary web series on new Italian emigrants

221

MONICA JANSEN

16 Deux jours, une nuit and La loi du marché: The tactical withdrawal of government and capital

236

JOHN MARKS

17 When The Flash said: “We were all struck by that lightning”: Work and contemporary superhero TV shows MARA SANTI

249

Contents

18 ‘A new name and a new job, that’s what he’d like’: Identity, labour and precarity, 1915–2015

vii

264

MORAG SHIACH

19 In the name of a loss: Work and the contradictions of contemporary literary imaginary

277

TIZIANO TORACCA

Index

294

Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

Growth of the resident population in Italy: 1861–2011, ISTAT data Growth of the resident population in Italy: 2001–2017, ISTAT data Projection of the demographic trend up to 2065 Italian debt/GDP ratio (1861–2015) Social benefits, pensions and employment income in public administration (percentage of GDP)

26 27 28 28 29

Notes on contributors

Emiliano Acosta (Mendoza, 1978) is associate professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and visiting professor at Ghent University. His research domain includes modern and contemporary political philosophy, Kant and German Idealism. Tiziana Andina is Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Turin, Italy (www.labont.it/andina). She is an expert in metaphysics and ontology with a specialization in social ontology and philosophy of art. David Ayers is Professor of Modernism and Critical Theory at the University of Kent. He has published books and articles on modernist literature, including most recently Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). He has a leading role in the European Network of Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, for which he edits a book series. Carlo Baghetti obtained a joint PhD (co-tutelle) in the Universities of Aix-Marseille and “La Sapienza” of Rome. His studies mostly focus on the representation of work in Italian literature. He is also the co-founder of the OB.E.R.T. (Observatoire Européen des Récits du Travail). He is currently lecturer at the Italian department of the University of Aix-Marseille. Alberto Baracco is a lecturer in film studies at the University of Basilicata. His main areas of research are film philosophy and film ecocriticism. His recent publications include the two monographs Philosophy in Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Hermeneutics of the Film World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and the essay “Soggettività e natura” (in Antroposcenari. Storie, paesaggi, ecologie, Il Mulino, 2018). Silvia Contarini is a law graduate and lawyer. She defended her Research Habilitation degree (HDR) in 2004 and was recruited as a full Professor of Italian studies at Université Paris Nanterre. Prof. Contarini’s research focuses on cultural production and social transformations in Italy in the 20th and 21st centuries. Author of some sixty articles and some twenty books (monographs, edited and co-edited collections), most recently Scrivere al tempo della globalizzazione (September 2019),

x

Notes on contributors

and Penser la différence culturelle du colonial au mondial. Une anthologie transculturelle (eds. S. Contarini, C. Joubert, JM Moura, April 2019). Anja Eleveld, Assistant Professor Social Law, VU University Amsterdam. Anja Eleveld is a laywer and a political scientist. Her research focuses on the labour market activation of recipients of social assistance. Maurizio Ferraris (Torino, 1956) has written more than sixty books that have been translated into several languages. The last one is From Fountain to Moleskine (Leiden, Brill). Full Professor of Philosophy, he is the President of the LabOnt – Center for Ontology and has been Deputy Rector for Humanities Research at the University of Turin. He is columnist for ‘La Repubblica’ and for ‘Neue Zürcher Zeitung’. He is working for the realization of Scienza Nuova, the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University and the Polytechnic University of Turin. The Institute is dedicated to Umberto Eco. Monica Jansen is Assistant Professor in Italian at Utrecht University. Her publications include: Il dibattito sul postmoderno in Italia: In bilico tra dialettica e ambiguità (2002); The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies (co-edited, 2012); Le culture del precariato. Pensiero, azione, narrazione (co-edited, 2015). John Marks is Associate Professor in French Studies at the University of Nottingham. His main research interests are contemporary French thought, culture and social theory. He has published on a variety of subjects in this area, including the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. His most recent research publications focus on the theorisation of work in France. Luke Mason is a labour lawyer and legal philosopher. He is Head of the School of Law at Birmingham City University in the United Kingdom. He has published widely in the field of legal theory and on European labour law and social policy. He has taught and researched at universities in various European countries. Mara Santi is associate professor of Italian Literature at Ghent University. Her main research interests lie in modernist and contemporary Italian narrative, narratology, philology, and literary theory. Morag Shiach is Professor of Cultural History at Queen Mary University of London, where she also directs Network: QMUL’s Centre for the Creative and Cultural Economy. She has published extensively on modernism and labour, including a monograph on Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890-1930 as well as various articles on immaterial labour. Anastasia Tataryn is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool, UK. Her research interrogates the limits of legal frameworks by deeply questioning notions of sociality, being and relationality, in particular, at the intersection of labour and migration. She is currently completing a monograph, 'Law,

Notes on contributors

xi

Migration, Precarious Labour: Ecotechnics and the Question of Legal Subjectivity’ with Routledge. This work draws on poststructuralism, the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, feminism, eco-philosophy and decoloniality. Enrico Terrone currently is Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Fellow at the LOGOS Research Group, Universitat de Barcelona. He works on issues concerning aesthetics, ontology and technology. He has published papers on international journals such as British Journal of Aesthetics and Erkenntnis. Gertrudis Van de Vijver is Full Professor (Gewoon Hoogleraar) at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences of Ghent University. She is the director of the Centre for Critical Philosophy. Her research is mainly on the epistemological implications of issues of complexity, self-organization and teleology in the life sciences, in psychology and in the study of cognition. For this, she developed a transcendental approach to the philosophy of biology, centering on the idea of co-constitution. In addition, she does research on other aspects and implications of transcendental philosophy, and on the connections of psychoanalytic theory with epistemology and philosophy of language. Marc De Vos is dean at the Macquarie University Law School (Sydney). He holds a Licentiate and Doctorate in Law (University of Ghent), a Master in Social Law (Université Libre de Bruxelles), and a Master of Laws (Harvard University). His main areas of research, in which he has also served as a practitioner and adviser, include employment and labour law, EU institutional and constitutional law, fundamental rights, social inclusion, the welfare state, and the rule of law.

Introduction: I work, therefore I am? Angela Condello and Tiziano Toracca

1 Revisiting the Cartesian consequentiality The present volume revisits Descartes’ principle according to which our existence depends on some action (in Descartes’ case, on thinking). We wanted to stress the focal position occupied by work in the definition of the subjectivity of the contemporary individual. By questioning the supposed Cartesian rationalism of the title – i.e. the deep connection between labour and existence – this book aims at tracing new critical approaches to the complex relationship between existence, identity and social recognition, from a strongly transdisciplinary perspective, bridging legal and humanistic questions and codes. Is it true that we work and therefore we are? What are the different roles played by work, social recognition and income today? What kind of risks does the “ideology of work” entail with respect to new forms of consumering and production? The many voices represented in this volume originate in and belong to different fields of knowledge and of academic research. Yet, there are keywords and themes that are consistent throughout the volume: precariousness, flexibility, polarization, alienation, fragmentation, freedom, recognition, possibilities and capabilities. Many contributions refer to the classical and fundamental theories of work elaborated by philosophers, sociologists and political theorists (e.g. Anders, Arendt, Bauman, Gorz, Foucault, Marx, Hegel, Smith) in order to understand the present, and by doing this they rephrase many questions connected to the theme of work and its meaning in respect to social identity.

2 Work in Europe, today: a transdisciplinary perspective Born of contract, and paradigmatically from the labour contract, the existence of modern law and charters has always been predicated upon the subject as labourer. The ontology of work and the economics of value underpin the legal institution in forms so profound as to frequently escape notice. Work constitutes the social and institutes the person, and thus the changing character and aspects of work urgently need to be depicted (which is what philosophy, literature and cinema do in this volume), their laws adumbrated, in their diverse new spheres.

2

Introduction

In contemporary Europe, the site of the present studies, work occupies a central position in human existence: since the first industrial revolution, it has been the principal criterion of reciprocal recognition and of universal mobilization. As it emerges from many of the chapters, in a multi-level governance system such as the European Union, through their profession people still continue to feel recognized by others: they are because of their work’s activity. Indeed, work is more than a mere economic relationship: it is rather an anthropological phenomenon radically influencing human existence (the rhythm of biological daily life, language, spaces, trajectories, etc.) and the geography of the world (economic areas, landscape, environment, migration flows, etc.). The volume analyses work in light of the transformation of the conditions of contemporary global and neoliberal economy, focussing on the European identity – specifically, on the latest legal, socio-economic and political trends such as deregulation, flexibility, deindustrialization, pervasive enlargement of markets, digitalization and virtual relationships, social polarization and migratory fluxes. It investigates the contradictions of the relationship between work and identity from both legal and humanistic perspectives, such as the fact that very often labour does not produce any social integration but, on the contrary, hides new and old forms of alienation. Literature and cinema with their capacity to depict the physical life of individuals show these contradictions and invite a reflection on the political unconscious connected to work. Moreover, the volume deals with the connection between the crisis of labour and the new forms of exploitation and slavery – this particular feature is connected to the concept of “mobilization” and to the disappearance of the distinction between the time for work and the time for personal life. Since the industrial revolution, the legal regulation of labour has been crucial because it is the symbolic epicentre of human identity and condition. The existential role played by labour in our lives – even when problematic – suggests, moreover, that the humanities could help in the understanding of why and how people need to work. As a matter of fact, the advent of the service economy and the competitive forces of globalization have blurred the distinctions between working time and free time, with increased labour demanded by market forces and household needs. The changes in the economic equilibrium have translated into recurring themes in the public discourse: flexibility, precariousness and work-life balance. Furthermore, the biopolitical turn has translated human rights such as labour rights into the moral ground of modern law. Labour rights and labour policies in the frame of the European Union legitimize the penetration of the world by neoliberal capitalism. The globalization of markets together with the outsourcing, the subcontracting and the increasing function of applied new technologies demand to rethink the professional roles and their social function in the European frame and in a global economy. This volume aims to discuss these issues by starting from common problems and case studies (concerning either law or the humanities). Considering the high social and civil value of labour and considering the transformations produced by the contemporary capitalist economy, labour relations are discussed from a critical point of view.

Introduction

3

The transformations of work and the strong impact of economy in the world of labour have thus led us to integrate different approaches – especially those of law and the humanities – in order to create a new and effective perspective of research on this topic. Such a transdisciplinary approach can expose the experience of new mechanisms of marginalization and new forms of subordination hidden behind the invisible curtain of legal machinery, and in particular can add something to the discourse on human dignity as it relates to social identity on the one side (law) and to physical life on the other side (literature and arts).

Acknowledgements We are deeply grateful to the European Commission, and especially to the Jean Monnet Programs, for the opportunity of researching, exchanging ideas, and building an international network of scholars around the Project “I work, therefore I am (European)” (2016–2018) that we had the privilege to coordinate together with Professor Maurizio Ferraris (University of Torino: http:// www.iworkthereforeiam.eu). We are indebted also to many people at the European Social and Economic Committee where we organized the conference from which most of these chapters stem, and especially to Virgilio Dastoli and the Italian Council of the European Movement, who supported our idea from the very beginning.

Part I

Law and Philosophy

Chapter 1

Migrants, Marx, Descartes, Fichte and Hegel On working and being Emiliano Acosta

1. Being and working: from causality to substantiality The identity between being and working, namely the fact that the propositions “I am” and “I work” can be conceived and experienced as two ways of saying the same thing, has nowadays become an obviousness. By obviousness I mean an incontestable truth that as such remains concealed in everyday life, although it is actively present in everything we do, since it constitutes the horizon for our self-understanding as human beings. We are, namely we really and essentially exist, or, in other words, we are recognized by ourselves and by the others as human beings, only if we work. We become, indeed, visible for the others only insofar as we produce and deliver an economic contribution to the system that guarantees the free exercise of our rights. It seems to us very natural, for instance, that in dealing with the migration crisis of the last few years, we are allowed to distinguish between a good and a bad migration. Migrants, no matter their nationality and cultural, ethnical or religious background, who can be integrated into our economic system serve to illustrate what a good migration should be or even to support the claim about the success of a particular migration policy. The bad ones, we know, are the migrants who do not find a way to productively participate in this mechanism. They represent a problem, since they do not play fair. Indeed: they take without giving or paying back. So, integrating them would result in an imbalance that would put our system (we call it “Europe” or “our identity”) at risk. This sounds surely a little bit right-wing, and indeed it is a claim we are used to hearing from European right-populist and conservative parties. But on the other side of the ideological spectrum things do not seem to be different. European socialism and other parties situated on the left (including left-populist parties) propose mutatis mutandis the same. Their proposal reads as follows: let us positively integrate them by means of giving them the needed tools and skills so that they can become a useful and valuable element in our economies (we say actually “our societies”). All these voices sing the same tune: other policies that neglect the fundamental role of the economical variable for integration, are naïve, abstract or demagogic, or even a sign of cynicism. The message is clear: without introducing migrants in the productive apparatus of the European Union, integration

8

Emiliano Acosta

is not possible. So, in order to become, and being recognized as, a citizen – or, put in modern terms, a subject – you have to work. Nevertheless, this last formulation does not accurately express what we are dealing with. Since the relation between work and being is not an issue of causality. The motto “I work, therefore I am (European)”, used as the title of the international conference at Brussels (November 2017) that gave birth to this book, seems to follow the form of hypothetical judgements such as “if you do X, then you become Y”. However, things are in fact more complex; and, paradoxically, the logical relation between being and working is simpler than we suppose. For we have to understand this relation in terms of substantiality rather than causality or even reciprocal effect. Hence, the above quoted motto should actually be formulated in a simple and categorical way such as: working is being. So, when we say no work, no being, we should not forget that the predicate of working is not a specification of being, such as, for instance, “lying” in the sentence “lying is sinning”. In “working is being”, “working” is not an example of being, but rather has become its substantial description. Being is thus nothing but working, it does not exceed the meaning of working. This is the reason why we could invert the proposition by saying: being is working and the meaning would not change at all. Accordingly, there is in the statements “working is being” and “being is working” a total identity between subject and predicate.

2. Being and working: from necessity to contingency As with every obviousness, the one concerning the identity between working and being appears in our everyday life firstly as an ahistorical and categorical truth. Its current ahistorical and categorical character reveals a necessity that as such refers eventually to a contingent origin. By that, I am not saying there is no necessity in the identity between working and being, but rather that this necessity has a history, namely that this necessity is a historical product that as such contains a moment of contingency in its very beginning. No doubt, the obviousness of the identity between working and being that confronts us every day is no longer contingent now, but rather necessary. We used to experience this necessity as an impossibility: we are compelled to acknowledge that in our present there is no real alternative to that universal truth we ceaselessly affirm with our deeds and omissions, namely that the only really or authentically human way of existence in the world is labour. We know this: as soon as you no longer take part in the productive process, you become invisible, you do not exist as a human being anymore. Of course, you can now react to my last claim by crying out a big “NO” to the system and making out of this negation a life, your own life. However, you are then no longer a human, but rather an animal or a god – the two extremes of the inhuman, just as Hobbes rightly observes.1

1

Hobbes 1651, p. 93.

Migrants, Marx, Descartes, Fichte and Hegel

9

So, the necessity of the identification between work and being is firstly experienced as the impossibility of thinking of (humanly) being in other terms. I suggested that there is always contingency at the origins of necessity. Furthermore: that every ahistorical, perennial truth has a history. Certainly, we have forgotten that this identification has not always been present in the history of European or Western culture. And this oblivion indicates that there must have been an event in the history of thinking and comprehending ourselves as human beings and, more specifically, as citizens, that has succeeded in changing human self-understanding. The establishment of the identity between work and being has been, no doubt, a revolution in thinking, namely a kind of turn in mentality that makes impossible effectively return to past forms of talking about and experiencing the human. By “effectively” I mean that the only way of returning to past forms of human dwelling in the world is by means of abstraction. I can now, for instance, reject the totalitarianism of the system (that big “NO” I mentioned before) and exclude myself from its determining power by means of beginning a kind of ascetic life parallel to social mechanisms. But this would be merely my truth, a particular one, and I would become a kind of abnormality, admired and tolerated because of being an exception, a living anachronism or even the incarnation of the kind of impossibilities we use to posit as the object of our hope. When trying to identify that event in the history of thought that would explain this transformation of our self-understanding as human beings, we must not forget that such events do not always correspond with what we commonly call a fact. Events in the history of philosophy comprehend periods sometimes longer than a century and crystallise in very different forms, for example the coining of a word, the subversion of a meaning, a trial, a sentence, a book. Concerning the substantial relation between working and being, it is not too difficult to notice that this event is related to the cultural and economic transformations in Europe that took place in the transit from the middle ages to the modern world. The rise of modern capitalism has its philosophical correlate in the invention of that modern subjectivity that identifies being with action (for instance in Descartes’ cogito). Nevertheless, the obviousness of “being = working” exceeds the Cartesian moment. It is rather the result of a process of critical reflection on that productive subjectivity that culminated, two centuries later, in Marx’s reduction of the human being to a proletarian. A complete account of the history of the identification between work and being goes beyond the limits and the scope of the present chapter. In what follows, I rather limit my examination to three moments of this event in modern philosophy that I consider relevant for understanding both this history and the metaphysical background for something we are living in and, maybe because of this, something that we don't usually talk about. The three episodes of this history each has a name: Descartes, Fichte and Hegel. They all contributed to or made possible the well-known passage of Engels and Marx’s Manifesto, defining proletariat as “a class of labourers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital”.2 2

Marx & Engels 2010, p. 18.

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3. Descartes or the primacy of productive being above being-at-rest The above-mentioned title of the international conference at Brussels “I work, therefore I am (European)” reminds us of the well-known sentence of the French philosopher and pioneer of modern philosophy Rene Descartes: “I think, therefore I am”. One could say that the association of the title of that conference with Descartes’ “cogito, ergo sum” is exclusively due to the form of both propositions. I think, however, that the connection goes beyond that anecdote, since Descartes is actually saying almost the same thing, namely that the subject, what he calls res cogitans, is nothing but thinking activity. Descartes affirms that, concerning subjectivity, reality or being (res) must be conceived exclusively as activity in terms of productivity of certainty. In short: “I produce certainty, therefore I am”. Being is producing is the Cartesian forerunner of being is working. According to Descartes famous metaphysical writing on first philosophy, his Meditationes de prima philosophia (1654), there are fundamentally two modes of being or, actually, of being real or, better, of being a real thing (res): res cogitans and res extensa.3 This division of reality into two classes, what we used to call Descartes’ ontological dualism, entails, of course, a considerable number of problems. For the purpose of this chapter, I would like to exclusively focus on the basic problem of Descartes’ terminology. The use of the term res in his distinction between two ways of being a real thing gives us the impression that above both classes of being there is, or there must be, a general concept encompassing them, namely that there is, or must be, something such as a res without any specification at all. In other words: a res that can be either cogitans or extensa. However, one of the most interesting things of Descartes’ dichotomous division of reality is that the predicate or the specific difference of res in both main concepts subverts the meaning of the genus proximum. Indeed, the term res does not mean the same when applied to thinking and extension. Both specifications of beings make it impossible to talk about being in general. This impossibility of reducing both res-modes to a higher and all-encompassing one represents the core of Descartes’ ontological dualism. Descartes’ dualism and the solipsism problem inherent to his ontology are precisely due to the fact that there is no common reality-ness between res cogitans and res extensa. The latter refers to a fixed reality, a being-at-rest that is necessarily the object of a subject that, on the contrary, is characterized by the impossibility of being an object, since it is the activity that produces objectivity. Consequently, “cogito, ergo sum” must not be understood as a syllogism nor as a concept, but rather as the immediate and self-evident certainty that makes objectivizing thinking possible. Descartes’ conception of res cogitans emancipates thinking from the realm of objective reality, gives essential autonomy to the subject and, consequently, elevates it to the range of an absolute entity. Furthermore, the being of res cogitans 3

Descartes 1654, pp. 11–13.

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cannot, unlike the being of what is not spontaneously active, be destroyed by Descartes’ radical scepticism, his well-known methodological doubt. So, Descartes’ Meditationes represents the invention of subjectivity as indestructible action. Subjectivity as restless activity is, paradoxically, the outcome of Descartes’ search for an “Archimedean point” that should be “firm and immobile”.4 Descartes’ redefinition of being as acting or producing means that fixity or being as mere presence cannot longer guarantee that stability and security that the human being of modern times was looking for despairingly. Descartes’ subjectivity is, as already said, production essentially emancipated from the object, an activity without a conditioning object since it represents the foundation of objectivity in general. At this moment, we should not forget that the main activity of Descartes’ res cogitans is not mere thinking, but thinking in terms of doubting. Indeed, his discovery of the indestructible character of res cogitans happens only when this activity is considered as doubting.5Cogito mainly conceived as I doubt has only a negative relation to its object. According to Descartes, everything can be the object of this destroying and producing subjectivity. Nevertheless, there is a relevant difference in both specific activities of subjectivity. Whereas everything except the activity as doubting can be destroyed, production is an activity that can be found in the constitution of both Cartesian modes of being. Both res extensa and res cogitans must be produced in order to become a reality. Of course, both modes of being differ in the fact that in the production of res cogitans we find the same res on both sides of the relation, since in this case we are dealing with a self-reflective operation. However, in terms of visibility – what Descartes calls being perceived as a clear and distinct idea6 – both modes of being do not differ from each other, since both have to participate in the productive process in order to be real, be it as res cogitans or res extensa. Production makes things visible, i.e. makes things real. And this statement includes subjectivity as well. Descartes says it clearly: I exist as long as I think.7 In Descartes’ conception of res cogitans and res extensa we witness the first steps of the invention of the identity between being and work. Nevertheless, there is still no direct link to labour as such. This is certainly due to the fact that Descartes does not consider corporeality as inherent to subjectivity. He cannot establish a necessary connection between res cogitans and the human. According to Descartes, the humanity of the subject, its being a human being, is also an object with extension that as such can be destroyed by his methodological doubt.8 In the next section, we will see that Fichte, unlike Descartes, departs from the idea of the human being as indissoluble unity of thinking activity and body. 4 5 6 7 8

Descartes Ibidem. Descartes Descartes Descartes

1654, p. 9. 1654, p. 21. 1654, pp. 9–10. 1654, p. 11.

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4. Fichte or the citizen as labourer No doubt, if we search for an almost identical correlate for the Cartesian couple res cogitans and res extensa in Fichte’s philosophy, we will find it formulated in the famous duo of I (Ich) and Not-I (Nicht-Ich).9 However, if what we want to identify and analyse in Fichte’s philosophy is his contribution to the construction of the necessity behind the identity between being and working, then we have to move from the realm of first philosophy, what Fichte calls his doctrine of knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), to the realm of philosophy of law. Indeed: the relevance of Fichte in the history of that identity lies in the fact that he includes in the Cartesian idea of subjectivity – specifically defined as autonomous productivity – the corporeality of the subject and, consequently, the dimensions of law and intersubjectivity as essential moments in the constitution of the modern subject. Unlike Descartes, Fichte does not consider the human character of the subject – its corporeality and its necessarily being involved in relations with other bodily subjectivities – as something secondary, but on the contrary as the very essence of real subjectivity. According to Fichte, it is the experience of material and moral resistances that individual self-consciousness originates. Hence, a subjectivity without a body is nothing but an unreal being, an ens rationis according to the Kantian table of nothing.10 According to Fichte, the human being is not the I of his doctrine of knowledge, but a rational and free individuality that due to its material corporeality is essentially determined and conditioned by rights and intersubjectivity.11 Therefore, individual human existence is not merely a free being but rather a social and political free being. According to Fichte, without the social and the political dimensions, the rational individual cannot develop its essence or, in other words, manifest and exercise its freedom. And without reflecting on its own experience of concretised freedom, the human being cannot recognize itself nor be recognized as such. This is the argument behind Fichte’s conviction that the human being is only a human being when he or she lives in the state – i.e. in the politically structured intersubjectivity.12 Accordingly, the citizen represents in Fichte’s philosophy of law the higher or completed form of subjectivity. Fichte’s conception of citizenship as a substantial predicate of the human being refers to his (at that moment) revolutionary insight that self-conscious activity depends on recognition and, therefore, on intersubjectivity.13 So, the human being becomes a subject through the activity of other subjectivities: subjectivity is a product of intersubjectivity and not vice-versa. There are mainly two forms of recognition in Fichte’s philosophy of law as explained in his Foundations of Natural Law according to the Principles of the 9 10 11 12 13

Fichte 1802, p. 13. Kant 1787, p. 348. Fichte 1970, p. 392. Fichte 1796, p. 129, see also Gaudio 2010. Fichte 1796, p. 19.

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Doctrine of Science (1796/97). The first one concerns a kind of intersubjectivity that is not as such or primarily regulated by the state and positive laws. Fichte calls it “education” (Erziehung)14 and it basically consists of parental love and other similar intersubjective relations by means of which a human being is integrated in a not politically structured community. Under this recognition dynamics we are recognized as mere human beings. This recognition, however, represents a first stage in the constitution of subjectivity, since it does not determine individual subjectivity as citizen. This last determination is the outcome of the Fichtean second form of recognition, which is a political one and takes place in the realm of civil society, i.e. in the domain of intersubjectivity regulated by positive law and under the controlling and coercive power of the state. In this case, we are recognized by the state as citizens (subject of rights and therefore of duties as well). The first mode of recognition is related to what we use to call the private sphere of modern societies. In this type of intersubjective relation, there is no third actor, recognition happens in the reciprocal activity of free beings without any kind of mediation. The second form of recognition is situated in the so-called public sphere and it consists of the relation between citizens mediated and facilitated by a third actor, which Fichte exclusively identifies with the state. For the purpose of the current investigation, we focus on the political recognition, since it is in this form of recognition where Fichte discovers the necessity behind the link between being and working in the constitution of free subjectivities. When dealing with the origin of the state by means of a social contract, Fichte realises that without the presupposition of a conflict among the individuals who will be involved in this contract, we cannot find an argument for the necessity of the existence of that political institution. For it is the conflict of interests among free human beings that then leads to the idea that order and individual freedoms can only be guaranteed and protected by a third person: the state, understood as the political institution that, being the only political actor with coercive and controlling power, can force everyone to act according to the demands of the social contract and/or the laws regulating political and social inter-subjectivity. As with other modern philosophers dealing with a theory of social contract, Fichte observes that this conflict of interests is based on a divergence about property. The state as the political actor that possesses the monopoly of violence reveals itself as the best instrument for arbitrating in social conflicts. Up to this moment, Fichte’s political thinking does not seem to have anything revolutionary or original. His originality appears only when we analyse his idea of property and its connection with freedom, work and political recognition. According to Fichte’s concept of a rational state, namely of a state deduced from the idea that we are free beings, political authority and the legal structuring of civil society must be founded in a civil contract signed without compulsion. Otherwise, the state is not legitimately established, since it does not represent the will of the sovereign, i.e. the sum of the individual wills incarnated in a collective 14 Fichte 1796, p. 32.

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subjectivity that Fichte calls the community (Gemeine) or the people (Volk). In this regard, the main tasks and competences of the rational state must provide for a solution to the fundamental conflicts and problems of the individuals involved in the social contract. Otherwise, they will not consent to enter into this political association. These conflicts and problems are related to freedom, since, according to Fichte, individuals have to be mainly understood as free wills. So, the principal right that a social contract must include is the right for free exercise of individual freedom. According to Fichte, this fundamental right is not a declaration of the absolute freedom of man – since this is a metaphysical issue rather than an issue of philosophy of law – but a particular conception of the right of property that necessarily leads to the idea of the state duty of guaranteeing that all citizens can work. This guarantee, namely the recognition of citizens’ right to work conceived as the state obligation of giving every citizen the means for self-subsistence, is according to Fichte “an axiom of all rational state constitutions”.15 Let us now analyse the link between freedom, property and work in Fichte’s philosophy of law. Fichte considers that the freedom of the citizen depends on his or her subsistence. Subsistence depends on property. So, in order to be effectively free, you have to own something. Property, however, is, for Fichte, not a thing, but productive activity aiming at self-subsistence. Accordingly, you only own what you produce by means of your work. So, in Fichte’s state you are not allowed to own things that are not reached by your work activity. Therefore, in order to guarantee citizens’ exercise of freedom, the state has to guarantee each citizen the monopoly of the use of a part of the territory of the state so that he or she can work on it and consequently develop his or her own freedom, without being disturbed by other citizens. Fichte’s displacement of the meaning of property from an object to an action of the subject establishes the necessary link between property, work and freedom. Since without the possibility of producing the means of subsistence, namely without property and work, there is no effective civil freedom. The state duty to guarantee individual freedoms by means of guaranteeing everyone the right to live on what they produce or earn with their jobs, represents, however, only one side of the coin. That fundamental right of the citizens to an existence worthy of human dignity is accordingly not the other side of the mentioned state duty. Fichte opposes this state duty and this citizen right with a second duty and a second right: the state right to require everyone who wants to be recognized as a citizen to work and the citizen’s duty to work in order to be recognized as such. This relation between state duty and right and citizen duty and right exceeds the limits of a naïve political philosophy, since what is at stake here is actually the very concept of the humanity of the human being. This ontologization of politics should not surprise us, for it is a necessary consequence of both Fichte’s idea of citizenship as a substantial predicate of the human and his premise that freedom 15 Fichte 1796, p. 30.

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primarily reveals itself in, and depends on, working. Hence, what Fichte is actually saying is not merely that the state is not obliged to recognized you as a citizen if you do not work, but rather that if you do not work, the state cannot recognize you as a citizen, because without working – being productive – you cannot show the state that you are a free being. If you are not productive, you are nothing but a being-at-rest. You are certainly released from duties and rights, but at the same time you become politically invisible, which in Fichte’s ontological conception of the political implies that you no longer exist as a free being, since political recognition constitutes accomplished subjectivity. As long as no state recognizes you as a citizen, you are a political and ontological nothing or, in the best case, a living petition for being integrated in humanity. Put in Fichtean obscure and controversial terms: you are a cosmopolitan, a kind of pariah that neither states nor laws can recognize as a citizen.16 Fichte’s concept of political recognition translates the Cartesian identification between being and productivity constituting the very notion of subjectivity into a chain of economic, legal, moral and ontological implications that can be formulated as follows: no work, no property; no property, no freedom; no freedom, no existence as a member of the sovereign and consequently as a citizen, too; no citizenship, no existence as a real human being or as a free being recognized as such.

5. Hegel The last stop of our inquiry into the history of the necessity behind the formula “being = working” is Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), more specifically the famous dialectics of master (Herr) and vassal (Knecht) in the section A of the fourth chapter of this work that corresponds with the figure of the spirit as selfconsciousness.17 Just like Fichte and unlike Descartes, Hegel considers that intersubjectivity in terms of reciprocal recognition produces individual self-consciousness. True selfconsciousness is recognized self-consciousness.18 It represents as such for Hegel the moment of the opening of the human being to the world and to the others. It is, however, self-reflection, but unlike Descartes and following Fichte’s discovery, it is self-reflection necessarily mediated, namely it is not obtained by means of destructive doubt of the external world in general. Nevertheless, Hegel, unlike Fichte, includes in the concept of intersubjectivity the elements of oppression, fear and impossible enjoyment. According to Hegel, subjectivity is not recognized as such exclusively by means of labour. Certainly, Hegel ascribes to labour an emancipative power, but the discovery of this power in human work activity is according to Hegel not a beginning but rather a consequence of two negative experiences: the failing of the 16 Fichte 1797, pp. 267–268, see also Acosta 2018. 17 Hegel 1979, pp. 145–155. 18 Hegel 1979, p. 146.

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individual in the attempt to remain absolute free and its capitulation against a stronger and more courageous contender: death, the absolute master.19 Etymologically, the term emancipation implies that the emancipated subject has been a slave (mancipium). If emancipation is what constitutes the truth of human self-consciousness, then every human being as such is a slave or, better, a vassal – a more adequate translation of the German Knecht. In Hegel’s dialectics of master and vassal, there is a first description of recognition, in which both extremes of the relation of recognition, master and vassal, are represented by human beings.20 But this is merely a provisory situation of recognition in Hegel’s argument, the moment of inequality.21 Since the real master is not the object of a particular, circumstantial fear, namely of that fear that obliges individuals to accept the oppression of specific political, cultural and economic powers. The real master is rather the object of the real and essential fear, the fear of death. This is the fear that makes equality among humans a reality. Hegel describes this fear as “the beginning of wisdom”,22 since it helps individuals to comprehend what finitude is about, to know themselves as mortals and to understand what makes them equals. Death as the absolute master establishes the reign of real and effective equality as the basis for accomplished and not asymmetric recognition. This equality is founded in the recognition of human finitude and mortality. According to Hegel, it is not, however, the fact that we will die that makes us equals, but rather the fact that we have to work in order to exist as recognized rational and free beings. The fear of death is the coercive power behind the unavoidable human duty to work. As mortals, we can never absolutely release ourselves from the chains of the objects nor enjoy in the same manner as the master, since his enjoyment is without any mediation of finitude at all.23 Such an enjoyment when experienced by the mortal is not real but imaginary. Our existence consists of being inevitably attached to the objects. According to Hegel, this situation of dependence appears originally as the result of a compulsive acceptance of the oppressive power of a circumstantial master. However, at the end of the day we should understand that this coercion is self-imposed as an answer to our fundamental fear. The mortal works in order to subsist. So, whereas for Fichte the equivalence between citizen and labourer is eventually a free decision of the political community, for Hegel this equivalence has been decided by the absolute master. Nevertheless, Hegel, like Fichte, proposes a positive interpretation of being as working. We are all certainly vassal, but because of this we have the possibility of emancipation. This emancipation does not correspond with absolute freedom, it is rather a kind of liberation within the limits of finitude; freedom in the world of objects. It is not emancipation from working, but emancipation from the passivity 19 20 21 22 23

Hegel Hegel Hegel Hegel Hegel

1979, 1979, 1979, 1979, 1979,

p. p. p. p. p.

152. 149. 146. 152. 150.

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in our dealing with the objects: emancipation by means of creative productivity. Unlike the master, unlike death, human beings can creatively handle objects and so, by means of labour, they can transform the earth into a world and fill the void of meaning – this strange feeling of not knowing whom we actually are working for – with culture products such as arts, religion and ideology.24 This is the reason why the vassal and not the master represents a progress in the history of what Hegel calls spirit. This is the reason why he affirms that “the truth of autonomous consciousness is therefore the servant-consciousness”.25

6. Concluding remarks In the three analysed moments of the event that I briefly formulate with the statement “being is working and working is being”, we can observe how the necessity of the identity between being and working grows in the philosophical understanding of the human between the 17th and the 19th centuries. The absolutely autonomous and free Cartesian productive activity that distinguished the res cogitans from res extensa develops into labour as a productive activity legally, culturally and materially conditioned. Just as the Cartesian doubt, labour distinguishes the human from the non-human. Just as the Cartesian doubt, work activity is not a specification of being in general, but the substantial predicate of the human being. As human beings, we cannot not work. Defending, on the contrary, a nostalgic view of the human as something more than “a class of labourers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital”26 is certainly a personal choice that deserves respect and (why not) arouses admiration. However, such an attitude towards my own finitude should not be anything but my individual truth, a fantasy that shows its limitations when confronted to the universality and necessity of the truth expressed by the identity between working and being. Unlike Aristotle’s economical distinction between, on the one hand, the ones who have to work in order to exist – artisans, physicians – and, on the other, the ones who need leisure for their subsistence – priests, scientists and philosophers27 – we, (post-)modern subjects, we all have to work in order to exist. For us, there is no difference between physical and intellectual work. Not only migrants, but also European kings and queens as well as their families have to work. And because of this, even they, including the Pope, have the right to retirement. We usually do not think about such issues. We constantly forget that we live in a world where a Pope instead of being murdered or of merely resigning, can retire and become emeritus. This would have been a scandal in other times. But, nowadays, we all have become labourers. 24 25 26 27

Hegel 1979, pp. 153–154. Hegel 1979, p. 151. Marx & Engels 2010, p. 18. Aristotle 1957, 981b.

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Bibliography Acosta, E. (2018) “Revisiting Kant and Fichte’s Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism”. Revista de Estud(i)os sobre Fichte [online], 16 (inv(i)erno). URL: http://journals.openedition. org/ref/805 Aristotle (1957) Metaphysica. Recognovit brevique anotatione critica instruxit W. Jaeger. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Descartes, R. (1654) Meditationes de prima philosophia. Amstelodami: apud Ludovicum Elzevirium. Fichte, J. G. (1796) Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wisseschaftslehre. Jena und Leipzig: bei Christian Gabler. Fichte, J. G. (1797) Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wisseschaftslehre. Zweiter Teil oder Angewandtes Naturrechts. Jena und Leipzig: bei Christian Gabler. Fichte, J. G. (1802) Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre. Neue unveränderte Aufgabe. Tübingen: Cotta. Fichte, J. G. (1970) Briefwechsel 1793–1795. Hrsg. v. R. Lauth und H. Jacob. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog Verlag. Gaudio, M. (2010) “El estado natural del hombre es el Estado”. Revista de Estud(i)os sobre Fichte [online], 1 (verano/verão). URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ref/324 Hegel, G.W.F. (1979) Phänomenologie des Geistes in: Werke in 20 Bänden. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, vol. 3. Hobbes, Th. (1651) Leviathan. London, printed for A. Crooke at the Green Dragon in St. Pauls Church-yard. Kant, I. (1787) Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Zweyten hin und wieder verbesserten Auflage. Toga: Hartknoch. Marx, K. & Engels, Fr. (2010) Manifesto of the Communist Party. [online] Transl. by S. Moore in cooperation with Fr. Engels, and corrected by A. Blunden. Marxists Internet Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Chapter 2

Work, pensions and transgenerational justice Tiziana Andina

1. Labor market 4.0 We have been promised happiness, freedom and emancipation: things that humans, at least in theory, aspire to. Freedom from invasive physical constraints (which would also create emancipation) and freedom from many manual arduous jobs that would be replaced by machines and artificial intelligence. Technological development would facilitate mobility and speed, freeing us from having to perform the most strenuous and exhausting tasks. Lastly, artificial intelligence would work hand in hand with natural intelligence, and humans would think more and work less. The overall vision or, in any case, the positive narrative of this project, sees technological development as a fundamental tool to achieve the net improvement of people’s quality of life. And yet, as history shows, things didn’t quite go as expected. The promise of happiness offered by technological development, for instance, was kept only to a small extent because, as often happens, things have taken an unexpected turn. Consider wealth, for example: if it is true that new wealth has been produced, it is equally true that its redistribution has been minimal and certainly not sufficient. Moreover, in a world that is largely globalized and extremely sophisticated in terms of technology, complexity ends up being the element that characterizes the social structure and dynamic in decisive ways. Culture and education are probably the only really useful tools to effectively navigate in contexts of this kind. Now, it’s not a bad thing if human beings must invest in their culture in order to really be able to dominate the complexity that surrounds them. Likewise, it’s not a bad thing if the less sophisticated jobs are gradually outsourced to machines in societies 4.0. After all, machines do not get tired, they are subject to less “wear and tear” than human beings, they do not protest for low wages, they generally do not get sick and are rarely replaced. In other words, they are highly performing and economically advantageous objects: they do not get tired, they can work non-stop, they are not subject to irritability or mood swings and they die differently from human beings. In this situation two things have progressively emerged: firstly, that human beings often resist their improvement due to their natural disposition or because

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the social condition makes this process particularly burdensome for them. Secondly, that the result of this resistance has led, in many circumstances, to a worsening of social inequality, since the gap between prestigious, well-paid intellectual jobs on the one hand and precarious, poorly paid and manual jobs on the other hand has not only grown but has also given way to a process of progressive desertification of the human factor. In fact, machines are gradually replacing human beings, so those who wish to carry out work with a low intellectual content often find it impossible to do so, as they are replaced by better performing and more efficient machines. And there is a second point worth considering: the serious risk of precarization that new generations have been facing for over fifteen years now. In a highly competitive world, in which people and things move in very short times and in which industrial production is able to reach very high numbers, the price of the transformation of production cycles has often been paid by workers. Apart from a few exceptions that, not coincidentally, play the role of monopolists or semimonopolists in the reference market, most companies produce based on the market’s demand. The workers, therefore, are often considered functional for the purpose, i.e. to meet a given production threshold or the objectives set by the market. Therefore, companies usually identify a fixed quota of people who support production on a permanent basis and who represent the main structure of the company, and then a variable quota that is asked to work only in case of need. This latter quota of workers is destined either to be kept precariously in view of a potential increase of demand, or to be dismissed when the demand drops. The significant fact from the scientific point of view, which is very upsetting from the point of view of social balance, is that the share of precarious workers is becoming ever wider. This is true in both the private and the public sectors. To give an idea of how paradoxical the situation is, it will suffice to mention a typical Italian real-life case: it involves Federica, Alessandra, Laura and Andrea,1 who for some time have “worked” for the National Library of Rome, the largest Italian library. The fact that they worked for the National Library means that they were entrusted with the tasks that are normally entrusted to a librarian. Nevertheless – i.e. despite the fact that they were workers who performed completely normal tasks – the institution treated them as phantom workers. In fact, they worked without being recognized either from an economic point of view – the remuneration was not the standard one in the sector either as regards the agreed minimum wage, or as to the methods of payment – or from a social point of view. They were not considered workers, but rather volunteers. All of them, in fact, were not formally public employees, although they worked for the public sector. In fact, they weren’t even employees – indeed, looking closer, they weren’t even workers. As shown by the journalistic investigation that brought media attention to the case, for more than five years Federica, Alessandra, 1

Complete data can be found in the journalistic investigation published by R. Ciccarelli in “Il Manifesto” on 4 June 2014, entitled “How to kill a national library”.

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Laura and Andrea were paid in vouchers: they were given about €400 for a 24-hour part-time job. Technically, therefore, they were not workers, yet they worked. They were classified as volunteers of the “Avaca” – Association of voluntary cultural and environmental activities, an association that looked suspiciously like a supplier of skilled labor. The concept of hidden workers, unfortunately, appears in large number of cases. It also applies to those young people who start a traineeship or an internship: in this case the basic idea is that the training comes at a price and that, in some way, the worker must pay for it. The logic is roughly the following: the worker accepts to be paid well below average so that, in exchange, they can receive training in a given area. Sometimes the worker even literally pays to work; more frequently, they accept to work almost for free, because the idea is that the main remuneration lies in the transfer of competences they learn. These few examples give a good idea of how the forms of work have become, over time, much more difficult to define. In other words, it has become a lot harder to answer a whole number of questions about the nature of work and workers, for example: who really works? And when do they do so? Can we identify specific places assigned to work? Or, again, why do we need to define “volunteers” people who work every day for years on end? Other questions concern the role that institutions play in the creation, protection and reinterpretation of work: for example, why does the state not assume the burden of protecting labour? Why, indeed, does the state very often engage in unreported employment or employment in conditions that are detrimental to personal dignity, as in the case of the “volunteers” for the National Library? In this regard, despite the fact that the traditional definition of labour has remained substantially unchanged – “a human activity aimed at the production of goods, wealth, or in any case a product of individual or general utility” – two seemingly strange things are happening. On the one hand, the most widespread trend is to remunerate, in terms of money and rights, only highly qualified labor, the kind that cannot be replaced by a machine. On the other hand, there is a tendency to dramatically make unskilled work precarious and undignified, which is exactly what happened to the workers of the National Library and what happens every day to thousands of young interns. So let’s start from here, or rather from the fact that in societies 4.0 the definition of work has not changed, and what has changed, rather, are the places, times and knowledge related to work. As for the places of labour, it is easy to say what’s changed: a good internet connection is now all that is needed to work and the workplace can be anywhere. Since work is no longer rigidly bound to defined places, working times have also become more flexible: if the place is changeable, time is completely expandable, provided the work dynamics require it. It is now possible to work from home with a certain ease, and in the not too distant future it will probably be possible to transform even one’s car into a mobile and perfectly connected workplace. This is what self-driving cars are pointing to: once driving and transporting passengers are tasks automatically taken care of, cars will end up becoming mobile offices, connected and perfectly equipped.

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While the twentieth century world clearly separated the places and times of work from the places and times of private life, the century we are going through, on the contrary, is characterized by a progressive and, apparently, irreversible blurring of borders: working from home is presented as, and perhaps in some respects is, an opportunity that should allow for greater flexibility. And yet it comes with a downside. The house itself can turn into a vice-office, with working time mixing with the time of personal life. Furthermore, for those precarious workers available to employers on request, home can become the actual workplace. When the boss calls, it is enough to sit in the living room and work from there. It goes without saying that for this type of worker flexibility comes with – among other things – a sense of isolation. Flexibility is therefore the keyword, which truly clarifies the dynamics in progress. Places are flexible because technologies are mobile, times are flexible and are less and less linked to places, wages are flexible because they depend directly on the amount of work secured by the worker. So, from a conceptual point of view work remains the same type of thing, but the truth is that, in reality, practically everything has changed. Not for everyone, though – or at least not for everyone in the same way. For example, things are noticeably worse for those who are about to enter the job market – i.e. young people. And, if we fail to reverse this trend, things will be even worse for future generations. This situation triggers a series of problems in terms of social justice, as it is not uncommon that the labor market presents inequality with regard to the fundamental rights enjoyed by workers. What follows is very often a social structure divided into two large groups: on the one hand, a labor market made up of – often older – workers who can boast a series of rights and protections that safeguard their professional lives; on the other hand, new generations who are very slow to find stability and therefore enjoy no protection or rights of any kind. In addition to being necessarily flexible, young people remain precarious for a long time: in many European countries stabilization is achieved at an increasingly advanced age. I define this phenomenon as “transgenerational inequality”, i.e. a permanent condition of injustice between generations that characterizes the contemporary labor market. Transgenerational inequality in the labor market implies not only that given the same working conditions two individuals may enjoy different rights, but also – in most cases – that some workers (i.e. young people) undergo a significant reduction in welfare, for example in relation to the enjoyment of certain rights or of pension coverage. To be clear, flexible jobs (in time and space) are also those that generally entail reduced access to welfare, despite the fact that these jobs, as with all others, contribute to the collective well-being in terms of general taxation. The thesis that I would like to support is that the cause of this situation of transgenerational inequality – or of an unbalanced relationship between generations for what concerns some important questions of justice – is a deficit of transgenerationality, i.e. a general underestimation of the crucial importance held by transgenerational links and actions within our societies.

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2. What is transgenerationality? Political thought has traditionally given a fundamental value to the defense of space: as is known, in fact, the modern state was born exactly through a process of delimiting boundaries and building national identities through separation. The core of this process is fear, which is rightly considered one of the emotions of the political sphere par excellence. Building a barrier that separates us from the other is tantamount to identifying a “we” and to delimiting the space containing this “we” so as to be able to protect it. Lastly, it means leveraging on political and social emotions so that they may take on a positive and active aspect rather than being purely reactional. In the Hobbesian model, the defense of the political space culminates in the delegation of the right to self-defense. At the end of the state formation process, Leviathan has the right and the power to defend the citizens and the space that contains them. Moreover, it has the mission to last in time: whatever happens, Leviathan must last throughout the millennia to come, regardless of any generational change. People and generations pass, Leviathan doesn’t – at most it changes in order to last. A commonwealth is said to be instituted when a multitude of men do agree, and covenant, every one with every one, that to whatsoever man or assembly of man, shall be given by the major part the right to present the person of them all, i.e. to be their representative; every one, as well he voted for it as he voted against it, shall authorize all the actions and judgments of that man, or assembly of men, in the same manner as if they were his own, to the end to live peaceably amongst themselves, and be protected against other men.2 Hobbes returns several times to the idea that Leviathan is an indestructible entity, since, ultimately, no one would have the power or the ability to deconstruct it. The basic idea, therefore, is that the state lasts over time because, if it didn’t, given the characteristics of human nature, there would be many reasons to fear the return to a bellum omnium contra omnes. Western democracies have equipped themselves with effective tools so that citizens have the opportunity to re-examine some of the foundations and dynamics of common life; nevertheless, the question of duration in time remains crucial, just as the concept of state (or metastate) which underlies the possibility of an institution lasting over time. Hobbes believed that the question of duration was linked to the sole need to guarantee the defense of a population. In reality, in complex societies such as the present ones the theme of durability appears to go hand in hand with the question of justice between different generations. Lasting means not only resisting, but also implementing types of social actions that envisage transgenerational cooperation: in fact, if, for example, a certain generation incurs a considerable public debt for whatever reason, that debt will have to be repaid at least in part by generations that have neither incurred nor wanted it. In this sense, collaboration between generations is a necessary condition so that 2

Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by C. B. Macpherson 1968, chp. XVIII.

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the fundamental objective – in our example, to incur a debt that allows for a given problem to be resolved – can be reached. Without the reasonable certainty that: (1) future generations will exist; and (2) these generations will agree to keep the commitments made by those who preceded them, there would be no such thing as the public debt of a state, so it would not be possible enjoy in a time x advantages whose cost we know will be sustained at a time y. The collaboration or, better, the link between different generations therefore lies in things, i.e. in the foundations of the social structure itself. This being the case, it is evident that there is a question of transgenerational justice to be answered, in relation to decisions and actions that have been made by a group of people – for example by a certain generation – but have significant consequences on the life of different generations. States guarantee the possibility of actions involving a considerable duration in time, since the state, contrary to individuals, has the faculty to last for all the time necessary for a certain action to be carried out. Therefore, it is evident that the questions of justice implicated in this particular performativity are different from those that depend on, or are connected to, the decisions or actions of an individual or of a certain group of people. Based on what we have already said, it is therefore clear that states cannot but pay particular attention not only to the structure of actions that have a transgenerational character, but also to the related questions of justice. Now, if lasting over time is strategic to achieve the state’s objectives, it is also true that what is strategic in theory is not always pursued in concrete political action. The preservation and management of power in Western democracies is an exemplary case in this sense: a central concern in the actions of governments is in fact the maintenance of consensus that, for the most part, comes with actions based on short-term planning. In other words, these are actions that often aimed at obtaining consensus from the voters and follow a short-term logic that is blind to transgenerationality: they do not express the conviction that the correct management of transgenerational relationships and bonds should be among the priorities of a government. This sounds like a real paradox because, as we mentioned earlier, the state’s primary concern, by definition, should be to deal with the transgenerational issue. What emerges, therefore, is an intrinsic conflict, relative to interests and objectives, between state and government: governments, in general, neglect and systematically disregard the importance of the adoption of a transgenerational perspective, favoring, on the contrary, policies aimed at generating and consolidating consensus. Instead, from the perspective of the state, the implementation of policies attentive to transgenerationality is vital both for the duration of the state and for the consolidation of social justice. On this point, therefore, governments and states diverge. Let us try to see why, by first of all trying to understand the nature of transgenerationality; i.e. by trying to understand what we are talking about when we talk about transgenerationality. So let’s try to answer the question: What is transgenerationality?. To understand the nature of transgenerationality it can be useful to start from its opposite, i.e.

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from societies that show clear insensitivity to transgenerationality. In these societies, people and institutions have little sensitivity for issues that involve collaboration between generations. In other words, these societies show little or no attention to decisions or actions whose consequences may have wide repercussions on the quality of life of generations to follow. Transgenerationality is therefore a social bond based on a double recognition: the transgenerational relationship that links parents to children (the so-called primary transgenerationality),3 but also the bond that unites different generations that belong to the same political place (secondary transgenerationality). However, while primary transgenerationality is a biological constraint, secondary transgenerationality is a social constraint that binds one generation to the other constituting the condition of possibility of the existence of states and metastases: if there were no generational passage, every state would have a duration limited to the life of a generation. Instead, willy-nilly, generations do collaborate – perhaps, in most cases, it is more correct to say that they make demands in terms of the use of economic resources, natural and environmental resources, and trust. If this is true – and it is – then it is necessary that the political action implemented by the states (we have seen how governments find themselves in a situation of greater difficulty) take into account the fact that the transgenerational constraint exists and indeed is one of the conditions that allows states to last over time. Therefore it must be taken into account not only when a generation makes demands from another, for example claiming rights, but also when it has to respect the duties that come with those rights. Let’s go back to the example of non-transgenerationality. The job market is a rather vague entity – a bit like the art world – composed of multiple actors, whose duties generally vary. Some seek work, some are employed, some have stopped looking for a job, some work by helping others find a job – such as recruitment agencies, private or public companies which continually seek workers, form them and draw from them the human capital they need to achieve their objectives. And many more. The transgenerational bond within the job market takes on at least two forms: that which involves the transfer of competences from one generation to another, and that which involves the “collaboration” between those who work and those who are retired, i.e. those who have worked for many years and are now living on their pension. This pension, as known, is paid for by active workers, according to an exemplary transgenerational exchange. In this respect, I think it’s interesting to consider an old Italian case. It was 1973. The Rumor government issued a provision that would go by the name of “baby pensions”: the D.P.R 1092 (see, in particular, article 42).4 This provision granted extremely generous conditions for the retirement of certain categories of public employees: 14 years, 6 months and 1 day was the amount of working time needed for married women with children to be able to retire. Other public 3 4

For a deeper analysis of the issues related to primary transgenerationality, see Schützenberger 1998. For the full text, see http://www.comune.jesi.an.it/MV/leggi/dpr1092-73.htm

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employees had to have worked for 20 years, while local government employees needed 25 years of paid contributions. The anticipated pension opportunity was exploited by around 400,000 people, for an annual expenditure that was estimated to be around €7.5 billion a year. The baby pensions were repealed in 1992 by the Amato government, when Italy risked a currency crisis that induced the government to draw up a maneuver based on the revision of the pension system, on the introduction of a property tax and on a general withdrawal from people’s bank accounts. The pension directive came with heavy and protracted consequences: there were consequences in terms of expenditure, since a considerable amount of public money was used to pay pensions for people who were still fully productive and who could easily have continued to work for another 25 years, contributing to the country’s wealth; and there were consequences in terms of justice between generations, since the following generations, besides having to bear part of the expense to pay for the baby pensions, were subjected to far less advantageous pension treatments, both in economic terms and in terms of rights, for example with reference to their retirement age. In other words, they had to retire much later and got much lower pensions, so as to allow for the sustainability of the system. The dramatic fact, from a perspective of transgenerational justice, was that the provision had effectively contributed to putting the entire system at risk of unsustainability. In order to continue to allow for early retirement in the long term – i.e. to be able to grant it to future generations as well, as would have been the case from the standpoint of equality – some factors should have jointly occurred: the curve of residents in Italy should have remained positive, and in addition to this, obviously, economic growth should have remained sustained. Instead, the opposite happened: in the 1970s, the growth of the resident population started to slow down substantially until it stopped in the 1980s (see Figure 2.1). The lowest level was reached in 2017 (see Figure 2.2). 62.000.000

62.000.000

55.800.000

55.800.000

49.600.000

49.600.000

43.400.000

43.400.000

37.200.000

37.200.000

31.000.000

31.000.000

24.800.000

24.800.000

18.600.000

18.600.000

12.400.000 1861 1871 1881

12.400.000 1901 1911 1921

'31 '36

1951 1961 1971 1981 1991 2001 2011

Poplazione residente ai censimenti ITALIA - Dati ISTAT - Elaborazione TUTTITALIA.IT

Figure 2.1 Growth of the resident population in Italy: 1861–2011, ISTAT data Note: Resident population trend, ISTAT data at December 31 each year (https://www.istat.it/en/). Source: ISTAT (http://www.programmazioneeconomica.gov.it/2018/12/20/andamenti-lungo-p eriodo-economia-italiana/#Debito%20pubblico).

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61.000.000 60.500.000 60.000.000 59.500.000 59.000.000 58.500.000 58.000.000 57.500.000 57.000.000 56.500.000 56.000.000 2001

02

03

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11(*)

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Andamento della popolazione residente ITALIA - Dati ISTAT al 31 dicembre di ogni anno - Elaborazione TUTTITALIA.IT (*) post-censimento

Figure 2.2 Growth of the resident population in Italy: 2001–2017, ISTAT data Note: Resident population trend, ISTAT data at December 31 each year (https://www.istat.it/en/). Source: ISTAT (http://www.programmazioneeconomica.gov.it/2018/12/20/andamenti-lungo-perio do-economia-italiana/#Debito%20pubblico).

The statistical projection of the demographic trend up to 2065 is shown in Figure 2.3. In this context, the gross domestic product (GDP), as is easy to imagine, did not fare any better: the debt/GDP ratio has been growing steadily from the 1970s until 1994, and has then started to rise again since 2008 (see Figure 2.4).5 With regard to the trend of public expenditure in relation to social benefits and pensions, in Figure 2.5, the lower line clearly shows a gradual decrease in employees of the public administration, while the upper line shows a progressive increase in expense items dedicated to social benefits and pensions since the 1980s. Looking at these data, the situation does not appear to be very promising. In fact, by cross-referencing the data, it can be concluded that since the 1970s the Italian debt has progressively worsened due to high public expenditure (the pension sector being one of the items with significant impact). This was accompanied by a significant reduction in the birth rate, a considerable increase in the age of the population and a progressive reduction in GDP. The question at this point is the following: could all this have been predicted in 1973, at the time of the Rumor provision? As Hans Jonas shows,6 when we talk about transgenerational issues – such as pensions – because the consequences of a 5

6

For an interesting dynamic comparison of the trends of the economies of the main industrialized countries between 1960 and 2017, cf. the World GDP by Country, http://digg.com/video/top-10-countries-by-gdp-1960-2017 Cf. Jonas 1984. Jonas addresses the question of the importance of the future for the structuring of social models, focusing above all on the role and potential of technology. The basic thesis, in essence, is this: since technological development has consistently accelerated the human possibilities of intervention on nature, and since technical development has been able to alter the deep balances of nature, humankind must take on the task of making predictions that envision, and prevent, the most negative consequences. For Jonas, therefore, constructing the social world means first of all taking charge of the consequences of social decisions and actions, thereby dealing with the future.

Proiezioni ISTAT sull’evoluzione della popolazione in Italia (ricostruzione della popazione residente al 1 gennaio fino al 2017, poi proiezioni 2018) 63000000 Massima

61000000 59000000

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PROIEZIONI

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Figure 2.3 Projection of the demographic trend up to 2065 Note: The graph shows the evolution of the total population residing in Italy on 1 January every year, from 1960 to 2017 (Italians and foreigners), as reconstructed by ISTAT. Starting from 2018, the graph shows three of the demographic projections developed by ISTAT up to 2065: the median is in the middle, between two projections in terms of the highest and lowest possible trends foreseen by ISTAT. Source: ISTAT (http://www.programmazioneeconomica.gov.it/2018/12/20/andamenti-lungo-perio do-economia-italiana/#Debito%20pubblico).

Italia: % Debito/PIL (1861–2015) 160,00% 140,00% 120,00% 100,00% 80,00% 60,00% 40,00% 20,00% 1861 1868 1875 1882 1889 1896 1903 1910 1917 1924 1931 1938 1945 1952 1959 1966 1973 1980 1987 1994 2001 2008 2015

0,00%

Figure 2.4 Italian debt/GDP ratio (1861–2015) Source: ISTAT (http://www.programmazioneeconomica.gov.it/2018/12/20/andamenti-lungo-perio do-economia-italiana/#Debito%20pubblico).

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Prestazioni sociali, pensioni e redditi da lavoro dispendente nella PA in % del PIL dati Istat, Eurostat e Banca d’Italia, tendenziale DEF 2018 Prestazioni sociali (pensioni e altre prestazioni sociali)

20 18 16 14 12 10

Redditi da lavoro dipendente nella PA

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Figure 2.5 Social benefits, pensions and employment income in public administration (percentage of GDP) Note: The graph shows the evolution of public expenditure on employees in the public administration and the expenditure on social benefits, where the expenditure on pensions is the most significant component. Source: ISTAT (http://www.programmazioneeconomica.gov.it/2018/12/20/andamenti-lungo-perio do-economia-italiana/#Debito%20pubblico), Eurostat, Bank of Italy.

decision in this regard can be seen over a very long time, the worst forecasts must be carefully considered when making any decision. The Italian government, embodied by Rumor and the whole Parliament, did not do so and preferred to make a choice that would guarantee broad consensus to the governing parties. Government and Parliament did not live up to the task of governing for the good of the state, of their fellow citizens and especially of future citizens. 2.1. Transgenerational inequality There are still some considerations to be made on questions of justice – in this specific case, it would be better to say social injustice – raised by this provision. The pension system of a country represents an important piece of the welfare system, which is difficult to keep in balance. When establishing the age for retirement, it is mandatory to think about the consequences of this decision in a dual sense: on the one hand, one needs to think about the sphere of social justice, taking into account the different types of jobs, the degree of labor they require, gender differences and so on. On the other hand, one needs to consider the aim to pursue justice between generations: i.e. parents and children ought to be placed in similar conditions with respect to the rights they enjoy and the duties to which they are subject.

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Now, considering the Italian pension system, one can easily verify the numerous reforms it has undergone.7 Let us briefly consider the fundamental stages of this transformation. Social security in Italy was born in 1898 with the aim of protecting workers from invalidity and old age. In 1919 the insurance for disability and old age became mandatory for private employees. The institution of invalidity and old-age pension was introduced, along with compulsory unemployment insurance. Between 1927 and 1941 the Wage Supplementation Fund was introduced, to protect the earnings of people who lost their jobs; the age limit to obtain an oldage pension was increased to 60 for men and 55 for women; the survivor’s pension was also established. In the period from 1968 to 1972, the retributive system based on the last salaries received replaced the contributory system. An old-age pension and a social pension were now paid out to all citizens over the age of 65 and below a certain income threshold. In 1992 the minimum retirement age was raised to 65 for men and women, bringing the insurance contribution to 20 years. Starting from 1995 a series of corrections were introduced aiming to calculate pensions based on some principles: the amount of the contributions paid during working life, the expected duration of the pension benefit, and life expectancy. Starting from the second half of the 1990s, the basic idea was that, while not losing sight of the centrality of the pension system, the increase in life expectancy should affect the ways to calculate the retirement checks. And, in fact, at least in theory, if people do have a greater life expectancy and a better quality of life, they can hopefully remain active in the workplace for longer. This is true at least in general terms, with due exceptions in individual cases or in relation to certain categories of workers. However, despite this general trend, the Rumor government allowed a whole generation to leave the workplace prematurely, setting the conditions to create a situation of true generational injustice, especially to the detriment of those citizens who not could no longer enjoy the same rights (the social composition in the meantime had changed significantly, as the aging of the population meant that people enjoyed retirement checks for a longer time), but who also had to pay for the rights of those baby-pensioners at the expense of their own. If we assume that an individual has to work for their own and for the collective well-being until the approach of old age, we can agree that the age limit to retire may vary in reference to different factors, but nevertheless should not replace work too early. This is not so much because of some vague paternalism about the idea that humans should prefer work to idleness – indeed, in ancient societies work was left to slaves, while the otium was considered by far the most noble activity since in idleness it was possible to dedicate oneself to one’s formation and to cultivate literacy. Rather, more prosaically, it is because a system in which the age of the population grows, the birthrate keeps decreasing and immigration fails to make up for the loss of active population can only be sustainable if people work (and therefore support themselves) for as long as possible. This guarantees that at the 7

Source: INPS, https://www.inps.it/nuovoportaleinps/default.aspx?sPathID=%3b0% 3b51646%3b&lastMenu=51646&iMenu=11&p4=2

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appropriate time, i.e. in the phase of life in which they really must be supported through passive income, people can actually be protected. Social justice means first of all protecting those who need it when they actually need it, implementing a reliable system so that this is always possible, for all generations.

Bibliography Hobbes, Thomas. 1968. Leviathan, The Pelican Classics, AC 2. Ed. by C. B. Macpherson, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jonas, Hans. 1984. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schützenberger, A.A. 1998. The Ancestor Syndrome: Transgenerational Psychotherapy and the Hidden Links in the Family Tree. London: Routledge.

Chapter 3

The disclosure of humanity Challenges of the digital turn Angela Condello

1. (Mis)Understanding When, more than sixty years ago now, Hannah Arendt and Günther Anders reflected on the impact of technology on humankind and society – and, more specifically, when they worked on the changes produced by new forms of work and automation – they both insisted on one aspect: observing the change is not enough (Arendt 1958, Anders [1980] 2002). Changes must be interpreted, understood, processed, and metabolized. It is our duty, as human beings, to think about and through the change. Humankind, in other words, has two choices: either we are subject and we suffer from the consequences of new economic and working balances, or we try to formalize the changes first and foremost at a conceptual level. Given the two options, in other words, we are to observe the change and, if necessary, to formulate a new conceptual frame through which it can be described. As a matter of fact, when faced with challenges – cultural, societal, economic, political, juridical – we could also choose to interpret that change through pre-existing conceptual frames; but that, according to Arendt and Anders, would produce problems in the social and economic relations. Which is why, on the contrary, human beings should instead be concerned with the reconceptualization of their frame of reference in order to elaborate the change, and go through it with less devastating consequences. In the present era, we are undoubtedly called to rephrase the vocabulary and conceptual frame concerning the working conditions of human beings. And in particular if we are, as in the case of the present volume, to interpret the forms of subjectivity emerging with (and from) the so-called “gig economy” – i.e. the labour market characterized by the prevalence of short-term contracts or freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs – with the categories of labour typical of precedent economic models, the result would be a failure. And yet, that is what happens most of the time. With shifting paradigms, the political and juridical vocabulary through which humankind and human relations are defined and through which lives are regulated (and protected) should shift, too. But the timings are different and so we find ourselves in some sort of “conceptual-short-circuit” in which – for example, to stick with the topic discussed in the present

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chapter – we try to understand whether sending an email, or writing a project for a start-up, can be considered as “work”. In order to analyze this “conceptualshort-circuit” and to eventually propose a solution for it, I shall resort to Hannah Arendt’s tripartite system on the human condition and on human engagement, trying to observe the superimpositions and confusions between the three terms through which she deconstructed this field: labour, work and action.

2. Indeterminate subjectivities: no time, no space, no clear task In the following series of remarks I will focus on (some of) the consequences produced on the identity of contemporary workers by what can be roughly defined as the “digitalization” of society (Romele and Terrone, 2018). The type of phenomena addressed here is, thus, partial: such a premise might sound a little prosaic, and yet it is necessary, since the forms of professional and economic relations (today) are so various and ambiguous that the paradigm shift addressed here cannot (and does not aim to) cover all working subjects and conditions. Before mentioning the main attributes of the type of working subject imagined here, another premise is necessary: what is defined as “digital society” is basically the world we live in, today. At the turn of the century, there was a substantial rise of digital media and such turn has produced relevant consequences on our way of living, working and interacting (Romele and Terrone 2018, 3). Most of the media we use in our daily life started digitalizing: press, phonograpy, photography and cinema. This means that texts, sounds and pictures are no longer recorded as analogue traces but rather as sequences of bits. Digital media have become the most important interfaces between the world and us. As far as the ways of interacting and working are concerned, digital media have introduced new ways of widening our horizons. In fact, emails, the web and social media are not just extensions of other media: by embedding traditional media such as writing, depiction and sound recording, they have profoundly transformed them and, consequently, they have transformed our way of talking, crafting, projecting and creating (Romele and Terrone 2018, 3 and ff.). Digital media have altered our relationship to the world, to the others and to ourselves. In addition to this, they are more than (mere) mediators: many of them are also interlocutors. We can collect information through them, and we can circulate information autonomously. Most importantly, and as far as the present volume is concerned, the technological paradigm shift has changed people’s availability and capacity of working: it has changed the entire relationship to work. In case of professional profiles that foresee tasks such as sending and replying to emails, or writing and sharing materials online, or working on data available through the web – individuals can work basically anywhere, and at any time. Furthermore, the main aspects characterizing life in the era of digital media are: (i) the continuous possibility of interacting; and (ii) the autonomy. Henceforth, contemporary subjects might seem to have more freedom than former generations.

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(i) On the one hand, if people used to work in an office or factory, from 9 am until 5 pm, today things tend to be very different – and will continue to change progressively (Ciccarelli 2017, 47). The condition of permanent interaction and communication is producing what has been defined as a feeling of “mobilization” (Ferraris, 2015), i.e. the fact that people can be asked to do something for their work also in the evening and during weekends. Or they can feel the urge to do something for their work also out of their working time. (ii) On the other hand, “autonomy” refers to the fact that potentially, the working subject can be transformed into an enterprise. We could all become entrepreneurs of ourselves. The new imperatives of the anthropology of the contemporary worker seem to be: initiative, creativity, availability, flexibility, capacity to learn, capacity to adapt, dynamism. Space, time and specific tasks no longer correspond to the structural foundations of the profession. The transition we are experiencing is thus pretty difficult to define; as it often happens in similar situations, we use words that aim at defining the paradigm shift (and that remain, for former generations, quite obscure). For instance, we say that today many workers are “freelance”: and we use this term, ‘freelance’, also in Italian, or French, or German. The word defines a hybrid category of subjects that – during the day – face very different questions and are challenged by very different tasks: their job does not correspond to one single task. These subjects constitutively use different languages and codes, and (must) work with different rhythms. In brief, the new working conditions are often characterized, for the type of subjects considered, by a mixture of initiative, creativity and permanent mobilization. The distinction between vita activa and vita contemplativa, i.e. between more “active” operations and more “reflective” ones, is blurred. These two forms of life, action and contemplation, are described by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1958): vita activa comprehends all human activities and reflects the ancient (specifically: Greek) condition of who is unquiet, i.e. for instance of who is engaged with political or working activity or with other forms of non-contemplation. Similarly, with reference to an ancient conception of life and public engagement, the idea of vita contemplativa expresses the time devoted to contemplation and to the observation of what has not been made, artificially, by man. Although they were considered as reciprocally necessary in ancient Greece, these two forms of life were considered distinct: work would fall into the type of activity defining the vita activa, with its aims and tasks of making and producing something. On the contrary, contemporary forms of life are characterized by a fusion of the two: though in contemplation, we could be thinking of a new project or idea to realize. Being engaged at both levels of action and contemplation seems to be the new categorical imperative. In other words, both vita activa and vita contemplativa have lost their original meaning and are currently going through a hybridization due to the blurred threshold between work and non-work. Workers such as independent contractors and freelance, or the “mini-jobbers” of the gig economy, or the workers on call and the self-employed, and likewise all those subjects who work within a project (with continuous deadlines and tasks to accomplish) – have

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a hard time distinguishing between the actions for which they receive a salary and those that are intended to create new networks, relations and possibilities, so potentially new working engagements. They often invest their time in order to build their position. In any case and at any time, they are engaged with their body and their psychic energies. Inasmuch as automation – in precedent industrial revolutions – had gradually dismantled the relations between human gestures and actions, and the product of those gestures and actions, the results of contemporary work are often untangible. Particularly if we consider the cases of freelance workers or the human beings involved in programmes such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. How could we describe the actions and gestures of those working subjects? What do they actually do?

3. Disclosure of humanity The blurred boundaries between doing and non-doing are at the core of Hannah Arendt’s anthropological philosophy. For her, all aspects of the vita activa can be the source of a new beginning. Among the different activities in which we can be involved, action in particular is the one characterizing humanity and distinguishing it from other living forms. It is through the initiative that makes our life “active” – that a disclosure of the unique “who” of each agent is possible. In The Human Condition, the political theorist reconstructs the active dimension of the human condition, which she differentiates into three functions: labour, work and action. Here we find the renowned definition of these three concepts (Arendt 1958, 7): With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labour, work and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man. 1

2

3

Labour is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labour. The human condition of labour is life itself. Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness. Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam – of all political life.

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In other words, labour constitutes the foundation of the vita activa: it lies at the bottom of the hierarchy of the functions-operations that constitute the vita activa. Labour sustains (biological) life: it involves eating, digesting, taking care of the body. All the activities aimed at maintaining or reproducing life must be considered, for Arendt, labour (planting seeds, buying food, taking care of the children). Work, on the other hand, constitutes and defines the world inhabited by human beings. People who work make things: in her account, work tends to correspond with craft. Workers make objects that are durable, that persist. What she has in mind are real, mundane and material objects (tables, buildings) and also cultural artefacts, such as books or films as well as poems or narratives. The characteristic of work is that it leaves a trace, it leaves something behind. Action is something undertaken by a person. This seemingly obvious fact hides an important distinction that motivates much of what Arendt has to say about action. She distinguishes between who a person is and what they are. What we are is: members of a particular species, physically, biologically and chemically much the same as other members. However, who we are picks out the ways in which we are different from others. So, for Arendt, each individual person is “unique, unexchangeable, and unrepeatable” (Arendt 1958, 97) and each has a narrative that distinguishes her from the manifold of humanity – men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct (Arendt 1958, 176). Actions are the deliberate deeds of particular humans that individualize them, lifting them from being mere instances of a natural species, to being persons who have a recognizable identity. Given the distinction between these three levels of the vita activa, how could the current forms of activity and engagement be defined? Again, what do contemporary workers do? If the ways we communicate, act and interact have changed so radically, is there still a relevant difference between the different “moments” of life as described by Arendt? Against Arendt’s theory, the question addressed in this chapter can be (re)formulated as follows: How have the categories of “action” and “work” been redefined by new technologies? In other words, how can a freelance worker be defined as someone who is working when he does not produce anything specific – or at least not everyday – and when his or her tasks are many, various and often indefinite? The digitalization of society has undoubtedly flattened the spatial and temporal differences that used to define the working relations in the case of subordinate work. If, in the case of subordinate work, the (potentially) conflictual relation was that between servant and master, in the case of the freelance worker the potential conflict is everywhere. Not by chance, all the rhetoric of new work is shaped by the conceptual frame of war and conflict: we must be mobilized, we are traceable at any time and anywhere. We can reach the others. We can be reached: by orders, messages, information and communications. We could convene other people: collaborators, clients and funding institutions. Also not by chance, the term “freelance” (deriving from the words “free” and “lance”), commonly used to describe a person who is self-employed and not necessarily committed to a particular employer, derives from wartime jargon. Like mercenaries, freelance workers are often

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represented by agencies that (temporarily) resell their work: equally like mercenaries, freelance workers follow specific programmes and must achieve specific tasks. Yet, unlike mercenaries, freelance workers believe in what they do and in the projects they are involved in. Most typically, they belong to the culturalcognitive industry and economy. In this indistinction between autonomous and subordinate work, unemployment and inactivity, i.e. in what has been named the context of “uberization” of the competences and of the working experiences, what is – then – the type of disclosure of humanity that characterizes the contemporary time? What is revealed about humankind? Today, again, it is with the “original” force of action that the disclosure of humanity is made possible. Action is the present’s disclosure: it reveals what the individual is, and it expresses his or her capacity to take initiative, to be open to new beginnings. The act is the occasion, the event, the moment of the disclosure of agency. Action is thus different from fabrication and it must be different from it. When we act, we do not need to produce or fabricate something. Action corresponds to inter-action: humanity is defined in the reciprocity of action. We cannot act alone, while we can produce an object if we are alone. In order to act, we must be surrounded by people – at least potentially. While in the production chain the individual is alone, and with automation he is both alone and much less engaged in a specific action, at the level of action (for instance in the case of speech) the individual is surrounded by others and he is in contact with them. At least, potentially. Action is directed towards the other: “action and speech are surrounded by and in constant contact with the web of the acts and words of other men” (Arendt 1958, 188). These differentiations of the levels of industry are currently regaining relevance. The meanings attributed to action and work are currently going through a paradigm shift. Such distinctions help understanding the meaning of our being in the world: they are – in Arendt’s terms – ways to access the “disclosure”, the revelation of the human nature. Then, in what sense can we say that we are in the world? Are we immersed? Are we connected? And if so, in what specific spatial and/or temporal system of reference? We can certainly reach the others and we can be reached more easily than before. As stated before, as it is often the case in the periods of transition, what is needed is a reconsideration of the human condition from the perspective of the experiences that characterize our everyday life. Humanity must be re-thought, re-conceptualized. We must think through what we are doing in order to understand who we are. An in-depth observation of our actions paves the way to understand the rationality that lies behind our society. André Gorz, when reflecting about the metamorphoses of labour in his Critique of the Economic Reason, has pointed out that what we experience in the contemporary (and he was not even thinking of digital society) is not a crisis of modernity (Gorz 1989), but it is a crisis of the presuppositions upon which we theorize and understand it: it is what I have already labelled a “conceptual short-circuit”. The current crisis is not an indication that the process of modernization has reached an impasse and that we shall have to retrace

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our steps. It is rather an indication of the need for modernity itself to be modernized, to be included reflexively in its own sphere of action and, most importantly, through a rephrased vocabulary and conceptual system aimed at understanding subjectivities (Gorz 1989, 1). The contemporary is constantly in need of resignification.

4. The blurred boundaries between means and ends Action is thus the principal function of human beings: the direct engagement with tasks, inventions, initiative and creation is what differentiates a man from an animal. Unlike labour and work, in fact, action is at the core of the possibility to interact with other fellow human beings – what Arendt calls the condition of “plurality”. And signifies, as well, the capacity to act freely and to choose among different options – what she phrases ‘freedom’ (Arendt, 1958, 175). Action is the itinerary towards disclosure: through action, we can introduce what is unexpected. The nature of action as beginning entails that – through action – something new is started which could not be expected from what has been, from what has happened before. For this reason, revolutions are the most important act that can be performed in the political realm: they represent the attempt to set up a new political space, a space where freedom can appear as a worldly reality. In some sense, they are the product of an initiative: for this reason, working solutions such as start-ups are often considered as revolutionary. They introduce new paths and possibilities. My claim is that the current “Californian ideology” (Ciccarelli 2017, 8 ff) of work understood as a constant, mobilized and perpetual potential action – produces a confusion between what used to be defined as “work” and what corresponds to the creativity and capacity to take initiative typical of what Arendt has defined as “action”. Such an ideology has been defined as the result of a mixture between the hippie spirit of San Francisco with the entrepreneurial zeal and capacity to take initiative typical of the Silicon Valley. This mixture confuses liberalism with freedom, autonomy with the bohémienne culture, all by connecting the new subjects through technological devices. We are free to work everywhere and yet we must operate on platforms online which follow very strict rules. We are at the apex of contradictions: subjects are displaced. They are totally free, but also (potentially) totally lost: they could work here, but also there: what counts is that work must be seen, original, recognized. And yet that is far from obvious; thus, what might potentially seem to be a virtuous circle is turned into a vicious circle. This is not the only level of confusion that characterizes the relationship between subjects and their working conditions, today. If, before the various industrial revolutions, the central relationship defining work was that between means and ends, today we can no longer say that such a relationship is clear and that there still is a distinction between means and ends (at all). The case of the start-up, for instance, is particularly interesting: the subject, her creativity and capacity to take initiative are both means and ends (to the extent that it has been thought as an “existential start-up”). In its extreme and more radical expressions,

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ways of professional engagement such as the start-up represent a hybridization between means and ends. The human being and his existence are both instruments and finality: what is the product, then? The question is difficult to answer, since (often) the product corresponds only to a new series of data, or to a new connection or possibility, in other words to mere “networking”. We are far from the Kantian principle (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785) for which human beings can never be treated merely as means to ends and they must, instead, always be treated as ends themselves. The aforementioned confusion between means and ends stemmed from the changes introduced by automation: and yet, today, the real change we are facing is not only connected (or reduced) to automation. With the current economic crisis, there are continuous and multiple calls to act as “entrepreneurs” (the start-up is the paradigm of such Zeitgeist). Since work is no longer the same, and (in particular, but not exclusively) since subordinate work is disappearing, individuals are called to create their own working perspectives and to achieve their working potential as much as they can. The individual subject embodies, today, her own initiative: the digital worker is her own “existential start-up”. The confusion between the means and the ends is, thus, at its apex: what used to be a socially centralized organization (the factory) has now translated into a sort of “widespread” factory. This rhetoric of work has led to the creation of hybrid entities as a matter of fact, the job market is populated by subjectivities including both a person and an enterprise (Ciccarelli 2017, 157). The contemporary is the time of the integration between the worker, the means of production and the result of their interaction. If, before, the subject would not be identified with the products of his work, now (since work has been absorbed into a wider category of “action”) the subject becomes identified with his own capacity to begin something new. The paradigmatic example is – once again – the start-up: which reflects, in fact, the correspondence between work and action. In Arendt’s account, as aforementioned, the crucial character of action is the force that comes from a new beginning. The subject becomes the start-up because the start-up is pure action in Arendt’s terms. The resignification of the relationship between the subject, labour, work and action, as well as of the connection between means and ends, is a consequence not only of the rationalization of production which followed the industrial revolutions that preceded the current paradigm shift (Ciccarelli 2017, 89). Following Arendt, we could infer that this confused perversion of ends and means has its roots in the changes of the factual situation of labour: The frequent complaints we hear about the perversion of ends and means in modern society, about men becoming the servants of the machines they themselves invented and of being “adapted” to their requirements instead of using them as instruments for human needs and wants, have their roots in the factual situation of laboring. In this situation, where production consists primarily in preparation for consumption, the very distinction between means and ends, so highly characteristic of the activities of homo faber, simply does

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not make sense, and the instruments which homo faber invented and with which he came to the help of the labor of the animal laborans therefore lose their instrumental character once they are used by it. Within the life process itself, of which laboring remains an integral part and which it never transcends, it is idle to ask questions that presuppose the category of means and end, such as whether men live and consume in order to have strength to labor or whether they labor in order to have the means of consumption. (Arendt 1958, 146 ff.) On the one hand, the homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools in order to erect a world, and not to help the human life process; on the other hand, the question is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, as it seems more plausible today with the digitalization of society and the “uberization” of the working conditions, they have begun to rule or at least they have begun to influence the way we interact, communicate, get involved in new projects, and imagine future working perspectives. In other words: the way we exist.

5. The blurred boundaries between action and contemplation Let us go back to the meaning of the expression vita activa: this phrase is loaded and overloaded with tradition. It is related to the tradition of thought on political engagement. Arendt reports that the concept appears in medieval philosophy as standard translation of the Aristotelian bios politikos (Arendt 1958, 12). St. Augustine mentions it. As vita negotiosa or actuosa, it still reflects its original meaning: a life devoted to public-political matters. Then, in the transition from the ancient city-state towards new forms of government, the expression vita activa lost its specifically political meaning and started denoting all kinds of active engagement in the things of this world. It indicated, then, also labour and work – since the political engagement was no longer a necessary condition of the “activity”. What seems to be a fundamental element of the ancient idea of vita activa – which for Arendt remains until the modern age – is the negative connotation: “activity” defines all which does not fall within the category of “contemplation”. Thus, vita activa is what is not vita contemplativa. Activa in particular means “unquiet”, indicates the negotium, what is not idleness (otium): nec-otium, a-skholia. As such, the term remained intimately related to the Greek distinction between things that are by themselves, whatever they are, and things which owe their existence to man. In other words, between an ontology of “natural” reality and an ontology of “artificial” reality. In antiquity, contemplation was considered superior to action and such a conviction was based on the idea that no work of human beings could equal in authenticity, truth, purity and beauty the natural kosmos – which was considered eternal. Traditionally, therefore, the expression vita activa receives its meaning from the vita contemplativa.

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Modernity reverses the precedent equilibrium and introduces the dominion of action over contemplation: action is glorified. The working middle-class subject considers activity (both in the sense of labour and of work) as the source of all values. Within this shift of paradigm (i.e. within the reversal between action and contemplation, in favour of action) originates the distinction between labour and work. Such a differentiation within the field of action becomes a crucial subject of the Marxist reflection on the workforce (in particular for what concerns the Arbeitskraft). The concept of workforce allows the detachment of labour and work from productivity: the engagement of the subject constitutes a form of “productivity” of its own. Such a force, such Kraft, has nothing to do with the object deriving from a production chain: the engagement is itself something that deserves recognition and guarantees. Arendt writes: This productivity does not lie in any of labor’s products but in the human “power”, whose strength is not exhausted when it has produced the means of its own subsistence and survival but is capable of producing a “surplus”, that is, more than is necessary for its own “reproduction”. It is because not labor itself but the surplus of human “labor power” (Arbeitskraft) explains labor’s productivity that Marx’s introduction of this term, as Engels rightly remarked, constituted the most original and revolutionary element of his whole system. Unlike the productivity of work, which adds new objects to the human artifice, the productivity of labor power produces objects only incidentally and is primarily concerned with the means of its own reproduction; since its power is not exhausted when its own reproduction has been secured, it can be used for the reproduction of more than one life process, but it never “produces” anything but life. (Arendt 1958, 88) These remarks resonate with the contemporary situation. It seems to me that, today, the contemplation is absorbed by the necessity of making, of being engaged in some activity. What is the place of contemplation in the present digital society, in which new technologies keep reversing the equilibrium between the passive observation of what is already there and the active engagement of making something? This necessity seems to have been transformed into a desire, a psychical pulsion or drive: since we can work anytime and anywhere, then non-work turns into a problem, a void that somehow generates the urge for its fulfilment. *** “I am free to work anywhere: I can work on the plane, in my bed, on Sunday mornings”. “In fact, I actually love working on Sunday mornings (or maybe I don’t)”. These sentences could reflect the thoughts of the average worker in the digital society. The everywhere and at any time subject, the here and now subject, connected with the rest of the world (or, more precisely: of the subjects that

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resemble him or her). The great confusion that is produced in the mind of digital workers is that the centrality of initiative has produced a situation in which the independent and autonomous manager ends up in a complex circle: he must have a reputation (a good one) in order to be known. There are lists and ranks on the online platforms and, according to the evaluations and to the level of recognition, the work of a subject has more or less visibility and thus has more or less chances to get fundings, for example. It is the society of “performance” (Chicchi and Simone, 2017), of services, of reputation: It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. Within this society, which is egalitarian because this is labor’s way of making men live together, there is no class left, no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew. Even presidents, kings, and prime ministers think of their offices in terms of a job necessary for the life of society, and among the intellectuals, only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living. What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse. (Arendt 1958, 5) The distinction at stake in the contemporary society is that between homo faber and homo laborans. Homo faber seems to have disappeared (apart from some sporadic cases): his ideals were permanence, stability and durability. The homo laborans is the man who is active, who is engaged in some sort of action (in Arendt’s terms). Work has been broken, one technological revolution after the other, into particles. We live in a labourers’ society because only labouring, with its inherent fertility, is likely to bring about abundance; work has been transformed into a mixture (a continuous mixture) between labour and action. We feel as if action was a vital need for us and the action must be permanent, something we are constantly engaged with.

6. Free time is not freedom: legal ontology of the workforce I have (intentionally) not mentioned law until now. What could be the function of law in this frame? What has been the function of law in the process that led to this frame? As is often the case, regulating a transition can be difficult (if not impossible). And, as a matter of fact, the subsequent reforms of labour law in the last twenty years prove that the challenge is hard. The “consumerism of action” which translates into a psychical “imperative to act”, which in turn reflects how and to what extent the lack of engagement is a problem – all these phenomena are causing (and have already caused) a hybridization between work and action,

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and – as stated before – action is almost impossible to regulate. Since “action” includes also forms of initiative and creativity, in theory deep contemplation of the void, or writing a tweet, could be considered as “action”. There have already been, for this reason, proposals for the introduction of a basic income for the people who are engaged in online activity, i.e. for the people who produce data that can then be capitalized by firms such as Amazon, Facebook, et similia. Now the problem is finding a conceptual frame that can be applied to the current forms of subjectivity, in other words the problem today is juridifying what before was not recognized as a worker. A similar set of issues had been faced by the figure of the artist in the XIX century: her or his work used to be (and needed to be) creative, innovative, but yet she or he had no specific working hours. The contemporary worker can be compared to the flâneur – for which a certain otium was always intertwined with the negotium. For the flâneur, the separation between action and contemplation was blurred. *** The lack of a proper juridical definition, and thus of a recognition and protection, has been read in relation to a basic characteristic of contemporary (digital) work: today, work is often free from “typical” effort and fatigue. People must go to the gym, or run for an hour, in order to feel physically tired. Here is where the consequences of automation and of “technologization” are making a difference on the relationship between the material and the psychical conditions of human beings (Anders 1980, passim). Making becomes non-making, or better: it gets transformed into the very process of making up the possibility of making something. We are far beyond the problems caused by the fragmentation of work in the automatized industrial production. We feel, today, like the sections of global and uninterrupted chains, and we feel the urge to enter all of these chains. This (current) mixture of labour and action which seems to be so different from (more traditional forms of) work, but which keeps being called as such, creates problems of frustration in the subject because he does not feel recognized. The problem concerns the categorization of current subjective and individual experiences within the traditional categories. To go back to the question addressed in the beginning of this chapter, such a misunderstanding will necessarily lead to a failure. Can law constitute an answer to this “conceptual short circuit”? The mobilized condition of contemporary workers is characterized by a “datafication” and by a “taskification” of the subject. Workforce is permanently active and it is thus hard to define the characteristics of its operations. What is needed, at a conceptual level, is an objectification of very indefinite situations: this is the challenge for the law, when confronted with the present situation. Workforce, which in former types of work was considered as one aspect (among others) within the chain of production (in which means and ends, as well as action and contemplation – where more clearly defined), constitutes today the core aspect of the working engagement.

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Following Alain Supiot (2007), who is among the principal theorists of labour law today, the questions presented in this chapter correspond to a series of issues which are characteristic of the human being. Law is the language that attributes existence to human conditions. Or at least, that makes them “powerful”: rights depend on legislation and legal recognition. Since we are, as Supiot claims, “metaphysical animals” (Supiot 2007, 12), we inhabit a world of sense and signs. We need references and definitions in order to recognize each other’s needs and positions, inasmuch as we need the rules in order to communicate and make sense of reality. As Plato says, the legislator “is of all the artisans among men the rarest”.1 What is needed is thus an “objectification” of the present condition, which is a mixture of different conditions, i.e. a hybridization. If what Hannah Arendt has termed ‘action’ constitutes the majority of the working relations today, then it means that we should not try to bring back such action into the conceptual structure of previous ideas or concepts of “work”, but that we should start thinking in terms of this new hybridization as the principal condition of human beings today; a condition that will characterize the lives of at least another generation (then, we shall see). If workforce was instead considered as the main generative engine of current economic relations, then workforce itself could (and should) be considered as the core of work (Ciccarelli 2017, 191). The subject, who embodies the fulcrum of the workforce, is sub-iectum, i.e. “thrown under”: defined by the bonds and by the conceptual frames. It is only by considering action and workforce as defined and determinate activities that a transformation of the subject into a homo juridicus can happen. In order for this to be possible, each subjective condition must be translated into a possible condition of existence, since “the biological and symbolic dimensions that make up our being have been linked together” (Supiot 2007, 17). The law, in this context, should operate in order to connect our infinite mental universe with our finite physical existence and – in so doing – it could fulfil the anthropological function of instituting us as rational beings. To reject either the biological or the symbolic dimension leads to the insane consequence of treating humans as mere animals or as pure mind, or otherwise as pure means or pure ends, subject to no limits. And thus, invisible.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Anders, Günther. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2: Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution [The Obsolescence of Human Beings 2: On the Destruction of Life in the Age of the Third Industrial Revolution], 3rd edn. Munich: C.H. Beck, [1980] 2002. Chicchi, Federico and Simone, Anna. La società della prestazione. Roma: Ediesse, 2017. Ciccarelli, Roberto. Forza Lavoro. Il lato oscuro della rivoluzione digitale. Roma: DeriveApprodi, 2017. 1

See Plato, Cratylus, 388e, trans. H.N. Fowler, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1927, p. 25.

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Ferraris, Maurizio. Mobilitazione totale. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2015. Gorz, André. Critique of Economic Reason. London-New York: Verso, 1989. Romele, Alberto and Terrone, Enrico. Towards a Philosophy of Digital Media. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Supiot, Alain. Homo Juridicus. On the Anthropological Function of the Law. London-New York: Verso, 2007.

Chapter 4

How the future of work can work for the workers Marc De Vos

1. Technology and Work 4.0 The world of work is undergoing a profound transformation generally referred to as ‘Work 4.0’. Described as the most radical change in the labour market since the first industrial revolution, not a week goes by without yet another study heralding the large-scale disappearance, reinvention or innovation of work, labour organisation and employment relationships. But what do all these predicted employment changes entail for the legal framework of employment? If the future of work is set to change, what will the future of labour law be? The future of labour law will reflect the future of work as it is perceivable or predictable from current underlying trends that are themselves changing the world of work. There is a general consensus on these long-lasting and wideranging megatrends.1 Adopting a widescreen perspective, we can notice that the Western world of work is changing as a result of three simultaneous tectonic shifts: 

 

1

A talent shift, driven by overall demographic ‘greying’ (ageing) combined with demographic ‘greening’ (rejuvenating) in sub groups, by generation diversity, mass immigration, ethnic and cultural hyper diversity and by changing values with respect to work-life balance. An economic shift, driven by globalisation, market changes, new company structures and shifting human resources (HR). A technological shift, driven by the internet, internet platforms, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), HR-Tech, ‘big data’, 3D-printing, nanotechnology, genetics and biotechnology.

For an overview see, e.g., Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, White Paper Work 4.0, Berlin: Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, 2017; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Information Technology and the U.S. Workforce: Where Are We and Where Do We Go from Here?, Washington DC: The National Academies Press, 2017; World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs, Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2016.

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Whereas all trends are integral to what follows, I focus on the role of technological change and the future of work. The technology angle serves the overarching perspective of the book, as it is relates to the position of the worker and his/her interaction with technology. In line with this overarching theme, this chapter seeks to answer the following normative research question: in a future of work driven by technology, how can future labour law put the worker at its heart? How can the future of work enable a human focus in labour law? Technological innovation has been transforming labour for more than four hundred years. Old technologies become redundant, eventually new technologies themselves become outdated and the cycle starts again. The impact on labour is the same with every cycle, every turn of the technological wheel. Jobs in old technologies become scarcer and eventually disappear altogether. That is the minus side. The plus side relates to technological innovation itself, which requires and creates new jobs. The weavers have gone, but weaving looms that have replaced them require raw materials, assembly, electricity, design, production, operation and maintenance. Similarly, there are no coach builders or coachmen anymore, but there are mega automotive assembly plants, networks of suppliers, studios crammed with designers, gigantic steel producers, paint factories, specialist machine builders, car dealers, etc. The best innovations develop into entirely new economic sectors with completely new value chains. Thanks to technology and the capital behind it, new jobs are usually more productive than the old ones: they generate greater economic value and output per input. This margin has beneficial effects: on the profitability of the businesses, on the income of the workers and on society in general, which benefits from both. Technological innovation is nothing less than the beating heart of the unique capitalist progress machine, the basis of mankind’s spectacular prosperity growth through the centuries. Despite occasional profound and disturbing adjustments, its impact on labour is without a doubt impressive: the number of working people in relation to the total population and the average quality of work have continued to improve.2 A structural sea change in this global quantitative and qualitative progress is not upon us. On the contrary, also driven by the demographic transition of the retiring baby boomers, the developed world is facing a talent shortage rather than a work shortage. Nevertheless, there is a growing fear or conviction that, for the first time in the annals of capitalism, technology may become an existential threat to labour and the working man. The assumption that ‘this time is different’ is fostered by various findings or expectations. New technology profoundly affects the service economy which is the backbone of modern society, whereas earlier technologies tended to impact agriculture and the industrial economy. The internet and internet platforms, with Uber the most 2

For an overview, see M. De Vos, Les vertus de l’inégalité, Paris: Saint-Simon, 2017; J. Appleby, The Relentless Revolution. A History of Capitalism, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2010. For data on progress, see e.g., S. Pinker, Enlightenment now, New York: Penguin, 2018.

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well-known name in an increasingly long list of contenders, digitalise and fragment work relationships into an automated flow of fleeting tasks. The processing power of computers, combined with breakthroughs in sensors, mobile communication, connectivity and so-called ‘block chain’ technology, is making such leaps forward that AI could replace human intelligence in jobs that have until now remained outside the remit of technology. Robots, for a long time merely valets for simple but arduous work, are said to be on the verge of what would exponentially increase their circulation: imitating human actions. Add all this together and technological innovation might, for the first time in history, generate a negative rather than a positive job balance. Estimates and opinions differ, however.3 Optimists merely expect more creative destruction, a combination of job losses and job gains, but still with a positive bottom line. Pessimists think certain professional groups and sectors are threatened with extinction. Doomsayers predict that humans are doomed to become like horses: once a productive economic entity, then superfluous except for the pursuit of leisure. Only in this total apocalypse will labour law eventually become devoid of purpose. In all other scenarios labour law instead becomes increasingly important as we face fundamental economic convulsion. What unites all these visions, however, is the expectation that the normal cycle of job destruction, job creation and job transition, typical of each technological innovation, will structurally and fundamentally accelerate, deepen and widen to include virtually all sectors, professions/jobs and educational levels. According to a well-known estimate, between 75 and 375 million workers worldwide could change jobs as a result of technological shifts by 2030.4 Furthermore, the content of many jobs that do not disappear is likely to change profoundly and consequently will require major adjustments.5 In each scenario there is obviously a key role for labour law.

2. Career law Economic, technological and international changes are nothing new, they have always been around. The convulsions of Work 4.0 may be more extensive and profound, but labour law has had to cope with disruption before. I anticipate that the career will become the dominant perspective in employment regulation. This perspective is already appropriate today. Our global labour market with generally 3

4 5

For a summary of the various studies and their diverse assessments, see European Parliamentary Research Service, The impact of new technologies on the labour market and the social economy, Brussels: European Parliament, 2018; E. Winick, ‘Every study we could find on what automation will do to jobs, in one chart’, MIT Technology Review, 2018. McKinsey Global Institute, Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation, McKinsey Global Institute, 2017. See L. Nedelkoska and G. Quintini, Automation, skills use and training, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, Paris: OECD Publishing, 2018.

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impressive job creation and participation hides an increasing diversity in flexible and temporary contracts, second jobs, self-employed workers, freelancers and parttimers. This trend is not equally prominent everywhere. In some countries it can be a temporary crisis phenomenon. It is not always a permanent reality for those involved. But what is commonly referred as ‘flexible labour’, atypical vis-à-vis the historic model of permanent full-time employment, is gaining ground. Estimates vary, but in Europe and the US up to a quarter of the working population can already be associated with one or another type of flexible labour, in total more than 160 million people.6 The trend towards diversification in work relationships will be reinforced by the megatrends behind Work 4.0. Both on the supply side, i.e. talent, and the demand side, i.e. the economy, Work 4.0 represents variation and diversity, with a good dose of globalisation and technology which injects flexibility right into the DNA of labour. The traditional differences between permanent and atypical labour will continue to fade away. Work relationships will increasingly be based on tasks, orders, peaks and periods. Atypical will become the new typical, which has both positive and negative connotations. Positive is better access to the labour market and a more seamless work/life balance. Where knowledge economy and technology meet, amongst highly trained mobile knowledge workers and independent professionals, flexible or independent working could even become a lifestyle. In this group the emergence of freelance work is a dream of career variation, freedom of choice and continual personal development, while also generally serving the economy well.7 Young people in particular are attracted by the opportunity of being able to maintain control over their own job and career.8 Negative is the risk of segmentation in the labour market, in which part of the working population has to be satisfied with insecure and lower paid jobs with few career prospects. Persistent marginalisation of sub groups is a painful reality in today’s labour market, partly overlapping with the increase in atypical work. Job polarisation through a combination of unattractive low paid jobs, disappearing routine jobs in the middle and attractive highly paid jobs higher up is already a reality today. It will predictably increase if hyper globalisation and the technologization of work continue without an appropriate policy framework.9 6 7 8 9

According to McKinsey Global Institute, Independent work: choice, necessity, and the gig economy, McKinsey Global Institute, 2016. See The Adecco Group and LinkedIn, Flexible Working: A career and lifestyle pathway, The Adecco Group and LinkedIn, 2018. See ManpowerGroup, Gig Responsibly. The Rise of NextGen Work, ManpowerGroup, 2018. See European Parliamentary Research Service, The impact of new technologies on the labour market and the social economy, Brussels: European Parliament, 2018; M. Lawrence et al., Managing Automation. Employment, inequality and ethics in the digital age, London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2017.

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The paradox of present-day labour law is that it tends to exacerbate rather than diminish labour segmentation. Under pressure from the above mentioned megatrends, continental European countries have opted for asymmetric liberalisation, increasing the opportunity for atypical work alongside the traditional ‘typical’ work, the legal status of which has remained largely unchanged. The proliferation of alternative contract formulas is a pull factor, increasing the polarisation between successful insiders and disadvantaged outsiders in the labour market. The switch from labour law to career law should reverse this incongruous effect. To maintain the choice and diversity that gives people autonomy, to facilitate the dynamics and variation that the economy needs and at the same time prevent people from being ‘subjected to’ flexibility and caught in fragmented work relationships without basic rights: that is the central triangle hypothesis of career law. As Work 4.0 will continue to boost the biodiversity in jobs in the economy, the focus needs to shift from the job to the career. Generally speaking, labour law will then lower the barriers to flexible work relationships, enhance secure rights across those barriers and focus more on the employability of workers in the labour market. This is not without precedent. The regulation of temporary agency work illustrates the practice of labour law as career law. It facilitates and limits flexibility at the same time, creates a level playing field of minimal rights and guarantees their transferability when changing clients. It also implies a third party who is responsible for the continuity of protection in the discontinuity of employment. In order to evolve further in the direction of career law, the continuity and transferability of employment protection must also become feasible when switching between social security statuses. In essence it should be possible, irrespective of the status and duration of work or the identity of the parties, to link economic activity to benefits that meet the following three requirements: the employee or otherwise economically active person must own and take their benefits with them; the other economic party must contribute to these benefits on a pro rata basis in line with the extent to which the parties collaborate; and the benefits must at least be partly independent from the legal qualification of that cooperation. Rather than fundamentally fragmenting basic labour protection between, for example, employees, the self-employed, freelancers and civil servants, employment status should be transcended by shared rights that seamlessly shadow and serve career variation. Moreover, substantively protection should focus more on career development and wide ranging employability, ensuring that ‘flexible work’ signifies more than just working differently. Here again, labour law evolution is already underway. Various European countries are experimenting with early variations of fully fledged career accounts.10 A career account is a multifunctional career instrument that offers a financial lever to manage and support career development tailored to the individual. The career account can be used for training and education, leave and reduced working hours, 10 See M. De Vos, ‘Naar een betere arbeidsmarkt (Towards a better labour market)’, in Roadmap 2014–18, Brussels: Itinera Institute, 2014.

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bespoke work formulas, in the event of redundancy or retirement, etc. It replaces or reinforces collective systems that work solely with generalised target groups, which produce suboptimal results in terms of individual career needs and artificially affect the personal career behaviour of employees, with adverse effects on the entire labour market. A well-structured career account puts the career at the heart of future labour law. Career competencies, development, planning, management, termination and transitions: everything is facilitated. A career is a shared responsibility that transcends the individual work relationship, which is why the career account is established within a three-way relationship between employee, employer and the government. It may also involve other parties such as insurance or HR providers. The employee will personally contribute to the career account, financially and by working, as it is through employment that the career account is built up by the employer and/or the government. Employee involvement illustrates how the evolution from labour law to career law entails not only new rights but also new responsibilities. The employee shares responsibility for the accumulation and disbursement of career account resources, which is the best guarantee for their effectiveness in line with his/her personal situation. This is the major difference compared with collective systems supported exclusively by third parties, in particular the tax payer. Financial contributions from employees may consist of a percentage of their wages and/or the exchange of time for money. In other words, a career account could also permit the more familiar ‘time saving’ where employees voluntarily exchange holidays, leave or other periods for capital that they can later use to work less or not at all. Depending on the actual career objective, financing in the above mentioned three-way relationship may vary and existing collective systems may be reduced, converted or stopped altogether. The maze of work suspensions, leave periods, vocational training and reduced working hours that makes modern labour law so complex and often needlessly encumbers the labour market, can be comprehensively simplified via career accounts. This would again improve the transferability and fluidity of social protection through the job changing process. For the employee, a career account represents a supported cultural shift towards different and sustainable working practices, better talent management, more voluntary change and fewer compulsory transitions. For the government, a career account is a flexible catalyst for policies that aim to promote employability, reward longer working lives and discourage early retirement. The government can contribute to ‘earmarked’ account expenditure in order to support activating career objectives. It can provide additional contribution to the account in the event of extraordinary career events or use it as ‘wage insurance’ or ‘adaptation insurance’ during labour market upheavals. It can extend the account into other areas such as family policy, or use it as a quasi-universal instrument for personalised social policy. Because it can be linked to any type of employment, a career account can also maintain career development for ‘atypical’ temporary labour. This does away with

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the familiar disadvantage that employers are less inclined to invest in the future of temporary personnel. For the employer, the career account is an instrument to put talent management at the centre of HR. When labour diversifies, organisations and companies evolve towards talent ecosystems with levels and gradations of collaboration that require integration and coordination. Again, a career account can play a facilitating role. Career law will support both involuntary and voluntary labour mobility. Indeed, the changes associated with Work 4.0 will also create many opportunities. It should be made easy for employees to seize these. Traditional labour law is too strict for employees who are interested in more than just their employment contract. Competition rules often prevent employees from using their talents elsewhere, either simultaneously with, or upon termination of, an existing employment contract. Intellectual property law and the confidentiality of professional information as company information can disconnect employees from career tools that are also their personal merit. Resigning often has unfortunate consequences in terms of both accrued rights and protection from unemployment. Combining and circulating between jobs requires a complete understanding between the parties. In a nutshell: the legal equilibrium between the parties of an employment contract is one-sided and does not facilitate a career approach. Modernisation is required. A career account can offer both financial and organisational empowerment to employees who want to venture out. Compared to the standardised, collective protection associated with a particular job, a personalised individual account linked to an overall career entails greater management and organisational complexity. This disadvantage can be managed, however. We are already familiar with third party service providers who take on and manage the organisational complexities of employment relationships. Career law will undoubtedly facilitate a new biotope of career services. In this evolution, the organisational potential of technology will be a critical factor. The data and communication technology that is changing the way we work will also transform and facilitate the organisation of work. Technology is the stepping stone to improved quality in labour organisation and labour management. To this we now turn.

3. Work quality law When we consider a career and consequently a long-term approach as the benchmark, the quality of work is, or should be, a key consideration. The human factor is the crucial success factor in the world of Work 4.0. Technological transformation, AI and robotisation equate to reinvestment and reinvention rather than automation. They do not merely pose a threat to certain human jobs; they also and even more so represent a reinvention of human roles and functions. As machines continue to liberate us, specific human characteristics, capacities and roles will come to the fore that machines cannot handle and are dependent

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upon.11 Technology can be embraced as an opportunity to enable people to work more effectively, improving quality and efficiency.12 If the future of work lies in technology, each business strategy will identify tasks that have to be executed by technology and simultaneously develop processes to synchronise these tasks with the human activities that utilise them. The success of a company is dependent upon the wellbeing of its employees when talent, effort, creativity, cooperation and conduct are the defining factors. We can therefore expect organisations to embrace technology in order to humanise personnel policy.13 If HR was forced to make people work like machines whenever possible in the past, it will enable them to work as little as possible like machines in the future. More and better data imply greater productivity and less waste. Technology will make business processes and decisions smarter and faster. Technology can personalise personnel policy. Whether in recruitment, training, education, guidance or evaluation: technology can stand to benefit the individual and the organisation alike. Behaviour, commitment and satisfaction can be measured and stimulated via communication technology and metadata. The history of centuries of technological innovation has always resulted in more, better and more productive labour. There is no reason to suspect that it will be any different in the future. Work 4.0 presents a huge opportunity, not to replace working people but to help them in both the productivity and quality of their labour. Greater productivity means higher income and more time. In people’s private lives technology will, as in the past, liberate them from, or assist them with, tasks and jobs. More private time will also facilitate their professional life. Medical technology and care robots will become crucial to accommodate our ageing population. As a society, we just have to make sure we develop and seize these quality opportunities. Progress will not be without its ‘progress diseases’. We are already familiar with stress, burn-out and bore-out as the peripheral phenomena of an evolution that has shifted the workload problem from the physical to the mental. The quality perspective of Work 4.0 requires boundaries: for employee availability and accessibility, for data control and communication within an organisation, for the interaction with new technology that entails wellbeing risks. The anchor points of labour organisation are shifting: work location, working hours, authority and control are changing and making employment more personal. Labour is becoming a porous process: the lines between mandatory and voluntary work, between work and leisure time, between autonomy and control, are fading. This demands a new balance, connecting work diversity to work quality. The same technology that gives people more autonomy also subjects them to greater controls and corresponding psychological pressure, a phenomenon that is 11 See H.J. Wilson, P.R. Daugherty and N. Morini-Bianzino, ‘The Jobs that Artificial Intelligence will create’, MIT Sloan Management Review, 58(4), 13–16 (2017). 12 Also refer to McKinsey Global Institute, A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, and Productivity, McKinsey Global Institute, 2017. 13 See Gartner, Predicts 2018: AI and the Future of Work, Stamford: Gartner Inc., 2018.

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already manifesting itself in the platform economy that permanently shadows app users. We can expect other phenomena to emerge and we will have to cope with them, from a preventive and curative as well as a regulatory and HR point of view. When the interaction between man and machine becomes systemic, a regulatory framework is needed in which its conditions and ethical limits are defined. Labour is and remains a social reality. The emergence of intelligent machines into this reality will definitely engender social questions. The Work 4.0 era doesn’t just promise quality innovation for individuals and businesses. Legislators, governments and administrations will be able to employ technology to improve the regulation and organisation of labour as well. We can already see this in countries that manage the platform economy through registration processes that imply the automatic electronic payment of taxes related to platform transactions. The insurance requirements, contribution obligations and administrative overheads associated with employment, for which companies currently often rely on subcontracted HR services, can also be digitalised. Quality careers require quality regulation and management that can rely on the opportunities offered by the new technological work era. In other words, work relationships going digital offer a major policy opportunity. It can eliminate benefit fraud and the black economy, while guaranteeing complete transparency in working hours and remuneration. Taxes and social security contributions can be paid instantly with zero bureaucracy. Platforms can organise the entire process of an employment relationship seamlessly and automatically. Employment mediation can be taken to another dimension. Longer and better careers, varied careers with more job changes, careers that facilitate training and education at every stage, careers with social protections tied to the individual: it can all be organised and supported. Technology can enable us to work longer and better.

4. Talent law Our highly technological, globalised knowledge economy forges an intimate link between human talent and economic outcomes, a structural evolution I have elsewhere referred to as ‘Human Capitalism’.14 Talent is the fuel of today’s economy, the forecaster of career trajectories and the driving force for a mass mobilisation for education and training in ‘the race between education and technology’.15 And that is just the beginning. The combination of demographic ageing and retiring baby boomers, hyper diversity, intense labour market marginalisation, and segmentation amongst young people makes talent the key priority for future policy. Add to this the mass job transition and innovation that the technological revolution can entail, and it seems 14 See M. De Vos, Les vertus de l’inégalité, Paris: Saint-Simon, 2017. 15 See C. Golding and L. Katz, The Race between Education and Technology, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010.

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logical that future labour law will fundamentally become talent law. The development, maintenance and renewal of economically useful human talent that widely supports people in the labour market, will permeate into the DNA of labour regulation. The perspective of talent law has several dimensions. Conceptually it intertwines labour and education. Our current understanding of life and work is chronological: school, diploma, work, training, education, holidays, up-skilling, etc. Our view of talent development is siloed and fragmented. The evolution from labour law to talent law will end the compartmentalisation of talent development and blend it transversally through lives and careers. Employment relationships will become part of a continual process of education and training, involving other and new parties, new roles, new financing and new learning formulas. Training and education will not only become part of the job, but of career development on the basis of shared responsibility. As talent law, labour law will combine with an education system that will focus more on learning ability, cognitive capacity, creativity, analytical thinking and resilience. Education faces the dilemma that existing knowledge will become outdated and that future knowledge cannot be predicted. Work 4.0 will increase the turnover rate of knowledge. Not so much technical know-how, but a capacity for change, critical and creative thinking, collaboration and dealing with complexity will be prerequisites. Being able to continually develop and adapt talent, under the motto of lifelong learning, will be the only strategy. That is why education will focus not only on the transfer of knowledge and skills, but also on so-called ‘meta skills’ for futureproof learning that will make future adults self-reliant.16 This requires ‘hybrid skills’: a mixture of basic technical knowledge, cognitive skills and personal attitudes that will enable us to manage technology, and evolve with it, all our lives.17 In training and education, technology will promote quantity, quality and accessibility, as is already the case with online courses and universities. Virtual reality and AI will enable even more people to benefit from education, cheaply and from the best institutions, in an easier and more effective way. Technology will enable traditional diploma-based education to evolve into teaching modules that can be taken advantage of at any stage of life. In this way, education will continuously underpin the labour market. Companies and organisations will have to select more on the basis of ability instead of knowledge, on skills rather than diplomas. The regulation of professional qualifications should assist in this process. Technologically personalised HR policy will make it possible to monitor employee requirements in more detail. This will optimise the timing and tailoring of talent management and development, which in turn will promote commitment, motivation and wellbeing. 16 See, e.g., P.A. Kirschner, Het voorbereiden van leerlingen op (nog) niet bestaande banen (Preparing for not yet existing jobs), Heerlen: Open Universiteit, 2017. 17 See also L. Rainie and J. Anderson, The Future of Jobs and Jobs Training, Washington DC: Pew Research Center, 2017.

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For companies, talent law illustrates how talent management becomes a key strategic business priority.18 The combination of quantitative talent shortage and qualitative skills transformation means that companies will never be able to make the transition to Work 4.0 without investing in retraining and up-skilling. Employing technology to increase productivity and profitability, eliminating repetitive and routine tasks and deploying people for more worthwhile activities doesn’t just happen. Companies will have to invest in both hardware and software, not just in technology and machines, but also in people and their organisation. Technological innovation will only succeed if it is used for innovation in work, people and labour organisation, which requires a business strategy linking technology to talent.19 For society, talent law is a vital component for inclusion and upward mobility. Work 4.0 represents a gigantic opportunity for greater talent inclusion through lower barriers, more choice and more diversity. There is, however, also a risk of talent erosion. There will be losers. At the top, winners will be able to gain even more because their talent and skills can be deployed even more productively and on a larger scale. Elsewhere, the risks are real. In the middle, cognitive AI could take over routine intellectual tasks such as writing, communication, transport, purchasing, accounting, contract management, medical diagnoses and office administration. At the bottom, robots could replace human actions and interactions in low productivity jobs, production, distribution, care and personal services. Technology is consequently not talent neutral and it seems logical that the megatrends behind Work 4.0 could amplify labour polarisation – the combination of a fast moving top, a disappearing middle and a stagnating bottom. There is considerable inequality in the acquisition, early in life and later in education, of the hybrid skills that can forge the connection between man and technology. If we don’t reduce this talent inequality, changing job structures will likely increase labour inequality.20 We will have to promote a talent shift across society in order to turn losers into winners. This can be done by mainstreaming talent development as a core value of social policy, using techniques such as training cheques, skills guarantees, individual learning accounts, subsidies and tax benefits.21 Labour law will play a central and unifying role in this process. The distant future of talent may well be a question mark, but data models can predict the job transitions and talent requirements of Work 4.0 in the medium term. These models anticipate waves of job destruction and renewal that will have 18 See data and trends described in World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs, Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2016. 19 See, e.g., E. Shook and M. Knickrehm, Reworking the revolution, Accenture Strategy, 2018. 20 See European Parliamentary Research Service, The impact of new technologies on the labour market and the social economy, Brussels: European Parliament, 2018; M. Lawrence et al., Managing Automation. Employment, inequality and ethics in the digital age, London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2017. 21 See, e.g., ILO Global Commission on the Future of Work, Skills policies and systems for a future workforce, Geneva: ILO Global Commission on the Future of Work, 2018.

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a varying impact on different sectors and professional groups at different times.22 Using this as a basis, policy makers will be able to define priorities and prepare pathways for future job transitions with a sufficient degree of certainty. This could be referred to as preventive target group policy in talent development. The motto of talent law consequently does not have to be a meaningless slogan. We can organise both broad talent development for the long term and specific talent transition in the short term. This way the switch to talent law can prevent labour market problems in the future. However, we have to have the courage to opt for prevention, rather than wait until transition issues actually become a reality in the labour market.

5. Protection beyond status Work 4.0 stands for the variation, fluidity and diversity of work, as exemplified in the (in)famous gig economy or platform economy. The traditional boundaries of legal status, such as employee, self-employed, independent contractor, temporary worker, part-time or full-time worker, are blurred beyond recognition. The necessity to transversally prioritise the career rather than the individual employment relationship, forces us in the direction of a legal framework of shared career rights irrespective of the individual employment relationship. The career perspective requires personal and transferable rights that can be nourished by any and all variations of job, career and/or contracting parties. If job variation increases without a decrease in legal status variation, the development of careers and the productive use of human talent will be undermined on a grand scale. We must evolve towards a shared base of personal rights, irrespective of underlying work status. There are already mechanisms in place that allow actors and artists to build up social benefits across all ups and downs of what is intrinsically a perennially changing project existence.23 If we are all to become project workers, the course seems quite clear. The same internet technology that divides work into project elements can seamlessly attach social rights to personal projects, without excessive overheads or transaction costs for the stakeholders. Platform players and the insurance sector are already experimenting with formulas that supply on the spot insurance for ad hoc services and deliveries.24 HR service providers and partnerships already offer digital tools that enable freelancers to manage their own careers, including ad hoc social protection with each impromptu contract.25 22 See, e.g., H. Bakhshi et al., The Future of Skills: Employment in 2030, London: Pearson and Nesta, 2017; McKinsey & Company, Shaping the future of work in Europe’s 9 digital front-runner countries, McKinsey & Company, 2017; PwC, Will robots really steal our jobs?, PwC, 2018; World Economic Forum, Towards a Reskilling Revolution: A Future of Jobs for All, Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2018. 23 See, e.g., D. Rolf, S. Clark and C. Watterson Bryant, Portable Benefits in the 21st Century, Washington DC: The Aspen Institute, 2016. 24 See, e.g., The Economist, ‘How insurance policies are being adapted to freelance working’, 7 April 2018. 25 See, e.g., YOSS of the Adecco Group and Smart.be cooperative.

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We are already seeing the future of labour law evolving into a law on persons, providing tailor-made follow-up and support for the activities of economically active individuals. As a law on persons, the future of labour law symbolizes a uniform framework for personal economic activity, irrespective of the parties and demarcation lines between social/legal statuses. The content of that framework is a political choice and can evolve. The demarcation lines will fade as the content of the framework grows. In addition to activation, career, talent development and work quality, labour conditions will predictably feature. From a ‘law on persons’ perspective, such topics coincide with the labour position of the working person, in which their regulation finds political legitimacy. The platform economy today is already subject to insurance rules and open to discussion on pricing structures. In essence this is about social security and minimum wages, but for a different category of people than employees. Take this to its logical conclusion and you realise that personal law ultimately does not have to differ much from labour law. In other words: the blurring of work statuses implies a convergence between the worker and the company as a source of economic activity, raising new identification issues in economic law. Add to this the digital deconstruction of the contract as a legal vehicle for cooperation and Work 4.0 becomes the proverbial tail wagging the entire legal dog.26 A law on persons shifts the focus onto the person, personal choice, talent and career. Personal law stands for an equal framework of rights and obligations, but for the unequal, personal implementation thereof. It lets labour law evolve towards regulation that can organise and facilitate a wide range of activities, supported by personal choice, responsibility and diversity and a shared base of minimal protection. A law on persons stands for labour law which is more than just the law regarding human interaction in a work environment. It will also regulate the interaction between people and machines and between machines and people. The intimate symbiosis of people and machines will be a key theme under Work 4.0. Focusing on the person as the core value in the relationship, labour law will be able to set out ethical, legal, organisational, quantitative and qualitative parameters. A law on persons approach puts people at the heart of Work 4.0. In that sense it tends towards a ‘human rights’ approach, but with a crucial conceptual switch. Existing social human rights want to turn traditional labour protections into fundamental rights. They ossify the static labour law of yore, with its protective focus on the job and its obligations for employers. A law on persons symbolizes the reform of labour law and labour organisation towards promoting activating investment, career development, talent management and labour quality. A law on persons stands for a dynamic career approach, with different rights and obligations, greater personal responsibility and a diversity of parties and players with complementary responsibilities. 26 See, e.g., F. Seghezzi and M. Tiraboschi, ‘Italy’s Industry 4.0 Plan: An Analysis from a Labour Law Perspective’, E-Journal of International and Comparative Labour Studies, 7(1), 1–32 (2018).

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As a law on persons, labour law structurally and fundamentally connects with other areas of the law and policy that focus specifically on the individual and on human development, including education, vocational training, housing, benefits, family and youth policy. It incorporates labour law in a holistic continuum of policies that invest in the development of human potential. Talent policy is no longer fragmented into life phases and institutional complexities. Actors, rights and obligations not traditionally included will enter the labour law domain, with an all-embracing talent mission. This requires the coordination of policy competences, at least operational, for instance via a central point of contact that divides a shared policy objective between relevant authorities and authority levels.

6. Embracing the future Societies, organisations, companies and individuals are not passive onlookers subjected to the impact of Work 4.0, but proactive players who will make it a success or a failure through choice. The investment decisions made by countries and companies, the regulations on safety, privacy and the interaction between man and machine, the integration of technology into HR and the organisation of work, our priorities and decisions as citizens and consumers: they are all in our hands. The most fundamental choice relates to the role of work in the economy and in society. It is only because productive economic labour is the basis of prosperity and wellbeing that our analysis is required. A revolutionary alternative for the future of work and labour law would consequently be to cut the umbilical cord between the economy, personal income and social protection on the one hand and work on the other hand. That is essentially what the utopian agenda of a universal basic income stands for. I have rejected it as dystopian elsewhere,27 but I share its underlying concern about the role of work in our modern societies and welfare states. If rights to healthcare, training, education, support, activation, etc. are only acquired through regular employment, Work 4.0 represents a large-scale threat to economic activity, prosperity and wellbeing. Hence my plea for general, personalised and transferable activation, career and talent rights that bridge all peripeteia of work and life. The personalisation of labour rights is an instrument for social inclusion in times of economic turbulence.28 I follow and extend this insight to predict that labour protection will move beyond labour. It will be incorporated in, and combined with, a transversal policy focus on personal talent development for, and throughout, a career. In essence, the social contract regarding the role of work and employment in our society needs to evolve. More job variation and job change means that social policy serves not only those without a job but also those with a job. The traditional 27 See M. De Vos and S. Ghiotto, L’allocation universelle entre rêve et réalité, Brussels: Skribis, 2017. 28 See and compare, e.g., A. Supiot et al., Beyond Employment. Changes in work and the future of labour law in Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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welfare state, which fills in the gaps after and between jobs, must evolve into an investment state, which offers ongoing, anticipatory and preventive protection. Hence the catchphrases of career law and talent law. The archetypal idea of ‘a job’, being a functional role within an organisation, with a set of responsibilities, functional competencies, a title, a rank and a career path, is disappearing. It will be replaced by tasks, projects, targets, teams and results, which offers more variation, choice and options. Working on a human scale makes work both easier and more difficult. We will have greater control over work, but also more responsibility as a result. The future of work is therefore tied to so much more than the regulation and organisation of labour. As a society we will have to adopt a more holistic approach to technological transformation: in the economy, in the environment, in politics and ethics, from a cultural, social and legal point of view. As human beings, we will have to learn to consider and manage work and careers as a continuum throughout all phases of our lives.29 In the final analysis, the technological future of work may well end up making the worker more important than ever.

Bibliography J. Appleby, The Relentless Revolution. A History of Capitalism, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2010. H. Bakhshi et al., The Future of Skills: Employment in 2030, London: Pearson and Nesta, 2017. M. De Vos, Les vertus de l’inégalité, Paris: Saint-Simon, 2017. M. De Vos, ‘Naar een betere arbeidsmarkt (Towards a better labour market)’, in Roadmap 2014–18, Brussels: Itinera Institute, 2014. M. De Vos and S. Ghiotto, L’allocation universelle entre rêve et réalité, Brussels: Skribis, 2017. European Parliamentary Research Service, The Impact of New Technologies on The Labour Market and the Social Economy, Brussels: European Parliament, 2018. Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, White Paper Work 4.0, Berlin: Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, 2017. Gartner, Predicts 2018: AI and the Future of Work, Stamford: Gartner Inc., 2018. C. Golding and L. Katz, The Race between Education and Technology, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010. ILO Global Commission on the Future of Work, Skills Policies and Systems for a Future Workforce, Geneva: ILO Global Commission on the Future of Work, 2018. P.A. Kirschner, Het voorbereiden van leerlingen op (nog) niet bestaande banen (Preparing for not yet existing jobs), Heerlen: Open Universiteit, 2017. M. Lawrence et al., Managing Automation. Employment, Inequality and Ethics in the Digital Age, London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2017. ManpowerGroup, Gig Responsibly. The Rise of NextGen Work, ManpowerGroup, 2018. McKinsey & Company, Shaping the Future of Work in Europe’s 9 Digital Front-runner Countries, McKinsey & Company, 2017. 29 See G. Petriglieri et al., ‘Agony and Ecstasy in the Gig Economy: Cultivating Holding Environments for Precarious and Personalized Work Identities’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 64(1), 124–170 (2019).

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McKinsey Global Institute, A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, and Productivity, McKinsey Global Institute, 2017. McKinsey Global Institute, Independent Work: Choice, Necessity, and the Gig Economy, McKinsey Global Institute, 2016. McKinsey Global Institute, Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation, McKinsey Global Institute, 2017. L. Nedelkoska and G. Quintini, Automation, Skills Use and Training, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, Paris: OECD Publishing, 2018. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Information Technology and the U.S. Workforce: Where Are We and Where Do We Go from Here?, Washington DC: The National Academies Press, 2017. G. Petriglieri et al., ‘Agony and Ecstasy in the Gig Economy: Cultivating Holding Environments for Precarious and Personalized Work Identities’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 64(1), 124–170 (2019). S. Pinker, Enlightenment Now, New York: Penguin, 2018. PwC, Will Robots Really Steal Our Jobs?, PwC, 2018. L. Rainie and J. Anderson, The Future of Jobs and Jobs Training, Washington DC: Pew Research Center, 2017. D. Rolf, S. Clark and C. Watterson Bryant, Portable Benefits in the 21st Century, Washington DC: The Aspen Institute, 2016. F. Seghezzi and M. Tiraboschi, ‘Italy’s Industry 4.0 Plan: An Analysis from a Labour Law Perspective’, E-Journal of International and Comparative Labour Studies, 7(1), 1–32 (2018). E. Shook and M. Knickrehm, Reworking the revolution, Accenture Strategy, 2018. A. Supiot et al., Beyond Employment. Changes in Work and the Future of Labour Law in Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. The Adecco Group and LinkedIn, Flexible Working: A Career and Lifestyle Pathway, The Adecco Group and LinkedIn, 2018. H.J. Wilson, P.R. Daugherty and N. Morini-Bianzino, ‘The Jobs that Artificial Intelligence will create’, MIT Sloan Management Review, 58(4), 13–16 (2017). E. Winick, ‘Every study we could find on what automation will do to jobs, in one chart’, MIT Technology Review, (2018), available from https://www.technologyreview.com/s/ 610005/every-study-we-could-find-on-what-automation-will-do-to-jobs-in-one-chart/ World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs, Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2016. World Economic Forum, Towards a Reskilling Revolution: A Future of Jobs for All, Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2018.

Chapter 5

Europe and the construction of a worker mentality Human rights as an instrument of neoliberal government? The case of Dutch labour activation programmes for welfare recipients Anja Eleveld

1. Introduction Labour occupies a dominant position in contemporary Europe. It has also become an important topic within the European Union (EU), especially since the 1990s, when the EU started developing labour market policies. The goal of making the labour market accessible for all citizens has since become one of the EU’s core objectives. But however admirable this objective may seem, there are concerns, as expressed here, that EU (and national) labour market policies are increasingly evolving into an obligation to participate in paid employment. Moreover, the emphasis being placed on labour is tending, in my opinion, to override other important European achievements, such as the fundamental right to a minimum means of subsistence, as enshrined in Article 34(3) of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (ECFR).1 Indeed, EU social policies have established a clear connection between active labour market policies and access to human social rights, with the intertwining of the EU goal of inclusion in the labour market and the fundamental right to a minimum means of subsistence having become even more pronounced since the EU adopted policies on active inclusion in 2008.2 In this context, the European Commission has explicitly highlighted the role of the right to social assistance benefits in safeguarding ‘an incentive to seek employment for people whose condition renders them fit for work’.3 This view on EU social

1

2

3

See also Article 13 of the European Social Charter. This provision was an important source for Article 34(3) of the ECFR. See the explanation relating to the Charter of Fundamental Rights (OJ 2007/C 303/27). The joint focus on income support and employment policies has continued in the Europe 2020 strategy. See, for example, the ‘flagship initiatives’ referring to both increased labour participation and access to social rights. See also the Communication from the Commission, Europe 2020, A strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth, 3 March 2010, COM (2010) 2020 final and the Commission Staff Working Document, Social Investment Package, 20 February 2013, SWD (2013) 39 final, pp. 4–5. Commission Recommendation of 3 October OJ L 307/11, 11 November 2008, p. 13.

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policies was recently reiterated in the European Pillar of Social Rights,4 where Article 14 (minimum income) stipulates that: Everyone lacking sufficient resources has the right to adequate minimum income benefits ensuring a life in dignity at all stages of life, and effective access to enabling goods and services. For those who can work, minimum income benefits should be combined with incentives to (re)integrate into the labour market. If we interpret Article 14 of the European Pillar of Social Rights along the lines of earlier EU policies on active inclusion, it could be argued that a fundamental social human right – the right to a basic means of subsistence – has become an instrument of governing people’s behaviour, whereby the right to minimum income benefits is acquired only if the recipient ‘behaves as a good worker’. As such, EU social policies have legitimized national welfare-to-work (WTW) policies that make the individual right to social assistance benefits dependent on welfare recipients’ willingness and readiness to re-integrate into the labour market (Serrano and Magnusson 2007). According to these policies, welfare recipients who refuse to comply with work-related obligations may legitimately expect their benefits to be withdrawn or reduced, as a result of which their income may fall below the poverty line (Eleveld 2017, 2018). Using Foucauldian power analytics, this chapter explores how the human social right to a minimum means of subsistence is being deployed as an instrument for governing the work behaviour of welfare recipients and whether deployment of this right creates an active worker mentality, as presupposed by EU social policies. For this purpose, I have drawn on two empirical case studies on labour activation programmes for benefit recipients that I conducted in the Netherlands between 2016 and 2018. The case of the Netherlands is interesting as this country has been one of the forerunners of WTW policies (Lødemel and Trickey 2001), while also being one of the main sources of inspiration for EU labour activation policies (Serrano and Magnusson 2007). Following this introduction, section 2 elaborates on Foucauldian power analytics, specifically examining how benefit sanctions operate as a technology or instrument of government and whether sanction-backed labour activation programmes for benefit recipients produce a worker mentality. Section 3 provides some background information on the Dutch activation policies for recipients of social assistance and how these are structured. Section 4 goes on to introduce two 4

The European Pillar of Social Rights was proclaimed by the EU Council and the European Parliament on 17 November 2017 during the Gothenburg Social Summit for fair jobs and growth. For the text, see Council of the European Union, Brussels, 20 October 2017 (13129/17). The European Pillar of Social Rights functions as an evaluative framework for member states by enabling them to test their employment rules and social policies against the Social Rights Framework established by the European Commission and, as such, provides a frame of reference for them.

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municipal case studies and outlines the methods used there, while section 5 examines the sanctioning and labour activation policies applied in the two municipalities. Sections 6 and 7 elaborate on the two different kinds of worker mentalities constructed in these municipalities, while section 8 contains the main conclusions.

2. Governing the good worker According to governmentality literature, the instrumental view on human rights is paramount to policies of neoliberal governmentality (Odysseos 2010). Whereas national governments decide whether and how citizens’ social human right to a basic means of subsistence is to be respected, the access to this fundamental right provides national authorities with important means to govern their citizens’ conduct. This section explores how, according to Foucault and the ensuing governmentality literature, different forms of government – including governmentality – are deployed in seeking to govern the conduct of citizen workers. In his 1978–1979 lectures series (‘Birth of Biopolitics’), Foucault (2008) referred to the neoliberal critique on classical economists such as Smith, Ricardo and Marx for focusing on land, capital and labour as the abstract factors determining the production of goods. As Foucault explained, neoliberals have shifted their focus to the ‘analysis of the internal rationality, the strategic programming of individuals’ activity’ (Foucault 2008, p. 223). Emphasizing the qualitative aspects of work and the worker, these new kinds of analyses would, according to Foucault, facilitate a new mode of government (‘governmentality’) that fosters and promotes a new kind of worker, one who has become increasingly responsible for his or her own investment decisions and is thus regarded as an enterprise, an entrepreneur of him- or herself (Foucault, 2008, p. 225–233; Rose 1999, pp. 161–162). Scholars who have elaborated on Foucault’s work on governmentality as a form of government include Dean (1999), who systematized the art of policymaking under governmentality by distinguishing between four phases of policymaking: (1) the problematization of a field of government; (2) the technologies of governmental instruments used; (3) the rationalities informing governmental policies, and (4) the construction of a subject presupposed by this form of government. If these phases are applied to WTW policies, it could be argued, first, that policy documents have problematized the role of ‘passive’ transfers during unemployment. Second, based on the policy rationality that benefit recipients bear responsibility for ensuring their active transfer to regular employment, new technologies have been developed, including sanction-backed labour activation programmes, to encourage and support welfare recipients to enter or re-enter the labour market. Lastly, these rationalities and technologies are aimed at constructing the benefit recipient as a new subject: the responsible, forward-looking worker (see also Dean 1995). It should be noted that, for Foucault, governmentality as a mode of government co-exists with the two other forms of government, namely ‘discipline’ (meaning inter alia disciplining the body of the worker) and ‘sovereignty’ (meaning inter alia

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imposing sanctions) (Foucault 2007), which have together made man into ‘a worker’ (Foucault 2002, p. 86). Indeed, it could be argued that modern welfare states deploy these three forms of government with the aim of transforming the passive benefit recipient into an active worker. This point can be illustrated using the example of welfare recipients’ obligation to perform work in labour activation programmes in order to retain their benefits. First of all, these sanction-backed labour activation programmes constitute a governmental technology aiming to change the mind-set of benefit recipients in order to construct a forward-looking, self-responsible ‘worker’ identity (i.e. governmentality as a form of government). Second, the obligation to perform work in the labour activation programme disciplines the welfare recipient (and the welfare recipient’s body) as a worker (i.e. disciplinary government). Third, the threat of a sanction either forces welfare recipients to participate in the labour activation programme or is used to punish them (i.e. sovereign government). The financial sanction is thus used as a technology of government in different ways. On the one hand, the risk of receiving a financial sanction may ‘nudge’ the benefit recipient into a labour activation programme (i.e. governmentality as a form of government), while, on the other hand, the financial sanction functions as a threat or punishment for those not complying (or not wanting to comply) with the rules (i.e. disciplinary or sovereign government). This chapter asks whether the right to a minimum means of subsistence functions as a technology of government (or governmentality) by nudging welfare recipients to participate in a labour activation programme or as a rather authoritative, disciplinary measure. It then investigates the kind of worker that these sanction-backed labour activation programmes produce. For example, do they indeed result in an active, forward-looking worker, as presupposed under governmentality, or do they instead suppress agency, while constructing a disciplined worker? It should be noted in this respect that governmentality as a mode of government is successful only to the extent that subjects actually experience themselves through this quality or status (Dean 1999, p. 32). This implies, among other things, that any study of policy documents needs to be supplemented by ethnographic research (McKee 2009). To date, however, there are only a few examples of ethnographic governmentality research (including that conducted by McDonald and Marston 2005). This chapter seeks to expand on this research by using in-depth interviews and observations in order to analyse in more detail how the human right to a basic means of subsistence is deployed as a means of constructing the active worker (see further section 4).

3. Welfare-to-work policies in the Netherlands Dutch welfare policies radically transformed to an activating WTW regime in the 1990s. Initially, WTW policies invested in training programmes and other ways of helping welfare recipients to transition to jobs, while in the meantime securing their right to social assistance benefits (Spies and van Berkel 2001). From 2004

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onwards, however, the nature of the WTW regime gradually changed with the introduction of the Work and Social Assistance Act (WWB 2004). The explanatory documents pertaining to this Act clearly state that, in the case of all the government’s WTW instruments, people are responsible for providing for their own existence through work. Only where people are incapable of providing for themselves will the government help them to find their way to the labour market, and only where necessary will it safeguard a minimum income.5 While these explanatory documents can be conceived of as expressions of neoliberal governmentality, disciplinary forms of government also come to the fore as, according to the documents, labour activation programmes for recipients of social assistance are designed not only to provide them with work experience (and hence increase their chances of finding regular work), but also to get them used to ‘aspects associated with performing paid work, such as regularity and authority relationships’.6 In order to ensure a more effective transition to regular jobs, the WWB 2004 shifted financial responsibility for re-integrating recipients of social assistance from the central authorities to the municipalities (Blommesteijn et al 2012). This devolution of WTW policies was then consolidated in the Participation Act (Participatiewet) of 2015. Compared, however, to the explanatory documents pertaining to the WWB 2004, those pertaining to the Participation Act paid more attention to sovereign forms of governing welfare recipients by explicitly stating, for example, that municipalities were not exercising sufficient coercion on benefit recipients in seeking to actively encourage them to find paid work.7 For that reason, the right to impose financial sanctions was transferred back from the municipalities to the central authorities, while the sanctions imposed on recipients failing to comply with work-related obligations increased considerably. In addition, one of the major changes introduced through the Participation Act was to impose (a uniform) 100% reduction in benefits for one month on any recipients failing to comply with work-related obligations, with the reduction being able to be extended to three months in the event of recidivism. This contrasted with the situation prior to the Participation Act, when most municipalities imposed onemonth benefit cuts of between 20% and 30% on recipients who failed to comply with such obligations. Since 2015, therefore, and as the policy documents show, access to social human rights has become a more important instrument of governing welfare recipients.

4. Case studies and methods The study in question was conducted in 2016 and 2018 in two municipalities: one of these was one of the four largest municipalities in the Netherlands, with over 300,000 inhabitants (municipality A), while the other was a medium-sized 5 6 7

Parliamentary Papers 2002–2003, 28 870, No. 3, pp. 1–2. Parliamentary Papers 2002–2003, 28 870, No. 3, p. 39. Parliamentary Papers 2013–2014, 33 801, No. 3, p. 32.

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municipality with just over 60,000 inhabitants (municipality B). In 2017, just over 40,000 people received welfare benefits in municipality A,8 while 1200 received them in municipality B. The research focused on labour activation programmes targeting recipients considered to be almost ready to enter the regular labour market. In both municipalities, recipients first attended a work-training programme to learn how to prepare a CV, apply for jobs and so on. Thereafter they could be referred to a labour activation programme (i.e. a work experience programme), where they performed non-paid work activities. Recipients in municipality A spent, in principle, 32 hours a week on the labour activation programme, while those in municipality B spent 24 hours a week on this programme. However, the duration of the work programme could be extended, and this regularly happened, particularly in municipality B. In both municipalities, the work involved in the programme was relatively straightforward and included such things as simple production activities, maintaining municipal green spaces, postal delivery, canteen work or serving coffee to elderly and sick people in nursing homes. I conducted almost 100 semi-structured in-depth interviews with benefit recipients participating in one of the labour activation programmes, welfare officers and workfare participants’ work supervisors. The research also included about 35 observations at benefit offices and on the work floor

5. Sanctions policies and worker mentalities in municipalities A and B In general, the research found that both municipalities used financial sanctions to encourage recipients to participate in the labour activation programmes. Yet the interviews showed that neither in municipality A nor in municipality B did the combination of financial sanctions and the labour activation programmes fostered the self-responsible, forward-looking worker presupposed in neoliberal governmentality. In both municipalities, this seemed to be primarily attributable to the nature of the work – generally repetitive and relatively low-skilled work – that recipients were required to perform. Where labour activities were more challenging, they seemed to induce a more positive entrepreneurial spirit among participants. However, instead of actively starting to look for work, those welfare recipients, too, generally preferred to stay on welfare benefits while expanding their abilities and gaining work experience. Depending on how the individual municipality implemented the national sanctioning provisions, the labour activation programmes seemed to produce different kinds of ‘active worker mentalities’ (i.e. not being an entrepreneurial worker mentality). Before addressing these worker mentalities in the next section, the remainder of this section examines the main differences between the sanctioning regimes applied by municipality A and municipality B. 8

Excluding people previously receiving Wajong (invalidity benefit for young disabled people) benefits.

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In municipality B, local welfare officers deliberately chose either to soften the sanctions or to refrain from using the technology of social human rights altogether. While this approach was obviously in violation of the Participation Act, officials and welfare officers believed that imposing harsh sanctions would have adverse results because of the damage this would cause to their working relationships with the benefit recipients (compare Hasenfeld 2000). In general, municipality B conceived of sanctions as instruments to nudge recipients into labour activation programmes. In municipality A, too, some of the welfare officers I interviewed admitted that – for the same reason as the officers in municipality B – they sometimes refrained from imposing the stipulated sanction. In order, however, to prevent conflicts of loyalty and to uphold the sanctioning system, this municipality had appointed specific sanctioning officers to assess whether a recipient’s behaviour justified imposing a sanction (i.e. withholding the full amount of benefits). These officers were also responsible for imposing the financial sanction if it was considered appropriate. Welfare officers who had to refer recipients (who were almost ready to enter the labour market) to a labour activation programme did not find it difficult to refer a recipient to the sanctioning officer. Indeed, they often expressed pride in the ‘closed system’ that the municipality had introduced and which meant that recipients who refused to be referred to a labour activation programme did not escape a sanction. In their opinion, this was the only way to activate welfare recipients. In addition, this closed system would effectively punish and expel fraudulent welfare recipients. The municipal data confirmed that municipality A imposed relatively more sanctions in the form of full benefit cuts than municipality B. In the next two sections I explain how these distinct sanctioning policies relating to the labour activation programmes affected worker mentalities in these municipalities.

6. Role-playing worker One of the mentalities I observed was what I refer to as the ‘role-playing worker’. This was where, despite labour activation programmes aiming to create active citizen-workers, I often saw participants to be playing the role of an active worker. While this behaviour could be observed in both municipalities, it was particularly evident in municipality A. By agreeing with almost every proposal made by the welfare officer, many of the welfare recipients I observed appeared to be ‘model welfare recipients’, presenting themselves as engaged workers. On a number of occasions, however, these welfare recipients reacted differently when I talked to them privately, with several of them admitting that they were participating in the work activation programme solely because they were obliged to do so and because they would receive a severe sanction if they did not cooperate. This can be illustrated by two excerpts from interviews with recipients:

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What do you expect from this labour activation programme? Nothing, that I keep my benefits, nothing more, that I won’t be sanctioned.

INTERVIEWER: RECIPIENT:

Another recipient put it like this: I know that when this work programme is finished and if I don’t have a job, I’ll have to work in a labour activation programme again. They give me their benefits and I have to work. INTERVIEWER: You have to do that? RECIPIENT: Yes, I have to do it. I only hope that it won’t be hard work. RECIPIENT:

These ‘role players’ did not see how participating in these activities would be of any help in re-integrating them into the labour market. They did not think they would learn anything and just expressed the hope that they would be able to get on with their lives after completing the mandatory labour activation programme. As one recipient argued: Now I think I’ll work here for three months. I’ll see what I have to do (…) and after three months I’ll go back to the voluntary work I was doing before.

RECIPIENT:

Role-playing could also deter recipients from being the active and entrepreneurial person whom they normally identified with. As one recipient put it: I do the work because otherwise they stop my benefits. That’s a pity because usually I’m the one with ideas and the one who tries to help people who are unemployed to think of things to do.

RECIPIENT:

Role-playing entailed not only playing the role of an active worker, but also playing the role of a good recipient-worker who does not cause trouble. This kind of roleplaying seemed to foster a rather passive, submissive kind of person, which was in fact the opposite of the active, forward-looking worker that the programme was designed to achieve. Indeed, some recipients admitted that they did not dare to give their real opinion on certain matters, even if the welfare officers explicitly asked them for it. Related to this, role-playing recipients did not see how they could have any voice in their relationship with their work supervisor or coach. As one recipient put it: RECIPIENT:

If they say that’s how it is, then it doesn’t matter what I say.

Keeping up appearances was a central issue for the role player. One recipient, who had to fold towels, complained to me that she did not want to do this work because some of them were dirty. She said: RECIPIENT:

I have to do it because I have to show them that I’m motivated to work.

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Some participants in a labour activation programme believed that the welfare officer checked whether they were working hard enough, even though the recipients did not know how the welfare officer was able to monitor them. They also believed that playing the role of a good recipient would benefit them in important ways, such as ‘You’ll probably get some privileges.’ In summary, in municipality A part of the welfare recipients whom I interviewed firmly believed they needed to maintain a ‘good relationship’ with their welfare officers and work supervisors in order to safeguard their benefits. The fact that welfare recipients could not entirely control this contributed to feelings of insecurity among some of them.

7. Fulfilled worker A second worker identity that I observed, particularly in municipality B, was that of the ‘fulfilled worker’; in other words, workers who were entirely satisfied with the work they were doing, and which also deterred them from actively looking for regular paid work. While some recipients in municipality B had not initially wanted to be referred to the labour activation programme, almost all the recipients I interviewed had changed their mind after participating in the programme for some time, and were more or less satisfied with it. In the case of these recipients, the risk of a sanction had in fact nudged them to participate in the labour activation programme. They expressed various reasons for remaining in the programme rather than looking for (or accepting) regular paid work. Benefit recipients assigned to care for elderly and disabled people said, for example, that they felt recognized because of the work that they were doing. One recipient working with mentally disabled people was disappointed when the welfare office forced her to stop this labour activation programme. She argued: RECIPIENT:

They need me there very much. Leave me alone. That’s how it feels

to me. Recipients participating in work programmes involving, for example, maintaining municipal green spaces or postal deliveries were happy doing this work and preferred to remain in the labour activation programme rather than look for paid work. The work they performed in the programme gave structure to their lives. At the same time, however, they were well aware that finding a regular paid job would be difficult. As one recipient put it: I’m over 50. No employer wants me. I’m happy with the work programme. If I was sitting at home the whole day, I’d go crazy, or become a heavy drinker. I think I’d start with my first beer at midday.

RECIPIENT:

One recipient, who had just completed her work programme and was forced, against her will, to leave, complained:

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Now I’m sitting at home and slowly night is becoming day again. (…) I would’ve liked to stay there until I found a new traineeship.

RECIPIENT:

Indeed, some people liked the work so much that, when asked, they maintained that they would have been happy to perform the same work even if the welfare office had not obliged them to do so. Other recipients argued that they viewed the work in the labour activation programme as their job and the welfare benefits as their wages. On one occasion this also affected how a recipient regarded the financial sanctions, as illustrated by this conversation: How do you feel about the fact that recipients receive a financial sanction if they don’t show up at their work programme or are late? RECIPIENT: I think that is good. INTERVIEWER: Really? RECIPIENT: Yes, because I think it’s a job. You have to see it as a job. INTERVIEWER: Yes … RECIPIENT: It’s not a kind of traineeship, but a job. You’re getting paid for it. INTERVIEWER:

In other words, this recipient believed that imposing a financial sanction on recipients who did not cooperate with work programmes was justified because an employee who does not work does not get a salary. He thus viewed the financial sanction as a disciplinary device, which was also applied in a similar way to employees. All in all, many of the recipients interviewed in the small municipality loved the work they were doing in the work programme. They felt recognized and had a sense of belonging, while they also enjoyed the social atmosphere, communicating with others and making friends. In addition, they did not want to think about alternative regular paid jobs as that would have caused them stress. Indeed, most of them hated the idea of the ‘new worker’, who is flexible, changing jobs all the time and working on zero-hours contract. Some of them hoped they would eventually obtain an employment contract from the employer on the work programme in which they were participating. And, if not, they preferred to continue working in the work programme and to live on benefits. In conclusion, these ‘fulfilled workers’ did not see themselves as active, forwardlooking people responsible for and governing themselves, and nor did they play the role of an active worker. Nonetheless, they clearly acted as workers in the labour activation programme.

8. Social human rights: an instrument for incentivizing or punishing recipients? These case studies showed how the human social right to a basic means of subsistence has been deployed (in the form of the threat of a financial sanction) to nudge and discipline benefit recipients into becoming active workers and to punish

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them if they did not comply. In addition, the case studies demonstrated that the municipal sanction-backed labour activation programmes did not necessarily foster a neoliberal worker mentality. This would seem primarily due to the nature of the work required to be performed, which generally consisted of simple and low-skilled work, without the recipient being challenged or encouraged to become a forwardlooking, self-responsible, enterprising worker. Second, it would seem attributable to the sanctioning policies implemented; in other words, to the technology of social human rights. Municipality A implemented a more punitive sanctioning system (i.e. reflecting a disciplinary approach to government) and imposed higher sanctions than municipality B. The case studies suggest that, as a result, the WTW policies implemented in municipality A produced subjects who primarily played the role of an active worker. For these role-playing subjects, safeguarding their full benefits was their main and often sole reason for participating in the work programmes. Rather than seeing themselves as active, responsible jobseekers, they actively sought to remain invisible and, above all, to avoid being noticed in any negative way so as not to receive a financial sanction. By contrast, the WTW policies in municipality B, which used the financial sanction as a nudge to encourage participation in the labour activation programme (i.e. reflecting governmentality), constructed, among other things, a fulfilled worker, who rather than playing the role of an active worker, genuinely acted as an active worker. At the same time, these welfare recipients were anxious about entering the precarious and insecure labour market and therefore preferred to continue acting as workers in the municipal labour activation programmes rather than behaving as active, forward-looking jobseekers. While none of the work activation programmes examined seemed to construct the forward-looking active worker, this does not imply that the recipients lacked agency. Indeed, recipients in both municipalities showed considerable agency. Realizing they were unable to escape their situation, they sought, first of all, to safeguard their benefits. Depending on the sanctioning regime imposed, they chose to play the role of a good worker and – particularly in municipality B – sometimes also seemed to internalize the mentality of a ‘good worker’. In my opinion, the right to a basic means of subsistence should be disconnected from WTW policies aimed at assisting benefit recipients to transition to regular paid jobs. This is because, first – as this research has demonstrated – the instrument of human social rights does not necessarily foster an active worker as presupposed in EU social policies, but may instead produce fear, indolence and submissive passivity among benefit recipients. Second, where social human rights function as an instrument of governmentality by seeking to nudge welfare recipients to become forward-looking jobseekers, in accordance with the neoliberal image of workers as an enterprise of themselves, it could still be argued that social rights should not be instrumentalized for achieving other policy goals, but that the goal of ensuring that all citizens have access to basic means of subsistence is a goal that is valuable in itself.

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Bibliography Blommesteijn, M., Kruis, G. and Van Geuns, R. (2012), ‘Dutch municipalities and the implementation of social assistance: Making social assistance work’, Local Economy, 27(5–6), 620–628. Dean, M. (1995), ‘Governing the unemployed self in an active society’, Economy and Society, 24(4), 559–583. Dean, M. (1999), Governmentality: power and rule in modern society, London: Sage Publications. Eleveld, A. (2017), ‘Activation policies: policies of social inclusion or social exclusion’, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, 25(3), 277–285. Eleveld, A. (2018), ‘The sanctions mitigation paradox in welfare to work benefit schemes’, Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, 39(2), 449–474. Foucault, M. (2002), ‘Truth and juridical forms’ in J.D. Faubion (ed.), Michel Foucault Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984. Vol. 3, Power, London: Penguin Books, pp. 1–89. Foucault, M. (2007), Security, territory, population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76 (trans: D. Macey), London: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (2008), The birth of biopolitics. Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979. (trans. G. Burchell), New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hasenfeld, Y. (2000), ‘Social services and welfare to work: Prospects for the social work profession’, Administration in social work, 23(3–4), 185–199. Lødemel, I. and Trickey, H. (eds) (2001), An offer you can’t refuse: Workfare in international perspective, Bristol: Policy Press. McDonald, C. and Marston, G. (2005), ‘Workfare as welfare: Governing unemployment in the advanced liberal state’, Critical Social Policy, 25(3), 374–401. Mckee, K. (2009), ‘Foucauldian governmentality: What does it offer critical social policy analysis’, Critical Social Policy, 29(3), 465–486. Odysseos, Louiza (2010), ‘Human rights, liberal ontogenesis and freedom: producing a subject for neoliberalism?’, Millennium, 38(3), 747–772. Rose, N. (1999), Powers of freedom. Reframing political thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Serrano Pascual, A. and Magnusson, L. (eds) (2007), Reshaping welfare states and activation regimes in Europe, Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang S.A. Spies, H. and van Berkel, R. (2001), ‘Workfare in the Netherlands: young unemployed people and the Jobseeker’s Allowance Act’ in I. Lødemel and H. Trickey (eds), An offer you can’t refuse: workfare in international perspective, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 105–132.

Chapter 6

From work to mobilization Maurizio Ferraris

1. Revelation The documedia revolution, where documents become the fundamental commodity of exchange, helps unravel the arcanum of work. If things have become documents, then the relationship between things is revealed to be a relationship between people. As dull as this may sound, it is an insight that compels us to rethink the entire framework of our labour laws, as traditional dichotomies crumble, the prejudices usually surrounding work are revealed, and the full nature of labour, regardless of its historical contingencies, becomes easier to understand. 1.1. Differentiation To talk about work and its transformations calls first of all for a definition of what work is. Faced with the question, it becomes clear that the notion is not at all unequivocal and can be broken down into two dimensions: an empirical dimension, made up of oppositions (work/play, toil/rest, duty/pleasure, otium/negotium, and so on), and a transcendental dimension, which aims to capture the notion of “work in itself”. That notion, however, is an essence that emerges precisely through the comparison of antithetical opposites, where the notion of “work” emerges through their difference. Work/play Play need not have a purpose; work always does. Yet it is easy to observe an abundance of forms of play that do have a purpose, and which by doing so become work. This is acknowledged in many cases, such as in sports defined as “professional”, where the activity is remunerated. Toil/rest Work requires physical toil (or it does if we accept the Biblical understanding of it); rest does not, but even here it is characterized in Western culture by ritual proscriptions that find their origin in the Bible.

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Duty/pleasure Work can be characterized by duty, as in the case, for example, of the call to arms or the exercise of religious functions, yet paradoxically these activities do not fall into the canonical definition of work – unless they are remunerated (a soldier works, indeed by definition soldiers are paid, but what about a resistance fighter? Or a terrorist? Is martyrdom a job?). Otium/negotium The distinction between otium and negotium, on its part, effects a first overturning of values destined to become particularly significant in the documedia world. Here, otium, deliberation, and consumption (both cultural and not) are of superordinate value to negotium, which suggests a mechanical activity much like the jobs that can be replaced today by machines. Thus, the human realm of the production of value lies in otium, which should therefore be recognized as a dimension of work and the production of wealth. Production of value In general, any activity or passivity or inactivity that is able to produce value should be understood, if not as work, then as a form of mobilization, which in turn implies something of superordinate form to work and to its opposite. The shift from work to mobilization in the documedia revolution constitutes the key feature for a new conceptualization of the phenomenon. 1.2. Deconstruction Besides undermining old dichotomies, the documedia revolution deconstructs old idòla and prejudices traditionally connected with the notion of “work”. Let us take a brief look at them. Fori The first family of idols is tied, as Bacon identified it, to the ambiguity of language. “Work” is one word, yet it is antithetically opposed to many others – such as idleness, unemployment, play, life – which suggests that what we call “work” can be said in many and often very different ways. Faced with such intricacy, generally we just cut things short and identify work more or less with the occupations of our parents when we were children, which are raised as the norm. But given that in reality we have no experience of such work in all its harshness, and that time tends to lend a rosy tinge of nostalgia to our memories, what often lies behind our debates over work is the idea that we should return to that lost world of “true” and “wholesome”

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work,1 which, all things considered, is something of a paradox considering that for over half a century (and for very good reason) left-wing thinkers have insisted on the need to overcome old labour arrangements and, more generally, work as a whole.2 Besides being paradoxical, however, nostalgia for the jobs of old is also passably insincere. Who would really want to be a typist, or a bookkeeper, or an assembly-line worker à la Chaplin in Modern Times? It is time we quit the nostalgia for the jobs of the past. Specus With the documedia revolution, the distinction between work and its antithesis – idleness or consumption – becomes extremely problematic from the moment that the Web has laid waste to the difference between intellectual work and manual work, just as it has to the difference between work time and private time. On a closer look, however, it becomes clear that what is presumed to be non-work today can positively be acknowledged as real work. In the documedia age, work is no longer primarily production, but consumption – a sphere in which humans will never really be replaceable. And such consumption effectively produces economic value, namely in the form of data, whereas the remunerated idleness of East German waiters or Italian public servants never produced economic value, but only political consensus. The sphere of consumption also encompasses (if we choose not to be moralists about it, but then what is there to be moral about?) caring, which is precisely a form of consumption. If we acknowledge this, it is no longer true that ageing does not produce work; on the contrary, it generates growing needs and consumption. Tribus It is essential that analyses of labour abandon anachronistic catchwords such as Taylorism, Fordism, alienation, and so on and so forth. This victimary paradigm renders new forms of labour incomprehensible, generating only resentment and imaginary enemies and making us lose sight of the real enemies and, above all, the real opportunities. We need to see through the fallacy of lining up, as though they were the same thing, the fear that machines will seize power and the fear that they will take work away from humans. Will robots steal our jobs? Of course they will. Will they seize power? On the whole, no. The two things do not go hand in hand with each other and it is wrong to associate them. From this point of view, a whole chain of problems arises. Ethical concerns linked to robots often disguise concerns about jobs. The latter are much more important and more justified than the former, but, even here, all too often the underlying assumption is that robotization is 1 2

R. Staglianò, Al posto tuo. Così web e robot ci stanno rubando il lavoro, Einaudi, Turin 2016; Id., Lavoretti. Così la sharing economy ci rende tutti più poveri, Einaudi, Turin 2018. F. Berardi Bifo, Quarant’anni contro il lavoro, DeriveApprodi, Rome 2017.

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ultimately always bad – even where, for example, the automation of domestic work, where talking servants (usually family members and women) are replaced by silent servants, is a sign of progress and enlightenment, as demonstrated by the impeccable humanitarian motivations behind Thomas Jefferson’s promotion of domestic automation at Monticello. Theatri The philosophical tradition is partial to reading labour in terms of toil and alienation, when it should rather be conceived in a broader sense as the production of value, which does not exclude fulfilment without toil and value production without alienation. In short, that means overcoming the distinction between otium and negotium. Work has become consumption and assumed aspects of otium, but that has not given rise to spiritual idleness. The idea that everything becomes spirit is the underlying equivocation that from Paul of Tarsus to Hegel, and onwards to Bauman, has made our understanding of modernity problematic. On the contrary, everything becomes letter, which is precisely why we are witnessing the spread of an aesthetic paradigm, which is not playful, but instead merciless and demanding. Our times are not liquid3 or virtual,4 as the post-modernists would have it. Rather, ours is arguably the most solid world ever known in history, given that everything is recorded and hence everything can be accounted for and we can be called to account for everything. Far from dissolving the world and transforming it into a fabulous fable of peace, post-modernism laid the theoretical foundations of posttruth, and hence for the strategies of the trolls who seek to pass fables off as truth, subverting democracy.5 Understanding the Web is much more than a simple inquiry into the means of communication. Suffice it to say that globalization does not depend on jet planes but on writing, a technology more ancient than the pyramids and alone in its ability to transfer not physical objects, but social objects, such as money, laws, policies, and identities. And not only. Writing, and recording in general, perform a miracle – the miracle of constructing social objects (verba volant, scripta manent). Through the Web we can understand the true nature of social action and social reality, which cannot be dissociated from the possession of inscriptions and records, archives and documents, and from that technology of all technologies which is writing. The recent and unexpected explosion of writing reveals the deeper nature of social reality, which is made up of documents, suggesting that power, which Foucault defined as “governmentality”, is more specifically “documentality”. Without documentality, we may still have trees and chairs, but not marriages or aristocratic titles, economic crises or Nobel prizes. That is how it has always been, and that is why documents, monuments, and rites are so 3 4 5

Z. Bauman, Modernità liquida (2000), Laterza, Roma-Bari 2011. P. Lévy, L’intelligenza collettiva: per un’antropologia del cyberspazio (1994), Feltrinelli, Milano 1996. M. Ferraris, Postverità e altri enigmi, il Mulino, Bologna 2017.

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important. What is new now is that the Web has brought into the light of day what in past ages was an arcanum imperii. 1.3. What is work? Production of value I define “work” as any production of value. But not everyone would agree. Added to the conceptual vagueness is the fact that the debate over work, and its transformation or simply its disappearance, appears to be shrouded by the various equivocations I spoke of earlier – the idòla, as Bacon put it, or, in more bread and butter terms (to borrow from precisely the sorts of things work traditionally was meant to guarantee), prejudices, misunderstandings, and perspective errors,6 all underpinned by the insurmountable conceptual problem of the intrinsic vagueness of the notion of “work”. Combine such vagueness with the technological and social transformations ushered in by the documedia revolution, and it should come as no surprise that confusion reigns supreme. Moralization The remedy for such conceptual obscurity is often sought in inappropriate and generic ethical-political appeals. The recourse to ethics is indicative of problematic situations that need to be resolved on the theoretical level, and even more so on the practical level. Ethics abounds when it comes to the Web and robots. Passions are consumed by the privacy debate, but people really do not care and instead get on with producing value in unpaid jobs. And the result is the social rage we have before our very eyes. What are the gilet jaunes angry about? About a lack of privacy protection? About being exploited? No. They are angry because there is something they do not understand, only they do not know what. The problem is that Macron would appear not to know either. Before moralizing over the cruelty of capital and breach of privacy, before taking to the streets and burning parked cars, a few thoughts on work would not be inapposite. Intellectual work and manual work Let us start with an elementary question. Shaking hands is intellectual work, marking, for instance, the closing of a contract. But nobody can deny that it is also 6

Variously conservative visions of work. R. Ciccarelli, Forza lavoro. Il lato oscuro della rivoluzione digitale, DeriveApprodi, Rome 2018; N. Srnicek and A. Williams, Inventare il futuro. Per un mondo senza lavoro, Nero Editions, Rome 2018; T. Scholz and N. Schneider, Ours to Hack and to Own. The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet, OR Books, New York-London 2017; B. Vecchi, Il capitalismo delle piattaforme, Manifestolibri, Castel San Pietro Romano (RM) 2017; P. Mason, Postcapitalismo. Una guida al nostro futuro, Il Saggiatore, Milan 2016.

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manual work, given that it is done with the hands (and this is true for the majority of intellectual jobs, which imply the use of hands and fingers on a keyboard or pen on paper). Of course, there are good grounds on which to argue that shaking hands is often not work, when it happens in convivial contexts for instance, although it can be a tough call to make, given that public relations can be a job (shaking hands along the campaign trail, for example, or shaking hands at the end of a business lunch). This simple phenomenology illustrates how problematic the notion of “work” is. What is work? What distinguishes work time from private time? What does the sociology of work become? The problems and confusion have only grown with time, fuelled by the diversification of work in the postindustrial and now documedia ages, and by the typically modern tendency to label as “work” any form of activity, including intellectual and convivial activities that in premodern times were considered otium, as opposed to utilitarian negotium and servile toil. But this inflationary growth of work, everywhere around us, reflects a state of affairs that cannot be denied: if the most prized commodities are the documents on our lives, then any form of social interaction, providing it is recorded and able to produce value, qualifies as work. What does it mean “to work”? It can then be asked whether work depends on intentionality. Indeed, most would agree that to work one needs to be aware of working, yet there is nothing strange in considering what a pack horse, draught ox or sled dog does as “work”. However, if what they do is work, for the value it produces, then we are compelled to consider any sort of production of value as work. In that case, a person watching a pornographic film subjectively might not be working (unless he or she were a film critic or a philosopher conducting an enquiry into pornography), but objectively, in the documedia age, they would be working, insofar as they are producing data, and hence wealth. Such an anomalous, yet omnipresent, production of work should therefore be remunerated, especially if we consider that the more time invested in this way, the more the documents produced, and to be able to invest so much time would likely suggest that I am unemployed, that is, that I do not work (and am not remunerated) in a traditional sense. It could be objected that work necessarily implies a level of alienation, so if you enjoy something, then it is not work. Or that what follows the dictates of nature, such as child-rearing, is not work. Such assumptions, however, are clearly open to challenge, implying as they do the absurdity that anyone who enjoys working should not be paid, because in reality they are not working, or the condition of two mothers who exchange their children for a few hours every day so as to be paid as babysitters. Even the assumed alienating character of work would appear to be a legacy of the characterization of work in the modern era. It follows that to pay for something would suffice to transform it into work, the conceptual advantage of which is that, if mobilization were paid, it would ideo facto be transformed into work and acknowledged as such.

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The need for a definition It is not a matter of redefining work, but rather of defining it and making it clear that the notion is anything but determinate and self-evident. The usual consensus is to define work as: an activity that produces goods or services, that meets an obligation, that implies intelligent effort obliged and protracted over time, that aims to satisfy needs and fulfil the capacities and plans of the worker or the master, and that contributes to the perduration and organization of the institutions of a society.7 What is sure is that the Marxist concept of work as a relationship between humans and nature does not apply to the documedia society.8 That relationship today is handled by machines and we relate to them; thus, in Hegelian terms, we retain the position of master, whereas it is the machine that is the servant. For similar reasons, it is not easy to determine exactly who the employer is when it comes to activities mediated by platforms. Is it the owners of the platforms? The businesses or individuals who consume the services? Or is it the workers themselves, who in many legal frameworks can be identified as self-employed? If we make the distinction between labour and work, where the former is a subspecies of the latter, in which exchange value is produced,9 then it is clear that mobilization has all the characteristics of labour except one, that of being remunerated (which is clearly unfair). Art is the new work10 To state the question again, what is it that we mean by “work”? The impression is that the question is no less problematic (although much more crucial) than the question, what is art? In the latter case, the passing of beauty as an identifying element of art led to the suggestion that “art” is all that a community of experts – the art world – acknowledges to be art. Similarly, we can say that the passing of alienation and toil as identifying characteristics of work means that “work” is nothing more than what a community of experts – let us call it the “work world” – identifies as work. With the important difference, however, that while it is in every interest of the art world to multiply the number of art works, the work world is driven by the diametrically opposite interest of minimizing as far as possible what we consider to be work to exclude activities which, if acknowledged as work, would have to be paid. 7 A. Cukier, Qu’est-ce que le travail, Vrin, Paris 2018, p. 32. 8 K. Marx, Il capitale (1867), vol. I, Editori Riuniti, Rome 1964, Book I. 9 J. Dewey, “Interest and Effort in Education”, The Middle Works 1899–1924, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale 1979, p. 189. 10 P.-M. Menger, Portrait de l’artiste en travailleur. Métamorphoses du capitalisme, Seuil, Paris 2003. The condition of the worker today is the same as what it has always been for the artist. See also Menger’s other writings on the matter, in particular his Oxford essays.

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Individuation Unlike when it was thought that the technological society would come hand in hand with depersonalization (an interpretation, among other things, derived from a misunderstanding of the notion of “technology”), never has so much humanity been produced as it is today – never have we been so attentive to humans as today. And the most evident form of this can be seen on the Web – fashion, travel, lifestyle, pornography, nutrition, answers to the most curious of questions (I myself have found a tutorial on how to tie a bowtie and another on how to use komboloi, or Greek worry beads). Those who pine for the closed market state of the past would be the last to give up all this worldly wealth in exchange for an old Trabant (which, by the way, can freely be purchased on Amazon). But above all, nothing would appear more inappropriate than how humans in the technological world were imagined last century. One dimensional man? Human solitude in the technological age? Anything but! We know just how alone a human can be in a community, just as we know how much human noise surrounds us, and how difficult it can be to handle, because it is the noise of individuals all different from each other.

2. Transformation Having passed through differentiation and then deconstruction, it is time to move on and acknowledge the transformation of traditional work, where the textualization of the documedia revolution has brought changes that often render such work unrecognizable, both in terms of its products and the organization of labour. That transformation fails to be understood by liquid modernity, by the gilet jaunes and other indignant protesters, and, unfortunately, by a good part of their leaders. So let us try instead. What manifest transformations are sweeping work in the traditional sense, driven by the documedia revolution? To begin with, it is clear that a new arcanum has emerged, this time in relation to work. 2.1. Dissemination In John Maynard Keynes’s day and age it was commonly thought we today would work just fifteen hours a week, giving rise to the problem of how we could occupy all that free time left to us by machines. Back then, they could never have predicted that the invention of a worldwide typewriter would keep us busy instead, mobilizing us for fifteen hours a day. Thus the unravelling of the arcanum of commodities has led to the creation of a new arcanum – the arcanum of work. How is it that jobs are being lost, yet we keep working more than ever? How is it that automation has not unearthed a chasm of free time for us to employ (now that our time is more employed than ever), yet at the same time, just as predicted last century, it has dramatically reduced employment? How can unprecedented levels of employment and unemployment coexist at one and the same time? Answering these questions comes with a certain priority, precisely because they all

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point to a new arcanum, one that would have been inconceivable for Marx, which is that people work without being aware of working, while providing the means of production themselves. If the unaccomplished dream of capitalism was to have children working through the night, today that dream has come true – and with the additional boon that children do not demand to be paid, it is their parents who furnish the means of production, and the Western world is racked by youth unemployment.11 In reality, it was never a matter of the end of work, but rather of its metamorphosis.12 And the key task of philosophy today is to conceptualize this transformation of work.13 The dissemination of work Work is disseminated and the central problem lies in recognizing the distinctive marks of its dissemination. What is sure is that it has not disappeared, if by “disappear” we mean its annihilation without trace. The end of work was announced by Lafargue at the end of the 1800s,14 by Jeremy Rifkin at the end of the 1900s,15 and by Keynes in the 1930s.16 But what was theorized as the end of work in reality is a series of phenomena that are not the same as its end, though they certainly mark a transformation that previously was unthinkable. Alleviation First of all, what we are witnessing is the disappearance of toil. Mobilization does not necessarily imply physical toil, which instead remains the realm of occupations merely subordinated to the Web, such as delivery riders or Amazon warehouse workers, jobs destined to disappear with the advance of automation. On the whole, however, toil is no longer a fundamental characteristic of work.17 Rather, it is becoming more of a characteristic of recreation, when with runners, for instance, it is a matter of working off the calories we no longer burn in the fields 11 T. Andina, Ontologia sociale: transgenerazionalità, potere, giustizia, Carocci, Rome 2016; S. Bailey, G. Farrell, U. Mattei (eds.), Protecting Future Generations through Commons, Council of Europe Publishing, Strasbourg 2013. 12 U. Beck, Il lavoro nell’epoca della fine del lavoro. Tramonto delle sicurezze e nuovo impegno civile (1999), Einaudi, Turin 2000. 13 See the special issue of Nature on the future of work: https://www.nature.com/ news/science-must-examine-the-future-of-work-1.22833 14 P. Lafargue, Le Droit à la paresse: refutation du “Droit au travail” de 1848 (1883), Bureau d’éditions, Paris 1929. 15 J. Rifkin, La fine dell’età del lavoro. Il declino della forza lavoro globale e l’avvento del post-mercato, Baldini & Castoldi, Milan 1995. 16 J. M. Keynes, Teoria generale dell’occupazione, dell’interesse e della moneta (1936), Utet, Turin 1971. 17 On deindustrialization (now from a historical perspective, given that it has been twenty years), see: R. Rowthorn, R. Ramaswarmy, Deindustrialization: Causes and Implications, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1997.

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or on the factory floor. The runner – a figure that finds its reason for being in the disappearance of physical toil – really is the symbol of this transformation. Runners run to work off the energy they do not burn at work, but it is a consumption that can produce more wealth than that generated by physical toil because it permits the consumption of low-cost, mass-produced goods (such as functional food, shoes, MP3 players, and pedometers) that would otherwise remain unsold, or would serve absolutely no purpose at all (what is the point of pedometer on a Fordist assembly line? Or with an MP3 player in your ears, you would risk crushing your hands under a press). This transformation runs much deeper than what was seen with the industrial revolution. There, countryside farm hands became urbanite factory workers, but the toil of labour remained. With the shift to a service economy, work assumed more of an interpersonal dimension, but it was still recognizable as work. Today, work has become indistinguishable from private life, as the production of goods is delegated to machines, but the production of value depends exclusively on human mobilization, sending the very concept of work to ruin. Deprofessionalization Secondly, trades and socio-professional categories are disappearing,18 giving rise, in social organization, to a phenomenon exemplified by how various activities, such as the manufacture (and sale) of radios, television sets, telephone handsets, calculators, computers, watches, compasses, barometers, and so on, have been subsumed by the manufacture and sale of smartphones. The commodity becomes the document. At this point, the bulk of production in the traditional sense is carried out by machines, which execute programmes, and hence by documents, the writing of which was exclusively the activity of human workers. Those workers, however, (as with anyone without a paid job) have another task to perform, a secondary or collateral task that is starting to become their main, if not exclusive, task, which is consumption, entertainment, and relationships. In this framework, the idea of an occupation is lost.19 The decline came with Fordism and although now there are occupations again, they do not coincide with a vocation, nor with an occupation for life, something which is particularly evident with Web-based activities (where you tend to start out by chance, but then over time end up doing something completely different).

18 This transformation lies at the heart of the work of Richard Sennett. See, in particular, R. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character. The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, Norton, New York-London 1998. 19 On the idea of “occupation” as intrinsically bourgeois and identity-forming, see M. Weber, L’etica protestante e lo spirito del capitalismo (1904–1905), BUR, Milan 1991. On the decadence of such a figure, see R. Sennet, Il declino dell’uomo pubblico (1977), Mondadori, Milan 2006 and L’uomo flessibile. Le conseguenze del nuovo capitalismo sulla vita personale (1998), Feltrinelli, Milan 1999.

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2.2. Documediatization Design These transformations are being led by the documedia revolution. Horizontality can be seen not only, nor primarily, in communications, but just as widely in new forms of production (or, more precisely, of design). Even in this case, we are witnessing a transformation in traditional jobs that is not just a restructuring of those jobs, but an ontological shift. The unification of labour is no longer driven by spatial coexistence in the factory, but by the platform that collects together its functions. Already in this simple circumstance, the difference between work time and private time fades. Production and distribution come closer together to the point of becoming a single concept, not only due to the fact that the two functions are unified in electronic documents, but because carriers such as DHL and UPS have the potential to create hubs where products conceived in other continents can be 3D-printed, reducing distribution and delivery to a local matter. Vitalization But above all it is life that is the greater vessel that takes on the dual purpose of providing data and of constructing the ultimate purpose of the entire machine, which can be automated as much we want, but it will always remain subordinated to needs and consumption – a characteristic that has been reinforced and has come to the fore with the documedia age. Factories are no longer the central gobetween. Now it is a matter of orchestrating networks that are rarely proprietary. The consumer is no longer an end point, but a transitional moment, if only for the fact that by consuming, the consumer produces data. The lines are blurred between raw material suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and consumers – indeed, consumers encapsulate all of them in one, thanks to their growing ability to produce data, making them the raw material, the manufacturer, the distributer, and, obviously, the consumer in one. Mobilization The emphasis continues to be placed quite rightly on changes in labour in the strict sense of the term, but that only captures a minimal part, the least important part, of work. It must not be neglected that a much more disseminated change is sweeping work in the broader sense of the term. Its causes are to be sought in the same drivers that are transforming work in the strict sense, without, however, restricting the perspective on the matter to work in the traditional sense (that is, to be more precise, work as we have known it in recent centuries). In this framework, I propose distinguishing between work (the classical, or rather, traditional concept of work over the past two centuries as a fixed, repetitive, and highly organized activity); activities (the system of semi-work activities that have always existed, but

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which now have become much more pervasive in the light of the transformations of work); and mobilization (namely, those functions that have never really been considered work, but which are so today, if we assume work to be defined as the production of value, as I propose, along the lines of Marx). Globalization We are witnessing the emergence of a global labour market20 to all effects (that is, not based simply on the delocalization of classical manufacturing). Only a quarter of internet users today are European or American (which may lead us to think of the rest in the “Third World”, but instead think of China!). The effect of this is a migration of work, and not of workers (which itself is not a bad thing, and may seem positively good for the immigration problem), while the jobs themselves are not those of delocalized manufacturing, where local workers provided low-cost labour. Serving a function that is much closer to consumption than to work in the classical sense, human agents are needed to organize, classify, and identify the vast piles of information gathered by algorithms. Compared to the classical delocalization of labour, or manufacturing processes, there are three main differences: 1

2

3

Labour today is truly global. If that is the way things are, then to argue that migration is overdetermined by economic interests aimed at creating an army of surplus labour to lower wages in the country is pure and simple nonsense, because the mere existence of the Web creates an army of surplus labour (if we so wish to put it) as big as the world itself. There is no need to migrate. And if people do migrate, it is to search for new ways of life, which is legitimate. Those opposed to the arrival of boats should instead openly admit that they are opposed to human beings looking for new ways of life, and provide good reasons to support their position. The labour market has become nomadic. Today you can find an employee here, tomorrow you can find one somewhere else. And work leaves no trace behind in the places where it is carried out (or rather, it only leaves traces through the consumption of workers). The nature of work is being transformed. We purchase services, not workers (as with platforms such as Upwork.com or Freelancer.com, which bring together 38 million people – but not workers – across the globe).

2.3. Repression, transvaluation, mobilization For a deeper understanding of the transformation of work, I propose three steps. The first is an examination of the repression of work, or the process by which work tends to be dispersed, so to speak, into private life. The second is to effect a 20 M. Graham, “The rise of the planetary labour market – and what it means for the future of work”, The New Statesman, 29 January 2018.

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transvaluation. Once it is understood that work is not only (and, above all, no longer) what we traditionally have known it to be – suffice it to think of the disappearance of toil and, in many cases, repetitiveness – we need to re-conceptualize the notion of work to be able to grasp its present characteristics. We also need to understand that the essence of humans is neither work nor knowledge, but technology and mobilization – and it is precisely this latter aspect that needs to be highlighted to account for the new world we find ourselves in. Lastly, having considered these transformations, repressions, and transvaluations, I will propose a notion of “mobilization” able to unify into a single concept the future of work in the documedia age.

3. Repression An enormous amount of work is repressed, in that it is not conceptualized as work. This is the cardinal point to grasp, because it is this misunderstanding of work that underpins the unprecedented (and richly deserved) competitive gains of documedia capital. In what ways does repression inhibit us from grasping in full the true nature of work in the documedia age? Let us start by focusing on mobilization. Work neither disappears nor is reduced, but is transformed and accelerates.21 Rather than the disappearance of work,22 what we are witnessing, as we have already said, is a dissemination,23 a shift in the places and relationships of work, and the transformation of work into “activities”,24 where work as a whole proves to be a subspecies of a more complex action of mobilization. Such mobilized life is not simply an active life,25 as opposed to a contemplative life, but an amalgam of action, understanding, and misunderstanding. Far from being a surrogate for human activity, new technologies extend human-machine interaction into every moment of life, establishing a clear division of labour where the machine takes care of all the dead work, while demanding that humans take care of the residual live work, which consists of the conferral of meaning. This is a new, yet hidden element of work (often written off as consumerism) that cuts out the traditional intermediaries, as users make their own agreements to offer services, or create alternative sources of information, or use the Web for self-promotional purposes (as with fashion bloggers, influencers, etc.). 21 “The demands made today by employers such as Amazon in Italy, or Pegatron in Taipei and Foxcomm in Shenzhen, would have been inconceivable not only at the end of the 1960s, but even in the factories managed by Taylor or by Ford in the early twentieth century” (D. De Masi, Il lavoro nel XXI secolo, Einaudi, Turin 2018, p. 584). 22 N. Snircek, A. Williams, Inventare il futuro. Per un mondo senza lavoro, Nero Editions, Rome 2018. 23 M. Ferraris, “Total Mobilization” in The Monist, Vol. 97, No 2, April 1, 2014, pp. 200–221; M. Ferraris, Mobilitazione totale, Laterza, Rome-Bari 2015. 24 A. Accornero, Era il secolo del lavoro, il Mulino, Bologna 1997. 25 H. Arendt, Vita activa (1958), Bompiani, Milan 2011.

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3.1. The work of dreams All this vast work is hidden from view. Bringing it to the surface is an essential task for our contemporary age. It is true that the US$20 a year that each user generates annually for Facebook is not much. It is little in the way of value added, generating capital only out of the sheer aggregate volumes involved. But there is an essential element here that should not be neglected, and that is that capital, in its overall volumes, is generated by the web of meanings produced by the set of all users. The true and fundamental value added is, therefore, responsiveness, which is priceless, and as such should be remunerated. Reducing the annual work of users mobilized on Facebook to just US$20 not only fails to consider that they are mobilized not only on Facebook, as lots of other documents are created on other platforms, but it also fails to take account of the fact that what is added by users is not just a part, but the whole, the overall meaning of mobilization, which is what gets the machine running and keeps it ticking. Refusing to acknowledge this key role that users play is no different to observing a work of conceptual art and remarking “A child could do that”. The value added is an intangible – it is what raises the price of a T-shirt from €1 to €20 – but it is not an intangible suspended in a Hyperuranion. It is generated in a system that requires two fundamental elements: recording and responsiveness, where recording is provided by the mobilizers, responsiveness by the mobilized. And in the radical tangibility of that system lies the origin of the intangible and the value it adds. As we are talking about repression, we can liken work to how Sigmund Freud spoke of the work of dreams. Not without some audacity, Freud assigned the status of work to dreaming (due to its essential function in the psychic economy). From the moment that capital becomes something closer to the ideal of a vast archive that records all transactions, it is hardly surprising that traditional work should undergo a process of repression and dissimulation on which we can transpose the categories of The Interpretation of Dreams: condensation, displacement, representation, and secondary revision. 3.2. Condensation Prosumer Work is dissimulated and condenses into the figure of the prosumer, and it does so to escape criticism, that is, to repress the fact that there is work where apparently there is only non-work activity. Trivially and paradigmatically, producers understand themselves to be simple consumers, in the figure of the prosumer. At this point, the worker feels subjectively tired, but does not understand why, because she is unaware of working (and hence tries to dissimulate it in some way). With this centralization of the work of consumption, we see a highly meaningful reversal of the relationship between enterprise and consumer. There is no need for advertising any more for an enterprise to reach the consumer; rather it is registration on a platform that is needed

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for a consumer to reach the enterprise. It is the same reversal that can be seen in politics, in the phenomenon that I have called the “reverse panopticon”,26 where the tricky and interesting part is not how to get voters to understand your ideology, but how to understand the ideology of voters to get elected. What was once the sphere of the producer is now performed by the consumer, venerating a shadow work that is not acknowledged as such.27 The consumer-producer (all consumption becomes production, if it is recorded) thus becomes the central figure of this shift. Mobilization overcomes a whole series of differences that formerly underpinned our way of seeing the world – the difference between live work and dead work, between manual work and intellectual work, and, especially, between work time and private time. With these transformations, intellectual work and manual work increasingly resemble each other. The truck driver at the wheel of a semi-automated truck is no different from an office clerk or a pilot. What is clear, however, is that their ranks are destined to fall. Implicit work Formal jobs in the documedia world employ few and far between. And it is unlikely that any more jobs will be created in the future, given that the logic of such jobs (and what enables their advancement) is essentiality, in pursuit of the ideal of one company made up of one person. Many jobs are being transferred to consumers, which is why I propose calling them the “implicit work of the documedia world”. Issuing an airline ticket or assembling a piece of furniture were once jobs, and they have not ceased to be simply because they are now carried out by consumers.28 Here we begin to understand how a major part of mobilization – which, in line with my general thesis, is a superordinate concept to that of work – is driven in large part, albeit not exclusively nor on the whole, by the immense amount of live work that is delegated to users. Such live and implicit work, however, expands the store of dead work, adding to the archive. The data available grow, algorithms become more efficient, and the output is increasingly more accurate. When compared to the dead work carried out by machines, mobilization is extremely more profitable for those in a position to take advantage of it. Writing a book and publishing it, given the uncertainty of its commercial success, is much less convenient than distributing one through a platform. The writer will be paid only years later, if ever. The distributor instead cashes in immediately, and in doing so acquires an even greater wealth, namely, an understanding of the mind of the consumer, which will prove useful in the future and in the meantime can be sold to others for a profit, while the distributor’s part in the live work done is minimal (the procedures are all automated). 26 M. Ferraris, “Web è comunismo realizzato, ma resta lo sfruttamento: ecco l’era documediale”, on agendadigitale.eu, https://www.agendadigitale.eu/cultura-digitale/ ferraris-web-e-comunismo-realizzato-ma-resta-lo-sfruttamento-ecco-lera-documediale/ M. Ferraris, Mobilitazione Totale, Laterza, Rome-Bari 2015. 27 https://www.internazionale.it/opinione/oliver-burkeman/2018/10/15/lavoro-ombra 28 A.M. Dujarier, Il lavoro del consumatore: come co-produciamo ciò che compriamo (2009), Egea, Milan 2015.

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New intermediaries The fundamental task awaiting us is precisely that of bringing to the surface and institutionalizing these new forms of production of commodities-documents which cut out the traditional intermediaries – agreements between users to offer services, the creation of alternative sources of information, and the use of the Web for self-promotional purposes. Harnessing these changes (especially the latter, the most innovative) is indispensable for industry (to produce new wealth), as well as for society (to prevent exploitation and remunerate work), because while the market and society depend on technological innovation, technological innovation can in turn be steered by the market and by society through innovation based first and foremost on insight into the dynamics at play. From the enterprise to the market Work is not just production through enterprises, but also, and more originally, it is the market. It is distribution and trade, which can be pursued anytime, anywhere, especially in a globalized market. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors certainly could not make do on a fifteen-hour working week. Instead they worked (or, as I would say, were mobilized) twenty-four hours a day. To a certain extent (albeit with a lot more comforts and infinitely broader life prospects), we find ourselves in much the same situation as our forebears. We can cooperate towards the same goal from the four corners of the earth (an author in London, an editor in Mumbai, a printer in Malaysia …), or, vice versa, we can share the same coworking space without working on the same goal or task at all – a situation reminiscent more of scholars all seated in a library and focused each on their own research, than an office in which a coordinated team of employees works towards the one objective. Undeclared documedia work Underpinning this framework is what I call all the great undeclared documedia work. The true transformation can only be driven by efforts to acknowledge mobilization, which consists precisely of all this great undeclared documedia work. It explains why, contrary to the predictions that automation would lead work to disappear, we are witnessing instead the growth of work, in the form of all the unpaid, continuous work done on social networks, which epitomizes the rise of mobilization while at the same time blurring the boundary between work time and private time. Now that everything is recorded everywhere, mobilization produces consumption, information, and commodities. The documedia revolution has thus brought a situation which is not paradoxical in the least, but instead demands understanding and conceptualization. It does not make sense to battle job instability and demand permanent employment contracts when the formal jobs created specifically by the Web employ so few people, while traditional enterprises push automation to the extreme in an effort to remain competitive. Analysis needs to focus not on that sector, but on the enormous amount

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of undeclared, unpaid, and unrecognized work done by users of the Web and which constitutes value production. 3.3. Displacement Work has shifted to become something that is not even remotely conceived as work, although it is contiguous with it (a contiguity that for Jacques Lacan constitutes the metonymic shift of displacement). Vacation work How many of the tourists milling around Venice’s alleyways or crowded into Stansted Airport at 5 am realize they are working? And yet they are working, in that they are producing value – much more so than if they were labouring down a mine shaft, where the utility of their efforts would come to little now that energy sources are changing. The fact that there is a circularity in utility – in that utility is determined by the desirability of a good, while the desirability of the good is determined by its utility29 – suggests that a whole series of dichotomies (which I will not call “metaphysical” as they might simply be traditional) no longer hold. Such as the dichotomy between utility and desirability, between value in use and value in exchange, between the symbolic and semiotic, and obviously between work and mobilization. Where classical economics defines exchange as a relationship of reciprocal desire,30 it is clear that exchange can have no utilitarian foundation, or, conversely, that the utilitarian does not coincide with any rational concept of “utility”. So why oppose the magical, the religious, and the aesthetic, on the one hand, to economics, as rationalization, and consumption, as a degradation of authentic forms, on the other? We can perfectly well conceive of value in use as depending on value in exchange, just as we can conceive of intentionality as deriving from documentality. But above all we need to consider how difficult it is to distinguish between needs and wants, gifting and exchange, essence and appearance, nature and perversion, or art and advertising. At this point, it becomes rather hard to say “that is not work”. The job of living In the light of all that has been said so far, the philosophical interest of life online, or “onlife”, does not lie in its virtual or computerized nature, but rather in how it blurs the boundary between work time and private time, driving a transformation that invests three fundamental spheres: consumption (construed as work at home); production (no longer separate from entertainment, as the spread of digital 29 J. Robinson, Economic Philosophy, Watts, London 1962. 30 T. R. Malthus, Principles of Political Economy considered with a view to their practical application. 2nd ed. William Pickering, London 1836, p. 50.

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interfaces break down the distinction between work and life); and recognition (as a fundamental motivation driving people to perform unpaid non-work activities). “Coworking 4.0” office design is based on the assumption that there is no difference between work and life, productivity and rest, art and industry. It would be wrong to consider this a sign of freedom for the work force (as it at least similarly shows how work has crept into our private lives), but it is undoubtedly a key transformation. Revealed life The disappearance of occupations, the instability and multiplicity of jobs, and the fact that identity is no longer tied to one’s job position are all elements that suggest that what we are facing today is not an altered or alienated life (ultimately, it is much fuller than our old offline lives, or life on the assembly line), but a revealed life. And that effectively is what life is, a mixture and blend of reason, desires, mobilization, obligations, and documents. For sure it is not naked life, which for humans has never existed, as human life is inconceivable without technology. Life today is revealed in all its hidden and essential characteristics – first and foremost in the fact that life is recorded and documented. When we protest against a technology, we never really do so in the name of nature and naked life, but in the name of another technology we are more comfortable with.31 Thus, ever since there has been technology, that is, right from the start, the difference between work and life has been threatened by indistinction. What emerges with mobilization reveals this condition – a condition that goes back to the very origins of humankind, and which was disguised by archaic modes of production, those of Marx’s underclasses (whose only records, and hence only work, were the goods they produced, just as in the Neolithic), and which has disappeared with the documedia revolution. Once life is recorded, the difference between praxis and poiesis vanishes. The machinal subjectivities that operate on the Web today32 are nothing new, given that subjectivity has always been machinal, and all documentality has ever done is reveal it. Biopolitical work Free time has become the fundamental work (along the same lines as consumption has for commodities). Think of the compulsive need to go on vacation, where we end up taking work with us, in what is, ultimately, a form of militarization of 31 “It can therefore be considered that technical objects today are considered from the point of view of the contents of civilization as a consequence of their recent transformations. They are ostracized not because they are technical, but because they have brought new forms that are heterogeneous in relation to the existing structures of the organism, which is culture”. G. Simondon, Sulla tecnica (2014), Orthotes, NaplesSalerno 2017. 32 See A. Negri (ed.), Filosofia del lavoro: storia antologica, Marzorati, Milan 1980–1981; C. Marazzi, Capitale e linguaggio: dalla New Economy all’economia di guerra, Derive Approdi, Rome 2002; C. Vercellone (ed.), Capitalismo cognitivo, Manfestolibri, Rome 2006.

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existence. Instead of attacking the incontestable fact of the value of work, I suggest taking the inverse approach of seeing all that produces value, such as our mobilization on the Web, objectively as work, even if subjectively it may not be perceived as such. If anything there has been “biopolitical work”, which is precisely what happens through mobilization. Human production by means of humans is not just the ingenuousness of the spiritual world, of a humanity fulfilled in the Schillerian sense. It is travel, night clubs, restaurants, wine, haute cuisine, fashion, extreme sex, drugs, and anything else that a beaver would not care for, that moralists condemn as consumerism and degeneration, and that to all effects define the greatest commercial undertaking of our times. 3.4. Representation Darstellung, or representation, was, for Freud, a necessary job to make latent contents acceptable to consciousness. In our terms, it is the centralization of recording functions that has led to dizzying growth in dead work. The systems of mediation that we deal with reveal the necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition of work (Upwork), capital (Blockchain), goods (Amazon), and knowledge (Google). Each of these mediations is a necessary, though not sufficient condition, in the sense that Amazon does not produce goods, Google does not possess knowledge, Uber does not own cars, and Airbnb does not have hotels. Such forms of mediation entail a complete transformation of work, affecting just as much the formal jobs recognized as such, as the apparently informal jobs (because they are not recognized as such) that have become the essence of contemporary work. Emergence Record-keeping is the transcendental (or the condition of possibility) of emergence. It is through the fundamental function of record-keeping, which is to keep a trace of impressions, that organized structures can be created. First of all, it permits living beings to interact with an environment; secondly, the development of complex social structures; and, thirdly, within those social structures, the appearance of meaning and the mental sphere. This process consists of an emergence, describable as a set of physical interactions and affordances (properties of objects) in an environment, the upshot of which is the creation of sense, that is, the world of mental and social meaning. Dead work The copyist’s writing is live work; “cut and paste” is dead work (excluding the few commands needed to do it). Racking one’s brains to find the right words of greeting, and writing them, is live work; the automatic completion of the phrase instead introduces an enormous amount of dead work at the heart of what instead most pre-eminently should be live work – the activity in act, Aristotle’s

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noesisnoeseos, or, to put it in a nutshell, thought. Everything, so to speak, began with “cut and paste”. From the moment that set phrases and formulas – which in turn, however, demanded live work (that of the copyist, for instance) before they could be repeated – can quite simply be copied and pasted, the level of dead work grows exponentially. The spread of records lessens the burden of work involved in the primary, initial act, as something that has no precedent behind it and cannot stand on what has already been done. In effect, work never stands on what has already been done, but we only clearly understand that now. Think of how a text used to be written and how we write one today. The blank page has vanished. Contrary to what is believed,33 the greatest fixed capital – or the greatest dead work – is not the human, but the archive, the technical apparatus that replaces human initiative. Record-keeping is the possibility of accumulation, which is the formation of dead work – the lever, the wheel, the knife, multiplication tables, language, and writing. These are all examples of accumulated know-how, which is not comprehensive of itself, but which can, and in practice does, generate live work, widening the gap between human animals and nonhuman animals – a gap that consists precisely of the fact that the former can build on externalized dead work, while the latter only has at its disposal internalized dead work, or what rather obscurely we call “instinct”. The work of the archive Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species at that. As a principle, this is particularly evident in the relationship between live work and dead work in the documedia revolution. The manual jobs that have survived are distinctly more inventive and skilled in nature. Chefs and tailors have survived, but chauffeurs have disappeared – not only because they have ceased to be an occupational category as Uberization advances, but above all because in the future we will have self-driving vehicles, where all the live work involved will be reduced to the paperwork required to hire one. But while chefs have become gurus, everyday eating is becoming an automated routine. When food is heated in a microwave, live work is reduced to opening the pre-packaged tray. I have brought examples tied directly to private life precisely because, as we will soon see more clearly, the distinction between work life and private life is vanishing. From this point of view, software (that enormous potential for recording) constitutes a store of dead work that greatly surpasses any hardware (a pen incorporates a much smaller memory than a pen drive, as all it recalls is its function), and it takes the place, as we said, of an enormous amount of work that could be said to be spiritual, in that it takes us into the sphere of live work at its maximum potential. It is a software that enables books to be written drawing from Wikipedia. Google Books (and Google in general) is a gigantic store of dead work that has become a condition for all live work, in particular as it successfully 33 C. Vercellone (ed.), Capitalismo cognitivo, Manfestolibri, Rome 2006.

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replaces the more routine tasks of translation. And culture, lastly, is humankind’s greatest dead work. It does not exist in the air, but is accumulated in records. The loss of culture is a total regression, as seen in the crisis depicted in the sequel to Blade Runner. In short, even with culture, the spread of records lessens the burden of work as a primary, initial act, as something that has no precedent behind it and does not stand on what has already been done. For work – any sort of work – never stands on what has already been done. The first live work of humans was to make use of a stick, which itself was dead work. But we only clearly understand that now. Automation and consumption Thus we have, at one and the same time, growth in live work (essentially consumption) and growth in automation. And here is another reason why automation, contrary to all expectations, has not replaced work, providing work is conceived within the broader framework of mobilization. Ultimately, the fact that a predominantly agricultural nation and economy such as China should have become industrialized implies (given its demographic weight) an enormous growth in dead work. Marx34 noted that, with large-scale industries, humans could limit themselves to regulating and overseeing processes, and in a not so distant future, surgical operations will be performed by machines, with the role of surgeons limited to overseeing what they do. Automation gives us the impression (or, more exactly, the hallucination) that matter has become intelligent, but what we actually have is a powerful development of memory, or, in other words, dead work. Gas meters that read themselves, interactive concrete, “smart agriculture”, “smart manufacturing” that uses robots, remote medical diagnoses, and the monitoring of health parameters are not a victory of the spirit. They do not herald the intelligent transformation of matter, but rather the triumph of memory. Without memory, we would have neither data nor the algorithms that gather and calculate the data and execute the programme. In Kantian terms, the algorithm is a schematism; machines do not think, they execute. Secondary revision Now for a last point, to which attention should be paid, recalling what we said at the start about the conservative idols that hover around work. The work of dreams finds its culmination in secondary revision, by which nineteenth- and twentieth-century working conditions are represented both as desirable objectives (in their stability, guarantees, and certainty) and as curses and concrete fetters on present working conditions (in the form of exploitation, social butchery, and so on). Against this ideological representation, a radical rethinking of the nature of work is necessary. 34 K. Marx, Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Penguin Books, London 1993, p. 705.

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4. Transvaluation Together, the redefinitions of new traditional jobs and all the great undeclared documedia work provide the groundwork for a transvaluation of all jobs. 4.1. A new medley of jobs New jobs Generally, “new” work is an activity that shares none of the characteristics of classical work. Alongside traditional work – which, as we have seen, is not traditional at all, granted that the notion of “traditional work” makes any sense – an economy of “minor” jobs has developed (a highly inadequate term, it must be said, as it is obvious that once work is reduced, as Keynes & co. banally prophesied, work can only become “minor”) and, at a deeper level, life as such – life as the production of data – has become work. On the one hand, we have minor jobs that are acknowledged, albeit wrongly considered a travesty in relation to the dream of restoring Great Classical Labour that is a complete anachronism; on the other, we have the major work that is hidden work, the mobilization that produces data. From a political point of view, the fundamental focus should be on recognizing all the major work that goes unseen. Instead, all we do is complain and demand, with a horrifying lack of historical awareness, that minor jobs be transformed into twentiethcentury jobs. But that cannot be, as we are no longer in the twentieth century and the idea of restoring qualified office jobs or factory worker jobs is just as anachronistic as restoring, in our age of asymmetrical warfare, traditional battles, with formal declarations of war, battlefields, generals in plumed hats and soldiers in spiked helmets or red breeches. On the other hand, we might wonder what work is done today by capitalists, or those who in this nostalgic-paranoiac picture occupy the upper hand of power. Even here, the various icons of the new economy, from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, if they had tried investing instead in an automobile factory or Consul Buddenbrook’s family business, would have been beaten from the outset. With enterprises differentiating their investments and areas of business (while in any case running the risk today of being left behind by the market and the horizontality of the Web), it sounds rather short-sighted to call for the restoration of twentieth-century jobs. New values The transformation of work has come with the creation of new values, whose genesis resembles much what has happened in art. In saying that, I mean no praise; I am simply telling it the way it is. Specifically, what we have today is: the primacy of correlation over causality, consisting of the fact that correlations have become more important than causal relationships; the primacy of vagueness over precision, in that vagueness, where built on an overabundance of data, has an advantage over precision achieved with limited data; the primacy of the archive

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over the original: Candide used three million sentences, Google has ninety-five million; the primacy of reuse over use, with an impact on capitalization that was formerly unthinkable; the primacy of emergence over construction, where uses emerge much more than they are planned: first you have the data, then you discover what to do with them; the primacy of consumption over production, where what is truly interesting is that documents attest consumption and are of interest for consumption, which today constitutes the core of documedia capital, since production has ceased to be a problem. Only once we understand these new values can we frame new jobs without falling into anachronisms. But to understand them calls for re-conceptualization, the crucial points of which can be summed up in a new conception of so-called “human capital”. 4.2. Human capital From this perspective, a hermeneutics of work is needed to enable repressed work to emerge, unravelling the arcanum of work, just as the arcanum of commodities was unravelled earlier. The first thing that has obviously been recovered is human capital. Much rhetoric surrounds the concept, but what is important here is that it is through the notion of human capital that we can acknowledge consumption as work. In the more literal sense of the term, humans can be capitalized once they can be documented. And humans can indeed be documented, because their actions are tied first and foremost not with work in the traditional sense, but with consumption, waste, and responsiveness (in brief, the characteristics of humans that enable us to speak of “human capital”, which rather than being edified, needs to be grasped in its specificity). Human Technology is not alienation, but the revelation of human nature. Do we really need to give robots a moral standing, when humans are often wanting in one? Putting aside those who kept the death camps running, can we even call someone who kisses Salvini’s hand a human? If it were a robot, of course, that simple gesture would suffice to criticize robots. We should beware of idealizing human capabilities. Humans have low moral standards and are often lacking in empathy and the capacity for understanding the feelings and desires of others, showing little in the way of intelligence and culture. Rather than the distance between humans and robots, we should think about the difference between the highly elevated image we have of humanity and the real human condition. Robot We need to re-conceptualize the notion of robot, which is not a humanoid, but a recording that collects data and perfects itself. Any record capable of correcting itself is a robot. That means we are robots.

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Technology Neither should we underestimate the fact that technology has always determined our behaviour, generally for the better. Without clothing and shelter and heating, we would not be able to philosophize over robots. Fiction, works of art, and culture are technologies designed to enhance our empathy. We are not immortal souls handed down from above; we are shaped by our bodies and through technology, through our responsiveness. Relationship Do we really always have to treat humans as ends and not as means? I am not sure I ever have. In any case, when I order a coffee from a waiter, or when students ask me information about an exam, they are treating me, and rightly so, as a means and not as an end. Is the recourse to robots a pathology of social relations? The same could be said of prostitution, or of sex tourism, or even quite simply of the power relationships that commonly characterize sexual or sentimental relationships. Idealizing human relationships as though they were free and equal does not make much sense because they are not free and equal. An assistant cannot say “no” to a professor, exactly like a robot cannot. Fear Do robots want power? I doubt it. Except when it comes to politics. Only by grasping this will we understand that the only sphere in which robots really have seized power is in politics, where big data, processed by algorithms and software, determine the behaviour of our leaders. And that is a bad thing – but it is bad because the bad ideas come from voters, not from computers. 4.3. Consumption In this framework, the revaluation of consumption plays a fundamental role, a role on par with that played by automation in the genesis of industrial capitalism. Work at home When he defined (albeit deploringly) consumption as work at home, Günther Anders had no idea just how right he was.35 You might be at home, and yet you work by consuming goods to make way for other goods and keeping production going.36 In our day and age, situated between capital and documediality, commodities are seen from the other side of the looking glass, from the point of view 35 G. Anders, L’uomo è antiquato (1956), Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2003. 36 J. Baudrillard, La società dei consumi. I suoi miti e le sue strutture (1970), il Mulino, Bologna 1976.

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not of production, but consumption. And a major part of communications is destined to serve a purpose that in classical manufacturing was marginal, namely the promotion of consumption and suggesting purchases. No sooner did this development emerge (and workers had access to commodities) than a wholesale critique of consumption was unleashed, on a par, if not more scathing, by force and depth of indignation, with the much more justified critique of the exploitation that preceded it. Even the casting of the spectacle as alienation, a characteristic of many analyses of the media society, would appear quite simply (and unjustifiably) to be nostalgia for the production world.37 To see television as a form of brutalization is to forget the illiteracy and degradation of the English working class described in Capital. Vice versa, it is worthwhile remembering how the spectacle or show as a social object reveals the arcanum of commodities to be – wrote Guy Debord, with a singularly exclusive focus on the image, as though music or literature were not a spectacle – a “social relation between people that is mediated by images”.38 Consumption determines production Production relations are secondary and are derived with respect to consumption patterns,39 in line with Marx’s idea that production does not satisfy needs, but produces them. No better argument can be made in favour of the fact that consumption is a form of work, or better, it is its transcendental. Without consumption, the notion of “work” loses any sort of meaning. Here, consumption patently has the aspect of mobilization, just as when Jean Baudrillard40 speaks of “innumerable individuals pledged to a parody of sacrificial consumption, mobilized as consumers”. It should be noted that Baudrillard, just like anyone else, would have a hard time explaining why consumption should constitute a parody of sacrifice and why, on the contrary (and in my view with good reason) sacrifice cannot be seen as a primitive form of consumption, a desire that is ill-expressed and horrendously satisfied, perhaps with human sacrifice.

37 Thus, typically for Debord, “there can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle activity is nullified” (G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967), trans. by Ken Knabb. Rebel Press, London 2005, § 27). It is on this basis that he considers liberation from work to be illusory, and is able to ignore the fact that activity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to achieve freedom. Debord fails to consider the dialectical movement underway, from paid activity to unpaid passivity to unpaid activity, which of course can be treated as a rather ruthless form of exploitation, but at the same time it is the fulfilment of Fichtean pure freedom, or action as self-revelation for the purpose of acknowledgement. 38 G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967), trans. by Ken Knabb. Rebel Press, London 2005, § 4. 39 V. Costa, Élites e populismo. La democrazia nel mondo della vita, Rubbettino, Soveria Manneli 2019, p. 54. 40 J. Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), trans. by Charles Levin, Telos Press, Candor NY 1981 p. 119.

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Consumption–Record–Consumption Cycle Moreover, from the moment in which every act is recorded, such dependency triggers a Consumption–Record–Consumption cycle. To begin with, we have an organic element that determines consumption. Then, given that consumption leaves traces and produces social objects (big data and information on consumption), we find ourselves – and this is the novelty introduced by the documedia age – dealing with the production of social objects through consumption, which leads to other consumption, and so on to infinity. Even consumption generates a commodity, but the documedia revolution shifts the bar forward – in the case at hand, into our homes, where we do not just consume, but produce as well, providing we have a terminal. The idea that with electrical technology every consumer becomes a producer (creating the figure of the prosumer, or producer-consumer) was already put forward at the start of the 1970s.41 Then it was observed that the prosumer was a part of production,42 due to the saturation of the market by standardized goods, which made it necessary to start individualizing goods, which hence required the cooperation of the consumer. Convergence of production and consumption This cycle falls within the framework of mobilization in exactly the same way its inverse does, which begins with production. In the past, by contrast, production and consumption were two separate moments. Why should consumption not be work? Perhaps because work is good and fulfils the essence of humans, whereas consumption is bad and perverts it? Or does the assumed laborious superiority of work depend on the fact that the determination of what humanity is and what work is goes back to an age when work still implied physical effort and toil was inevitable? But above all, it must not be neglected that consumption today (both material and spiritual) is an eminently human activity, in the dual sense that it is the only activity that remains the prerogative of humans in a world of total automation, and it is an activity that constitutes a property of humans, as it cannot be automated, and can satisfy irrational wants and needs. Rubbish The opposite of work has today become true work. To waste is to produce; to pollute is to generate value. What has grown exponentially is not alienation, but the spirit. Documedia capital is infinitely more spiritual than all the forms of capital that have come before it. To say that responsiveness is not work is not all that much different to saying that intellectual work is not work. Consumption, as the outcome of responsiveness, is a property of humans. Thus rubbish is an inevitable 41 M. McLuhan, B. Nevitt, Take today: the Executive as Dropout, Longman, Don Mills 1972. 42 A. Toffler, The Third Wave, Bantam Books, New York 1980.

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corollary of humankind – ever since there have been humans, there has been rubbish. Nothing can be more wrong, therefore, than to think of humankind without rubbish, or to imagine “happy degrowth”. They are pure Rousseauan myths, which for all their radical pretensions simply evade the need to address how to manage consumption and rubbish rationally. Nobility of consumption If we reflect on the role of social objects and artefacts, we can understand how absurd and moralistic the critique of consumerism is. Fortunately, today it is on the decline (surviving only in foolish utopian ideas such as that of “happy degrowth”, which if it were to be self-consistent would also preach a decline in the average life span, in which case it would make sense), but it was the torment of my own generation, as though one could only be human by eschewing objects, which instead are precisely what make us human and, in particular, spiritual. In its unjustified moralism, the critique of consumerism postulates the perfection of humanity in the absence of objects, yet without objects, technology, and documents, humanity ceases to be such. Humans differ from non-human animals because they have technology, but they differ from automata because they have an organic nature. Consumption is a more than justified ground for a salary. We are effectively consumers, and consumption is a property that belongs exclusively to organisms, not to mechanisms. It is, therefore, something that machines cannot replace us in and which gives meaning to the entire process, thus it deserves to be paid – if nothing else, so as to relaunch consumption, following the argument for which if Ford had not paid his workers, they would not have had the money to buy his cars. That commodities are no longer produced by human workers does not subtract from the fact that they need to be purchased. Consumption at large Ever since ancient times, philosophers have insisted on the values of conscience, intelligence, and desire. In contrast to them, consumption has been seen as a subordinate phenomenon, one that should be banned when it goes beyond the mere satisfaction of the needs of survival. Such a viewpoint, however, fails to consider that when humans crowd a shopping mall, they are fulfilling a spiritual function no different from (and above all not contrary to, as the critics of consumerism would have it) that fulfilled in religious sacrifice, in intellectual understanding, in aesthetic enjoyment, and, obviously, in sensual pleasure, of which consumption is a sublimation, in the same way that courtly love and mystical literature are. Rethinking commodities implies rethinking consumption.43 The common element unifying humans lies in commodities-documents, not in nature, 43 E. Coccia, Il bene nelle cose, il Mulino, Bologna 2014; G. Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, Pelican, London 2018.

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and shopping malls are the new cathedrals in which all social classes meet. It is not easy to discriminate clearly between consumption, religion, and aesthetics, and the suspicion is that if we tried, consumption would be the winner. Often, what underlies the condemnation of consumption and the proposal of new (but mostly old) alternatives is an idealization of a “normal” age, which usually coincides with the childhood and youth of the author. In my own case, I was born in the consumer society and it constitutes my roots, my tradition, my alternative to religion, and the lens through which I see aesthetics. Unless we want to embrace a negative philosophy of history, it is not clear why the advance of consumption should be seen as negative. Does it not instead reveal a characteristic of humans that is rather more preferable to cannibalism, to wars of religion, and especially, to extreme poverty and destitution? Moreover, even the most profligate consumerist would never submit to his purchases the way a religious fanatic does to his idols. The suspicion arises that critics of consumption have a certain sympathy for avarice in the plainer sense of the term, that is, not for avidity, but for saving, penny-pinching, and in general all that is idealized under the banner of “happy degrowth”. Veblen’s own analysis of luxury as waste44 suggests an essential proximity between consumption, aesthetics, and religion. 4.4. Waste It is precisely what is officially priceless – art and life – that constitutes the fulcrum of appreciation. That is profoundly just and necessary, as the alternative would be hypocrisy or barbarism. What we are witnessing with the documedia revolution is the shift from a restricted documentality (segmented, deliberated, intentional) to a general documentality (pervasive, automatic, involuntary). Gratuity Such general documentality, which is the condition of possibility of the economy as a system of debits and credits, and obviously of earnings, waste, and gifts, is documedia capital, a capital so pervasive and all-inclusive that it even encompasses dépense,45 or spending, and gratuity.46 It has recently been suggested47 that the Web, from an economic point of view, is un-economic, in that it does not satisfy, in any primary way, the principle of capital accumulation; if anything it serves the growth of exchange (both economic and not). I am not sure of that. The Web, as documedia capital, is the culmination of capital as accumulation. In this ideal and eternal sense, capital is insuperable, as, together with language and technology, it is one of the constituent elements of our way of being. To augur a humanity 44 45 46 47

T. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, Palgrave Macmillan, London 1899. G. Bataille, La part maudite: essai d’économie géneralé, Éditions de minuit, Paris 1949. P. Klossowski, La monnaie vivante, Eric Losfeld, Paris 1970. A. Romele, M. Severo, “The Economy of the Digital Gift: From Socialism to Sociality Online”. Theory, Culture & Society, 33(5), 2016.

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without capital, in the sense given here, is to augur a humanity without humanity. If humans are animals gifted with language that lives in a society, then humans are necessarily inclined to capitalization. The human as commodity We saw earlier how intensive documentation implies the humanization of commodities and the commodification of humans. There is nothing surprising in that, however vexing it may be to our moral convictions (but then let us not forget Baudelaire’s argument, which is not without its grounds, that God is the most prostituted of all beings for his inexhaustible love for all of humankind48). With an argument that seeks to be provocative and perverse, but which is perfectly in line with the documedia revolution, about half a century ago Pierre Klossowski49 imagined a system of payment in kind, where men are paid in women and women in men, without considering that even this is no more than a certain variation of the economy of memory. Indeed, when Georges Bataille speaks of a general economy of waste that is wider than the restricted economy of accumulation, he fails to consider that to recognize waste as waste an economy of memory is needed to keep account of waste, in the same way it keeps account of accumulation. Restricted economy and general economy are thus possible only within the framework of an overarching economy of memory. The same can be said of Klossowski’s living currency, which is explicitly presented as a form of memory in which each and every exchange is noted. Human capital If everything that is recorded can be capitalized, then it comes as no surprise that in the documedia age something like “human capital” can arise, where “human capital” does not mean the know-how and knowledge acquired by an individual over time, but the information that everyone releases online. Memory is a commodity like any other (indeed it lies at the very origin of the concept of “commodity”, given that memorization is a prerequisite for exchange and accounting, and hence for the production of value). And despite the assumption that humanity is off the market, it is evident that humans are documents just like any other,50 48 C. Baudelaire, Mon cœur mis à nu: “L’être le plus prostitué, c’est l’être par excellence, c’est Dieu, puis qu’il est l’ami suprême pour chaque individu, puis qu’il est le réservoir commun, inépuisable, de l’amour”. 49 P. Klossowski, La monnaie vivante, Eric Losfeld, Paris 1970. 50 O. Ertscheid, “L’homme, un document comme les autres”. Hermès, 53(I), 2009, pp. 33–40. See also J. Davallon, Le Don Du Patrimoine: Une Approche Communicationnelle de La Patrimonialisation, Lavoisier-Hermès science, Paris 2006; B. Bachimont, Patrimoine et numérique: Technique et politique de la mémoire, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, Bry-sur-Marne 2017; C. Scopsi, “Les trois états de la mémoire: la source, le medium et l’index”, on Passerelle de mémoires, 2017 https://pa sserelle.hypotheses.org/category/grattidees

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and can become a commodity just like any other, as happens with the sale of organs. Part of this same trend towards the capitalization of humans through documentation is the fact that reputation is a commodity,51 and as such it straddles the otium/negotium dichotomy (reputation is first and foremost a social fact and can be attained even simply by taking part in salons or, today, social media networks). Prestige and fame are commodities per se, in which (just as with exchange value) what matters is not so much what they are based on, but mostly how, and how much, they are documented. Social capital Economic documentality is but a specific case of a more general documentality, which was anticipated by art, religion, and philosophy, to draw on Hegel’s forms of absolute spirit. From this insight, the underlying thesis that follows is that “nothing social can exist outside the text”,52 that is, without being recorded. Compared to economic documentality (which can be defined as restricted documentality), with philosophical documentality (which can be defined as broad documentality), recording is necessary not only for economic exchange, but for any social act aimed at the constitution of social objects. Documedia capital, as we have seen, is the fourth age of capital, after the mercantile, industrial, and financial ages. And a certain progression can be seen through those stages. First there was mercantile capital, which consisted of a series of practices aimed at guaranteeing debits and credits in the exchange of goods; then came industrial capital, which was directly productive, incorporating within it labour; then followed financial capital, which unified production and exchange, generating wealth through wealth; and finally we have documedia capital, which unifies and incorporates production, exchange, and the construction of social reality all in one. Responsiveness What is it that is priceless in humans? What apparently is priceless is that which effectively is most appreciated and prized, which is the insufficiency and mess of the human heart, which invests meaning and direction in the system and puts it in motion. It is the other face of capital, and it only makes sense in the light of accumulation. There is no “happy degrowth”. There is only growth, which is possibly happy. All the rest is a Buddhism (or Luddism) that has nothing to do with the reality of human behaviour. I call “responsiveness” that which is the essential property of humans, that which cannot be replaced by an automaton. It is not true that only humans have a world, although it is probably true that only humans have radically anti-economical behaviour (to the precise same extent that they have economical 51 G. Origgi, La Réputation, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 2015. 52 M. Ferraris, Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces, Fordham University Press, New York 2012.

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behaviour). But only humans have an underworld. Only humans produce rubbish; only humans are wasteful. The waste of nature in evolution can only be considered a waste by analogy, just as the queen bee is a queen only as a figure of speech. Real waste only occurs where there is capital, and that occurs only with humans.

5. Mobilization To conclude, let us try to define mobilization as a superordinate concept to traditional work, which takes account of the transformation of work in the documedia age. 5.1. Recording and not punishing The interest in behaviour We are the ones who provide data through our behaviour and consumption, and through our expressions and manifestations. Ultimately, though, it is our consumption that attracts the greatest interest, given that the companies that gather our data do so for business purposes, and only derivatively for political ends. What counts for documedia capital is not surveillance,53 but, if anything, mobilization, the putting into motion and profit-making from resources and the creation of value. Surveillance capitalism as a notion is just as imperfect (anthropomorphic) as cognitive capitalism is. Workers do not really know much, just as capitalists do not really surveil much. Capitalism is not surveillance, it is simply data gathering. Its goal is not supremacy over people; its goal is consumption: to steer it, understand it, and capture it. Archive capitalism, not surveillance capitalism The archival turn (or race to collect big data) on Facebook began in 2008, when Sheryl Sandberg left Google to become Zuckerberg’s number two. Capital takes a gamble on our future behaviour – not our political behaviour, though, but rather our consumption patterns. Our behaviour, in effect, is only of any interest inasmuch as it concerns consumption. Why would it be of any interest otherwise? Knowing whether someone orders Das Kapital or Mein Kampf online is completely by the by, given that all that interests me is his or her behaviour. Amazon is not a Big Brother that punishes deviants; on the contrary, it encourages them, because they point the way to market niches to be saturated. This is a triumph of civilization, and only those nostalgic for the totalitarianism of the past would lament it.

53 S. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power, Profile Books, 2019.

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Surveillance, not punishment! What is important today is not advertising a product, but knowing the consumer. Even, and above all, those aspects that the consumer would rather keep secret. That is the point. And let us not forget that surveillance targets consumption, not ideas. And once we understand that what is being monitored is consumption, then for all the more reason what is provided should be considered work. Here we are talking about the determination of future consumption, so it is highly profitable. Thus we should be paid just as market research companies are paid – and consider that even the latter buy our products. If we condemn everything under the right to privacy, we will never get on top of the issue. Either the companies close (as the application of privacy laws would entail just that) and we lose all our services, or they continue. But not by suspending services, but by paying their workers, which means all of us. Instruments of capital The instruments of documedia capital today are instruments designed for archiving. And what needs to be archived are documents concerning behaviour. Thus they consist of data science, tangible infrastructure, algorithmic systems, and automated platforms. Of course it is things, processes, and behaviour that need to be translated into information, but the condition of possibility for all this information is recording, and the product that is capitalized is an archive made up of documents. Recorded commodities and recording, or performance, commodities Commodities are consumed and depleted, leaving behind rubbish. But if commodities are documented (which means first they are recorded), that is no longer the case. They leave traces and create new meanings, new knowledge, and potentially new wealth. Money is a commodity like anything else, but with the salient characteristic of being designed to record other commodities. Very soon, however, with Faustian money and financialization, it takes on an autonomous life of its own, but without losing its fundamental driving purpose, which is to record acts. The behavioural turn and the origin of mobilization It is no wonder that the machines we have adopted instigate mobilization (mobile phones) or archive it (trivially, pedometers), because what is of interest is not our thoughts or beliefs, but our behaviour, to the extent that it can be captured in documents. Documents on behaviour, or recorded acts Today we document facts that in the past were impossible to document in practice (we did not have the means) and in theory (we did not think that certain facts

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could constitute documents, and ultimately we never even thought of them as facts). The documents we collect are the recordings of facts ensuing from acts (in my classification of it,54 “weak documents”) and the recordings of social acts, whether deliberate or not, formal or informal (what I call “strong documents”). Here, the sphere of documentation is not limited to documenting canonical acts (marriages, bets, etc.), but archiving records that make relationships (Facebook), sentiments (Twitter), and professional experience (LinkedIn) interchangeable. Unthinkable documents We can document things that in the past we never would have thought could be documented (though this is obviously true of any sort of knowledge: for a long time is was never thought possible to record the coordinates of nautical motion or double-entry accounts, simply because they had never been thought of and their value was not understood). For instance, the utility of documenting the location of a person, or the vibrations of an engine, or the load borne by a bridge, or the heat level of a manhole cover might not appear immediately obvious. But the perspective shifts decisively once it becomes technically possible, and we realize that even these documents can generate new uses. Overcoming old biases Is it wrong to record behaviour? I do not think so. Otherwise we would have to punish people who watch the street from their windows (not that there are many left, now that we have mobile phones). Is it wrong to appropriate data? Even here, I do not think so. To say that any claim to be able to use data is “as if the Web belonged to Google” is to forget that we generally believe the world was made to be known by human beings. We need to overcome both the bias for progress, as well as the biases of the critics who see capital as evil, nosey, and avid, seeking above all to impose a new social order. Since when? We have never been so diverse and so disorganized as we are today. A digital world without archives would lack all interest, but above all it would be impossible, because the digital is recording, and hence it intrinsically incorporates surveillance. The relevant point, therefore, is not the surveillance, but all the work that is exploited without pay. It is not true that documedia capital no longer relies on people as consumers.55 On the contrary, it needs consumption more than any other form of capitalism, it is just that the consumption is not recognized as such and, above all, it is not clear that consumption constitutes the most elevated form of work in the documedia age. In any case, the future will not be a regression. The gathering of data undoubtedly 54 M. Ferraris, Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces, Fordham University Press, New York 2012. 55 As S. Zuboff argues in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power, Profile Books, 2019.

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introduces a new wealth to the world. The matter is not about throwing away that wealth, but how to socialize it. 5.2. Developments in mobilization Rather than the disappearance of work, what we have is the shift from work to mobilization, a phenomenon whose impact has yet to be calculated. Ours has been called the era of the knowledge worker, yet it is not clear what such knowledge is meant to consist of. For knowledge is what is drawn from the analysis of data by the mobilizers, not from the production of data by the mobilized. Thus we have a production of knowledge by actors who do not know what they produce, but instead labour away through a process of total mobilization that is not recognized as work. Mobilization is the culmination of the idea for which the world as we know it is vanishing, because the present is already projected into the future, along the lines of a philosophy of history which from Paul of Tarsus leads us to modernity and its obsession with the future. For which being modern – or rather, very, very old, with all the past we have behind us – means being swift, and swiftness is the old age of the world.56 But it is also the fulfilment of what Marx conceived of as the Faustian character of capitalism, or the fact that everything can become faster – as Mephistopheles argued, embodying in this the spirit of technology – once I can replace my two legs with the power of six stallions. Now, the first to have spoken of the “total mobilization” of the social fabric was Ernst Jünger.57 He dreamed of a totalitarian state in which every soldier behaved like a worker – as had been witnessed in that great battle of shrapnel and steel that was the First World War – and every worker acted like a soldier, without giving in to weakness and civic rest, filling every space of their lives with work (or, more exactly, with readiness for mobilization). Back then, such mobilization was never fulfilled and as late as February 1943, after the battle of Stalingrad, Goebbels still complained that the Germans were still not sufficiently ready for total war. It could be concluded that if not even the Nazis succeeded in achieving total mobilization, then nobody ever will. Yet that is not the way things have turned out. Half a century on from the end of the Second World War, the advent of the Web and the mobile phone in liberal countries, distinguished by their strong emphasis on individual rights, marked the start of total mobilization, demanding responsiveness at all times, blurring the lines between work time and private time (which, lest we forget, was the dream not only of Jünger, but also one of the dreams of Communist society according to Marx), and provoking the disappearance of social classes, replacing them with monads interconnected through 56 P. Virilio, Vitesse et politique, Galilée, Paris 1977. 57 E. Jünger, L’operaio: dominio e forma (1932), Longanesi, Milan 1984 and E. Jünger, La mobilitazione totale (1932), in Id. Scritti politici e di guerra 1919–1933, Libreria editrice goriziana, Gorizia 2005.

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the screens of their devices (even the disappearance of classes was a goal for both Jünger and Marx). Total mobilization is not the active service of workers in factories but the readiness of people to work online for no pay, regardless of their official occupation or social status. Even the great captains of industry (to use an expression from olden times) become workers when connected to the Web – workers mobilized by an apparatus more powerful than them. It is similarly ironic that such militarization has taken place not in a state of totalitarianism, but in a context of total liberalism and apparent demilitarization. Although if we consider that present day warfare essentially takes place over the Web, the paradox is less striking. Nevertheless, what this suggests most of all is that, as in the case of workers, our anthropological transformation is essentially the consequence of a technological transformation. In short, for a strange historical necessity tied up with the essence of technology, mobilization has been accomplished with the Web and with the explosion of records that it entails. From that moment on, messages, which being written can take on the imperative form of orders, reach civilians exactly the same way they reached soldiers in the past. And the situation is becoming ever more the norm with the spread of the Web, the growth of social networks, and the evolution of smartphones, that is, with the documedia revolution. Swiftness, which the twentieth century welcomed as pure emancipation (“quickness”, together with “lightness”, was one of the key words for the new millennium in Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium) comes at an enormous and surreptitious price and burden.

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Origgi, G. (2015). La Réputation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Rifkin, J. (1995). La fine dell’età del lavoro. Il declino della forza lavoro globale e l’avvento del post-mercato. Milan: Baldini & Castoldi. Robinson, J. (1962). Economic Philosophy. London: Watts. Romele, A. and M. Severo (2016). “The Economy of the Digital Gift: From Socialism to Sociality Online”. Theory, Culture & Society, 33(5), 43–63. Rowthorn, R. and R. Ramaswarmy (1997). Deindustrialization: Causes and Implications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scholz, T. and N. Schneider (2017). Ours to Hack and to Own. The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. New YorkLondon: OR Books. Scopsi, C. (2017). “Les trois états de la mémoire: la source, le medium et l’index”, on Passerelle de mémoires. https://passerelle.hypotheses.org/category/grattidees Sennett, R. (1999). L’uomo flessibile. Le conseguenze del nuovo capitalismo sulla vita personale (1998). Milan: Feltrinelli. Sennett, R. (2006). Il declino dell’uomo pubblico (1977). Milan: Mondadori. Sennett, R. (1998). The Corrosion of Character. The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York-London: Norton. Simondon, G. (2017). Sulla tecnica (2014). Naples-Salerno: Orthotes. Srnicek, N. and A. Williams (2018). Inventare il futuro. Per un mondo senza lavoro. Rome: Nero Editions. Staglianò, R. (2016). Al posto tuo. Così web e robot ci stanno rubando il lavoro. Turin: Einaudi. Staglianò, R. (2018). Lavoretti. Così la sharing economy ci rende tutti più poveri. Turin: Einaudi. Toffler, A. (1980). The Third Wave. New York: Bantam Books. Veblen, T. (1899). Theory of the Leisure Class. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Vecchi, B. (2017). Il capitalismo delle piattaforme. Castel San Pietro Romano (RM): Manifestolibri. Vercellone, C. ed. (2006). Capitalismo cognitivo. Rome: Manfestolibri. Virilio, P. (1977). Vitesse et politique. Paris: Galilée. Weber, M. (1991). L’etica protestante e lo spirito del capitalismo (1904–1905). Milan: BUR. Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books.

Chapter 7

On working and being The legal metaphysics of labour and the constitutional errors of Social Europe Luke Mason

1. Introduction: a legal metaphysics of work This chapter outlines the legal contradictions in the European ‘project’ with regard to work. In particular, it points to grave tensions between, on the one hand, the ‘existential’ social aspirations of the European Union (EU or Union), which place work at their centre, and, on the other hand, the ‘metaphysical’ realities of a legal framework which has singularly failed to constitute the very working relationships upon which the much vaunted ‘Social Europe’ is predicated. By constructing this ontological account of the role of law in constituting all social and economic identity and exchange, this chapter argues that the legal and constitutional theory which formed the basis of the ‘economic’ phase of European integration has not been followed during the subsequent ‘social’ phase of integration. In this manner, the ‘social’ within Europe has been relegated to an inferior status, precisely due to the failure to construct the working relationships which this social vision is based upon. While the idea that the ‘social’ gives way to the ‘economic’ is one which emerges from much writing on the EU and international economic integration more generally, this chapter breaks with that vast, cacophonous body of literature to argue that it is precisely the efforts to rectify this ‘social deficit’ which cement this failure. The emergent ‘social’ acquis of EU law at constitutional level has often come to adopt the ‘existential’ trappings of constitutional language, by expressing the identity of its polity through its values and social aims. However, in so doing, it has failed to capture the ontological essence of constitutionalism, whereby social or economic actors are literally constituted by the law. It is this ontological role of the law which allows us to talk of the EU as a genuinely constitutional project, at least in the economic sphere. As the social values of the Union largely rest on an economic framework premised on stable working relationships, the failure of the constitutional settlement to ensure such relationships has the effect of negating the ontological status of the work in the European social model. In this manner, this chapter questions the coherence of the European employment and social policies through their failure to deliberately constitute stable employment relationships, while nonetheless being premised upon their existence.

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This failure is not simply a legal one however, but also one of ideology: much labour law thinking, including that which is critical of the relegation of social policy within the European project, shares this naïve vision of economic relationships and work. On the one hand, labour law emerged within an economico-historical, materialist heritage, rejecting the importance of law in the arranging of industrial affairs. On the other hand, more recent labour law scholarship and policy development have often fallen into a form of jurisprudential naivety, in which it has been thought sufficient to engage in a form of juridical ‘virtue signalling’ through the use of the rhetoric of social values and human rights. Such scholarship is based on, respectively, legitimate and laudable concerns regarding social power and the pervasiveness of constitutional principles. However, this chapter argues that without the necessary legal constitution of the economic relationships, in particular working relationships, upon which these values and rights are predicated, such goals will remain illusory, and social power will prove difficult to shape. While the passing of ambitious legislation such as the European Pillar of Social Rights, declared in late 2017, in many ways typifies and indeed magnifies these errors yet again, it might offer an opportunity for judicial and policy-focused reflection that forces greater focus on constituting working relationships within the shared European economic and social space.

2. The ontology of normativity and the deep constitutional role of law As with all complex constitutional arrangements, the EU is a project with no one single clear essence, instead being a pluralistic compromise seeking to balance various, sometimes inchoate, aims. Tensions between these various goals, and between those of Member States and the Union, come to the fore at moments of crisis from time to time. The legally binding goals of the EU, which have been progressively added to over the past six decades or so, can be found primarily in the opening Articles of the Treaty on the European Union (TEU), some of which possess a certain literary merit due to their verve and lyricism, in keeping with the ambitious mission statements of other modern Constitutional documents. These Treaty provisions reveal that the Union has evolved significantly from its early stated goals of the establishment of the ‘Common Market’ (later rebranded the internal market), a customs union and joint competition policy in Articles 2 and 3 of the Treaty of Rome (1957), which has now evolved into the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Aside from some subsidiary or indirect aims, this was the extent of the legally stated goals of the EU at its inception. In contrast, the TEU’s formal goals now include a prodigious list of aims and values for the Union, which reflect an expanded set of ambitions for the EU, a changing global economy and a generally diminished role for the Nation State, but also a perception of the failure of the Union’s original constitutional settlement to guarantee and promote social standards and other aims. Progressively, therefore, goals such as equality, environmental protection and

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labour rights have been included in both the legally binding goals of the EU, and, to some extent, the competences which the Union is able to exercise to achieve these goals. Indeed, it is in relation to work and the regulation of working relationships where these constitutional changes can perhaps be seen most easily. At the Union’s inception, there was a deliberate political decision, ratifying the conclusions of the Spaak and Ohlin Reports,1 to exclude matters of employment protections and social standards more generally from the integration process at European level. The justification for this was several-fold, but was largely based on a combination of two mutually reinforcing considerations. On the one hand, the creation of an internal market, in which the factors of production were fully mobile, was seen as sufficient to create the economic conditions to ensure raising living standards among Europeans; increased social standards would follow from this economic progress and increased aggregate wealth. On the other hand, these matters were considered to be better left to Member States, with welfare and labour models being sensitive matters attached on various levels to the nation state. A combination of these two factors resulted in a model of ‘regulatory competition’, in which Member States were free to experiment with social models which suited their circumstances, while the free movement of workers and other factors of production meant that economic actors could choose the regime which struck the best balance in this regard. Over the intervening sixty years or so, this original constitutional settlement has been revisited on several occasions, with an increasing consensus around the need to harmonise certain social standards, in particular employment rights, at European level, at least in certain areas (Bercusson 2009). The reasons for this have been complex, and have responded to particular political exigencies at different times. However, it is possible to sketch a broad genealogy of the current constitutional arrangements in this regard. The progressive attainment of the internal market, and, in particular, the growth in the mobility of capital and goods, created an apprehension, both in regard to the European economic space and in the global economy, that a lack of concerted harmonisation of employment standards, at least in certain areas, would lead to a so-called ‘race-to-the-bottom’ in which Member States would respond to a threat of capital flight, or alternatively seek to attract additional inward investment by lowering labour standards, and this would force other Member States to seek to progressively undercut each other, in turn undercutting the social standards which the promise of increased aggregate wealth was supposed to ensure (Lee 1997). The competences of the EU, and the aims of the Union itself, have therefore progressively expanded to include employment protections and labour rights, at least of certain types, although core matters such 1

Report of the Heads of Delegation to the Foreign Ministers (‘Spaak Committee’) [‘Spaak Report’] 1956; International Labour Organisation, Social Aspects of European Economic Co-operation: Report by a Group of Experts (summary) [‘Ohlin Report’] (1956) 74 International Labour Review 99.

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as pay and collective bargaining have remained matters for Member States. However, these developments have also periodically taken a more symbolic form, with the passing of ‘existential’ constitution-like documents, which proclaim the importance of such aims or rights, seeking to locate ‘Europe’ as a protector of these rights, rather than a threat to the national model of social protections. Such existential proclamations have sometimes come in the form of Bill of Rights-type documents, which enumerate social rights, such as the European Social Charter of 1989 or the European Pillar of Social Rights of 2017. At other times, they have been included in the language of the legally binding goals of the Union, such as the current Article 3 of the TEU, which states that the aim of the Union is a ‘highly competitive social market’, and that it will ‘combat social exclusion and discrimination, and shall promote social justice and protection’. These developments have been accompanied by an increased focus more generally of fundamental rights within the European legal order, both in legislative form and through their progressive recognition by the Court of Justice of the European Union. This sweeping genealogy of ‘Social Europe’ is crucial for a number of reasons. Importantly, it shows the continued significance of ‘work’ and ‘workers’ within the predominant models of social justice even as we move into a post-national and fully post-industrial phase of European history. The social goals of the Union are inextricably linked to the maintenance of the crucial locus of social justice within the post-war model of the welfare state: the employment relationship. While recent European employment policy has shifted to a broader focus on ‘employment security’ and ‘flexicurity’ (Wilthagen and Tros 2004; Kenner 2009), which seek to combine labour market inclusion and flexibility with social rights connected to participation in the labour market rather than any particular single job, this policy agenda has remained largely focused on the desirability and importance of long-term stable employment relationships and the ultimate goal and continued basis of social policy. The increased focus on social rights connected to employment over the past decades does not, in this way, demonstrate an innovation in a fundamental sense, but rather a shift to the transnational level of certain social goals which were previously understood as the competence of the Nation State (Mason 2014). There is, therefore, a deep continuity embedded in the emerging ‘Social Europe’. Its success or failure will therefore depend on its ability to achieve these goals through the structures and frameworks which it establishes. An examination of the overarching legal framework within the economic and social sphere reveals a deep flaw in this vision of Social Europe. By revisiting the constitutional theory which was the basis of the legal foundations of the internal market, we can see that these same deliberate ‘constitutive’ legal steps have not been taken in relation to employment relationships. In this way, European law has failed to legally constitute the very relationships upon which its social model, and by extension its political legitimacy, are based. The following section examines the legal and social theory which has led to this mismatch in aims and reality in the context of the broader intellectual and political crisis surrounding labour law and the legal regulation of work.

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3. The crisis of labour law and the mistakes of the good European In has become customary to think of labour law as being ‘in crisis’ (Countouris and Freedland 2013; Coutu 2007; D’Antona 1998; Hepple 1987; Davidov and Langille 2011). Broadly understood, labour law is the body of legislation, other legal sources, and industrial practices which regulate the terms of work and their generation which emerged, and the participation of workers and their representatives within negotiations or company procedures. Labour law emerged in the twentieth century in all industrialised legal systems as a response to political and intellectual pressures which perceived that the formal legal status of the individual, benefitting from the formal equality of civil law, did not adequately reflect the shared located realities of the worker, and the specificities of the employment relationship, which might justify their own autonomous body of law and legal principles (Sinzheimer 1976a). While each national legal experience differed markedly in this respect, some broad trends can be identified within the emergence of this body of law, in particular the development of minimum employment standards, standardised patterns of work, representative mechanisms or collective forms of establishing certain core labour terms, and protections against various risks inherent in the employment relationship, in particular that of losing one’s job, and all manner of more specific risks, such as threats to health and safety, or the more general threat of mistreatment (Hepple 1986). Throughout this period, there existed a curious paradox within labour law’s regulation of the employment relationship, indeed one which has failed to garner sufficient attention. On the one hand, and as is well-known by labour lawyers, the relation between the employee and the employer was seen as a locus of risk to be regulated, not amenable to the ordinary principles of freedom of contract and private law more generally. On the other hand, but unfortunately less widely recognised, labour law was crucially premised on the deliberate reinforcing of that relationship, and indeed its legal construction, through the constitution of the stable employment relation or contract of employment, as both a source of value in itself, and as a locus of regulation for all manner of other goals which labour law encapsulated. In this manner, labour law, predicated on the risks and shared locatedness which characterised the social reality of the subordination and domination of the employment relationship, came to see the maintenance and stability of such relationships as crucial to the achievement of multifarious social goals. These goals evolved and expanded as time went by, and indeed the goals which employment regulation is supposed to serve continue to expand (Collins, Lester, and Mantouvalou 2018; Deakin and Wilkinson 1994). Such goals might include the generation of income and wealth distribution, equality more broadly, the collection of taxes, the source of training, industrial democracy, economic efficiency or social inclusion. As a consequence, the employment relation, in this stable form, came to be a key demarcator for both personal and collective identity, in both the modern usage in terms of ‘sense of self’ and worth, and the more classical usage in terms of ‘sameness’ within a social framework. It is crucial to note therefore that the employment relationships

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which emerged to form this bedrock of labour law, and by extension of social policy and organisation of late industrial Western democracies, was one which was largely legally constructed, rather than being something which only emerged organically and was later ‘domesticated’ by social pressure and legislation. The emergence of unfair dismissal legislation in particular underlines this point, with stable forms of employment relationship seen as paramount, at least in the absence of other good competing reasons which were legally regulated and proceduralised. Now, this model of labour law has been increasingly seen as being ‘in crisis’ over recent decades. This crisis has many forms, but these can be most easily understood as linked the progressive erosion of the very locus of regulation, that is the employment relation, which was delineated in the previous sections (Prassl 2015; Freedland and Kountouris 2011). A combination of technological, industrial, economic and political changes and trends have emerged over the past three decades or so which have encouraged the fragmentation of working practices, meaning that they do not fit easily into the stable forms of relationship which bring with them both risk and the opportunity to guard against that risk through progressive regulation to achieve the aims of social policy. As working practices become more flexible and the contractual nexus between those who work and those who direct or pay for that work becomes more diverse, the less uniform the nature of work becomes and the harder to maintain the guise of ‘unity’ and ‘autonomy’ of labour law through the shared social location of those people who find themselves within employment relationships. In some respects, this change has been the result of deliberate steps within employment policy at national and European level, whereby rigid employment practices are seen as a brake on productivity, employment levels, and broader social inclusion (Esping-Andersen and Regini 2000). The resulting policy changes have seen what might be called the ‘normalisation’ of atypical work, whereby the legal system and State policies encourage the use of new models of employment by reducing resistance to their usage, both by employers and employees. More broadly, such policies, have built upon intellectual developments in labour law thinking over the past two decades or so which have sought to detach the social protections which labour law has traditionally sought to provide from employment relationships themselves, and reattach them to participation in the labour market (Deakin and Wilkinson 2005). This policy direction moves away from a model of job security and towards a model of ‘employment security’ in which people are given the tools to thrive within a more flexible labour market, in which their specific job is not guaranteed. This vision builds loosely on the influential work of economist Amartya Sen, in particular on capabilities (Sen 1993; Deakin and Browne 2003; Deakin and Rogowski 2011), and the influential Supiot Report, which sought to understand social policy and labour law in Europe au dela de l’emploi (Supiot 1999). Most significantly, these changes were expressed in the Green Paper on 2006 (Commission of the European Communities 2006), which officially adopted the language of flexicurity within EU institutions, and the coordinated policy mechanisms in the intervening period have sought, at least at a rhetorical level, to

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encourage the implementation of such policies. In many ways, the realities of the implementation of these policies, coming as they have during a period of deep financial and debt crisis within Europe, have been characterised by the progressive deregulation of employment law, and the deconstruction of the employment relationship, without the commensurate reconstruction of social protections and guarantees around labour market participation (Coutu, Le Friant, and Murray 2012; Heyes 2013). This has often been achieved around the distribution of socalled bail-outs, with labour market reform being a condition of receipt of funds (Koukiadaki and Kretsos 2012). This process has of course been accompanied, and indeed partly motivated, by a series of technological and industrial changes which have progressively changed the nature of working practices within post-industrial economies (Prassl 2018). While so-called ‘atypical’ working practices, such as ‘work on demand’ have always existed, and indeed sometimes dominated, within certain industries at certain times, the proliferation of such practices of fixed-term, temporary, flexible, parttime, agency and other non-standard forms of work has accelerated in recent years, at times with the tacit or explicit support of legislators, at times creating a deep divide between standard employees and those in non-standard employment arrangements. This process has been accelerated by the rapid emergence of the connected phenomena of ‘platform capitalism’ and the ‘gig economy’, in which working relationships are mediated by technology which creates an environment of trust in the platform while putting end-users and workers in direct contact, removing some of the salient elements of the classical employment nexus, such as control or the obligation to accept work. With these challenges facing the prevalence of the employment relationship or its increasing transience come a number of connected issues, largely located around the lack of an identifiable legally classifiable relationship which can be properly understood as one of employment. Instead, such workers tend to exist within the hinterland of employment law, and within relationships which possess at least some of the components of ordinary commercial relationships. In various legal contexts, there have been efforts to overcome this problem by creating new intermediate categories of work which seek to extend certain social protections to such workers (De Stefano 2015–2016). In other contexts, there have been attempts to argue that such relationships are already captured by existing legal tests for employment status when properly understood (McGaughey 2019). The issue which emerges however is a significant one: employment law and practice has become characterised by working relationships which are either unclassifiable (or not easily classifiable) as employment relationships, or which have become so varied and unstable that there remains little unity. The upshot of this ‘crisis’ is significant: the European Social Model remains largely based around the existence of stable employment relationships, even in the context of the promotion of ‘flexicurity’, where stable employment and quality work remains the ultimate aspiration. Without this stable nexus, the goals of Social Europe will be illusory. Yet European law has been naïve about its own contribution to the progressive (legal) deconstruction of these economic

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relationships. This will be explored further in the following section, which seeks to understand the deep assumptions (and errors) in the economic constitutionalism and social constitutionalism of the EU.

4. Constituting economic reality and the forgotten influence of ordoliberal constitutional theory This crisis of labour law has caused many labour lawyers to seek to reconsider the fundamental nature and assumptions of their field. At times, this has been in line with current changes, seeking to relocate labour law within a broader understanding of new relationships, or the labour market more generally. In other cases, labour law thinkers have sought to underline the moral or legal importance of their field, in the face of political and industrial change, by reconceptualising labour rights as human rights, seeking to link their thinking to a growing focus on both fundamental rights discourse in law in general and in private law in particular (Alston 2005; Mantouvalou 2012). However, certain thinkers have sought to take this re-examination further, seeking to revisit the seminal works from labour law’s genealogy and genesis, to better understand the fundamental place or role of labour law as a separate area of law (Dukes 2008; Rödl 2009). This section seeks to engage in a similar exercise in legal theory, seeking to underline the fundamental importance of the law in constituting employment relationships as a political choice. In particular, this section will analyse the constitutive nature of law in economic relationships, and to sketch how the success of the EU has been premised on precisely this understanding of law’s constitutional role. A failure to appreciate this function, in particular on the part of labour lawyers, but also others including many who wish to re-assert the values and goals of labour law, has had the effect of deconstructing the very working relationships which much social policy and meaning currently rest upon, even in the midst of the shift to a ‘flexible’ labour market (Davies and Freedland 2007). Labour law has always found itself, at least in its more intellectually ambitious forms, at the complex intersection of private and constitutional law on the one hand, and of sociology and legal theory on the other. An attempt to explain and justify an area of law which combines private law relationships with the broader collective policy aims of constitutional law inevitably finds itself engaged with a discussion of the social realities of power and economics, both at work and more broadly. Moreover, the complex relationship between social pressure and political and economic forces on the one hand, and the aspirations of the legal system to regulate and shape these forces on the other hand, requires deep reflection on the relationship between law and social reality. One of the very earliest attempts to capture this complex nexus came in the hugely influential work of Hugo Sinzheimer, who developed the complex, multi-layered conception of labour constitution (Arbeitsverfassung) (Sinzheimer 1927; Sinzheimer 1976b). Sinzheimer was writing at a time during which the very notion of labour law as a separate field was emerging, partly under his influence. This took place within a European

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intellectual environment where his peers were developing a sociological vision of law which sought to understand law within a broader range of social sources of regulation, for instance in the realm of the workplace, which had its own rules and sources of normativity (Gurvitch 1934; Ehrlich 1936). This forced early labour lawyers to reflect on the role of law, and its potential limits, in ensuring justice and other goals in the working environment. It is to be argued here that the key insights of Sinzheimer in relation to the constitutional function of law have been lost to labour law, and that a proper reflection on the deeper meanings of Sinzheimer’s work on labour law and constitutions can help to frame the inconsistencies of the current legal and constitutional framework in relation to work in Europe. Now, it has become modish to analyse labour law through a ‘constitutional’ lens, and indeed there is a longstanding tradition of seeing labour law as somehow fundamentally related to the ‘constitution’ of a national legal system (Fudge 2011; Mason 2014; Mason 2018). In many cases, what this involves is the analysis of the employment relation through the lens of fundamental human rights, often seeking to defend the notion that certain labour standards should be respected because they find their moral root within constitutional principles, such as equality or dignity. These are important and creative forms of legal and constitutional reasoning and provide important frameworks for judicial and critical interpretation of employment law provisions. Other ‘constitutional’ perspectives on labour law seek to analyse the place of labour law provisions, standards or principles themselves within the constitutionally entrenched level of a legal system (Lecomte 2010–2011). These are of course interesting and necessary debates, relating the standards of employment regulation with the core values of a legal system, a constitution and a polity. They are also important in the modern global legal system, because they allow a critical dialogue with international or transnational fundamental rights discourses and legal frameworks. However, while there are many virtues to such perspectives on labour law, they tend to fall into a particularly grave form of category error which can overlook the insights of Sinzheimer’s labour constitution. The recent advent of the Social Pillar is the latest example of such muddled thinking. These assertions require some explanation and location within both the broader intellectual history of labour law and the constitutional and legal history of the EU. The upshot of Sinzheimer’s work is, it is argued, that the law, whether deliberately or more latently, necessarily (re-)constitutes the actors in the industrial sphere and enables and limits their ability to generate norms in the employment context. This is a complex, and in some ways controversial, claim which appears to conflict with certain assumptions within much labour law scholarship. Upon examination, it is less contentious than it might first appear, simply asserting that any normative ordering (such as that of the workplace) has its latent constitutional norms, which, to whatever extent, must by definition constitute the actors who act within that normative ordering to generate sub-constitutional norms (such as the terms and conditions of employment). If this is true, one key task for the labour

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lawyer is therefore to identify the actors as defined by law in any given legal system. Other scholars of European labour law have also recently made similar observations about the relevance of Sinzheimer’s work (Dukes 2014; Rödl 2006). Dukes and Rödl make a deliberate attempt to delve into recent use of ‘constitutional’ language in labour law, and both seek to develop Sinzheimer’s account of a labour or economic constitution, discussed above. They assert, furthermore, that the core meaning of this idea is the assertion that labour law possess a ‘constitutional function’. Dukes, for instance, focuses on the ability of (and indeed moral necessity for) labour law to be built according to the principles of justice which inform the constitution in general. This, according to Dukes, is possible precisely because the market is constructed as a matter of political choices, which can be illuminatingly termed ‘constitutional’. Equally, Rödl underlines his belief that Sinzheimer’s basic concept of the labour constitution helps us to understand the interdependence of legal norms and social power in a systematic and precise way. That is to say, that the ‘constitutional’ status of labour law is a reflection of the fact that labour norms, actors and goals are the result of deliberate political choices which are, in turn, reflected in laws. As such, he argues, labour law is not merely a negligible superstructure built upon the material reality of society, but rather constitutive of that social reality. Social relations such as in the labour context are, argues Rödl, constituted by law. The point which both writers seem to be underlining is the ability of the law to radically alter the constellation of economic power within the context of labour law and, therefore, the non-socially a priori status of current economic rights or actors. This is well summarised by Arthurs in his attempt to understand Dukes’ position as a description of how labour law can construct the ‘new normal’ (Arthurs 2010), that is the basic normative ordering which is the starting point for labour and employment relations. Sinzheimer’s concepts of the labour constitution, and, by extension, his broader concept of the Wirtschaftsverfassung, the ‘economic constitution’. While these ideas, when used by Sinzheimer, primarily drew upon the values and moral connotations of the idea of ‘constitution’, they also implied this functional element. Here, we are concerned exclusively with this second aspect. To understand it more fully, and to relate it to the EU, we can draw upon the work of another group of scholars, near-contemporaries of Sinzheimer, who also worked on the idea of the Wirtschaftsverfassung or economic constitution. These are the ordoliberals, whose work, upon analysis, was equally fraught with competing ‘constitutional’ claims. The work of the ordoliberals is particularly important, because it provided the basic framework for the so-called ‘economic constitution’ of the EU, and can, in large part, explain the continued success of the Union’s original core goals (Eucken 1989; Böhm 1933; Vanberg 2004). Just as Sinzheimer’s ideas of the labour and economic constitution elide a series of overlapping ‘constitutional’ ideas, ordoliberal thinkers developed a similarly complex and multifaceted idea of the economic constitution. This notion, and terminology has become highly influential in current discussions of both law and economics, in particular in discussions of various aspects of EU integration and the

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internal market, as well as more generally (Kaupa 2016; Nörr 1996; Streit and Mussler 1995). However, the core constitutional claim in ordoliberal thought is often lost, confused with a prescriptive approach to the organisation of the economy according to the principle of an entrenched Ordnungspolitik, that is a private ‘transactional’ economy guaranteed by the legal entrenchment of certain economic rights. Like Sinzheimer, Böhm and Eucken, the jurist and economist respectively at the centre of the ordoliberal movement, were concerned about the inadequacies of materialist or historicist accounts of the economy which did not perceive the crucial role of rules in building and framing economic interaction. They proposed an iconoclastic idea in economics at the time that the law was foundational in economic interaction, and that the application of economic theory to reality required its translation into legal techniques. While Böhm advocated a form of entrenchment of economic rights, entrenchment was not the core meaning of ‘constitution’ in ordoliberal thought. Böhm’s ‘constitutional’ perspective is related to the claim that the law constitutes the economic sphere. He argued that the economy was constructed as a result of political choices which had, to be effective, to be entrenched in law, although not necessarily formal ‘constitutional law’. For Böhm it was private law more generally which actually possessed this constitutional function. In this respect, therefore, Böhm shares Dukes’ insight, that the organisation of the economy is a matter of political choice because such choices can change the identity and the potential scope for action of the actors involved. The important point here is that such claims must, if they are true, be entirely separable from the normative claims of economic and social justice with which they are used in conjunction. They are conceptual social claims about the function of the law, with this function being meaningfully characterised as ‘constitutional’. The idea of Ordnung – order – in ordoliberalism should not therefore be linked to the normative arguments of political economy but rather been seen as a form of institutional economics, which asserts that the structure of the norms and institutions which frame economic interaction are seen as fundamental in ordering economic activity and relationships. This is a controversial claim in labour law in particular because of its ‘pluralistic’ history on the fringes of State law in many countries, and, indeed in influential scholarship about the European Social Model (Lo Faro 2000). However, the force of the argument presented here suggested that, in fact, legal rules also necessarily constitute market, and therefore social, actors, just as, for instance, the norms of the political constitution necessarily constitute the institutions which generate the laws within a legal system. While this makes intuitive sense with regard to the legal creation of legislative institutions for instance, this sounds an improbable claim in the context of the private economy, where most actors are in fact natural persons (or groups of persons) who cannot be metaphysically ‘constituted’ nor granted agency by a constitutional ‘moment’ or its legal iteration. However, this would be to misunderstand the social function of the ‘material constitution’, to adopt a Kelsenian term, where law holds sway in a particular social sphere (Kelsen 1945). One is only able to act within such a framework for norm generation by following

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the paths provided by that framework. In a very important sense, therefore, all material constitutions create new social actors, in that they create potential avenues for agency and cut off others. At least where the legal system is effective, all laws possess their latent material constitutional underpinnings which create actors. Taking a step back from this rather theoretical discussion, we can apply these general considerations to the specifics of the development of the EU. The ordoliberal influence in the Union is well documented, however this work generally focuses on the underlying economic rather than legal or constitutional theory implicit therein. In fact, the EU’s central legal tenets are a perfect case-study for the application of ordoliberal economic constitutionalism, explaining the success of the original goals of the creation of a particular form of market economy within the EU. Firstly, the ‘four freedoms’ (the economic rights at the heart of the original Common Market), combined with the proactive stance of the Court of Justice regarding their direct effectiveness, had the effect of creating economic actors within the legal space of the EU.2 This shifted the Treaties from being a series of binding agreements between States, under the general principle of pacta sunt servanda, to a framework for a new economic and social ordering. Through the creation of these actors and their potential pathways for cross-border economic activity, the law served an ontological social purpose. This method has been successful precisely because it removes the direct requirement for each Member State to translate broader free trade goals into national frameworks, which leaves such aspirations vulnerable for all manner of reasons. As the EU has grown in complexity and ambition in the subsequent decades, this firm basis of economic actors and rights has meant that attempts to positively or negatively harmonise EU law have been far more effective than they would otherwise have been, because they have built directly upon an enforceable legally constructed core. This is to be contrasted with the European Social Model, whose genesis and development was discussed above. Since the 1970s, there has been a growing perception that some of the social aspects which were originally reserved for national competence within the EU should be shifted to Union-level in order to allow harmonised and coordinated action. In the intervening decades, the Treaties and other important Declarations and instruments have increasingly underlined the centrality of social goals, rights and principles within the European project. Now, while these changes can be understood as being a constitutionalisation of social priorities and labour law in a symbolic sense, their significance is limited because of their general existential rather than ontological nature, that is to say, they have not created a material social constitution. They have a tendency to be a statement of the values which the Union represents, rather than an economic reconfiguration of the relationship between actors in the manner described in the preceding paragraphs regarding the constitution of the internal market. The following section seeks to describe the legal construction of working relationships and the anaemic social 2

Case 26/62, Van Gend en Loos v Nederlandse Administratie der Belastingen [1963] ECR 1.

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model of the EU due to its merely existential nature, and the Court of Justice’s limited attempts to remedy this problem.

5. The European Union’s constitution of the worker: between mobility and nowhere The previous section’s thrust was based on an account of labour law which posited that it is the law which actively constructs social and economic actors, a realisation which explains the success of the internal market project within the Union, and EU law’s more general success in regulating that market, whether through regulation or deregulation, due to a firm legal basis as an object for regulation. Now, as European labour law and social priorities have seemingly gained in prominence and importance within the EU legal order, one might have expected a similar success in that field also. While certain areas of social harmonisation have been successful during this time, there has now emerged a pattern of ‘existential posturing’ within the recent history of the Union, as discussed earlier in this chapter, with the successive promulgation of ambitious statements regarding, and catalogues of, central social principles and rights, seeking to place these at the heart of the EU legal order. The social model of the EU is expressly based on many social goals and questions of social justice being attained, in part at least, through the utilisation of the employment relationship. There is a pre-supposition that such structures will form the basis of the necessary transformations which promote fairness and equity, allowing people to share in the prosperity of the Union’s market economy and to be treated fairly while so doing. There is a continuation, in this regard, of the twentieth-century paradigm whereby the power and exchange nexus of the employment relationship is seen as both a source of risk and a source of potential for social justice and social meaning. Although recent policy documents have sought to encourage more ‘atypical’ forms of working, these are seen as either examples of, or stepping stones towards, employment relationships (Commission of the European Communities 2006). While there are numerous other social models imaginable which are not based on the employment relationship as the core motor for social meaning, stability and justice, none of these are currently seemingly on the agenda within the European Social Model. The veracity of the preceding paragraphs is not difficult to demonstrate. If one takes the social rights contained in the Social Pillar, or in the Charter of Fundamental Rights, or those principles mentioned in Article 3 TEU, these are clearly based on the continued, or even increased, importance of the employment relationship for their attainment. What is striking in this regard is that these are not simply labour law instruments, but rather are more general statements of social goals and aspirations, and indeed rights, which see the central nexus of employment as their basis. The central problem with this model is the absence of that relationship from the Union’s legal paradigm. From a very basic standpoint, there is no general right, within these existential constitutional instruments, to a stable and clearly defined employment relationship, or to such a legal framing to be the default for

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relationships akin to work. This is alarming, it should be self-evident, because the other rights are parasitic upon that very relationship, just in the manner in which the regulation of the internal market is parasitic on a stable and clear legal framework of actors and rights which constitute that internal market. Member State labour law is replete with complex legal constructions of individual and collective actors and relationships, reflecting the importance of these so-called ‘gateway’ questions within labour law, defining its scope and separating it from other areas, such as commercial and consumer law. As concern for the ‘social’ has been shifted, at least in part, to the European level, EU law has failed to learn the lesson of its success in the economic sphere, taking for granted the existence of the very relationships upon which its social policy is predicated, rather than understanding that employment relationships are legally constituted frameworks. There are at least four reasons for this, and these can be linked directly to errors in labour law scholarship and ideology which have meant that such problems have been largely ignored within the vast literature on Social Europe and its failings. The first such error is the dogged intellectual separation between so-called ‘social’ and ‘economic’ aspects of the Union, which is promoted by both those who would like to see the ‘social’ prioritised as well as those who would prefer to see it take a back seat to the economic aspects of integration for whatever reason (Countouris 2009; Countouris and Freedland 2013; Syrpis and Novitz 2008; Kenner 2003). In understanding that ‘social’ aspects of European policy rely on the construction of economic relationships, such as employment relationships, one is forced to recognise the non-separability of the social and the economic. The European project was founded on this false dichotomy at the outset, and its continued influence leads to unnecessary and flawed legal wrangling, such as the ‘balancing’ of social and economic rights. On the contrary, and as the Court of Justice recognised in its celebrated Defrenne jurisprudence,3 it is unwise to seek to separate social and economic aspects of European, and indeed other, policy and law. By seeing employment relationships as questions of social policy, their constitution or creation is neglected, because the crucial role of the law in constructing economic relationships is not apprehended. This leads on to the second factor which has led commentary on the European social model to neglect the importance of the construction of employment relationships at EU-level, namely a continued belief that such matters should remain questions of national law for national social models (Rödl 2006). This of course is a viewpoint which reflects the original constitutional compromises, discussed above, of the EU and its original implementation of the Spaak and Ohlin reports. This is a problematic precisely because of the inseparability of the economic and social elements of integration, discussed in the preceding paragraph, and because economic integration has immediate ramifications for national social models if these are not somehow protected through European-level harmonisation. While one could favour a model in which national competence for ‘social’ 3

Case 43/75, Defrenne v Sabena (No 2) [1976] ECR 455.

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matters, such as the construction of employment contracts, were reserved and could not be impacted upon by EU law, this would not resolve the issue of the progressive fragmentation of such models and the pressure to deregulate at national level in the absence of a harmonised response. Such a position therefore assumes that national law will continue to seek to maintain and, more importantly, be capable of maintaining the centrality of such economic relationships. Given that the success of the European Social Model is predicated on the continued centrality of such relationships, this would appear to be a rather imprudent strategy. Thirdly, labour law scholarship has undergone an interesting shift in rhetoric and focus in recent years, discussed in part above, which has led to a diminished focus on the institutional frameworks which characterise its normative core. This has largely been in the form of a rights-based rhetoric, building in interesting ways upon the focus on fundamental and constitutional rights-focused scholarship within many areas of legal study (Nieuwenhuis 2005). While this has created various interesting avenues of legal thought, and indeed heavily influenced jurisprudential practice and reasoning, it runs the risk of seeing labour law and social policy as simply the application of abstract rights to existing social structures and their operation, rather than the more or less deliberate restructuring of those social frameworks. This criticism should not be taken too far: rights-based models of labour law scholarship and ideology are capable of generating hugely transformative results, precisely because, to be fully enjoyed, many rights require certain background considerations to be fulfilled. This is precisely the case with the type of rights which have come to characterise the European Social Model, as has been argued in this chapter: they are dependent on the stable relationships akin to an employment contract. However, there is a danger, when coupled with the moralistic vim and virtuousness which accompanies rights discourse, that labour law scholarship itself can fall into the same trap as has characterised EU social policy’s existential rather than ontological tendencies. This is linked to the fourth tendency within labour law, which may further exacerbate labour law scholarship’s blind spot towards EU law’s deficiencies in its social constitution, particularly within certain national traditions. This is labour law’s historical materialist heritage, most famously encapsulated by Otto Kahn-Freund’s celebrated formulations that ‘law is a secondary force in human affairs […] especially in labour relations’ and that ‘the law is not the principal source of social power’ (Kahn-Freund 1983, chap. 1). Bob Hepple (1980) has described Kahn-Freund’s assertion of law as a secondary force as ‘a belief written in gold letters’. It is an assertion which is made, in various ways, in writings of Kahn-Freund which were directed at both lawyers and non-lawyers, warning them both of a temptation to believe in the law’s ability to achieve certain goals, at least where other social practices or forces were not conducive to their achievement (Kahn-Freund 1954). Such perspectives have of course been one of the core strengths of labour law scholarship in Europe, allowing a dual focus on both legal norms on the one hand and industrial relations and work-based practice on the other, placing labour law scholarship at the vanguard of legal

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academia and transcending the over-idealised, naïve and socially detached doctrinal focus of much legal scholarship. However, this same wealth also creates a curious paradox within much labour law scholarship, namely that it appears to be authored by community of lawyers who do not ‘believe’ in law. In this manner, labour law scholarship has a tendency to reflect the economic materialism which is found within both Marxist accounts of history (Cohen 2000; Marx and Engels 1970), but also many modern variants of neoliberal economics (Posner 1987). The upshot of such a perspective is to easily fall into the trap of thinking of social relationships as somehow pre-legal and requiring regulation rather than creation. If one conceives of economic relationships, such as the employment relationship, as being matter of brute social fact, it is only natural to think of it as unnecessary, or even incoherent, for the law to construct these relationships, including at European level (Lo Faro 2000). A combination of these enumerated elements, it is suggested therefore, has led to a blind spot within labour law scholarship whereby the employment relationship is presumed within paradigms of ‘Social Europe’ but where there is no need, legitimacy or coherence in it being EU law itself which constructs such relationships. This tendency can be witnessed within the classical model for employment regulation at EU level. Directives in this field generally delegate questions of ‘personal scope’ to national law, presupposing their existence, but also reflecting a subsidiarity-based conception of competences, whereby such matters are left to the national legal system to deal with, in line with the division of social and economic competences envisaged by original Treaty settlement. This approach has been largely endorsed by the Court of Justice, with some exceptions in the field of free movement of workers and the meaning of worker under what is now Art 45 TFEU establishing that basic pillar of the internal market.4 The relatively explicit treatment of this matter in Danmols Inventar5 has become the locus classicus for the Court’s treatment of such questions (Kountouris 2018). In that case, decided in 1984, the Court held the relevant employment protections could ‘be relied upon only by persons who are, in one way or another, protected as employees under the law of the member state concerned’. However, in the intervening period, the Court has sought to claw back some of the autonomy left to national legal systems and, sometimes, economic actors in defining their relationships for the purpose of EU law. The Court held in the celebrated case of Allonby6 that ‘[t]he formal classification of a self-employed 4 5 6

See Case 66/85, Lawrie-Blum v Land Baden-Württemberg [1986] ECR 2121 and subsequent case law. Case 105/84, Danmols Inventar [1985] ECR 2639. Case C-256/01, Allonby v Accrington and Rossendale College [2004] ECR I-00873 para 71, but see also the following cases, where the Court of Justice has, similarly held that there exists a European definition of worker, rejecting the possibility of a purely national definition: Case C-428/09, Union Syndicale Solidaires Isère [2010] ECR I– 9961; Case C-32/02, Commission v Italy [2003] ECR I-12063; Case C-596/12, Commission v Italy ECLI:EU:C:2017:77; Case C-229/14, Balkaya v Kiesel Abbruchund Recycling Technik GmbH [2015] ICR 1110.

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person under national law does not exclude the possibility that a person must be classified as a worker within the meaning of [EU employment law provisions]’, thus opening the way for the Court to develop its own definition of ‘worker’ within the context of EU law employment rights. In a series of cases concerning different Directives, the Court has perceived the need to develop an EU law meaning of the notion of worker, in order to ensure the existence of the necessary employment structures upon which the Directives may rest, meaning that, in relation to some Directives at least, EU law does possess a definition of ‘worker’, although the Court generally appears rather deferential to national definitions. The problematic nature of this approach was cleverly linked by Advocate General Kokott in Wippel7 to the more general duty of sincere cooperation, now found within Art 4(3) TEU, whereby Member States would be in breach of that duty if it ‘were to define the term “worker” so narrowly under its national law that the [Directive] were deprived of any validity in practice’. Kokott is alive to the fact that labour law, as has been discussed in this chapter, is parasitic on a particular form of stable relationship, which the law must also guarantee if the law is to have any meaning. Although the Court in Wippel declined to heed this warning, the spirit of her advice has seemingly been followed in other cases. Indeed, the Court itself adopted similar language regarding the scope of other Directives, holding in O’Brien,8 for instance, that Member States ‘may not apply rules [regarding someone’s employment status] which are liable to jeopardise the achievement of the objectives pursued by a directive and, therefore, deprive it of its effectiveness’. The upshot of this brief survey of a rather chaotic body of case law is that there currently exists a rather contradictory approach to employment status within EU law, with the Court seeking to draw a fine line between leaving such matters to national law classifications and developing an autonomous EU definition, with the curious result that there are several different approaches to this question, with no purposive justification for the difference in approach. There exist Directives for which an ‘autonomous’ EU law definition of worker applies, largely taken from Art 45 TFEU jurisprudence, that is regarding who benefits from the freedom movement rights guaranteed to workers. There exist those intermediate areas, where the matter is one for national law, but the Court will seek to ascertain whether the definition is so narrow as to avoid the effect of the legislation. And lastly there are those areas which follow the ‘Danmols orthodoxy’ where such matters are seemingly left entirely to the judgment of the national legal system. However, broadly speaking, there would seem to be a general shift towards the application of the free movement definition of worker to most EU employment law matters. Superficially, it would seem appear that the recent subtle change in approach is a positive development, in the light of the arguments made in the present chapter. It is certainly to be applauded that the Court has perceived that parasitic nature of employment rights on certain forms of economic relationship or status and has sought 7 8

Case C-313/02, Wippel v Peek & Cloppenburg GmbH & Co KG [2004] ECR I-9483. Case C-393/10, O’Brien v Ministry of Justice [2012] 2 CMLR 25.

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to act upon this to the extent that it feels legitimated in so-doing. However, at present, this is, at best, a fragmented and piecemeal approach, which does not provide the basic framework for the full realisation of the European Social Model, as was advocated above. Indeed, the application of a definition of worker which stems from the purposive and expansive application of free movement-related rights would, in many ways appear to be entirely inappropriate given the assumptions and prerequisites for the European Social Model based on stable employment relationships. The definition of worker within EU law which has primarily developed in relation to freedom of movement-related rights has been admirably broad and has sought to incorporate as wide a category of people engaged in work-like activities as possible. Indeed, one could also link the success of this expansive definition to the creation, within the economic ordoliberal constitution, of the worker as economic actor, with directly effective claim rights. However, the starting point for such cases was generally the distinction between economically active and economically inactive people, rather than the rather more complex scenario facing labour law now, which is the fragmentation of economic relationships in various ways due to a plethora of legal, technological industrial, cultural and economic changes. These have led to the increasing marginalisation of the employment contract as the basis for working arrangements. Given that the European Social Model is still based on the desirability and necessity of such relationships, a more concerted and robust form of employment status is required to ensure the attainment of the laudable goals in documents such as the Social Pillar.

6. Small developments in the legal constitution of the worker and the (limited) potential of the Social Pillar This chapter has engaged in wide-ranging discussion, but has at its core a relatively simple contention: the European Social Model is based upon a vision of work which is, in turn, based on an analytically prior model of economic relationships: stable contracts of employment. In contrast to the ‘four freedoms’ of the internal market, EU law has failed, for various historical reasons and continued political and intellectual blindspots, to attempt to construct these relationships. One reason for the continued failure of the Union to achieve the laudable goals of such documents as the recent Social Pillar is the continued assumption that such relationships will somehow exist in a manner which precedes their regulation and instrumentalisation to achieve the various goals of EU law. It has been argued here that this is based on fundamental misunderstanding of the role of law within the construction of employment relationships, reflecting various misconceptions within the intellectual heritage of labour law itself. While the Court of Justice has come to recognise this danger, its perhaps necessarily muted response is far from sufficient to even begin to put in place the framework of stable economic relationships necessary for the attainment of the European Social Model. Member States are under increasing pressure to turn a blind eye to the progressive deregulation of working relationships, creating a more fragmented and more transitory system of work. One must not underestimate the extent to which far more than the

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attainment of the goals of sometimes rather esoteric employment law Directives rests on the creation of stable employment relationships. The structures of training, taxation, social inclusion, meaning, identity, income policy, pensions and all manner of other social concerns in EU Member States are based on the existence of more or less stable employment relationships. The employment nexus here is not something to be seen only as a source of danger, due to its inherent power imbalance, but rather a necessary and desirable social and economic framework to achieve manifold other social and economic goals, and indeed a structure to control imbalances of power and dangers of abuse and injustice. How can EU law achieve this goal? A first step should be the recognition that the right to a stable employment relationship is a fundamental right, alongside those rights and principles which rest upon such relationships. This can be captured either by an express creation of a distinct claim right, or through a rather modest judicial interpretation of other substantive rights as presupposing at least the assumption of such rights. This would necessitate the assumption that an employment relationship exists in cases where this is in doubt. However, given the aspirational nature of documents such as the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the Social Pillar, and their lack of direct applicability in many circumstances, something more than this is required. The EU should seek to reconstruct Social Europe starting from its basic economic building blocks, creating an archetypal regulatory norm in the form of a European Employment Contract which should form the personal or relational scope for all existing EU employment protections, and as the basis for future employment protections. The precise nature, form and flexibility of such a contract are of course important matters to be discussed and debated in detail, and questions of space preclude such discussions here. However, current changes in working practices and new technologies which have placed the employment relationship in ‘crisis’ in national legal orders make such a development more rather than less necessary: the EU can build economic relationships which positively shape the development of work in a socially and economically appropriate way. The alternative is that the EU continues to engage in existential grandstanding without engaging in the necessary accompanying social ontological engineering to achieve its stated goals. The impending exit of the United Kingdom from the Union was the initial motivation for the promulgation of the Social Pillar, whose failures have been mapped in this chapter. The opportunity that Brexit provides for the EU to revisit its own constitutional precepts must not rest simply on the naïve assumptions about the role of law in regulating the world of work. If the EU wishes to develop a genuinely Social Europe, this must be based on the necessary economic relationships which allow the achievement of those social aspirations.

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Chapter 8

Irregular migrants at work and the groundless legal subject Anastasia Tataryn

Introduction Irregular migration and work cannot be identified solely as a problem of employment law or immigration law or European law per se. The challenge of recognising persons living and migrating across borders for work is part of the global movement of capital in which there are preferred legal subjects – namely citizens and visa holders often in high-earning employment – and irregular legal subjects whose legal status is precarious, uncertain, or who are deemed ‘illegal’ as they do not hold the legal immigration status to remain (and work) within a country of which they are not a citizen. Migration status, as a function of immigration law, is left to the discretion of European Union (EU) member states. Many migrants can be left in limbo if they cannot be removed to their country of origin through a non-removal order, but do not have leave to remain, i.e. lack permanent residency (Queiroz 2018, 4). The situation of irregular migrant workers is an example where the mechanisms of the law fail for these individuals. In other words, the law’s limit is exposed as being where the ‘imaginative capacities’ of the nation-state limit citizenship and recognition of persons within their territory (Pryor 2004, 267). In spite of being physically present in the country, and often working and therefore actively contributing to the economic and social fabric of the country, without legal status these persons are suspended in a legal grey area. Their legal subjectivity is irregular; their subject-hood is groundless – it is neither found to rest in citizenship nor in employment law. The legal categories of employment law and immigration are based on predetermined frames of recognition that restrict and condition legal subjectivity according to principles of contract law (Collins 2007), the standard employment relationship (Fudge 2014; Langstaff 2016) and citizenship (Guild 2018; Anderson 2013; Mundlak 2002). The existing legal categories of employee, foreign worker or EU-citizen worker are limited in their ability to address what is identified as irregular, where a person may have transgressed an element of their immigration status or formal work arrangement. For instance, overstaying a work or visitor permit, working more than the permitted hours per week on a student visa or changing employers where sponsorship and work visa is contingent on one

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employer (see Anderson 2013). Moreover, the limits of the recognised categories in employment law, modelled around the standard employment contract, obscure processes of neo-liberalisation (Peck 2012) that seek out cheaper forms of labour where employers are not bound to provide job security or reciprocal contractual terms to temporary or subcontracted workers (not ‘employees’, see Langstaff 2016; Collins 2007). Neoliberalisation processes chisel away at formal employment law protections and responsibilities to contribute to an economic market system dependent on persons in irregular situations (Fudge and Strauss 2013; Hepple 2011). Workers experience an ‘intensified depletion’ (Stewart 2011) of rights, protections and recognition. The lower the value given to one’s work (‘low-waged’, ‘low-skilled’) the weaker the claim to job security and rights. For instance, labour law protections are demanded for workers based on provisions within the EU freedom of movement.1 But due to the changing conditions and nature of work, the struggle remains to have these rights protected and practiced (Kountouris 2018). Meanwhile, irregular migrant workers are found lower down the ladder of protection, often working in the most dirty, dangerous and demeaning conditions (3Ds, see Boucher 2008) with even less recourse or protection against exploitation by their employers (Mantouvalou 2018). Employers, moreover, take advantage of the vulnerability of irregular migrant workers. In particular, as will be discussed below, when a worker’s immigration status, and often physically their identity documents/passport, is dependent on, or held by, the employer as is the case with domestic worker visas in the United Kingdom (UK).

1. The law and irregular migrants at work Law, as a practice and a frame, offers recognition. This recognition is affirmed and reaffirmed through legal subjectivity. The subjection of persons as legal subjects is troubled when persons are in the shadow or gaps of the law. These gaps exist, for instance, when a person is in a country in contravention of immigration laws such as overstaying a visitor visa but maintaining employment through a contract of employment. Jurisprudential questions need to consider, are they legal subjects? Are they excluded from the law? The UK Supreme Court cases of Hounga [2014] and Taiwo and Onu [2016], illustrate how the gaps in employment law contain an experience of work that goes beyond formal legal categories in employment law and immigration. Persons such as Miss Hounga, Ms Taiwo and Ms Onu are not without legal subjectivity, but their subject-hood and subsequent treatment by the law is ambivalent. Conventionally, the aim of recognition and the goal of achieving legal subjectivity and status is conformity with a subject that is a liberal, individual and autonomous being. This liberal legal subject is typified through the standard 1

EU Freedom of Movement: Article 3(2) of the Treaty on European Union (TEU). Article 21, Titles IV and V, of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Article 45 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

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employment contract: the male, able-bodied, citizen worker, working in full-time permanent employment, with a single employer, with consistent hours and salary. This ‘ideal’ worker has been demystified by labour law scholars who draw attention to the current labour market and globalised economic system that does not support this type of employment clarity and consistency, notwithstanding that the standard employment contract only ever existed as a reality for a very small percentage of the population (Kountouris 2018; Fudge and Strauss 2013). Moreover, the liberal, individual, autonomous legal subject presupposes a nation-state system whereby the subject remains in the country of birth and citizenship. While this subject may theoretically remain the model for legal categories, the practice of employment law in tribunal and court levels demonstrate that most legal actors struggle to fit this mould. Crucially, irregular migrant workers, especially women from non-EU countries, brought by their employer-sponsors to work in private households radically challenge the liberal legal subject and standard employment contractual arrangement. In the UK Supreme Court case law, legal actors – particularly those who are not able to conform to the liberal model – can be seen to shift their position and subjectivity to cover up or make up for the gaps inherent in the law.2 The law works by both consolidating its boundaries and responding to difference, always extending beyond itself to include what is present but beyond the formal limit. In other words, the law is both determinate and indeterminate (Fitzpatrick 2007, 156; Fitzpatrick 2009, 124). The irregular migrant worker is a legal subject not ignored by the law: persons in these irregular, grey areas are subjected to the determinate law, in that they are included within the ambit of law by their activity, and importance, in the labour market.3 However, they are denied recognition as full legal subjects; their treatment and ability to receive compensation through legal mechanisms is, in the case law, largely indeterminate. Their ambiguous position is a condition of popularly reinforced notions that firstly, migrant workers are foreign/non-citizens and therefore not the responsibility of the nation-state or worthy of state protection. Secondly, their labour market position relegates them to spaces and conditions that are in the margins of statutory protection. For instance, often not fulfilling the criteria for ‘employee’ status under the Employment Rights Act 1996 (Collins 2007; see also Halawi [2014]). Or being in the margins of contract law including the doctrine of illegality (Hounga [2014]). Or receiving ambiguous recognition under the Modern Slavery Act 2015 (Broad and Turnbull 2018), which largely depends on presenting the subject as a victim and who has had no part in consenting to their treatment and situation. Or the margins of the Equality Act 2010, for instance experiencing discrimination based on a characteristic that is not protected under the Act such as will be discussed below in Taiwo and Onu [2016]. 2 3

For more on the gaps inherent in the law, see Tataryn 2016. See Lindahl 2009, for his explication of the migrant as the ‘included-as-excluded’.

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The legal grey areas occupied by persons considered irregular migrant labourers suggest that to search for a legal remedy for the phenomenon of irregular migrant labourers is to face a legal impasse (for further elaboration on the irregular, see Amaya Castro 2013). However, the attempts of legal actors within existing systems and functions of law ultimately reveal not an impasse, but shifting groundlessness at the core of legal subjectivity in labour rights. This groundlessness refers to the unpredictable, ambivalent treatment within the case law. Also, more fundamentally, that the irregular migrant is not so much an anomaly (ir-regular) as an archetypal legal subject in labour law. The legal subject in labour law, migrant or citizen, is not definitive because the experience of labour or working is dependent on relationships and employment arrangements that differ according to experience. Thus, the ambivalent treatment experienced by irregular migrant workers under the law is not uniquely the experience of migrant workers, but heightened due to their precarious immigration status. The law constitutes an order of being, something is made valid when it is legalized, but equally what the law sidelines, or maintains as irregular, is also part of its constitution. The irregular migrant, living, working, contributing to the economic, social and political system is not an outsider but rather is ‘inside’ but significantly lacking equal status and subjectivity. Many theorists have written of how one cannot speak about Europe without speaking of its other – the non-European inside, or the ‘almost European’ – be it people from former colonized countries or those that are seen to aspire to be ‘European’ but are forever judged against a European norm (see Balibar 2004; Butler and Chakravorty Spivak 2010). Thus the irregular migrant in Europe cannot be conceptualized as an outsider, and in the UK cases of irregular migrants have been heard at the Supreme Court. Thus irregular migrants are not lacking in legal subjectivity, but their subject-hood is treated differentially in the law by the nation-state legal regime. This leaves them exposed to exploitation outside state protection. Irregular migrant workers, although not totally excluded from legal subjectivity, are a demographic that, practically, often cannot gain legal representation in court processes due to a lack of resources. There are few cases at the Supreme Court to address the situation of irregular migrants at work. However in the past few years, two cases have significantly demonstrated the legal questions and difficulty of extending national legal protection to irregular migrants. The two cases, Hounga [2014] and the jointly heard appeals of Taiwo and Onu [2016], are exemplary of labour situations that many other workers experience. Hounga v Allen [2014] UKSC 47 The case of Miss Hounga, heard at the UK Supreme Court on appeal in 2014, illustrates the condition of legal irregularity that irregular migrant workers may find themselves in, in spite of employment law. Miss Hounga was a Nigerian national brought to work in a private household by the Allen’s in 2007, when she was about 14 years old. She travelled with an affidavit that stated she was born in

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1986, however Miss Hounga admitted that the statement was falsified (she was 14, not 19 years old). Meanwhile, Mrs Allen testified to the employment tribunal that the affidavit was true, meaning that Miss Hounga was an adult when she arrived in the UK and thus legally able to consent to work and employment. Miss Hounga was illiterate and had been orphaned in Nigeria. Upon arriving in the UK, she began work at the Allen’s in spite of not holding a work permit. After six months her visitor visa expired and she had no legal right to stay and/or work in the UK. Nevertheless, Miss Hounga continued to live and work in the Allen household. The Allens did not pay Miss Hounga for her work and she was subjected to violence, verbal abuse and harassment. Miss Hounga was eventually kicked out of the Allen home after Mrs Allen beat her, poured water over her and locked her out of the house. Miss Hounga was found in a supermarket car park and brought to a non-governmental organization that advocated on her behalf. The case was brought to the employment tribunal on the basis of racial discrimination (under the Race Relations Act 1976 incorporated into the Equality Act 2010, s 9) with regards to the harassment suffered during employment and her dismissal. Miss Hounga claimed that she was treated less favourably (discriminated against) based on her race. In other words, a British worker in the same or similar circumstances would have been treated more favourably. Contractual claims were also brought to the tribunal based on breach of employment contract, unfair dismissal, unpaid wages and holiday pay. At the employment tribunal, Miss Hounga’s contract law claims were dismissed based on the doctrine of illegality. The doctrine of illegality deems that if there is illegality at the basis of the contract – i.e. Miss Hounga’s living and work in the country without legal permit – then the contract is void. The racial discrimination claims were dismissed based on Miss Hounga’s failure to follow grievance procedures whilst in employment. Furthermore, her dismissal from employment was held to be due to her illegal immigration status that she was deemed to be aware of, therefore not wrongful on the part of the employer (the Allens). The Court of Appeal held that the illegality at the basis of Miss Hounga’s presence in the country overrode any claims to contractual grievances or discrimination.4 The contract law claims were not pursed at the Supreme Court level because of the lasting doctrine of illegality in contracts (see Hounga [2014], per Lord Hughes at [54], [59]). However, the appeal for compensation for the discrimination suffered by Miss Hounga, in spite of the illegality underlying their contractual relationship, was revisited. The decision revealed the malleability of legal rules exercised when the will to provide justice for irregular (vulnerable) migrants exists. In reviewing the law that dealt with the doctrine of illegality, the Supreme Court justices held that the inextricable link test – meaning that there is an inextricable link between the illegality and the claim on the contract/employment relationship – had to take public policy into account. The public policy considerations of Miss Hounga’s case were two-fold. On the one hand, the Court 4

For more analysis of the doctrine of illegality in Hounga v Allen [2014] UKSC 47, see Bogg and Green 2015.

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did not want to be seen to condone immigration illegality. On the other hand, the Court did not want to explicitly deny Miss Hounga protection in the face of her undeniable suffering and vulnerability in the hands of her employers. Additionally, the Court held that permitting the doctrine of illegality to override discrimination claims would condone the abusive, illegal behaviour of the employers, the Allens. Lord Wilson, in the majority decision, raised the following considerations: (a) Would the tribunal’s award (compensation) allow Miss Hounga to profit from her wrongdoing? No. (b) Did the award ‘permit evasion of a penalty prescribed by the criminal law’? No, there was no prosecution for her entry into the employment contract. (c) Would the award of compensation encourage others to act as Miss Hounga did? No. And lastly, (d) ‘Would the application of the defence of illegality so as to defeat the award compromise the integrity of the legal system by appearing to encourage those in the situation of Mrs Allen to enter into illegal contracts of employment?’ and for this final consideration Lord Wilson suggested that yes, it was possible that employers would believe they could discriminate against vulnerable employees ‘with impunity’ (from Hounga [2014], per Lord Wilson at [44]). The Supreme Court interpreted the doctrine of illegality against the previous decisions. Lord Wilson expressed concern that the defence could condone the abusive behaviour of the employers, rather than the actions of opportunistic employees. Lord Wilson went on to discuss trafficking and modern day slavery. Modern day slavery allegations against Mrs Allen were not considered at the tribunal level perhaps due to the alleged consent and action taken by Miss Hounga herself, seemingly demonstrating that she was not an actor and not a hapless victim. Also, Parliament was only debating the Modern Slavery Bill in 2014, during the time of the Supreme Court hearing. Thus, the legal lens through which the employment tribunal, and Court of Appeal, regarded Miss Hounga was restricted to the contract of employment, where illegality overwhelmed all other factors in the case. Legal subjects, conventionally understood within a liberal, legal understanding are compartmentalised into particular categories, in this case the employee and employer relationship. Fitting subjects into predetermined categories ignores other factors of the working relationship, in this case the exploitation and vulnerability experienced. Ignoring the context behind these employment relationships is arguably what makes employment law efficient and transferrable to different and diverse contexts. Yet, as was made clear in Hounga [2014], forcing conformity into these categories and limited interpretations exacerbates the gaps that cause certain populations to exist beyond legal protection. Notwithstanding the immigration transgression of her presence in the UK, Lord Wilson held that, ‘it would be a breach of the UK’s international obligations under the Convention for its law to cause Miss Hounga’s complaint to be defeated by the defence of illegality’ (Hounga [2014], per Wilson at [50]). The Supreme Court allowed Miss Hounga’s appeal to receive compensation for the discrimination she experienced while working and living with the Allen’s. Miss

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Hounga was deemed ‘worthy’ (Hounga [2014], per Wilson at [56]) of legal protection and a victim of conditions akin to modern-day slavery, and the law was used to respond accordingly. Taiwo (Appellant) v Olaigbe and another; Onu (Appellant) v Akwiwu and another [2016] UKSC 31 Ms Taiwo and Ms Onu were, similar to Miss Hounga, brought from Nigeria to work in domestic, private households. Their cases were jointly heard at the UK Supreme Court on appeal, with Lady Hale delivering the judgment. Both women were independently employed to take care of the household and children. However, their right to employment in the UK (including their immigration status) was tied to their employers as per immigration rules on foreign workers. In both Ms Taiwo and Ms Onu’s employment tribunal hearings, it was held that ‘the reason for the employers’ mistreatment of their employees was their victims’ vulnerability owing to their precarious immigration status’ (Taiwo and Onu [2016], per Lady Hale at [2]). The Supreme Court, therefore, had to decide whether the two women suffered discrimination because of, or on the basis of, immigration status – which, under the Equality Act 2010, would constitute discrimination because of, or on the basis of, nationality (s 9(1)(b)). The facts of their situations were as follows: Ms Taiwo arrived in the UK to escape poverty in Nigeria and work in the Olaigbe household, in order to send money home to her children. While Ms Taiwo’s entry into the country was legal, via a domestic worker visa, the Olaigbes fabricated a contract of employment, and failed to show her the contract or pay her for her work. Ms Taiwo’s passport was taken from her and she was routinely abused physically and mentally. Ms Onu was employed by Mr and Mrs Akwiwu and, similar Ms Taiwo, was brought to the UK on a domestic worker visa, but with information falsified by the employers. Once Ms Onu was in the Akwiwu’s residence, they refused to pay her for her work. Ms Onu was refused rest periods and annual leave. She was regularly threatened that if she tried to run away she would be arrested and imprisoned. In both Ms Taiwo and Ms Onu’s experiences, their passports were taken and withheld from them by their employers. According to the Employment Appeal Tribunal, Ms Taiwo’s situation was ‘systematic and callous exploitation’ (Taiwo and Onu [2016], per Lady Hale at [4]). Nevertheless, her ill treatment by her employer was held not to be due to her being Nigerian (race/nationality), but because she was a precarious migrant: precarious because her status depended on her employers, Mr and Mrs Olaigbe. On the basis that immigration status is not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010 (chapter 1, s 4), the Supreme Court too rejected the appeals from both Ms Taiwo and Ms Onu. It was held that the rejection was ‘not because these appellants do not deserve a remedy for all the grievous harms they have suffered. It is because the present law, while able to redress some of those harms, cannot redress them all’ (Taiwo and Onu [2016], per Lady Hale at [34]). The

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Supreme Court acknowledged that the abuse suffered by these women held in exploitative working conditions needed recognition and compensation. However the Equality Act 2010’s anti-discrimination provisions under employment law or the Modern Slavery Act 2015 lacked the jurisdiction to recognize their legal subjectivity and remedy/compensate for their ill treatment. Here, the law was not able to respond to the exploitation they experienced, but rather affirmed the limit of law’s reach at the existing statutory provisions for anti-discrimination and the protected characteristics. Arguably the law, formally understood and administered, failed all three women. Existing provisions under the Employment Rights Act 1996 and the Equality Act 2010, the statutory foundations of UK employment law, failed to extend themselves to these vulnerable irregular migrants at work. Yet the shifting subjectivity of these irregular workers was used to shape them into legal subjects, where in the case of Miss Hounga the law was able to shine the light and grant compensation. She was deemed worthy of protection because of her vulnerability akin to the modern slavery being discussed in Parliament and because she did not profit or benefit from her illegality – her situation was not seen to condone illegal entry, but rather could be seen to condone employers abusing vulnerable workers. In the case of Ms Taiwo and Ms Onu, their exploitation and abuse was recognised as being ‘callous and systematic’, but not due to a characteristic recognised by UK law. The limit of the law would have to be stretched too far to recognize immigration status as a characteristic in need to protection, in spite of the obvious vulnerability their precarious immigration status created.

2. Groundlessness and the legal subject What, then, does the legal subjectivity of the irregular migrant worker rest on? Where, or what, is its foundation? Vulnerability to exploitation and a need for protection are not enough. But conformity with the standard employment relationship and citizenship is not a definitive prerequisite. This illustrates how the limit of the law, and the basis of legal recognition to grant legal subjectivity and protection are groundless. In other words, when we search for the core of the legal subject, we find no bedrock, no foundation. Because there is no-thing at the basis of the law: Law is no object or thing in and of itself (see Nancy 1993, 47–48, 55). Law responds to, shapes and is shaped by, experiences in and of the world. Thus, the subject of the law, while a thing (a noun: a person, a figure, a being) is not constituted from something before it – it cannot be presupposed based on an external other. Undeniably, the legal frame provides us with ‘ideal’5 legal actors: the formal employee, the single employer, the migrant worker present with a valid, temporary work visa. But in practice, few subjects fit these character moulds. Therefore, what constitutes the law and the subjects of the law is the experience of beings, of people working and relating in society. 5

See Anderson 2013 for a discussion of the ‘ideal’ or ‘good’ citizen and ‘good’ migrant versus the failed citizen and failed migrant.

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Groundlessness is the condition of there being ‘nothing other than experience of sense (and this is the world) if “experience” says that sense precedes all appropriation or succeeds on and exceeds it’ (Nancy 1997, 11, 159). The experience of work and the relation of working presuppose subjectivity because experience precedes and exceeds categories. And so if experience is what we have, all that we have, as a foundation, then foundation is without one, single, solid ground; it is groundless. The bodies at work, as evident in the cases of Hounga [2014] and Taiwo and Onu [2016], re-constitute law’s limit by challenging the formal predetermined boundary and legal category. Bodies, the people that work and interact in the labour market and nation-state, are part of the constitution of law by challenging it beyond itself – to a beyond that is unknown until the experience of the judgment. It is only through the circulation of beings, as the experience of bodies at work, that do we have law, society and economy. Bodies have a constitutional role because being presupposes any subjectivity placed onto being.6 Furthermore, law’s existence as no-thing is consistent because no single foundation can be found to collectively ground being and world. Therefore law cannot ‘be’ something, but is responsive to the constitutional relationality and action of bodies. Put into action for labour law and persons at work, this means that when thinking of labour and law the very nature of law needs to be recognised for its ambivalence. Work and the relationality that is formed through working are elemental to our subjectivity and cannot be predetermined or prescribed. Otherwise, respect, dignity and rights will never be attainable for the most vulnerable of workers (those with precarious, irregular status, working in the lowest forms of labour and employment).

3. Groundless legal subjects The irregular migrant is a condition of the impossibility for existing legal frames, which use as their reference a predetermined notion of what is ‘regular’ and what is ‘legal’ that is based on a limited liberal subject. The presence and experience of persons at work do not fit into pre-determined frameworks of legal subjectivity, and in practice legal subjects extend beyond these frames and categories. The legal gaps that reinforce migration situations considered irregular reveal that the categories of migration law exist for limited recognition of a particular conforming legal subject. If one is not recognised as within this legal category, one is irregular. Yet legal categories are not built from some elemental core, they are a construct of a particular modern legal system that does not reflect labour market practices. 6

This claim is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach of subjectivity as living body (Merleau Ponty 2013, 121). The difference, however, is in my contention that the subject is constituted by the relationality of experience. In other words, the living body not in isolation, but the living body as a relation of work and being with others.

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Those who are not recognised as easily fitting into categories of UK employment law when bringing a grievance to the employment tribunal and then appealing to the UK Supreme Court – Miss Hounga, Ms Taiwo and Ms Onu – are nevertheless subjected to the law and are subjects of the law. Employment law rests on the employment contract and contractual principles – which, in Miss Hounga’s case in the Court of Appeal, affirmed the doctrine of illegality. Embedded within this contract-based definition of employment is a particular legal subject as worker: a national with formal citizenship status, who is a full employee working for one employer in a workplace that is neither the employer nor employees place of residence, and rights (benefits, holiday pay, sick leave and pension) are delegated accordingly. Miss Hounga’s presence and experience of exploitation challenged the limits of employment law (including the doctrine of illegality) and ultimately demanded that her vulnerability be recognised and compensated. Ms Taiwo and Ms Onu’s respective experiences also demanded recognition but met the limit of the law at the limit of anti-discrimination protected characteristics. The three women’s experiences as legal subjects illustrate how legal categories and limits can shift in practice, because at the base the legal subject is nothing but the person standing before the law, constituting the law. The cases of Hounga [2014] and Taiwo and Onu [2016] demonstrate the irregular migrant exposes how the law itself – and legal subjects under the law – is founded in groundlessness. Nevertheless, limited recognition in formal categories of employment law persist in creating and maintaining irregular situations, which in turn bear the burden of depleted rights and protection. The presence of irregular migrant workers allows employers and businesses to demand cheaper, more temporary and precarious forms of labour in order to maintain economic market competitiveness in processes of neoliberalisation. However, when law is taken from its fixed form and recognised in its practice or application as simultaneously determinate and indeterminate, law does not withhold legal subjectivity. Within such an understanding of law, the only sense we can make of legal subjectivity is that all legal subjects are founded in groundlessness. Labour migration and the challenges arising out of crossborder movement whereby workers are labelled as ‘irregular’ are exemplary of the constitutive groundlessness of our being against the frameworks of juridical, political and economic categories. Meaning that our subject-hood and the way we see and relate to each other is only ever formed by our experience. Therefore law must respond to these experiences, not be beholden to predetermined frames of recognition, to protect the fair treatment, rights and dignity of persons at work.

Bibliography Amaya Castro, Juan. ‘International Refugees and Irregular Migrants: Caught in the Mundane Shadow of Crisis’. In Netherlands Yearbook of International Law 2013. The Hague: Springer, 2013. Anderson, Bridget. Us & Them: The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

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Balibar, Etienne. We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Bigo, Didier. ‘Reflections on Immigration Controls and Free Movement in Europe’. In Constructing and Imagining Labour Migration. Edited by Elspeth Guild and Sandra Mantu, 293–305. London: Ashgate, 2011. Bogg, Alan and Sarah Green. ‘Rights Are Not Just for the Virtuous: What Hounga Means for the Illegality Defence in the Discrimination Torts’, Industrial Law Journal 44(1), 101–122, (2015). Boucher, Gerard. ‘A Critique of Global Policy Discourses on Managing International Migration’, Third World Quarterly 29(7), 1461–1471, (2008). Broad, Rose and Nick Turnbull. ‘From Human Trafficking to Modern Slavery: The Development of Anti-Trafficking Policy in the UK’, European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 25(2), 119–133, (2018). Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Who Sings the Nation-State? New York, London, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2010. Collins, Hugh. ‘Legal Responses to the Standard Form Contract of Employment’, Industrial Relations Journal 36(1), 2–18, (2007). Fitzpatrick, Peter. ‘The Triumph of a Departed World: Law, Modernity, and the Sacred’. In Law and the Sacred. Edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, Martha Merrill Umphrey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Fitzpatrick, Peter. ‘Finding Normativity: Immigration Policy and Normative Formation’. In A Right to Inclusion and Exclusion? Normative Thought Lines of the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, edited by Hans Lindahl, 118–135. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2009. Fudge, Judy. ‘Feminist Reflections on the Scope of Labour Law: Domestic Work, Social Reproduction, and Jurisdiction’, Feminist Legal Studies 22(1), 1–23, (2014). Fudge, Judy, and Kendra Strauss. Temporary Work, Agencies and Unfree Labour. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. Guild, Elspeth and Leonie Ansems de Vries. ‘Seeing refuge in Europe: spaces of transit and the violence of migration management’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2018). doi:10.1080/1369183X.2018.1468308. Hepple, Bob. ‘Factors Influencing the Making and Transformation of Labour Law in Europe’. In The Idea of Labour Law. Edited by Guy Davidov and Brian Langille, 30–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Kountouris, Nicola. ‘The Concept of “Worker” in European Labour Law: Fragmentation, Autonomy and Scope’, Industrial Law Journal, 47(2), 192–225, (2018). Langstaff, Brian. ‘Changing Times, Changing Relationships at Work…Changing Law?’, Industrial Law Journal, 45(2), 131–143,(2016). Lindahl, Hans. ed., A Right to Inclusion and Exclusion? Normative Thought Lines of the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2009. Mantouvalou, Virgina. ‘Legal Construction of Structures of Exploitation’. In Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law. Edited by Virginia Mantouvalou, Hugh Collins and Gillian Lester. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. (1st Edition 1945). Translated by Donald A. Landes. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. Mundlak, Guy. ‘The Limits of Labour Law in a Fungible Community’. In Labour Law in An Era of Globalization: Transformative practices and possibilities. Edited by Joanne Conaghan, Richard Michael Fischl and Karl Klare, 280–299. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

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Nancy, Jean-Luc. Experience of Freedom. (1st Edition 1988). Translated by Bridget McDonald. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Sense of the World. (1st Edition 1993). Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Peck, Jaime, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brennar. ‘Neoliberalism Resurgent? Market Rule after the Great Recession’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 111(2), Spring, 265–288, (2012). Pryor, Benjamin. ‘Law in Abandon: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Critical Study of Law’, Law and Critique 15, 259–285, (2004). Queiroz, Benedita Menezes. Illegally Staying in the EU. Oxford and Portland: Hart Publishing, 2018. Stewart, Ann. Gender, Law and Justice in a Global Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Tataryn, Anastasia. ‘Re-conceptualising Labour Law in an Era of Migration and Precarity’, Law, Culture and the Humanities 1–22, (2016). doi:10.1177/1743872116683381.

Case law Halawi v WDFG UK Ltd T/A World Duty Free [2014] EWCA Civ 1387. Hounga v Allen [2014] UKSC 47. Taiwo (Appellant) v Olaigbe and another; Onu (Appellant) v Akwiwu and another [2016] UKSC 31.

Legislation Employment Rights Act 1996, c 18. Equality Act2010, c 15. Modern Slavery Act2015, c 30. Race Relations Act1976, c 74.

Chapter 9

The ontology of labor Enrico Terrone

Introduction Since ontology is the study of being, the ontology of labor should investigate the kind of being that is specific to labor. This is a rather neglected topic both in the history of philosophy and in the contemporary philosophical landscape. Ontological researches have traditionally focused – and still focus – on material objects such as particles or organisms, and abstract entities such as numbers or values, whereas labor is rather discussed in political philosophy and in the social sciences. The aim of this chapter is to show, on the one hand, that labor can be an outstanding subject of ontological investigation, and, on the other hand, that ontology can fruitfully contribute to a better understanding of labor. In section 1, I shall present a basic ontological framework inspired by Peter Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics, which has brought Aristotle’s ontological conception into contemporary analytic philosophy. In section 2, I shall draw, within that framework, a distinction between labor, work and job, and I shall explain how these three dimensions are connected. In section 3, I shall show how this ontological account allows us to take different kinds of labor into account, thereby reviving a philosophical project whose roots can be found in Plato’s dialogs, especially in the Republic, the Sophist and the Statesman. Lastly, in section 4, I shall argue that the ontology of labor can shed some light on the reasons why labor is so crucial for the life of human beings.

1. The framework Strawson’s Individuals is an attempt to discover the structure of the world starting by analyzing how language works. What Strawson calls “the world” is our shared version of the world, that is, what beings such as us ordinarily experience as our world. From this perspective, inherited from Aristotle’s metaphysics, Strawson individuates the ordinary use of language as “the best, and indeed the only sure, way in philosophy” (Strawson 1959, 9). He labels his metaphysics as “descriptive” since he aims to describe what the world is for beings provided with perceptual,

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cognitive and linguistic systems such as ours, instead of forcing us to conceive of the world by revising our basic ways of experiencing it. However, Strawson is not arguing that a close examination of the actual use of words is the best, and indeed the only sure, philosophy. He does not try to reduce ontology to semantics. He just argues that semantics is our best way to philosophy, thereby leaving room for the possibility that an ontological investigation revises the semantic insights with which it started. Descriptive metaphysics is an especially well-suited framework for the ontology of entities such as labor whose existence seems to be deeply entrenched in our social and cultural practices, and thus lucidly reflected by our linguistic uses. I thus start by outlining Strawson’s ontological view, with the aim of clarifying some basic ontological notions that I shall exploit in the second half of the chapter. Particulars Strawson’s main linguistic way to ontology is the subject-predicate structure. He characterizes this structure as a sentence constituted by two linguistic expressions (S, P) that introduce two non-linguistic terms (S*, P*) into a proposition (which attributes P* to S*). He observes that in language there are special kinds of non-predicable expressions that normally work only as subjects, not as predicates (cf. Strawson 1959, 174). The basic non-predicable expressions are demonstratives and proper names. They introduce particulars, that is, entities that we can localize in the shared unified spatiotemporal framework of our experience: “particulars have their place in the spatio-temporal system, or, if they have no place of their own there, are identified by reference to other particulars which do have such a place” (Strawson 1959, 233). From Strawson’s perspective, the basic particulars are bodies and persons. Bodies are “three-dimensional objects with some endurance through time” (Strawson 1959, 39). Persons are special bodies to which we attribute not only spatiotemporal locations (and physical or manifest properties), but also experiences and mental states. In Strawson’s terms, what is in fact ascribed to persons consists of “actions and intentions (I am doing, did, shall do this); sensations (I am warm, in pain); thoughts and feelings (I think, wonder, want this, am angry, disappointed, contented); perceptions and memories (I see this, hear the other, remember that)” (Strawson 1959, 89). Events and higher-level particulars Events in turn are particulars, but they sharply differ from bodies with respect to their identification. One can wholly identify a body just by experiencing its spatial parts or properties, whereas the whole identification of an event also requires the experience of its temporal parts or properties. In other words, a body can be instantaneously experienced as a whole, whereas the experience of an event as a whole necessarily unfolds in time. For example the ontological difference between

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a particular body such as a tiger and a particular event such as a flood is that “the flood is not wholly present throughout each moment of its existence – at each moment only a part of the flood is present, not the whole flood – whereas the whole tiger is” (Crane 2001, 36). A special kind of events is that of actions, which can be conceived of as events that are up to persons, that is, events that reveal themselves to be “intentional under some description” (cf. Anscombe 1957; Davidson 1980). According to Strawson, events are ontologically less basic than bodies since we can identify whatever body without referring to any event, whereas most events can be identified only by referring to the bodies involved in them. For example, “a death is necessarily the death of some creature” (Strawson 1959, 46). Still, in some exceptional cases, the identification of events does not depend on the identification of bodies. Consider for example purely sensory events such as flashes or noises: “That a flash or a bang occurred does not entail that anything flashed or banged. ‘Let there be light’ does not mean ‘Let something shine’” (Strawson 1959, 46). But these are precisely exceptions. Whatever body can be identified without referring to events, whereas some (indeed, most) events need to be identified by referring to bodies. From Strawson’s perspective, this asymmetry is sufficient to state the ontological primacy of bodies. Besides bodies, persons and events, there are higher order particulars as for example families, teams and armies. Such things are not events or persons, neither are they material things such as bodies because “one of the requirements for the identity of a material thing is that its existence, as well as being continuous in time, should be continuous in space” (Strawson 1959, 37). Yet, in spite of lacking spatial continuity, things such as families or teams are particulars since, at any moment of their existence, they can be identified by making reference to more basic particulars whose existence is continuous in both space and time. For example, a family can be identified by making reference to its members, a team by making reference to its players. Properties All particulars share the feature of being introduced into ordinary subject-predicate propositions by expressions (e.g. demonstratives, proper names, definite descriptions) that can only be used as subjects, not as predicates. We cannot say “X is Socrates” unless X is another expression referring to Socrates; yet, in the latter case, we have no longer an ordinary subject-predicate proposition but an identity statement. An expression introducing a particular can, at most, contribute to the constitution of a predicate, but it cannot be a predicate on its own. For example, “X is older than Socrates” is an ordinary subject-predicate proposition in which the expression “Socrates” contributes to the constitution of the predicate (“is older than Socrates”) that is attributed to that particular X. By contrast, “X is Socrates” may only be a statement of identity in which the expression X introduces the same particular introduced by “Socrates”.

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Subject-predicate propositions normally needs genuine predicates, that is, expressions introducing properties. An expression introducing a certain property P allows us to construct several subject-predicate propositions sharing the form “x is P”, in which the values of the variable x introduce different particulars (e.g. “Socrates is a philosopher”, “Kant is a philosopher”, “Wittgenstein is a philosopher”). Strawson conceives of the property as a universal, that is, “a principle of collection of like things” (Strawson 1959, 226). While a particular has, on its own, its place in our spatiotemporal system, a universal has its place thanks to its instances, that is, the particulars that manifest it. Finally, in the domain of properties, one can distinguish between monadic properties and relational properties or relations. While a monadic property only involves one particular, a relational property involve more than one particulars. For instance, “being red” is a monadic property whereas “being close to” is a relation. Individuals In ordinary subject-predicate propositions, the subject introduces a particular and the predicate introduces a property, that is, a universal. More generally, Strawson calls individuals the entities that are introduced by subjects into genuine subjectpredicate propositions. He is inclined to treat individuals as the entities that primarily exist in our world, since he considers the linguistic functioning of subjects as a clue of the existence of what they introduce. The subject is, indeed, a linguistic expression that has a certain degree of completeness. By introducing a term, the subject implicitly suggests the existence of such a term. By contrast, the predicate introduces a term without suggesting any existence at all. For example, in the sentence “The Sun is yellow”, the subject “The Sun” presupposes that there is something identifiable as the Sun regardless of the following predicate, whereas the predicate “is yellow” does not presuppose any existence unless it is paired with a subject. The subject commits on its own to the existence of a certain entity, whereas the predicate commits to existence only if it specifies a feature of an entity whose existence has already been suggested by a subject. From this perspective, the subject has a semantic privilege, which Strawson traces back to an ontological privilege of the non-linguistic term, namely the individual, that the linguistic subject introduces into a proposition. Since particulars play a key subject role in our subject-predicate propositions, they can be treated as the basic individuals of our world. Yet, in our language, also expressions introducing properties can play the subject role. For example, we can say “red is my favorite color”, and we can even use the derived word “redness” so as to emphasize the fact that an expression introducing a property can play the subject role. Thus, properties seem to be individuals, to the extent that they are introduced by expressions that can play the subject role in a subject-predicate proposition. Still, Strawson doubts that properties are genuine individuals. Although the use of language is our best way to ontology, some linguistic expression can be ontologically misleading. Indeed, individuals are not only introduced by subjects, but also

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introduced within sentences that cannot be satisfactorily paraphrased into sentences about particulars. For example the putative individual introduced by the expression “anger” does not seem to be a genuine individual, since a proposition that has “anger” as subject can normally be satisfactorily paraphrased. As Strawson puts it: “the paraphrase of, say, ‘Anger impairs the judgment’ into ‘People are generally less capable of arriving at sound judgments when they are angry than when they are not’ seems natural and satisfying” (Strawson 1959, 231). Such paraphrase shows that anger, just as redness, is not a genuine individual, but rather a property. Ultimately, Strawson’s distinction between individuals and properties can be related to the Aristotelian distinction between substance and attributes (cf. Wiggins 2001). While individuals (or substances) exist on their own, properties exist thanks to the individuals that bear them. In short, individuals have properties, whereas properties are of individuals. Tropes and sortals The ontological framework that Strawson proposes in Individuals relies on two basic distinctions, namely, that between universals and particulars, and that between individuals and properties. Individuals usually go hand-in-hand with particulars just as properties go hand-in-hand with universals. However, this correspondence is not absolute. On the one hand, as Strawson (2006) acknowledges, there can be particular properties, that is, those properties possessed by a particular individual. For example redness is a universal property but that redness of that particular apple is a particular property or trope. On the other hand, there can be universal individuals or sortals, that is, universals whose instances are not tropes of particular individuals, but the particular individuals themselves. For example, redness is not a sortal because its instances are tropes, whereas animal is a sortal because its instances are not particular properties but rather particular individuals (this animal, that animal …). Types and tokens Among sortals, Strawson attributes a special ontological role to types, which, unlike all other universals, behave like particulars under two decisive respects. First, in subject-predicate sentences types are normally introduced by subjects rather than by predicates. Second, types often have a proper name. While universals basically are principles of collection of like particulars, types are first of all principles of construction of like particulars called tokens. For example, a novel such as Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is a type whose tokens are particular printed copies. A type allows us to collect particulars in virtue of being the principle that specifies how to construct them. In this sense the type plays not only an epistemic role but also an ontological one. That is why we treat types as genuine individuals. In Strawson’s terms:

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The general title of “types”, often, though rather waveringly, confined to words and sentences, may well be extended. I have in mind, for example: works of art, such as musical and literary compositions, and even, in a certain sense, paintings and works of sculpture; makes of thing, e.g. makes of motor-car, such as the 1957 Cadillac, of which there are many particular instances but which is itself a non-particular; and more generally other things of which the instances are made or produced to a certain design, and which, or some of which, bear what one is strongly inclined to call a proper name, e.g. flags such as the Union Jack. (Strawson 1959, 231) Facts and states of affairs Lastly, one can call facts the connections between individuals and properties (cf. Crane 2001, 39). While individuals correspond to linguistic subjects and properties to linguistic predicates, facts correspond to the linguistic connections between subjects and predicates that constitute propositions. In sum, a fact is the possession of a certain property by a certain individual. It is a fact that the Sun is yellow and it is a fact that Italy borders France. More generally, one can call state of affairs a possible connection between an individual and a property thereby reserving the term “fact” for a state of affairs that actually occurs. For example “the Moon revolves around Venus” is a mere state of affairs whereas “the Moon revolves around the Earth” is a fact.

2. The three dimensions of labor The phenomenon of labor involves three distinct albeit connected dimensions that I shall highlight by resorting to the three terms that denote labor with different connotations, namely, “job”, “work” and “labor” itself. By “labor” I mean a process involving a physical or mental effort whereby a subject accomplishes a goal. Interestingly, this fits well with the use of this term also to designate the process of giving birth to a baby. One might say that the latter is the paradigmatic case of labor, which is, in general, an effortful means to a valuable end. While “labor” designates the means, “work” designates the end. Consider for instance a craftsman who builds a table; the latter is her work, while the building process is her labor. Lastly, “job” characterizes the subject that produces the work by means of the labor. For instance, a person’s job is craftsman since that person produces works of a certain kind by means of a certain kind of labor. After specifying these three basic dimensions of the phenomenon, let us consider their ontological status, that is, their place in the ontological framework described in the previous section. Labor is a kind of action, which in turn, as seen above, is a kind of event. Job is rather a property, which allows us to group people with respect to their labor. The ontological status of work, instead, is more heterogeneous. Some jobs involve the production of particular material objects. For instance, craftsmen can

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build things such as tables or beds. Other jobs, instead, involve the production of particular facts. For instance, doctors can heal patients, and plumbers can repair faucets. That is to say that the doctor produces the fact that the patient is healed, and the plumber produces the fact that the faucet is repaired. Moreover, there are jobs that involve the production of universal individuals, namely types. For instance, an engineer can design a car, which is not a particular car, but rather a principle of construction of like cars, that is, a type of car. Labor, work and job, albeit logically distinct, are significantly connected. On the one hand, the connection between labor and work is a causal relation. Labor is the cause, work is the effect. To work is to causally produce works through labor. On the other hand, job introduces a normative relation between a person, her labor and her work. In virtue of this relation, a person is entitled and committed to perform the kind of labor and produce the kind of works that are prescribed by her job. Job thus functions as a rule of behavior that systematizes and governs the connection between a person, her labor and her work. In John Searle’s (1995) terms, a job is a “status function”, that is, a rule that prescribes what one is entitled and committed to do. Just as the function of a hammer specifies what it should do, namely, hitting nails, the job of a person specifies what she should do, namely, producing certain works by means of a certain labor. For instance, the job of the cook specifies that one should produce dishes by means of one’s labor. Job is what turns labor into a social fact. Let us consider a beaver making a dam. We might call “labor” the beaver’s effort, and we might call “work” the dam, but there is arguably nothing to be called “job” there. While labor and work just describe somebody doing something, job requires a community that expects somebody to do something. A dam builder, unlike a beaver, is not just somebody who makes dams. If dam builder is one’s job, then one is expected to make dams. As a normative connection between a person, her labor and her work, job involves a bundle of entitlements and commitments. For instance, in virtue of having a certain job, one is committed to regularly be in a certain workplace at a certain time, and is entitled to regularly receive a salary. Job thus puts normative constraints not only on the worker herself but also on the attitudes and behaviors of the community towards that worker. Arguably, job is the most powerful way in which human communities assign roles and functions to their members, turning them into what one might call “human artifacts”.

3. The varieties of labor In the Republic, Plato highlights three basic categories of jobs that essentially contribute to the life of a community, namely, rulers, soldiers and producers. The ruler and the soldier are special jobs since they directly concern the community. That is to say that the work that they produce through their labor are facts that constitute the current state of the community. Specifically, rulers are expected to take care of the welfare of the community while soldiers are expected to take care of its safety. Thus, the fact that a ruler should contribute to produce is a wealthy

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and flourishing community while the fact that a soldier should primarily contribute to produce is a safe community. Producers, unlike rulers and soldiers, make works that do not directly involve the community. Indeed, they indirectly contribute to the life of the community by providing specific works. Plato stresses the crucial contribution of three categories of producers: farmers, who provide the community with food; craftsmen, who provide the community with buildings, clothes and tools; traders, who enables the circulation of the commodities produced by farmers and craftsmen. Farmers and craftsmen mainly produces objects, namely, commodities, whereas traders mainly produce facts, for instance the fact that a certain commodity is available in a certain place at a certain time. To sum up, the job of rulers and that of soldiers directly take care of the community, whereas the job of producers is rather to make (if they are farmers or craftsmen) or distribute (if they are traders) commodities that are of interest for the community. In addition to these, Plato outlines another category of jobs, whose outcomes are facts that involve particular members of the community. For instance, doctors are expected to produce healed patients while teachers are expected to produce educated students. That being the case, we can classify jobs in three macro-categories: community‑oriented jobs (viz. rulers, soldiers), member-oriented jobs (viz. doctors, teachers) and commodity-oriented jobs (viz. farmers, craftsmen, traders). Moreover, in the Statesman, Plato introduces a further distinction that applies within each of these macro‑categories, namely, the distinction between jobs that consist in giving orders and jobs that consist in executing orders. If somebody works on one’s own, the distinction collapses, and we might say, at most, that one executes the orders one gives to oneself. However, in human communities labor is usually organized in a way that significantly relies on the distinction between giving and executing orders. In commodity-oriented jobs, this distinction matches that between designers (e.g. engineers, architects, agronomists) and workers (e.g. welders, bricklayers, farm hands); the former produce work types, that is, principle of constructions of like particulars that count as orders for the latter, who must actually construct such particulars. Likewise, in community-oriented jobs, the distinction between giving and executing orders matches that between rulers and civil servants working in the public service, as well as that between officers and privates in the army. Interestingly, many jobs involve both giving and executing orders. This is what happens when labor is hierarchically organized. In such case, one executes orders coming from the top of the hierarchy by giving orders directed towards the bottom of the hierarchy. The distinction between giving and executing orders seems to be less relevant in the case of member-oriented jobs. Teachers and doctors usually work on their own, they execute their own orders, as it were. However, the distinction between giving and executing orders might be of some relevance also in such domains: for instance, the job of the nurse can involve the execution of orders coming from

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doctors. Moreover, member-oriented jobs are often done in hierarchically organized institutions such as schools or hospitals, and in these cases teachers and doctors are to some extent constrained by the guidelines of the directors of those institutions. Although Plato built up his ontology of labor almost 2,400 years ago in a historical context very different from ours, his main categories seem to still hold their validity. Community-oriented jobs, member-oriented jobs and commodity-oriented jobs seem to be the three main kinds of jobs nowadays as well. The economic and technological development has involved changes within the categories rather than changes of the categories. For instance, within the category of commodity-oriented jobs, trade has played a more and more crucial role thereby imposing its medium, money, as a sort of meta‑commodity, and thus giving rise to a new kind of jobs, namely, financial jobs. Another peculiar commodity that plays a crucial role in contemporary society is that constituted by representations, that is, texts, pictures and sounds. Representations can carry knowledge or information, but can also aim to elicit appreciation or entertainment. Thus, among the jobs that produce representations, one might include not only the scientist and the historian but also the artist and the showman. The kind of representation-oriented jobs is the main topic of the Sophist. In this dialog, Plato draws a sharp distinction between jobs that aim to produce truthful representations and jobs that aim to produce fanciful representations. He sees the philosopher as the paradigm of the former class, and the sophist of the latter. In his analysis, Plato conflates ontological and axiological claims, that is, statements concerning the being of things and statements concerning their value. He does not limit himself to state that the philosopher and the sophist are different jobs; he also states that the job of the philosopher is valuable whereas the job of the sophist is rather harmful. I am rather sympathetic with this analysis, which I find topical. However, in this chapter, I would like to disentangle ontology from axiology since I believe that axiological claims can be more effective if they rely on a preliminary ontological analysis carried out in an axiologically neutral way. From this perspective, the category of representation-oriented jobs can be articulated along two distinct dimensions. On the one hand, the distinction considered above, namely, that between representations that pursue the truth and representations that do not care about the truth. On the other hand, the distinction between representations that present themselves as aimed at the truth and representations that present themselves as indifferent to the truth. The intersection between these distinctions gives us four kinds. First, representations that present themselves as aimed at the truth and actually are so, for instance the works that should be produced by jobs such as the scientist or the philosopher. Secondly, representations that present themselves as indifferent to the truth and actually are so, for instance the works produced by jobs such as the artist. Thirdly, representations that present themselves as aimed at the truth but actually are indifferent to the truth. This is the sort of work that according to Plato is

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produced by the job of the sophist. Indeed, the dramatic ontological discrepancy between the truthful appearance and the fanciful nature of such representations is what motivates Plato’s axiological condemnation of the sophist, whom he sees as a professional impostor. However, in a pragmatist vein, one might object that even such a job might play a positive role in the life of a community if it succeeds in leading citizens to do the right thing, in spite of persuading them by means of some deception. The last representational kind to be considered consists of those representations that present themselves as indifferent to the truth but actually are aimed at the truth. This is a rather peculiar job that one might call “the Shakespearean fool”. It is a job that reveals itself to be especially valuable in a repressive society in which some truths cannot publicly asserted and thus, if one wants to express them anyway, one should disguise them as fiction.

4. Why labor? The ontological clarification of the phenomenon of labor puts us in the right position to address a basic question – arguably, the most basic question – concerning our relation to this phenomenon, namely, why do we labor? There are two main strategies for answering this question, namely, an external strategy that looks for the answer outside the phenomenon of labor and an internal strategy that does so inside this very phenomenon. Let us begin with considering the external strategy. A basic version of this states that people labor in order to directly satisfy their needs and desires. This seems to be a good explanation of primitive human activities such as hunting, gathering and farming. However, in more advanced societies, the goal of labor seems to be rather the indirect satisfaction of need and desires via money. That is to say that people labor in order to acquire the money that allows them to satisfy their needs and desires. Both these versions of the external strategy are individualistic in the sense that they explain why a person labors by resorting to reasons that are externals to labor itself and are rather grounded in needs and desires of that individual. Yet, one can also propose a non-individualistic external strategy, according to which one labors in order to contribute to the life of the community to whom one belongs. From this perspective, the efforts one makes in laboring are compensated by the benefit that one’s community receives from the outcomes of such efforts. While external strategies situate the reasons of labor either in the individual who labor or in the community to whom she belongs, the internal strategy situates the reasons of labor in this very phenomenon. Specifically, one can distinguish three internal strategies that correspond to the three dimensions of the phenomenon, namely labor, work and job. First, we can identify the reason of labor with labor itself if this is a valuable or pleasurable activity in spite of the effort it requires. Games and sports seems to be activities of this kind, and thus the sportsman can be considered a paradigmatic case of job that finds its reason in the kind of labor it prescribes.

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Secondly, we can identify the reason of labor with the work produced if this is a valuable object or event or fact. Works of art are usually considered things valuable for their own sake, and thus the artist can be considered a paradigmatic case of job that finds its reason in the kind of work it produces. Thirdly, we can identify the reason of labor with the property that relates a person to his or her labor, namely, the job. We can do so if such property involves some pleasurable feature such as prestige or power. In particular, in virtue of its relation to power, the statesman can be considered a paradigmatic case of job that finds its reason in itself. In principle, labor rests upon both internal and external reasons. That is to say that the ideal job is such that it enables satisfaction of needs and desires, fruitfully contributes to the life of the community, and it is valuable for the activity it involves, just as for the works it produces and the status it confers. On the other hand, labor risks to become a sort of curse when its reasons come down to the external ones, especially when labor allows only the satisfaction of needs, not that of desires. From this perspective, the factory worker is usually considered, at least since Marx and Engels, the paradigmatic case of job that lacks internal reasons thereby involving alienation. While the craftsman may find valuable the outcome of her labor, the factory worker finds it hard to do so since she does not directly produce the object but limits herself to taking care of a machine that does that. Furthermore, with the raise of the systematic division of labor called Taylorism (and its practical application, Fordism), the outcome of the factory worker’s labor is no longer a fully-fledged work but only a small part of it. Heidegger’s criticism of technology also can be seen as a criticism of the transformation of labor into something lacking internal reasons. Relying on his etymological method, Heidegger points out that the ancient Greeks used the word “techne” to designate both the art and the technique, and he sees this as a symptom of the fact that in ancient societies the outcome of technical jobs was valuable for its own sake just as a work of art normally is. Yet, according to Heidegger, technology in modern societies has completely disconnected itself from art, and this involves that technical jobs no longer can find their reason in the works they produce through labor. The distinction between internal and external reasons seems to be crucial also to understand utopian conceptions of labor. In particular, the raise of robotics might lead to the possibility of assigning to robots many jobs that are usually carried out by human beings, thereby leading us to rethink labor (cf. West 2015; De Vos 2018). In this sense, I contend, there are two main options to be considered, which I will call “internal-labor option” and “no-labor option”. According to the internal-labor option, a society might assign to robots jobs lacking internal reasons, thereby allowing human beings to focus on those having internal reasons. This would somehow restore the identity of art and technique that, as Heidegger points out, was expressed by ancient Greeks through the word “techne”. Arguably, in ancient societies the unification of art and technique was possible because of slavery. Although Heidegger does not acknowledge this, the

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citizens could enjoy jobs having internal reasons since the jobs lacking internal reasons were carried out by the slaves. In the utopian “new techne” that the internal-labor option foreshadows, robots would play the “techne-enabling” role that slaves played in ancient societies. According to the no-labor option, instead, a society might assign to robots all jobs, thereby delivering human beings from labor. In particular, one would be delivered from job understood as a norm that prescribes one to labor in order to produce a certain work. It is worth considering the relationship between the nolabor option and the idea of a basic income (cf. Van Parijs 2001). In an utopian community that combines advanced robotics and basic income, citizens can still produce works by means of their labor, if they want, but there is no longer a job prescribing specific labors and works to them. In this sense, the combination of robotics and basic income might allow humanity to approximate the situation that Marx and Engels describe in this passage of the The German Ideology: In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. (Marx and Engels 1975) It would surely be fruitful to further compare the no-labor option and the internal‑labor option in order to establish which of them is more worth pursuing. However, this is precisely the point where matters of being become matters of value, that is, the point where ontology ends and axiology starts. Since mine is an essay on the ontology of labor, this is precisely the point where it must end.

Bibliography Anscombe, G.E.M. 1957, Intention, Oxford: Blackwell. Barnes, J. (ed.) 1984, The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volumes I and II, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cooper, J.M. (ed.) 1997, Plato: Complete Works, Indianapolis: Hackett. Crane, T. 2001, Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davidson, D. 1980, Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Vos, M. 2018, “Work 4.0 and the Future of Labour Law”, http://www.labourlawresea rch.net/sites/default/files/papers/MarcDV.pdf. Accessed 31 January 2019. Heidegger, M. 1977, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, New York: Garland. Marx, K. and Engels, F. 1975, Collected Works, New York and London: International Publishers. Searle, J. 1995, The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press.

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Strawson, P.F. 1959, Individuals: Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, London: Methuen. Strawson, P.F. 1962, “Freedom and Resentment”, reprinted in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, London: Methuen, 1974, pp. 1–28. Strawson, P.F. 2006, “A Category of Particulars”, in P.F. Strawson and A. Chakrabarti (eds.), Universals, Concepts and Qualities. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 301–308. Van Parijs, Ph. 2001, “Basic Income: A Simple and Powerful Idea for the 21st Century”, https:// www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/faculty/pages/wright/RUP-vol-V.pdf#page=6. Accessed 31 January 2019. West, D.M. 2015, “What Happens if Robots Take Jobs? The Impact of Emerging Technologies on Employment and Public Policy”, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-con tent/uploads/2016/06/robotwork.pdf. Accessed 31 January 2019. Wiggins, D. 2001, Sameness and Substance Renewed, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 10

Objectivity, repetition, and the search for satisfaction Gertrudis Van de Vijver

1. Introduction The Cartesian dictum “I think, therefore I am”, suggests that there is a way of affirming being: if the subject fulfills certain conditions appropriately, it can access its own being, it is capable of affirming its identity, of saying that it is. “I think, therefore I am”, “I play, therefore I am”, “I enjoy, therefore I am”, “I work, therefore I am”, etc. are all forms of what we can call the Cartesian slide: start from certain conditions (thinking, working, enjoying, etc.), try to fulfill them, and yes, you will eventually arrive where the deduction promises you to go. It is “just” a matter of thinking well enough, working hard enough, enjoying convincingly enough. The idea that a subject appropriately fulfilling the conditions can eventually capture what has to be captured, is the horizon that was opened by Descartes. Thinking thereby contains the norm for what counts as an object; the normativity is external to the thing and speaks for it. Admittedly, Descartes went through a meditative hell for this, but he sees heaven, a heaven that will be, or can be, but only if we think enough, or work enough, or enjoy enough. Descartes’ horizon, in which the subject is launched as a thinking thing, a res cogitans, comes with a price. The price was well noted by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. In The Crisis of the European Sciences (Husserl, 1970 [1936]), he interprets the history of modern philosophy concurrent with the development of the modern sciences, in terms of more or less forced gestures that favor either the object-side, or the subject-side of Descartes’ dualism. Objectivism and subjectivism are the respective extreme results, with the truth one way or the other, and the Cartesian slide intact. What is interesting is that Husserl grafts the Cartesian meditation on the modern drive to know things objectively, and considers the thinking subject as a remnant in function of a deceiving object (cf. Van de Vijver, 2012). That is why he speaks of a transcendental motive in Descartes’ dualism: the thinking subject is what has to be presupposed in order to explain that something of the order of the object is possible: no object without subject. We take Husserl’s viewpoint as a source of inspiration for our reading of Kant and psychoanalysis: in particular the idea that the subject is a remnant of what is

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being produced in relation to objects, involving a first step that always already took place and that escapes the attention of a knowing subject, as well as the idea that the thinking subject is in some sense restored, reassured as something that sole possesses certainty in relation to the object. The interesting thing about Kant is that he does address the issue of the thinking subject as a condition of possibility of what counts as an object, but that beyond this, he also addresses, and concomitantly with it, the issue of the object as a condition of possibility of what counts as a subject: no subject without object. It is at this point that we see him, more than (Husserlian) phenomenology, as a precursor of psychoanalysis, of Lacanian psychoanalysis in particular.1

2. Kant and the object: from (Cartesian) deducibility to structural heterogeneity We know that Kant’s critical system started with worries about how perception can be distinguished from hallucination (Kant, 1764; David-Ménard, 1992). Kant didn’t take for granted that there is a world out there just because we have perceptions or representations that purport to deal with it. Neither just things (intellectus ectypus), nor just thinking subjects (intellectus archetypus) decide about what counts as a perception, and what as a hallucination. However, it is to Kant not very likely that we live in a world that is the mere result of a collective dream or hallucination – if that were the case, we would not be able to explain that in our daily and sensitive lives we move together in ways that are, at least from time to time, not overly disturbing, more or less predictable, more or less stable and reliable. Neither would we be able to explain that there is something like scientific knowledge, at least of the form of classical mechanics, that is proposed as universally and necessarily valid, and deals with things of nature, and not just with ideal things such as mathematical objects. Meanwhile, Kant was strict in his idea that things in themselves are not knowable, an idea that to him implied that from the moment we objectively know, things must be for us, cannot be in themselves. If Kant’s categorical system envisages something, it is to capture the conditions of validity within which something such as an object can be constituted as universally valid for us. However, in all cases sensitive contingency is to Kant the ever renewed starting point: a heterogeneity, an orthogonality even, between conceptuality and sensitivity constitutes for him the structural frame within which to conceive of objectivity. If Kant has changed anything in the Cartesian scheme of thought, it is thus that instead of a logical deduction, an “ergo”, in the “cogito ergo sum”, a justification is required of the validity of concepts that succeed in making a bridge with 1

Husserl, and with him, phenomenology, stay, more than Kant, attached to the figure of the Cartesian meditation, and in particular to its horizon of reflexive clarity (Husserl, 1947 [1929]), implying the possibility of some form of proportionality between subjective reflection and what intentionality is about. The horizon of phenomenology remains faithful to the Cartesian slide in as far as it pursues the idea that it is possible to identify and fulfill the right conditions and in this way to adequately capture the object.

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a realm heterogeneous to them, the sensitive one. Kant therefore speaks of a transcendental deduction, and modifies the Cartesian slide accordingly. What there is, certainly depends on our ways of perceiving and phrasing, but also on the input from sensitivity, always contingent. There is in no way a continuity, a slide from the one to the other – things are not situated on a plane. What can therefore be done from the side of thinking is to articulate a functional space that foresees places to be occupied by some sensitive content.2 Depending on the kinds of sensitive encounters, this functional space can appear to be stable or on the contrary continually demand revision. What we are inclined to call scientific objectivity then, is the kind of stability that deserves the qualification of universality and necessity, but that nonetheless indefinitely depends on sensitive input heterogeneous to it. That the pursuit of objectivity is marked by an ineliminable point of contingency is what Kant makes most clear in his Critique of Judgment. This Critique discusses the cases of failing objectification: the beautiful, the sublime, the natural purposes are all cases where the impossibility to objectify is a matter of principle. They are all related to teleology and to pleasure and displeasure. Moreover, Kant describes here the subjective ways of dealing with this type of failure, of circumventing or supplementing it, and enables us to see that the cases of successful objectification as described in the first Critique are equally grounded in subjective efforts whereby Reason restlessly strives towards something without necessarily being in the capacity to foresee beforehand the outcome. Reason functions as an organ, so he says, and tries ever again, passes through successes and failures, is driven to obtain something, sometimes without being in the capacity to know exactly what. Moreover, Reason has to be driven in that way – it is a lucky thing that our nature is organized in such a manner. Two points of Kant’s Critique of Judgment are worth mentioning here. Firstly, in the second introduction (KU AA05: 177), Kant describes how our cognitive, representational capacities would never have reached the level we know of, if they hadn’t gone through processes of wanting and striving, of desiring. It is, so Kant states, “a beneficent arrangement in our nature” to strive without knowing for sure beforehand, intentionally, “in the head”, that the striving will be successful, because if we did do just that, if we had done just that – representational striving with the certainty of success – we would never have come to know the meaning of our capacities and forces. In that passage, that I quote in full length in footnote 3, Kant mentions that there is a clear causal relation between the representational strivings of reason and the objects, even, and perhaps most noticeably (sichtbar), in cases of longing, that put our forces under acute 2

Interesting parallels are to be made here between the Fregean conception of function, and Kant’s more or less implicit way of anticipating developments in logics. The distinction between function, argument and value is in particular worth pursuing from within Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. It is in that regard for instance remarkable that in this Critique (KRV, A-338/B-406–407), Kant states that is not consciousness of determination, but the determinable itself that is the object. The determinable, that is, the place that can be occupied, the argument-place of the function.

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representational stress, because we are aware “in some sense” that the striving will not be successful: “an awareness of its insufficiency for producing the effect cannot keep it from striving for the effect”. And he continues: But why our nature was given a propensity toward desires of whose futility we are aware is an anthropological-teleological question. It seems that if we had to assure ourselves that we can in fact produce the object before we could be determined [by the presentation] to apply our forces, then our forces would remain largely unused. For usually we do not come to know what forces we have in the first place except by trying them out. Hence the deception contained in vain wishes is only the result of a beneficent arrangement in our nature.3 3

“If concepts are used as empirical principles and there is cause to suppose that there is a kinship between them and the pure a priori cognitive power, then it is useful to attempt, on account of that relation, to give a transcendental definition of them. i.e., a definition by means of pure categories, insofar as these suffice by themselves to indicate how the concept at hand differs from others. This procedure follows the example of the mathematician, who leaves the empirical data in his problem undetermined and only brings the relation they have in their pure synthesis under the concepts of pure arithmetic, thereby universalizing his solution of the problem. I have been reproached for following a similar procedure (…) namely, for defining the power of desire as the power of being the cause, through one’s presentations, of the actuality of the objects of these presentations. The criticism was that, after all, mere wishes are desires too, and yet we all know that they alone do not enable us to produce their object. That, however, proves nothing more than that some of man’s desires involve him in self-contradiction, inasmuch as he uses the presentation by itself to strive to produce the object, while yet he cannot expect success from it. Such is the case because he is aware that his mechanical forces (if I may call the nonpsychological ones that), which would have to be determined by that presentation in order to bring the object about (hence to be the means for it) are either insufficient, or perhaps even directed to something impossible, such as to undo what is done (O mihi praeter itos, etc.), or as being able, as one is waiting impatiently for some wished-for moment, to destroy what time remains. In such fanciful desires we are indeed aware that our presentations are insufficient (or even unfit) to be the cause of their objects. Still their causal relation, and hence the thought of their causality, is contained in every wish and is especially noticeable [sichtbar] when that wish is an affect, namely, longing. For since these desires [alternately] expand the heart and make it languid, thus exhausting its forces, they prove that these forces are repeatedly tensed by presentations, but that they allow the mind each time to relapse into weariness as it considers again the impossibility. Even prayers that ask for the deflection of some great and, as far as we can see, unavoidable evil, and also various superstitious means aimed at achieving purposes unattainable through nature prove the causal relation of these presentations to their objects; and this relation is such that even an awareness of its insufficiency for producing the effect cannot keep it from striving for the effect. But why our nature was given a propensity toward desires of whose futility we are aware is an anthropological-teleological question. It seems that if we had to assure ourselves that we can in fact produce the object, before we could be determined [by the presentation] to apply our forces, then our forces would remain largely unused. For usually we do not come to know what forces we have in the first place except by trying them out. Hence the deception contained in vain wishes is only the result of a beneficent arrangement in our nature.” Kant, 1987 [1793], KU AA05: 177: 16.

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In sum: within a configuration of heterogeneity (forces and representations), with the contingency with which feelings of pleasure and displeasure present themselves to us, there is something in the forces that has to try, fail, and, if need be, fail better, independently of the adequacy of our representations. Or in other words, our representational world is grafted upon processes of desire in which a place for the object is already prepared, without knowing beforehand whether it will ever be grasped. Or still in other words, there is a place for the object delineated through desire, independently of its being ultimately graspable or not, independently of how we succeed in building representations around it. But meanwhile, this striving capacity of Reason is acknowledged by Kant to be a beneficent arrangement of nature: without it, so we conjecture, we wouldn’t even come to build representations! Secondly, Kant’s concept of natural purpose, that he introduces in the second part of the third Critique, in relation to organic systems, is, along similar lines, highly instructive for our purposes. Kant distinguishes (in particular in §65) the configuration of systems in which “everything is at the same time cause and effect”, in which the parts and the whole mutually determine each other following efficient causality. However, we cannot, so he says, understand this type of causality, as we only understand teleological causality on the basis of representations, that is, on the basis of a prefiguration of the whole in relation to which the parts are taken to behave in certain ways – intentionally. As an example: we make a clock by having an idea about what a clock should be, and we figure out the parts accordingly. But with natural purposes, nothing of the sort is possible: who would be the maker here, who would be the one having the idea? The interesting thing about natural purposes is that Kant here makes a difference between being alive (e.g. animals, humans), and being not-alive and nevertheless being a natural purpose, that is, a non-intentional, teleological causal structure (e.g. plants). Whereas the former can be thought of as representational, the latter, to him, can’t. And nevertheless it cannot be said that the latter obey mere mechanical laws and principles – a plant is not an ensemble of inert particles that just happen to move together in organized ways. Natural purposes do obey causally efficient principles – the parts and the whole determine each other in causally efficient ways – but they can only be adequately grasped through teleological principles: because we cannot understand how the causality between parts and wholes in these cases works, the only thing we can do, is to do as if these natural purposes are organized in terms of purposes. In other words, it is at the level of the purposes that we, as intentionally structured beings, expect them (that we prepare the functional space) – we somehow estimate that that is where they essentially are. So, the importance of what Kant here says about natural purposes, is that there are things: (i) that are situated in between inert matter and intentional directedness, in between the Cartesian res extensa and res cogitans; (ii) that obey efficient causality, even if we cannot understand them through our classical, mechanical ways of dealing with efficient causality as it works in relation to inert matter; (iii) that cannot be grasped through intentional, representational accounts that would

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conceive of them in terms of prefigured aims or concepts; (iv) that are grounded in contingency but nevertheless lawlike – as autonomous systems, they carry within themselves the norm, as there is no external norm (a concept) capable of grasping or rendering them, speaking for them; and (v) that we can only understand by analogy with our intentional or representational minds – we have to consider natural purposes as if they were made according to purposes. Kant thus stresses that there are things for which the thinking subject cannot objectively, normatively speak – it cannot build objective knowledge about them. But meanwhile, the thinking subject cannot shy away from their existence and their form – it cannot consistently be without them. The procedure of the “as if” can therefore be taken as an attempt to subjectively relate by catching up with what escaped, to add a “supplement of meaning” as Alexis Philonenko (1984) calls it, a supplement that speaks for subject- and object-pole concomitantly. These ideas, around the point of escape and the attempts to catch up, bring us to the hypothesis of the unconscious subject as put forward by Freud, and to the compulsion to repeat, the radical acknowledgement of which constitutes the hard core of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

3. Freud’s Wiederholungszwang, Lacan’s Jouissance According to Freud (1963 [1915]), the unconscious boils down to a hypothesis about a cut in the continuity of discourse. We don’t need to make the hypothesis of the unconscious, so he says, if we don’t value the fact that things escape in what we say and in how we speak: dreams, parapraxes, slips of the tongue, etc. We can consider these as “just” small errors without any subjective meaning. However, if we do take to heart the fact that we are startled or embarrassed when making a slip of the tongue, or that we acknowledge our dreams as nightmares or as anxiety provoking, if, in other words, we feel to be subjectively concerned, then the hypothesis of the unconscious can serve to explain these apparent discontinuities in discourse. This means taking up the challenge of what it is to speak, which is what Freud and Lacan do: genuinely and systematically taking up the challenge of what the act of speaking involves for human subjectivity. “Not without them” could well be their dictum in relation to unconscious processes, as it was to Kant in relation to natural purposes. However, as with Kant, there is something to say here also about the “Not about them”, as the acknowledgment of impossible objectification, specifically in relation to language, brings Freud as well as Lacan to a conception of the subject that is different from the Cartesian cogito, brings them to a divided, alienated subject, a subject that is constituted as an answer to something that structurally escapes. Freud’s repetition compulsion is a good starting point to illustrate this. By the end of his life, Freud did not shy away from the clinical observation that people do not necessarily want to get rid of their suffering or their symptoms. Against therapeutic efforts of all kinds, people time and again repeat, even cannot not but repeat, what makes them suffer. This is what Freud tries to capture in has

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famous text “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud, 2015 [1920]) in terms of Wiederholungszwang, the compulsion to repeat, situated “beyond the pleasure principle”. At stake is not just the fact that people from time to time are subject to impulses that go against satisfaction and pleasure and that, at better times, they can be put back on the right track. No, at stake is the idea that the compulsion to repeat, and not the pursuit of pleasure or of satisfaction, is what constitutes the basic module of mental life, is what constitutes the core of subjectivity. Lacan calls this idea a “conceptual intrusion” in Freud’s work (Lacan, 2017 [1966, 1967, ]: 135). To him, the Wiederholungszwang constitutes a genuine break with the pleasure principle, a contradiction even with what Freud would have thought until then to be the module of the functioning of the mental system, namely homeostasis, that holds that living substances always seek the state of minor tension. To Lacan, there is no doubt about the fact that the pleasure principle reissues homeostasis for mental life: the mental system, in as far as it is ruled by the pleasure principle, “echoes”, “repeats”, “redoubles” organic, homeostatic requirements.4 To Lacan, the conceptual intrusion consists in the fact that subjects are launched in a perpetual and repetitive return, a “thinking of return”, through the fact that “something” structurally escapes.5 What cuts with the homeostatic logics of satisfaction, then, is the fact that something comes to play the role of a symbolic “matchmark” (repère symbolique) – also called a unary trait or a first signifier (Lacan, 2017 [1966, 1967, ]: 135) – something that no longer obeys the principles of similarity and differentiation that hold at the level of homeostatic satisfaction, but that obeys other, symbolic principles of differentiation.6 It is therefore impossible to match the variations at the level of homeostatic satisfaction with variations at the level of, let us say, subjective satisfaction. Without going into any detail here, we highlight two aspects, relevant against the background of our discussion of Kant and objectivity: the signifier as an object, and the (unconscious) subject as a structure of enjoyment.

4

5 6

“Quand Freud introduit pour la première fois, dans son Jenseits à lui, l’Au-delà du principe du plaisir, le concept de répétition comme du forçage, Zwang, répétition, Wiederholung – cette répétition est forcée: Wiederholungszwang – quand il l’introduit pour donner son état définitif au statut du sujet de l’inconscient, mesure-t-on bien la portée de cette intrusion conceptuelle? Si elle s’appelle ‘au-delà du principe du plaisir,’ c’est précisément en ceci qu’elle rompt avec ce qui, jusque-là, lui donnait le module de la fonction psychique, à savoir cette homéostase qui fait écho à celle que nécessite la substance de l’organisme, qui la redouble et la répète et qui est celle que, dans l’appareil nerveux isolé comme tel, il définit par la loi de la moindre tension. Ce qu’introduit la Wiederholungszwang est nettement en contradiction avec cette loi primitive, celle qui s’était énoncée dans le principe du plaisir” (Lacan, 2017 [1966, 1967, ], séance XI: 134). For a more extensive discussion of these points, see Van de Vijver et al., 2017. “(…) le trait unaire joue le rôle de repère symbolique, précisément d’exclure que ce soient ni la similitude ni donc, non plus, la différence qui se posent au principe de la différenciation” (Lacan, 2017 [1966, 1967, ], séance XI: 135).

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Lacan stresses that the signifier is to be viewed as material, by which he means that if language determines subjectivity, it is not primarily in terms of symbols that carry meaning, but as forms, that is, as objects to be manipulated. To speak is first and foremost to manipulate objects.7 This changes everything about the representational potential of language. If to speak is to manipulate objects, then we can indeed wonder what “aboutness” still means. Precisely this brings us back to the idea of efficient causality that Kant related to natural purposes, and to the fact that it concerns autonomous structures in which the norm comes from within, not from without. Similarly, we suggest to consider the unconscious subject as a structure that consists of causally efficient workings between signifiers, the (subjective) norm of which emerges from within these workings. The unconscious is “structured as a language”, says Lacan, as he says that “the subject is what is represented by a signifier for another signifier”. The latter expresses the idea – akin to Kant’s idea that the thing in itself is not knowable – that there is no signifier simply signifying the subject, no external normativity capturing the meaning of the subject. If the signifier refers to something, to some Bedeutung, it is language itself, i.e. the always again to be produced signifier (Lacan, 1967, 1968, ). Lacan therefore warns time and again against the idea that the unconscious contains hidden treasures, hidden meanings, a most common and widespread idea since Freud’s use of archaeological metaphors. Lacan overall warns against a too quick understanding, because to him the unconscious subject does not obey a logics that is anchored into the search for meaningful (satisfying) objects, it obeys a logics of the signifier. The crucial point in this logics is to acknowledge the fact that something is structurally escaping – that acknowledgement is what Lacan’s famous object a, “le manque pris en objet”, refers to. From there on, the subject is seen as a structure of repetition, a structure of enjoyment, of Jouissance – endlessly driven by the search for the ungraspable object. In psychoanalysis, the basic ontological structure of the subject is therefore one of alienation, consisting in a fundamental dividedness between the “I” that thinks and the “I” that is. The one is not about the other, but both cannot, should not, be without each other. To consider that the one can be grasped (represented, satisfied) through the other, that it is, more or less adequately, about the other, as the Cartesian slide suggests, is a forcing with regard to the subject as divided. The subject is in the search for satisfaction, in Jouissance, more than in satisfaction itself. To consider subjects as beings of need-satisfaction, is what leads us back to the homeostatic search for satisfaction, and hurries us all into a solidified kind of subjective being Cartesian style – the cause for wars and violence. 7

See Lacan’s discussion of Freud’s Fort-Da, as described in “The interpretation of dreams” (Freud, 1953 [1900]; Lacan, 1981 [1963, 1964, ]). The idea that the signifier is an object is to be related to the fact that it is first and foremost the phonematic character that is determinative. This is one of the major innovative insights from Freud, that he clearly describes in “The interpretation of dreams”, and phrased on the basis of structuralist insights by Lacan. The focus on words and sentences, with a more or less fixed meaning attached, are thereby left behind, and this allows for an alternative cutting that opens up alternative semantic contexts.

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“Not without it, but not about it” could in a sense be the dictum of Freud and Lacan: no subject without the phenomena related to unconscious processes; and no signifier to signify the subject. Or in other words, no subjectivity without representationally escaping, unspeakable, unnamable object.

4. Conclusion: “not about them, but not without them” We started from the observation of a tension between the compulsion to repeat and liberation, a tension becoming manifest in the organization of economic and societal and work processes. It seems that we are in the middle of it, participating in it without really knowing very well how to get out, without knowing even whether we should get out, what it would bring, what it would bring if we got out. And what do we do, meanwhile? Either we remain silent and work, or we criticize, complain, panic, we try to grasp what happens, we try to anticipate, and in function of this, we amend things or propose amendments that, most of the time, stay exactly within the same frame: we think there is a way out, a liberation. Or rather, we think that the liberation is where the human being is free from the compulsion to repeat and satisfied at last. That is where psychoanalysis, with Lacan and Freud, makes a difference: to them, the core of the human subject is repetition, is the compulsion to repeat, is the indefinite search for satisfaction. The human being, because of the fact of speaking is divided between the dynamics of its speaking and what is being said: a fundamental alienation between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the enunciated. Just as Kant’s natural purposes confront us with the need to qualitatively cut with the mechanical and representational means of objectification, the speaking subject confronts us with the need to qualitatively cut with the pleasure principle as a means of objectification. To Lacan, a speaking (unconscious) subject is not a pleasure seeking structure, it is a structure of enjoyment. If subjectivity is to be approached, it is radically “at another level”, a level at which some mark was inscribed that forced the human being to a return and to a “thinking of return”. As long as we remain within the frame of the pleasure principle, the subjects are “just” after the satisfaction of their needs, and the economic, political, societal forms of organization cannot but be complicit to this search for satisfaction, and hence, cannot but attempt to provide for the objects that bring that satisfaction. This is precisely what leads to the ever more frenetic search for satisfaction with which we started this text, and in relation to which we situated the Cartesian slide. The cogito, as the pleasure principle, operate on a plane, with one and the same “I” that alternately satisfies its needs, and contributes to the production of a representational world. The horizon is one in which the territory will be mastered, slowly but steadily, “just” a matter of realizing the right efforts, ever more specialized and finer grained. The infinity at stake is one that demands ever more fine-grained and specialized approaches – a multiplication of disciplines, a cross-fertilization within those disciplines, etc. all with a view to covering the territory.

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The infinity we would propose here is of a different kind. In line with what becomes clear in clinical practice, and trustful in what humanity can be, we suggest that the wished for infinity would be one in which finite and contingently grounded subjectivities could time and again emerge, indefinitely so, in search for a structurally escaping object, and acknowledging that they cannot be without each other, even if they cannot be about each other.

Bibliography David-Ménard, M., 1992, La Folie dans la Raison Pure: Kant lecteur de Swedenborg, Paris: Vrin. Freud, S. 1953 [1900], “The interpretation of dreams”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 5, trans. J. Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press. Freud, S., 1963 [1915], The Unconscious, Oxford: Collier Books, Macmillan Publishing Company, 116–150. Freud, S. 2015 [1920], “Beyond the pleasure principle”, in Psychoanalysis and History, Vol. 17, transl. M. Solms, London: International Psycho-Analytical, 151–204. Husserl, E., 1947 [1929], Méditations cartésiennes, Paris: Vrin. Husserl, E., 1970 [1936], The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. D. Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Kant, I., 1900 [1764], Versuch über die Krankheiten des Kopfes, Gesammelte Schriften Hrsg.: Bd. 1–22, Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften; Bd. 23, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin; Bd. 24, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Berlin, https://korpora.zim.uni-duisburg-essen.de/kant/. AAII, 259–274. Kant, I., 1987 [1793], Critique of Judgment, trans. W.H. Pluhar, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket Publishing Company. Lacan, J., 1966–1967, L’Acte Psychanalytique, Le Séminaire XV, Staferla, http://staferla. free.fr/S15/S15.htm Lacan, J., 1967–1968, Séance of March 6th, 1968, p. 106. Lacan, J., 1981 [1963–1964], The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Book XI, trans. A. Sheridan, New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. Lacan, J., 2017 [1966–1967], La Logique du Fantasme, Le Séminaire XIV, éd. M. Roussan, Paris: Auto-Edition. Philonenko, A., 1984, “Introduction à la Critique de la Faculté de Juger”, in Critique de la Faculté de Juger, Paris: Vrin, 7–16. Van de Vijver, G., 2012, “Lacan, de ziel, het object”, Ethische Perspectieven, 22(3): 206–220. Van de Vijver, G., BazanA., and DetandtS., 2017, “The mark, the Thing and the object: On what commands repetition in Freud and Lacan”, Frontiers in Psychology, https://doi. org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02244

Part II

Literature and Cinema

Chapter 11

From text to work Or, operation without production David Ayers

The first part of the title of this chapter inverts that of a famous essay by Roland Barthes, ‘De l’oeuvre au texte’ (1971), ‘From Work to Text’. This familiar essay, in its own time and still, and alongside the even more famous ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), is a marker of a shift more generally from a literary poetics which treated the single, bounded work as its object, to the analysis of textuality-as-such, which saw every word, trope or gesture as participating in unlimited chains of reference. It marks a break from the notion of the work as a closed and selfreferential entity, bounded at least initially by a set of discernible authorial intentions, to the notion of textuality as an interweaving not only of voices – the notion promoted by Bakhtin in his analysis of the novel – but of linguistic or other meaning-bearing elements which receive their mooring indiscernibly in language itself, in languages, in the field generally of meaning production both actual and potential, and indeed in the surpluses, absences, and irreducible materiality of the sign or signifier – if we allow to stand for a moment without critique the routinely used but not logically sustainable metaphorical application of the notion of matter which is characteristic of some of the argumentation in this field. In the present context it is worth briefly revisiting some of the formulas in Barthes’ essay on the work, as it is quite easy to forget that the emphasis on textuality as the universal process of all inscribed text is not exactly what we find there. Rather, we find a tension between that notion and the concept of ‘text’ as a special type of literary object which is to be distinguished from the more routine literary ‘work’. This tension between the two modes of ‘text’ is both constitutive of the origin and spread of the basic concepts of so-called post-structuralism, and the residue of a more fundamental oscillation in Western thought between object and process more generally, and here specifically in the notion of the commodity as theorised by Marx in the thoroughly Hegelian fashion which treats the commodity-object and the relations of consumption in which it is embedded as an appearance which disguises what is claimed to be the reality of the unending process of capitalist monetary circulation in which, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Barthes approaches his key formulations with the claim that: ‘Over against the traditional notion of the work, for long – and still – conceived of in a, so to speak, Newtonian way, there is now the

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requirement of a new object, obtained by the sliding or overturning of former categories. That object is the Text.’1 This opening statement preserves an ambiguity – is it that a new type of (literary) product must be sought or created for analysis, or is it that analysis must seek a new point of attention in and among the products which already exist? The ambiguity arises because in the context of the Tel Quel group, known after the journal of the same name, with which Barthes was associated, the radical-seeming opening up of questions of textuality routinely prioritised modernist or avant-garde forms of writing – the poetry of Mallarmé or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake – in its search to examine language beyond the claims of structuralism. Barthes’ essay looks in two directions. In part he seeks to warn against grasping ‘text’ through the route of high modernism. Works cannot be sorted out from texts, he argues, and: In particular, the tendency must be avoided to say that the work is classic, the text avant-garde; it is not a question of drawing up a crude honours list in the name of modernity and declaring certain literary productions ‘in’ and others ‘out’ […]. This seems clear until he immediately adds that ‘there may be “text” in a very ancient work, while many products of contemporary literature are in no way texts.’2 This formulation seems to assume that work/text is a question of the classification of literary objects, yet this formulation is immediately succeeded by another which points much more in the methodological direction: The difference is this; the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example), the Text is a methodological field. […T]he work can be seen (in bookshops, in catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the text is a process of demonstration […]; the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language.3 The tension or ambiguity persists throughout the essay, which closes by locating the work as an object of consumption and the text as an effect of reading in which reading and writing are ‘joined in a single signifying practice’,4 with the implication of an analogy between the work and the Marxist commodity-form, while the text suggests some kind of escape from commodification. This brief presentation of the concept of work in Barthes’ essay is not intended as a critique, but as just one way of indicating the complexities of desedimenting 1

2 3 4

Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Flamingo, 1984), pp. 155–164, quoted p. 156; and see Roland Barthes, Oeuvres Complètes. Tome II: 1966–73, ed. Eric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 1994), pp. 1211–1217. ‘From Work to Text’, p. 156. ‘From Work to Text’, pp. 156–157. ‘From Work to Text’, p. 162.

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treatment of the work as a classification of objects or activities in thought more generally. Here the notion of work is intersected in general by the conceptions of work as the product of labour and work as the process of labour, and in particular by the very approximate insertion of this cultural-theoretical paradigm, with its roots in linguistics, into the Marxist model of production, in what is probably an attempt to replace pessimistic Althusserian models of culture with a liberating notion of ‘reading’. The opposition between process and product, between flux and thing, is banal at the same time as it has been strangely embedded, since at least the time of Aristotle. In the context of work as a topos, while the English language has the same word, ‘work’, to represent both process and product, in other languages the connection is etymological, whether more directly (operare/opere, in Italian) or less so (so oeuvre corresponds to the common ouvrier, in French, but travailler is much more generally used for work than the term oeuvrer, which has specific connotations). In fact the subtle shifts around the cognates and analogues of terms for work in various languages can sometimes be referred to ambiguities of context which they nevertheless conceal – my labour, which may appear as effort, to me appears as something different to my employer. The reference to Barthes here though is intended to trail a different and in fact fairly basic question. What is lost of work itself, and therefore of the human more broadly, in this shift from work to text, if we are to assert that recent theoretical tradition prizes flux or process above the illusory status of the entity? Although we refer here to the Barthesian and deconstructionist emphasis on endless textual flow, we might as easily invoke the various processual assertions of Deleuze and Guattari that ‘desire never ceases to couple continuous flows and partial objects’, that ‘desiring production is production of production’.5 This in a way is already the end of the reflection, to the extent that anything may any longer be permitted an end, or to which any ‘reflection’ can be referred back unproblematically to its originating object. This essay has its origins in the conference ‘I work therefore I am European’. If the term European is removed – as implying a further and even more problematic set of considerations – we are left exposed to a fundamental ontological question in which an implied meme drawn from Cartesian ontology is hurled briskly together with the inherited Marxist analysis of work, in which both the product of work and the labour-power of the producer are alienated from the producer in the exchange process: ‘I work therefore I am’. Michel Henry is just one of those commentators who has noted that Marx’s materialist analysis of the workings of capitalism, for all that it shares so many elements with the school of the English economists, Ricardo and Smith, differs in offering a transcendental analysis which asks the question, what makes exchange possible?, and begins with the premise that exchange as such is a problem.6 Henry’s account of Marx concludes with the 5 6

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’Anti-Œdipe (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1972/1973), pp. 11, 12. See Michel Henry, Marx. Volume 2: Une philosophie de l’économie (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 138–207.

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stunning assertion that Marx is one of the ‘first Christian thinkers of the West’, claiming as part of his conclusion that when Marx describes cases such as that of the seamstress Mary-Ann Walkley, who famously died at her work aged 20 following a 26½ hour shift, and became the object of widespread public outcry in 1863, his point is not to cite an example which proves his general case regarding the analysis of capital, but that Walkley and other individuals who Marx names refer not to ‘a reality of another order’ but ‘to other individuals, like them, who are valid in themselves’. They do not serve to illustrate the law but show its working-out on the individuals who, in Henry’s account of Marx, are alone what matter.7 Henry quotes Marx’s description of the crowd of workers of both sexes and all ages who press before us, more numerous than the souls of the dead who call for Odysseus’ attention in hell. So in outline what we are pointing to here is the parallel between the notion of the loss of the aesthetic work in what once seemed to be its integrity, linked to the loss of authority of its author, and the loss of control over the work time and the object produced of the proletarian. ‘Even though I work, I am’, Mary Walkley might have tried to say. The repetition of the word loss, though, ought to make us suspicious. Not least, in the version of post-structuralism offered in Barthes’ formulation, there is no hint that the displacement and decentring of author and work – or, if we prefer, of worker and product – might constitute any kind of loss. The contrary, in fact. Barthes may himself be no Hegelian, but the move he outlines is quite consonant with the Hegelian subsumption of immediacy. It is moreover directly in line with the Marxist critique of false consciousness which extends Marx’s analysis of the false presence of the commodity under capitalism as use-value into the realm of culture and – in the case of Lukács – denounces those literary forms which offer only the semblance of immediacy (modernism) instead of the analytical grasp of totality (realism), or – in the case of Althusser – maps cultural production in toto as a kind of institutionalised mass deception, a complex of ideological practices. In this way, poststructuralist textuality lends force to the various attempts of cultural Marxism to engineer a convergence between Marx’s elaborate analysis of the commodity and his fairly basic suggestions about the nature of ideology by drawing ‘culture’ away from its place in something like the superstructure to – in effect – blur, if not obliterate, the latently idealist opposition between the realm of ideas and those of actions, and establish cultural production as one kind of production among others. Barthes’ strategy in ‘From Work to Text’ and ‘The Death of the Author’ is to take a hammer to the ideological nexus of author and text which, in prevailing literary-critical practice in France at least, is said to have secured the notion of genius and thereby mystified the notion of the individual, as well as obscuring the true nature of culture as the realm of the social and collective. Derridean dissemination, which both is part too of this movement, while it keeps the Marxist project at something more than arm’s length, has always lent 7

Marx. Volume 2, pp. 442–444.

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itself to the leftist cultural project for exactly these reasons, even if it was never shaped as part of that project. So much is the disseminative move celebrated indeed that J-F Lyotard takes to task Marx, in an essay called ‘Le Désir nommé Marx’ which forms part of Économie Libidinale (1974), for seeking to stem the sublime flow of capital by obsessively mapping its every turn and transformation – as if, in my paraphrase, you could somehow ever get your money back. In effect, Lyotard accuses Marx of a sort of misbehaviour in the face of sublimity.8 All we are noting here then is that, while the theory of labour found in Marx seems to indicate, if not a loss, the continued deferment of the human, in cultural matters what is basically the fact that every apparent object belongs to a chain of deferral and dissemination is not only taken for granted but is celebrated. In one analysis the worker/consumer is dispossessed of their product and re-engineered as a subject in the process; in the other, the process of removing the product (work) from its producer (the author) without restoring it as a totality to its consumer (the reader, and despite Barthes’s lacklustre announcement of the birth of the reader) is loudly cheered. And the celebration of textuality seems only to confirm the world in which we find ourselves, 50 years after the developments we are outlining, in which the technology of networking, both fiscal and social, seems only further to confirm the unbounded nature of dissemination and the irrecuperablity of the products of labour. Anxiety is real, but it would be too easy in this context to produce an account suggesting that attempts at recuperation of worker and work are motivated by simple anxiety, in that weakly freudianised vocabulary which has become an easy gesture in itself in cultural analysis and commentary more generally. Even if we eschew that vocabulary, though, it is important to say something about the notion of the masses which might have implications beyond the critique of existing social conditions with which we are familiar. The passage from Marx quoted by Henry is notable for the contrast which it sets in operation between the masses and the individual, a contrast made more notable by Marx’s comparison of the mass of workers, living or dead, to the souls in Hell who clamour for the attention of Odysseus. The notion of the mass, and the challenge this presents to the possibility of the individual or community as imaginary spaces, is a recurrent motif of modernity. We may add that the potential for the negation of the I and of its immediate community is in any case and, in the context of the analysis of this aspect of the imaginary in relation to identity, already bounded by death, the absolute negation of the I and of the living, in which the living basically know that they are merely temporary elements in the continuing chain of reproduction. In evoking biological reproduction we also open a window on the role played by the concept of reproduction in Marxism, in which production itself is also and always a 8

In paraphrasing Lyotard here I am following the ethics of his own comment about reading Marx without taking responsibility for interpreting him. See Jean-François Lyotard, Économie Libidinale (Paris: Minuit, 1974), pp. 117–188.

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reproduction of the existing conditions of society, another form or aspect, we might think, of the infernal cyclical trap presented by modernity in which our product of which we are dispossessed in the very relations and act of production, is held over against us as a negation of our own self-realisation. Yet modern cultural thought – we have already noted – celebrates this endless reproductive concatenation in which all centres and all grounded actualities are lost. The death of the author/producer and their endless recycling in the chain of being is acclaimed. Shape can be given to this set of observations by reference to Aristotle. To approach this question at first a little obliquely, I will cite the passage from Aristotle’s Politics which is itself cited by Agamben (1995) in his famous exposition of biopolitics in Homo Sacer: The good life is the chief end, both for the community as a whole and for each of us individually. But people also come together, and form and maintain political associations, merely for the sake of life; for perhaps there is some element of the good even in the simple fact of living [kata ton bion], so long as the evils of existence do not preponderate too heavily. It is an evident fact that most people cling hard enough to life [zoe] to be willing to endure a good deal of suffering, which implies that life has in it a sort of healthy happiness (serenity; euemeria; bella giornata) and a natural quality of pleasure. (Politics 1278b 23–31) Agamben cites this passage in order to ground his account of biopolitics, following Foucault, which hinges on the opposition between a natural life (zoe) and the instrumentalised life of modernity (bios). Setting aside the corrosive pessimism of the biopolitical point of view, which ends – and in a way always led to – the claim that the Nazi extermination camps were the paradigm of the modern biopolitical condition, it is worth pausing a moment over the pastoral simplicity of Aristotle’s observation that people come together in political association merely for the sake of life. This absolutely unanalysed claim, which has none of the trappings of modernity, has a gentleness about it, in its affirmation of euemeria or well-being (and not quite happiness, eudaemonia) which in another and more modern vocabulary could be read as a marker of the opposition (and overlap, I suppose) of lifeworld and systemworld. Aristotle was more than anything a biologist, and it is his analysis of life – of psyche – which lies at the centre of his presentation of what an organic entity is. Even though his History of Animals dedicates many pages to the description of reproduction, Aristotle has no notion of genetics, of course, no notion of the biological drive of propagation, and treats every being as an end in itself which is, in the process of growth, striving to reach its potential. Aristotle uses the term entelechy, a word which etymologically harbours the notion of telos, a concept which is often the butt of poststructuralist critique. While tradition has in many ways set aside the notions of telos and entelechy, the gloss on the concept of entelechy provided by Heidegger in his Introduction to

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Metaphysics reads as a renewed celebration of the Aristotelian model of what it means to be not just extant but in the process of biological unfolding: The self-restraining hold that comes from a limit, the having-of-itself wherein the constant holds itself, is the Being of beings; it is what first makes a being be a being as opposed to a nonbeing. For something to take such a stand therefore means for it to attain its limit, to de-limit itself. Thus a basic characteristic of a being is its telos, which does not mean goal or purpose, but end. Here ‘end’ does not have any negative sense, as if ‘end’ meant that something can go no further, that it breaks down and gives out. Instead, ‘end’ means completion in the sense of coming to fulfilment (Vollendung). Limit and end are that whereby beings first begin to be. This is the key to understanding the highest term that Aristotle used for Being: entelecheia, something’s holding(or maintaining)-itself-in-its-completion-(or limit). […] Whatever places itself into and thereby enacts its limit, and thus stands, has form, morphe-. The essence of form, as understood by the Greeks, comes from the emergent placing-itself-forth-into-the-limit.9 This very beautiful gloss helps to remind us of Heidegger’s attention to the question of the finitude of being and the imperative that philosophy orient itself to modelling the manner in which we find ourselves at home in the world. Here, the simple reason that we might invoke this conception of being is as a reminder of the need – in considering the expression ‘I work therefore I am’ – of the need for an ontology which might pay attention to the sedimented nature of the ontological in considering a being whether as self, in the itself historically contingent vocabulary of a human being as ‘I’, or as body. Conceptual language can only secure so much in this context. A very striking but ambiguous passage in Dante’s Purgatorio offers a meditative reflection on the trope of self-constitution through work. The passage presents the figures of Rachel and Leah and is set in a dream, in contrast to the bulk of personages presented in Purgatorio. Dante falls into a dream and sees a beautiful young woman collecting flowers and singing. The passage in which Leah speaks is given below in the original Italian and in my own fairly literal version: Sappia qualunque il mio nome dimanda ch’I’ mi son Lia, e vo movendo intorno le belle mani a farmi una ghirlanda. Per piacermi allo specchio, qui m’adorno; ma mia suora Rachel mai non si smaga dal suo miraglio, e siede tutto giorno. 9

Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 63.

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Ell’è d’i suoi belli occhi veder vaga com’io dell’adornarmi con le mani; lei lo vedere, e me l’ovrare appaga. [Purgatorio Canto 27: 100–108]10 Know, whoever asks my name That I am called Leah, and I am moving around My beautiful hands to make myself a garland. To please myself at the mirror, here I adorn myself. But my sister Rachel never drags herself away From her mirror, and sits all day. She likes to look at her beautiful eyes As I like to adorn myself with my hands: She likes looking: I like working. While this dream has a prefigurative role in Dante’s narrative,11 it is fascinating in itself as a reflection on work, not least because it is centred on the key tropes of work and reflective vision. As most commentators note, in Christian tradition, itself the inheritor of Rabbinic tradition, Leah is taken to stand for the active life while her sister Rachel is the symbol of the contemplative life. In Catholic theology the notion of vita activa refers to all aspects of practical life, including labour, so it would not be accurate to identify Leah solely with labour. It would be yet a further stretch to conflate this aspect of labour of the hands with the fecundity for which the biblical Leah is principally known, in the anglophone sense of labour, even though it is her ability to produce children which makes her into a more practical asset for her sister’s husband Jacob, mother to six of Jacob’s twelve children and thereby to half of the tribes of Israel. Our general commentary here can note the existential knot which weaves together production as making of things through the medium of labour, with social reproduction in its Marxist context as defining the processes by which an existing society seeks to maintain its social relations of production into the future, and human organic reproduction which is the basis of existence over time. It is Marx’s skill, perhaps, which begins to gather into the network of the self-reproduction of class society the ‘natural life’ which might once have seemed to precede the political life, to transcend it, and to outlast it. It is Marx’s skill, not to have shown something hidden, or secret, or otherwise unknowable, but simply to give firm and fatal expression to what was easily already to be suspected of the life of labour – that it was shaped not merely by the necessity of nature and its ends, but by the instrumental ends of the second nature which had somehow interwoven its own inevitability with the most basic organic realities. 10 Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia. Volume 2: Purgatorio, edited by Natalino Sapegno (17th printing. Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1984), pp. 300–301. 11 See for example Patrick Boyde, Perception and Passion in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 138–139.

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The general subordination of the individual to process was resisted by Aristotle. Rejecting the philosophical mode of grasping the world as flux, Aristotle advanced entelechy as a key term in asserting the individual entity – what in only a later stage of science would be termed organism – as an end in itself. This move enabled the biologist Aristotle to ground his analysis of beings in a set of terms organised around psyche – anima or soul – as the principle of unity of the disparate parts and functions of the living thing. It also made available a thought-structure to medieval theologians to ground their assertion that the human anima existed eternally, with actualised human bodies as its transient embodiment.12 The Thomist anima, like Aristotelian entelechy, is set to staunch the endless temporal-organic flow – in the Christian case by transcending it, in the classical case by embedding the form of function of the entity within the flux in such a way as to affirm its ideal appearance as its end – and not its ending as its passage into inexistence, its demise. So Aristotle’s recourse to entelechy – which, as we have seen, Heidegger affirms to be central – can be grasped as part of a set of technical devices to stabilise the biological entity as an object of enquiry and thereby enable the proper examination of the life process as such, and, in a more concealed fashion, to assert life as manifestation against its disappearance. When Heidegger revives the notion of entelechy its function is modified by modernity, in Heidegger’s presentation of it. Now, the process of industrial production shaped by technology has substituted itself for simple organic life. The individual entity is pressed back into its functionality in the system of production: Beings now become just something one comes across; they are findings. What is completed is no longer that which is pressed into limits [that is, set into form] but is now merely what is finished and as such is at the disposal of just anybody, the present-at-hand, within which no world is worlding any more – instead, human beings now steer and hold sway with whatever is at their disposal. Beings become objects, whether for observing (view, picture), or for making, as the fabricated, the object of calculation.13 There is much more of course to Heidegger’s account of the occlusion of being, but for the purpose of this account this passage presents us with the notion that appearing (entelechy – here, being ‘set into form’, but also more broadly phainesthai) has been subordinated to instrumentality, with beings (that is, in this account, human beings)14 rendered whether as the objects of science (‘view, 12 The trajectory from Aristotle to Aquinas via Averroes has been widely studied; I give some reiteration of it in David Ayers, ‘De Anima: Or, Ulysses and the Theological Turn in Modernist Studies’, in: Humanities 2017, 6(3), article 57, pp. 1–12. 13 Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 66. 14 On Heidegger’s approach to animals and worlding, see Christiane Bailey, ‘Affection, compréhension et langage: L’être-au-monde animal dans les interpretations phénoménologiques d’Aristote du jeune Heidegger’, in Florence Burgat and Cristian Ciocan (eds), Phénoménologie de la Vie Animale (Bucarest: Zeta, 2016), pp. 121–58.

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picture’) or as the producers of commodities (‘the fabricated, the object of calculation’). Framed by science and technology, beings become the mere producers, blindly locked into the cycle of production and reproduction – and we may conclude that it is a melancholy consciousness which contemplates them in their toils. For it is always reflection which procures this pessimism, and it is for this that we have turned to the passage from Dante. Once we have isolated this trope of the cyclical blindness of the work of production there might be several ways to show how thought has described and sought to dissolve labour’s dilemma. It might be considered even normal at this point to return to Hegel’s celebrated use of the master-slave relationship as a model for the dialectic of reason’s selfknowledge. As we have already seen, and without beginning an arduous journey through Marx’s analysis of the commodity form as the deflection or deferral of a somehow true consciousness, there is a need in the account of capitalist modernity to set aside the obsession with circulation and alight on the individual and their manifestation – as Michel Henry did with Mary Walkley in his reading of Marx’s text. Since I am suggesting that modernity’s take on work has some structural roots in, or at least some structural features in common with the ancient discourse about the contemplative and active life, and since in any case this is a loop which cannot properly be closed, it seems fitting to bridge the gap of ancient and modern with reference to a text of the late middle ages. Let it be said that no amount of concept generation can manufacture an escape from this tropology. We read Dante here in the spirit of that passage from Derrida’s celebrated account of Plato’s pharmacy, which opens with a charged account of the ethics of reading over time and the reconstruction and invention which reading necessarily implies.15 In examining the vita activa in Dante, and in the spirit of treating the philosophical trope in its longer optic, we should mention here the sustained engagement of Hannah Arendt with this concept in her The Human Condition (1958). Arendt suggests that the vita activa corresponds to ‘the Greek askholia (“unquiet”) with which Aristotle designated all activity’, and that ‘the term vita activa receives it meaning from the vita contemplativa; its very restricted dignity is bestowed upon it because it serves the needs and wants of contemplation in a living body’.16 Though Arendt does not in this work explicitly take up Heidegger’s discussion of entelechy, she does tackle the question of appearance in which entelechy takes its place, in a treatment of ‘the space of appearance’ which ‘comes into being wherever men are together in the pattern of speech and action’.17 Arendt’s account is a version at some remove from Heidegger’s pessimistic account of modernity and its overall argument concerns the fashion in which, over the time of world-historical change, the vita activa has 15 Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 79–80. 16 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 15–16. 17 The Human Condition, p. 199.

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overcome the vita contemplativa and, in effect, subjugated ‘thought’.18 Arendt’s text has the advantage here that it offers confirmation of the long genealogy of this conceptual nexus. When Dante’s text figures the vita contemplativa and the vita activa in Rachel and Leah, we might expect to find Rachel contemplating her blindly labouring sister. That it is labour which contemplates contemplation here is an inversion which suggests a questioning at least of the conventional opposition. Leah as labour may indeed be unaware of contemplation, unable to understand why her sister sits looking into her own eyes in the mirror; Leah sees a parallel – Rachel is said to take the same pleasure in looking into her own eyes that Leah takes in adorning herself. Leah does not imagine that contemplation may be something which, in her activity, she cannot contemplate; at the same time, the doubt is raised that contemplation, which of course is not named here as such, may be no more than a vain introspection, not a reflection on the world but on reflection itself. Each sister looks in the mirror. Leah seems to complain that her sister can never drag herself away from the mirror, though we are not told that Leah does so either. Leah though knows why she is there; to please herself by working on her appearance. She likes working, her sister likes looking. Yet there is looking too in Leah’s working. Leah’s work suggests circularity – a garland is usually a ring, her hands move ‘around’ (‘intorno’) – but here the cyclicity of work and reproduction is tamed into stasis as image, the product of work stabilised as its own end in appearance. Contemplation always knows finitude, that contemplation will be folded back into nature quite as much as labour and its products. Yet where is contemplation here and where work? Rachel as contemplation is given no voice. The image presented by Dante is one of innocence, and it is experience which silently contemplates this innocence. These are the sisters surely before their marriages, before their story of reproduction and deception has begun, before any of the history of the tribes of Israel, which the contemplative reader knows but which the innocent sisters cannot see. Or at least, one of them cannot. Barthes argued that the work ‘is a fragment of substance’ and that ‘the work can be held in the hand’ while ‘the text is held in language.’ In this chapter we have examined through a series of hints and partial references the recurrent strain between the individual entity as a kind of entelechy or end in itself and the claims of infinite process, whether as nature or as industrial economy; noting in the reference to Barthes that in one optic sheer infinite process is asserted and celebrated, and in the reference to Heidegger and Henry that in another optic manifestation is reclaimed. The passage from Dante, where Leah does indeed hold her work in her working hands and contemplates herself as product of her own culture and thereby as end, innocent of the historical and textual flow – and the flows of engenderment – in which she is embedded, a subtle balance is achieved between the two competing figurations of work. 18 The Human Condition, p. 324.

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Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 1995. Homo Sacer: Il Potere Sovrano e la Nuda Vita. Torino: Einaudi. Alighieri, Dante. 1984. La Divina Commedia. Volume 2: Purgatorio, ed. Natalino Sapegno. Firenze: La Nuova Italia. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ayers, David. 2017. ‘De Anima: Or, Ulysses and the Theological Turn in Modernist Studies’, in: Humanities, 6(3), article 57, 1–12. Bailey, Christiane. 2016. ‘Affection, comprehension et langage: L’être-au-monde animal dans les interpretations phénoménologiques d’Aristote du jeune Heidegger’, in: Florence Burgat and Cristian Ciocan (eds), Phénoménologie de la Vie Animale. Bucarest: Zeta. Barthes, Roland. 1984. ‘From Work to Text’, in: Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath. London: Flamingo, pp. 155–164. Barthes, Roland. 1994. Oeuvres Complètes. Tome II: 1966–73, ed. Eric Marty. Paris: Seuil. Boyde, Patrick. 2006. Perception and Passion in Dante’s Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1972/1973. Capitalisme et schizophrénie : L’AntiŒdipe. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Derrida, Jacques. 1972. La Dissémination. Paris: Seuil. Heidegger, Martin. 2000. Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Henry, Michel. 1976. Marx. Volume 2: Une philosophie de l’économie. Paris: Gallimard. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1974. Économie Libidinale. Paris: Minuit.

Chapter 12

Works by Vitaliano Trevisan and the representation of work in the neoliberal age Carlo Baghetti

Introduction Starting from the mid-1990s, there has been a growing number of novels in Italy, with work in the neo-liberal age as their main theme. The theme was not new to Italian literature:1 it had begun to emerge in Italian literature in the late-nineteenth century, with works such as Portafoglio d’un operaio by Cesare Cantù, (1871), or Il Primo maggio (1891) and La maestrina degli operai (1895) by Edmondo De Amicis.2 The theme of work, and more specifically, of working-class labor, continued to be part of the collective imagination in the early twentieth century, although with different characteristics: during Futurism, industrial workers were exalted as part of a hard-working mass, marching towards the future. Marinetti, in his Manifesto del Futurismo, expressed his desire to sing “the vibrant nocturnal fervor of the shipyards and building sites set afire by violent electrical moons; […] the factories suspended from the clouds on the spiraling ropes of their fumes”.3 In the Fascist period, although less marked, the interest in the working class remained and two different but equally important works were published: I tre operai by Carlo Bernari and Il capofabbrica by Romano Bilenchi.4 However, it was in the 1950s and 1960s, the years of the Italian economic “boom”, that the theme of labor (workingclass but not only) became particularly prominent, leading critics and historians to coin the label “industrial literature” to refer to works that creatively explored the world of the factory, a place that, as Ottiero Ottieri, one of its

1 2

3 4

V. Trevisan, Works, Einaudi, Turin, 2016. Following is a very brief and cursory list of works illustrating the literary background in which these texts situate themselves. For an organic study of factory work literature, see D. Fioretti, Carte di fabbrica. La narrativa industriale in Italia (1934–1989), Tracce, Pescara, 2013. Also useful is the anthology edited by G. Bigatti, G. Lupo, Fabbrica di carta. I libri che raccontano l’Italia industriale, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 2013. F. T. Marinetti, “Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo” (1909), in Id., Teoria e invenzione futurista, 1983, Milan, Mondadori, 2001, p. 9. C. Bernari, I tre operai, Rizzoli, Milan, 1934; R. Bilenchi, Il capofabbrica, Rizzoli, Milan, 1997 [1935].

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foremost interpreters, wrote in “La linea gotica”, “is a closed world, one that is not easily entered, nor left”.5 The separate nature of the factory and the nature of the protagonists of this world has some immediate consequences on the very possibility of narrating it. As Ottieri adds: “Those who are inside can give us documents, but not their elaboration […]. The few who work there become mute”.6 The desire to narrate the factory and the difficulty of doing so became thus the challenge that enlivened those years, the focus of the creative energies of many Italian intellectuals and fiction writers: Volponi, Mastronardi, Bianciardi, Parise, Arpino, Buzzi and many others offered a cross-section of the Italy of the time, with as its focal part the divergent lines of factories and office corridors. Although the 1950s and 1960s were the most prolific decades, “industrial” novels continued to appear in the 1970s. Two representative novels were published in this decade which function as a sort of dialog: Vogliamo tutto7 by Nanni Balestrini, which, in the style of the Neoavanguardia, recounts the events of the protest during the “hot autumn” of 1969 in Milan and Turin, and the so-called “rejection of work” theorized by the members of the “autonomia operaia”; and La chiave a stella, by Primo Levi, a novel on the importance of the “well-done job” as a way to express the self. After this period, there was an interval of over a decade in which very few novels dealing with work were published, in parallel with the rise in of postmodernism in Italy, and the rest of the world.8 This then was the historical and literary tradition behind the nouvelle vague of industrial literature that began in the mid-1990s when, almost simultaneously, Sebastiano Nata, Antonio Pennacchi and Giuseppe Culicchia, published three novels with working class labor as their central theme.9 Starting from this moment, the number of novels on the subject has been more or less constantly on the rise, leading some critics to brand the phenomenon as a mere market fashion.10 After this brief survey, I would now like to say a few words on the difficulties attending those who study industrial novels, and the opportunity of adopting an approach that allows one to examine in detail the literary form of the text while at the same time exploring the way the identity of the working subject is presented. Having outlined this theoretical approach, I will proceed to apply it to my O. Ottieri, “La linea gotica”, in Id., Opere scelte, Mondadori, Milano, 2009, pp. 360–361. Ibidem. N. Balestrini, Vogliamo tutto, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1971. In the 1980s, there are very few novels that deal with work. Among these one should at least cite P. Volponi, Le mosche del capitale, Einaudi, Turin, 1989 and A. Busi, Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant, Mondadori, Milan, 1985. 9 G. Culicchia, Tutti giù per terra, Garzanti, Milan, 1994; S. Nata, Il dipendente, Theoria, Rome, 1995; A. Pennacchi, Mammut, Donzelli, Rome, 1994. 10 R. Donnarumma, Ipermodernità, il Mulino, Bologna, 2014, p. 108; C. Raimo, “Perché non c’è ancora un grande romanzo italiano sulla crisi?”, online, http://www. minimaetmoralia.it/wp/perche-non-ce-ancora-un-grande-romanzo-italiano-sulla-crisi/ (last consulted on 31.10.2018). 5 6 7 8

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discussion of Vitaliano Trevisan’s Works. It is my hope to show how an awareness of the characteristics of literature on work is useful also when dealing with the contemporary labor market from other perspectives. The choice of Works as our case study, in particular, is due to the paradigmatic nature of the work. Trevisan condenses in the novel many of the central themes of work literature, as well as creating a narrative structure (from the internal organization of the chapters to the paratexts) that functions as an analog of the narrated content.

1. A methodological note This cursory introduction allows us to distinguish from the start, at least chronologically, between literature on “historical” and “contemporary” work, using the postmodern interval as the watershed. This interval, roughly coinciding with the 1980s, has two uses: in the first place, it is consistent with the general tendency of postmodernism to neglect the social dimension and referential aspects of literature. As Donnarumma notes, notwithstanding the efforts to offer a “political” and non-restrictive interpretation of postmodernism,11 in Italy, “the structures of social, political and cultural integration […] not only collapse […] they are the object of rejection and attacks”.12 In the second place, the presence of this interval makes the re-emergence of work in literature even more significant, because it occurs in a new situation, in which the entire cultural and social system has changed, losing many of the characteristics it had before this interval. It is Donnarumma again who accurately summarizes this change and the new attitude it engenders: “the intellectual or narrator who describes the anthropological transformations under way, the ethnic conflicts or organized crime, does it on his own, without any ideological guarantees, in the absence of any party protection, while appealing to a cross-sectional audience”.13 There are at least two advantages to having isolated an “historical” corpus, when studying works published more recently. The first is practical: a contemporary corpus is by nature unstable and in need of constant updating; a comparison with older texts provides us with a frame of reference; in our case, the study of the works of the 1950s and 1960s helps us to establish a sort of model, or reference grid, in respect of which we can read and interpret the works published after the 1980s. The second advantage is the possibility of identifying, through a careful study of the corpus, the typical plots, the topoi, the recurring metaphors and the themes, and of establishing a difference between enduring aspects of the genre and those typical exclusively of the more recent period. Contemporary work literature should 11 P. Antonello, F. Mussgnug, Postmodern Impegno. Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture, Peter Lang, Oxford, New York, 2009. 12 R. Donnarumma, Ipermodernità, op. cit., p. 108 13 Ibidem.

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not therefore be isolated from the previous tradition; preserving the continuity in this genre is useful for better understanding the works that update it. If the literary scenario in which the texts need to be inserted is now clearer, we need to discuss the two criteria through which I propose to approach this literary phenomenon: themes and formal structures. The thematic or “thematological” approach is certainly one of the most productive insofar as, as stated by Anna Trocchi, it allows the critic to interpret “the variations and metamorphoses of a literary theme through time, in the light of their relations with the historical, ideological and intellectual context”.14 We must add however that the term “thematology”, and its horizon of studies remain today the object of critical controversy. Although it is beyond the scope of the present chapter to offer a survey of this controversy as well as of the authors who have used this methodology in various ways,15 it will be useful to point out that the approach we propose does not involve, at least for the time being, the comparison of different linguistic and literary systems,16 and that it applies to the very limited chronological period outlined in the opening of the present chapter. Every theme is structured on the basis of a series of motifs,17 and the theme of work too can be subdivided in a number of recurring elements. Although the list could be longer, I list here the most common ones. a

Recurring metaphors: 1 2 3

b

Bestiary, animal metaphor and rare cases of prosopopoeia; Metaphors of ending, of death or sickness; Metaphors representing the workplace (hell, paradise, cathedral, lager, prison, battlefield).

Topoi: 1 2 3 4

Being fired, resigning or end of contract; Job description; Problems with co-workers or (less commonly) solidarity; Job interview/hiring;

14 A. Trocchi, “Temi e miti letterari”, in A. Gnisci (ed.), Letteratura comparata, Mondadori, Milan, 2002, p. 66. 15 I refer to the reader to the special issue of Allegoria, n° 58, year XX, July–December 2008, which contains important updated information on the question and all primary bibliographical references. 16 The presence essay is part of a wider, still unpublished research, that applies this method to a larger sample of literary texts, all part of Italian literature. It would be certainly useful to extend the research to other national literatures. This is the object of Project OBERT (Observatoire Européen des Récits du Travail), which I coordinate along with Mariagrazia Cairo and Carmela Lettieri of Aix-Marseille Université. Website: https://caer.univ-amu.fr/obert/ (last consulted on 2 November 2018). 17 The relation between theme and motif has been and is still today the object of critical debate. Besides the already mentioned sources see at least C. Segre, “Tema/motivo”, in Id., Avviamento all’analisi del testo letterario, Einaudi, Turin, 1999 [1985], pp. 331–359; D. Giglioli, Tema, La Nuova Italia, Scandicci, 2001.

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6 c

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Medical checkup (a topos that tends to disappear in contemporary literature, but has an important function, as a rite of passage, in traditional industrial literature); Strikes or demonstrations (significant differences between the two periods).

Recurring motifs: 1 2 3 4 5

6

End of work; Defeat of the working class; Decline of the industrial world; Depression and psychological issues; Lack of job safety (in particular “occupational accidents” and “workplace fatalities”, the latter at times being the only event on which the plot revolves);18 Impossibility of setting up a family (connected to the “disappearance of the father figure”).

These metaphors, topoi and recurring motifs are, in a way, typical of this narrative, which offers a representation of Italian labor in the neo-liberal age.19 The above elements can be studied in combination or individually, as in the following examples: Example 1: E. Rea, La dismissione, Feltrinelli, Milan, 2014 [2002], elements found: a 1/2/3, b 1/2/3/4/5/6/7, c 1/3/4/5 Example 2: The topos of the disappearance of the father figure, whose symbolical value has been the object of many a writer’s and critic’s attention20 is found in: La dismissione, Works, Ternitti, Il lunedì arriva sempre di domenica pomeriggio, Acciaio, Se consideri le colpe, Cordiali saluti, Vita and morte di un ingegnere, Mammut.21 18 Vv. Aa., Maledetta fabbrica, Stampa alternativa, Viterbo, 2010. 19 Similar if not the same elements can also be found in industrial literature, with which a comparison is certainly useful. Here, however I limit myself to the contemporary period. 20 There are many studies dedicated to the figure of the dying father in literature, less however dedicated to the particular perspective we are interested in. See at the least the nonacademic essay by M. Recalcati, Il complesso di Telemaco. Genitori e figli dopo il tramonto del padre, Feltrinelli, Milan, 2013, but especially Wu Ming 1, “Noi dobbiamo essere i genitori”, on Carmilla online, https://www.carmillaonline.com/2008/10/08/noidobbiamo-essere-i-genitori/ (last consulted on 05.11.2018). On the father-son relation from a more general perspective, see E. Zucchi, “Padri e figli nel romanzo degli anni Zero. Considerazioni critiche sul ‘complesso di Telemaco’”, in Allegoria, n° 75, year XXIX, January–June, 2017, pp. 7–22. 21 E. Rea, La dismissione, op. cit.; V. Trevisan, Works, op. cit.; M. Desiati, Ternitti, Mondadori, Milan, 2011; M. Lolli, Il lunedì arriva sempre di domenica pomeriggio, Mondadori, Milan, 2009; S. Avallone, Acciaio, Rizzoli, Milan, 2010; A. Bajani, Se consideri le colpe, Einaudi, Turin, 2007; Id., Cordiali saluti, Einaudi, Turin, 2006; E. Albinati, Vita e morte di un ingegnere, Rizzoli, Milan, 2016 [2012]; A. Pennacchi, Mammut, Mondadori, Milan, 1994.

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To avoid some of the issues that have often plagued thematology such as “its descriptive and documentary more than hermeneutic character, the aleatory nature of the concept of theme itself, the vagueness of the genre-theme relation, its archaeological vocation, often prevalent”,22 we have combined it with a more form-oriented approach, identifying a series of textual characteristics, some of them typical of the genre and some of them which, although not as common, seem significant and worthy of special attention: Recurring elements: 1 2 3 4 5

First-person narration; Overlapping (and deliberate blurring) of author and narrator; Subdivision of the plot in brief chapters (at times the brevity extending even to the sentences and language);23 Hybridizing of the literary genre; Use of citations, footnotes, bibliographies, name indexes and other paratextual elements typical of academic essays.

While the above characteristics are typical of the genre, there are others that, although less common, have a significant role when present, because of their relation to the theme of work. These significant characteristics include: 1

2

3

Diversification along chronological and geographical axes. While the setting in literature is always an important element, it acquires a special importance in our case, insofar as Italy is a very diversified nation in terms of job market and economic development, and the neo-liberal model in particular has not had the same impact everywhere in the country. It is all the more important therefore to take into consideration these two aspects. Linguistic registers and linguistic mimicry. In the corpus there is a considerable variety of linguistic registers; this aspect, along with the mimetic tendency, can be associated not only with the relations among the characters in the novels, but also and more importantly with sectors of society that have been affected by the transformations of the job market in Italy and to the way they have been transformed; Narrative tone (comic-ironic, serious, dramatic, documentary-style). Although our corpus deals with a serious and at times dramatic subject matter, as in the case of work fatalities, more than one author opts for an ironic, comic or grotesque tone,24 which recuperates aspects of farce or of the picaresque

22 R. Luperini, “Immaginario e critica tematica: un dibattito”, in Allegoria, n° 58, year XX, July–December, pp. 7–8. 23 The most evident example is perhaps S. Nata, Il dipendente, Theoria, Rome, 1995. 24 As in M. Murgia, Il mondo deve sapere, ISBN Edizioni, Milan, 2006.

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novel.25 The analysis of the variations of this aspect in the corpus is useful for the discussion of the implicit author. Considering these formal characteristics, alongside the content-related ones can help us gain a better sense of the strictly literary aspects of work literature. Before proceeding with Trevisan’s novel, I would like to spend a moment on what appears to be in many ways the elephant in the room of our discussion: the issue of interdisciplinarity. The question of work in the neo-liberal age, as witnessed by the present volume and the works that have preceded it, is a topic of interest for many disciplines, from philosophy to law, from economics to literary criticism, disciplines that offer different and complementary perspectives. If the characteristic of the novel is that of being an “open” organism, when read as well as written, there is a risk, when studying novels dealing with a theme as vast as work, of approaching literary texts through theories and ideas pertaining to other disciplines. We risk in other words approaching the literary work as a mere document and neglecting its literary and formal aspects, and the interesting stimuli to the debate these aspects can offer. Italo Calvino cautioned against this danger when he wrote, in his Dialogo di due scrittori in crisi: “the novel cannot expect to inform us on how the world is made: it must and can however discover the way, the thousands, hundreds of thousands of ways in which our entrance in the world takes place, it can express the new existential situations as they appear”.26 Work literature cannot be considered an X-ray of contemporary reality, an instruction manual of the world in the neo-liberal age comparable to a sociological inquiry, but must be seen as the expression of the “new existential situations” that result from the new capitalist mode of production

2. Case-study: Works by Vitaliano Trevisan Published in 2016 by Einaudi, Works is the result of almost five years of labor, as specified on the last page: “Berlin, December 2010 – Campodalberto, March 2015”.27 The citation already evidences a distinctive feature of the work: the search for a hybrid form, and specifically in this case the emulation of the diary or other forms of private writing, as well as the general tendency to disseminate in the work a series of “reality effects”.28 Two other formal features should be added: (1) the text is entirely in the first person; (2) there is a constant juxtaposition, almost a coincidence, of author and 25 V. Trevisan, Works, op. cit., shares this approach. 26 I. Calvino, “Dialogo di due scrittori in crisi”, in Id., Una pietra sopra. Discorsi di letteratura e società, Einaudi, Turin, 1980, p. 69. 27 V. Trevisan, Works, op. cit. p. 651. 28 G. Simonetti, La letteratura circostante, il Mulino, Bologna, pp. 89–107; Id., “Gli effetti di realtà. Un bilancio della narrativa italiana di questi anni”, in S. Contarini, M. P. De Paulis, A. Tosatti, Nuovi realismi, Transeuropa, Massa, 2016, pp. 149–166.

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narrator.29 Simonetti speaks of Works as a literary masterpiece which has strangely appeared at the end of a cycle;30 I would be more cautious, but the text does have a representative value within this work literature, for example in the realistic markers mentioned above, which are a constant within this corpus, generally characterized by a close connection to the referent.31 This aspect is in line with the more general turn to realistic in Italian literature of the last few decades, a turn which has not escaped the eye of literary critics. From this perspective, the contribution of work literature has been significant, making it one of the most innovative and productive trends in the contemporary Italian scene.32 Hybridization, reality markers, juxtaposition of author and narrator are only some of the features that make Works and similar novels the mature expression of what Donnarumma terms “hypermodernism”. In the essay in which he theorizes the advent of this new literary season, Donnarumma points to the growing number of novels in which the authors focus on “themes taken from the news, […] ranging from job insecurity to the lives of the so-called migrants”,33 indeed one could add that these have been one of the vehicles of the gradual affirmation of hypermodernism in Italy. The characters in these narratives, even outside the non-fiction genre,34 tend to present their stories as truthful (although not necessarily “true”),35 direct accounts whose force is that of being partial, limited, incomplete: With pride or uncertainty, and in the form it knows, the hypermodern subject wants to say the truth: whether claiming the right to speak, or saying “I” because it does not presume to omniscience, this narrator asks the reader for an attention founded not on a playful complicity or hermeneutic disorientation (as was the 29 Except for a few brief passages in which the narrator shifts from first to third person, but once again this is a “reality effect”. The narrator calls himself “the author” (p. 11), “the writer of these lines” (p. 9), or “the undersigned” (p. 337), juxtaposing once again narrator and author. 30 G. Simonetti, La letteratura circostante, op. cit., p. 123. 31 There are novels that deal with the topic of work from a less realistic perspective, such as G. Pispisa, Città perfetta, Einaudi, Turin, 2005, but they are by far the minority. 32 There are many important studies on the question, alongside the critical survey written by F. Bertoni, Realismo e letteratura. Una storia possibile, Einaudi, Turin, 2007, I recommend to consider at least H. Serkowska (ed.), Finzione cronaca realtà. Scambi intrecci e prospettive nella narrativa italiana contemporanea, Transeuropa, Massa, 2011; L. Somigli (ed.), Negli archivi e per le strade. Il ritorno alla realtà nella narrativa di inizio millennio, Aracne, Rome, 2013, both collective volumes that analyze various aspect of this “return”, including the one that is the subject of the present essay. 33 R. Donnarumma, Ipermodernità, op. cit., p. 108. 34 S. Ricciardi, Gli artifici della non-fiction. La messinscena narrativa di Albinati, Franchini, Veronesi, Transeuropa, Massa, 2011; but also C. Baghetti, D. Comberiati, Contro la finzione. Percorsi letterari nella non-fiction italiana, Ombre corte, Verona, 2019. 35 See R. Palumbo Mosca, L’invenzione del vero. Romanzi ibridi e discorso etico nell’Italia contemporanea, Gaffi, Rome, 2014.

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case with the postmoderns), but – and the noun is deliberately chosen for its simplicity – on trust.36 The narrative strategies adopted by Trevisan in Works offer us a text that, like many of those published in Italy in the last few years, does not fall easily into a specific literary category;37 while autobiography is too wide a field38 and autofiction39 is a variant that can only partially represent the operation enacted by the author, we could accept at face value the label of “memoir”, suggested by the author himself in a self-aware passage.40 The memoir is a genre close to historiography41 and it is distinguished from autobiography: whereas in autobiography the subject is the author himself, often a well-known figure, in the memoir the focus is on the context in which the protagonist finds himself or herself, whether it is a lager (Nazi concentration camp), a battlefield, or an industrial district.42 The main focus of Works is therefore not the life of the author (or of its narrative projection), but the world of contemporary work, described from a subjective perspective, a partial point of view that rejects omniscience. This aspect is evident in the way Trevisan constructs the novel: the first chapter, entitled “How it all started”, tells about the very encounter between the protagonist and the world of work (a factory in which he is underpaid and hired under the table) while in the final chapter Trevisan tells of his emancipation from the role of employee, marking his disillusioned and distant attitude towards the world of neo-liberal labor, which he has negatively depicted in the previous chapters: the protagonist is not free from work, but his newly acquired status does put him in a different, stronger position in regards to the market.43 36 R. Donnarumma, Ipermodernità, op. cit., p. 210. 37 Wu Ming, New Italian Epic. Letteratura, sguardo obliquo, ritorno al futuro, Einaudi, Turin, 2009. 38 According to P. Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, Seuil, Paris, 1996 [1975], p. 14, this is a “récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité” (“this is a retrospective story in prose that a real person makes of his existence, in which he emphasizes his individual life, in particular the story of his personality”). 39 See L. Marchese, L’io possibile. L’autofiction come paradosso del romanzo contemporaneo, Transeuropa, Massa, 2014. 40 V. Trevisan, Works, op. cit., p. 422 note. 41 Consider the classic model of Caesar’s De bello gallico or Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo. The reference to the classic age is useful also to underline, following I. Jablonka, L’histoire est une littérature contemporaine, Seuil, Paris, 2014, how, today, the relation between the two literary genres is particularly close. 42 The lager and the battlefield are, after all, metaphors often present in work narratives of the neo-liberal age. They are both found in S. Valenti, La fabbrica del panico, Feltrinelli, Milan, 2013. 43 In the present chapter we will focus mainly on methodological questions; as for the question of political commitment, allow me to refer the reader to my own, “Da ‘Vogliamo tutto’ a ‘Io non voglio niente’”, in Vv. Aa., Le vie del lavoro nella cultura italiana contemporanea, Franco Cesati, Florence, 2020, in preparation, or to Chapter 14 by S. Contarini in the present volume.

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The above-mentioned importance of the geographical and chronological coordinates is evident in Works: the protagonist is born in 1960 in the North-East of Italy, an area which, as noted among others by Richard Sennet, has become a leading example of neo-liberal economy and of the just-on-time model, the area in Europe with the greatest “flexible specialization in the relation between small businesses […], which has made these companies capable of rapidly responding to changes in demand”.44 In his analysis, Sennet interestingly touches on a point which is specifically relevant to our discussion, i.e. the possibility of narrating, arguing that “a world characterized by short-term flexibility […] does not offer much, neither economically nor socially, from the point of view of narration”.45 Without recalling in detail the various theoretical studies that in the last few years have discussed the importance of narration for the development of views and the construction of identity,46 I will limit myself to noting how Trevisan makes use of a series of textual strategies to counter the narrative and existential dissolution that Sennet refers to, the threat to the self posed by an increasingly irregular and unpredictable situation on the job and in the economy at large. These textual characteristics make Works one of the most successful attempts, both in terms of form and content, to narrate the effects of the new spirit of capitalism on the possibility of subjects to tell their own stories.47 In the novel, Trevisan works mainly on the contrast between the self and the world, the world of work in the neo-liberal age. While previously, in an age that was still fully modern and liberal, the self could hope to find the continuity and stability necessary to enact a process of formation48 that would include labor,49 today, the self seems caught in a discontinuous, fragmentary, liquid dimension, and the Bildung process inescapably blocked by the unpredictable developments of financial capital. The self is forced to incorporate in itself the fragmentation of the context in which it operates, and must look for other, multiple ways to enact a process of formation and growth. In Works, this contradiction emerges in at least 44 R. Sennett, L’uomo flessibile. Le conseguenze del nuovo capitalismo sulla vita personale, Feltrinelli, Milan, 2001 [1999], p. 50. 45 Ibid., p. 28. Italics mine. 46 See at least J.-M. Schaeffer, Pourquoi la fiction?, Paris, Seuil, 1999, pp. 50–132; P. Ricoeur, Tempo e racconto, 3 vol., Jaca Book, Milan, 1986–1988 [1983–1985]; T. G. Pavel, Mondi di invenzione. Realtà e immaginario narrativo, Einaudi, Turin, 1992 [1986]; M. Nussbaum, L’intelligenza delle emozioni, il Mulino, Bologna, 2004 [2003]; J. S. Bruner, La fabbrica delle storie. Diritto, letteratura, vita, Laterza, Rome, 2002. 47 Analyzed in many of its aspects in L. Boltanski, E. Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Gallimard, Paris, 1999. 48 From a literary perspective this has been studied by F. Moretti, Il romanzo di formazione, Einaudi, Turin, 1999 [1986]. 49 T. Toracca, “Flessibilità e precarietà nella letteratura italiana contemporanea: Precarious ́ Characters by Vanni Santoni”, in N. di Nunzio, S. Jurišic, F. Ragni (eds), “La parola mi tradiva”. Letteratura e crisi, Università degli studi di Perugia, Perugia, 2017, pp. 53–66.

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four notable features of the plot, features that can be traced also in other instances of work literature, a fact that highlights once again the representative quality of Trevisan’s novel. The four features are: 1

2

3

In the first place, the insistence on two residual elements: on the one hand, the psycho-physical identity of the worker, who has to physically and intellectually face the sphere of the πρᾶξις on the other hand, a real-life document, an Italian work card that serves as a deposit and trace of past experiences. Both function as a trait d’union in an otherwise fragmented and incoherent world. In a context in which there are only distant relations between the various jobs performed by the main character (tinsmith, night doorman, pusher, industrial designer), what serves as connector is the protagonist’s subjectivity, which acquires a central and dominant role in relation to the events.50 Having to choose between “concentrating on the subjective side of particularities […] or dwelling on the objective aspects, on the multiplicity of the outside life, on the variety of what exists”, in the words of Mazzoni, Trevisan opts for the first, showing how the continuity of the work experience is no longer supported by an external world controlled by linearity and rationality, but solely by the individual’s narrative of himself and to himself. In this context, literature – and particularly the tradition of the novel as a repository of narratives – acquires an important role, which could explain also the great number of narrative works dedicated to the representation of contemporary work. The second feature is the author’s mimetic adaptation of the structure of the novel to what it describes, the search for a deeper coincidence between form and content. Trevisan subdivides his novel into thirty-one, more or less autonomous, chapters, of varying length. Just as the jobs listed in the protagonist’s work card are not related to one another, the chapters also lend themselves to be read independently or even in random order. The existential difficulty of contemporary workers described by Sennet is thus reproduced in an apparently incoherent plot supported only by the above mentioned residual elements. A third feature is the use of footnotes. The lack of consistency in the professional biography of the protagonist is balanced, using a technical feature typical of essays but rarely found in novels, an expedient that serves to further the hybrid quality of the text. Although the footnotes in Works serve various functions, including bibliographical reference or translation, their most original function is that of connecting distant points in the plot. On more than one occasion, readers find themselves dealing with references to actions, observations, conversations, situations, characters found in chapters other than the one they are reading (chapters often conceived as independent stories). In

50 A tendency common to many contemporary Italian novels, as noted in R. Donnarumma, Ipermodernità, op. cit., pp. 129–133.

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these cases, the footnotes serve to integrate and better contextualize the scene. In the hands of Trevisan, the footnotes become thus a sort of hypertextual link: in a world made up of heterogeneous materials, distant and only weakly connected, in a digital age whose icon and privileged medium is the web, Trevisan creates a narrative organism that resembles that medium as much as possible: a web novel. While footnotes are not typical of work literature (other than in non-fictional instances and in any case not as connections between points in the plot), the fragmentation of the plot in short disconnected chapters which they serve to balance is a recurring characteristic of this literary trend.51 The fourth feature is the tendency towards multilingualism, in line with the general fragmentation of the text. Trevisan often uses words from other languages, English mostly, but also German and French. In an increasingly globalized world, the novel thus incorporates terms from foreign linguistic worlds, almost always without translating them,52 as well often employing Venetian dialect, an actual “work-language”, using Paolo Steffan’s definition.53

2.1. Works – an in-depth look at the chapters Switching our focus from the general outline of the novel to that of the chapters, we may start by noting that they tend to reiterate a similar plot based on a series of steps, although not all the steps are present in all chapters and in some cases a single step can correspond to more than one event:       

job search job interview hiring job description arising of a problem firing/quitting search for a new job.

51 The point is made also by P. Chirumbolo, Letteratura e lavoro. Conversazioni critiche, Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli, 2013, pp. 24–25. 52 From this perspective too Works has a paradigmatic value, insofar as it systematically uses a linguistic effect at times found also in other authors (see at least G. Falco, Pausa caffè, Sironi, Milan, 2004); as Pasolini said, “language is the embodiment of the spirit” (P. P. Pasolini, Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, II, Mondadori, Milan, 1999, p. 2844) and Trevisan pays a lot of attention to linguistic aspects, to dialect first of all, but also to the globalized and impoverished English, κοινὴ διᾶλεκτος of neo-liberalism. Since it is a global phenomenon, consider also the essay by T. Beinstingel, “La sauvagerie du langage à l’oeuvre”, in S. Bikialo, J.-P. Engélibert (eds), Dire le travail. Fiction et témoignage depuis 1980, PUR, Rennes, 2012, pp. 59–69. 53 P. Steffan, “Gli scrittori veneti e il lavoro. La ‘lingua-lavoro’ dei poeti nei narratori degli anni 2010”, in C. Baghetti (ed.), Notos, n° 4, Letteratura e lavoro in Italia. Analisi e prospettive, 2017, pp. 204–221, http://www.revue-notos.net/?page_id=1506

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The paradigmatic quality of Works is evidenced also in the above scheme. Without arriving at the thirty-one functions of the fable described by Vladimir Propp,54 we may note that a similarly codified plot sequence is present to some extent in many of the novels of the new work literature. The coincidence of the first step “job search” with the final step “search for a new job” (in Works this search almost always includes the perusal of the ads in the Sunday issue of the Giornale di Vicenza), evokes in more than one way the main theme of these novels: the search for an impossible evolution, for a professional, financial, but also existential growth, which the protagonists are forced to continuously postpone. Contemporary workers are the Sisyphuses of present day, forced to constantly reiterate the same action, as if subject to a divine sentence from which any Bildung process is excluded from the start.

3. Final considerations When moving in a vast terrain characterized by a myriad of hidden connections between literature and social sciences, the risk of reducing our interpretations of novels to the categories of other disciplines is high. The dual approach adopted in the present chapter, combining formal and thematic analysis, should help to avoid this risk. By reflecting on linguistic elements, on the organization of the plot, on the construction of the narrative voice, we avoid the risk, noted by Calvino, of turning literature into mere documents. At the same time an approach based on thematology helps us avoid the symmetrical risk of focusing exclusively on literary aspects and neglecting the extent to which these texts deal with social, economic and anthropological issues,55 and offer a critique of the neo-liberal way of life. This approach is effective solely in the case of Works but lends itself to all the texts of the corpus. Through the analysis and discussion of Trevisan’s novel we have evidenced at least four interesting elements. The first is that work literature is a unique literary trend with well-distinct features. Even if inside this trend we find novels belonging to different literary genres (detective story,56 memoir,57 or even (not-) coming-ofage novels58), the presence of these common traits allows them to be considered from a unitary perspective. In the second place, the reading of Works offers us an idea of how these authors are experimenting with new ways of writing novels within this genre. Furthermore, the presence of this theme in contemporary Italian literature helps us to establish a comparison between the previous social and economic age (as 54 V. Propp, Морфология сказки , Italian translation, Morfologia della fiaba, Einaudi, Turin, 2000 [1926], pp. 31–71. 55 In openly non-fictional works, or in the many reportages that can be included in work literature. 56 D. Zito, Robledo, Fazi, Rome, 2017. 57 V. Trevisan, Works, op. cit. 58 G. Culicchia, Tutti giù per terra, op. cit.

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represented in literature) and the current one, allowing us to better understand the stylistic and thematic features of the works. In the third place, we have seen, albeit in a cursory fashion, how the examination of this literary trend in its entirety, that is from the mid-1990s to the present day, reproduces on a minor scale, and almost metonymically, the transition from postmodern to hypermodern in Italian literature studied by Donnarumma. Given the great number of works belonging to this trend, it would be interesting to consider the role of work literature in this transition. Lastly, I would like to say a word on a topic addressed more explicitly in other chapters in the present volume, namely the extent to which work narrative re-elaborates and adapts a series of concepts such as alienation, the rejection of work, political commitment and the centrality (if not the possibility) of class struggle,59 which, after having occupied a central position in the intellectual debate as well as in the literature of the twentieth century, had been utterly marginalized in the postmodern period. This re-emergence of the question, occurring after the fall of the Berlin wall, in a profoundly changed political and ideological scenario, opens up interesting study perspectives; Italian (and non-Italian) work literature is an ideal corpus for studying the capability of contemporary literature to critically react and offer alternatives to the dominant ideology of the neo-liberal age.

Bibliography E. Albinati, Vita e morte di un ingegnere, Rizzoli, Milan, 2016 [2012]. P. Antonello, F. Mussgnug, Postmodern Impegno. Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture, Peter Lang, Oxford, New York, 2009. S. Avallone, Acciaio, Rizzoli, Milan, 2010. C. Baghetti, D. Comberiati, Contro la finzione. Percorsi letterari nella non-fiction italiana, Ombre corte, Verona, 2019. A. Bajani, Se consideri le colpe, Einaudi, Turin, 2007. A. Bajani, Cordiali saluti, Einaudi, Turin, 2006. N. Balestrini, Vogliamo tutto, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1971. T. Beinstingel, “La sauvagerie du langage à l’oeuvre”, in S. Bikialo, J.-P. Engélibert (eds), Dire le travail. Fiction et témoignage depuis 1980, PUR, Rennes, 2012, pp. 59–69. C. Bernari, I tre operai, Rizzoli, Milan, 1934. F. Bertoni, Realismo e letteratura. Una storia possibile, Einaudi, Turin, 2007. G. Bigatti, G. Lupo, Fabbrica di carta. I libri che raccontano l’Italia industriale, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 2013. R. Bilenchi, Il capofabbrica, Rizzoli, Milan, 1997 [1935]. L. Boltanski, E. Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Gallimard, Paris, 1999. J. S. Bruner, La fabbrica delle storie. Diritto, letteratura, vita, Laterza, Rome, 2002. A. Busi, Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant, Mondadori, Milan, 1985. I. Calvino, Una pietra sopra. Discorsi di letteratura e società, Einaudi, Turin, 1980. G. J. Cesare, De bello gallico, Rizzoli, Milano, 2016. 59 A particularly problematic term but one use without qualms by writers like A. Prunetti, 108 metri. The new working class hero, Laterza, Bari-Rome, 2018.

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C. Cantù, Portafoglio d’un operaio, Bompiani, Milano, 1997 [1871]. P. Chirumbolo, Letteratura e lavoro. Conversazioni critiche, Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli, 2013. G. Culicchia, Tutti giù per terra, Garzanti, Milan, 1994. E. De Amicis, Primo maggio, Garzanti, Milano, 1980 [1891]. E. De Amicis, La maestrina degli operai, Treves, Milano, 1895. M. Desiati, Ternitti, Mondadori, Milan, 2011. R. Donnarumma, Ipermodernità, il Mulino, Bologna, 2014. G. Falco, Pausa caffè, Sironi, Milan, 2004. D. Fioretti, Carte di fabbrica. La narrativa industriale in Italia (1934–1989), Tracce, Pescara, 2013. D. Giglioli, Tema, La Nuova Italia, Scandicci, 2001. I. Jablonka, L’histoire est une littérature contemporaine, Seuil, Paris, 2014. P. Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, Seuil, Paris, 1996 [1975]. P. Levi, La chiave a stella, Einaudi, Torino, 1978. P. Levi, Se questo è un uomo, Einaudi, Torino, 2018 [1947]. M. Lolli, Il lunedì arriva sempre di domenica pomeriggio, Mondadori, Milan, 2009. R. Luperini, “Immaginario e critica tematica: un dibattito”, in Allegoria, n° 58, year XX, July–December, 2008, pp. 7–8. L. Marchese, L’io possibile. L’autofiction come paradosso del romanzo contemporaneo, Transeuropa, Massa, 2014. T. F. Marinetti, “Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo” (1909), in T. F. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, 1983, Mondadori, Milan, 2001. F. Moretti, Il romanzo di formazione, Einaudi, Turin, 1999 [1986]. M. Murgia, Il mondo deve sapere, ISBN Edizioni, Milan, 2006. S. Nata, Il dipendente, Theoria, Rome, 1995. M. Nussbaum, L’intelligenza delle emozioni, il Mulino, Bologna, 2004 [2003]. O. Ottieri, Opere scelte, Mondadori, Milano, 2009. R. Palumbo Mosca, L’invenzione del vero. Romanzi ibridi e discorso etico nell’Italia contemporanea, Gaffi, Rome, 2014. P. P. Pasolini, Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, II, Mondadori, Milano, 1999. T. G. Pavel, Mondi di invenzione. Realtà e immaginario narrativo, Einaudi, Turin, 1992 [1986]. A. Pennacchi, Mammut, Donzelli, Rome, 1994. G. Pispisa, Città perfetta, Einaudi, Turin, 2005. V. Propp, Морфология сказки, Italian translation, Morfologia della fiaba, Einaudi, Turin, 2000 [1926]. A. Prunetti, Amianto. Una storia operaia, Alegre, Roma, 2014 [2012]. A. Prunetti, 108 metri. The new working class hero, Laterza, Bari-Rome, 2018. C. Raimo, “Perché non c’è ancora un grande romanzo italiano sulla crisi?”, online, http:// www.minimaetmoralia.it/wp/perche-non-ce-ancora-un-grande-romanzo-italiano-sulla -crisi/ (last consulted on 31. 10. 2018). E. Rea, La dismissione, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2014 [2002]. M. Recalcati, Il complesso di Telemaco. Genitori e figli dopo il tramonto del padre, Feltrinelli, Milan, 2013. S. Ricciardi, Gli artifici della non-fiction. La messinscena narrativa di Albinati, Franchini, Veronesi, Transeuropa, Massa, 2011. P. Ricoeur, Tempo e racconto, 3 vol., Jaca Book, Milan, 1986–1988 [1983–1985].

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J.-M. Schaeffer, Pourquoi la fiction?, Seuil, Paris, 1999. C. Segre, “Tema/motivo”, in C. Segre, Avviamento all’analisi del testo letterario, Einaudi, Turin, 1999 [1985], pp. 331–359. R. Sennett, L’uomo flessibile. Le conseguenze del nuovo capitalismo sulla vita personale, Feltrinelli, Milan, 2001 [1999]. H. Serkowska (ed.), Finzione cronaca realtà. Scambi intrecci e prospettive nella narrativa italiana contemporanea, Transeuropa, Massa, 2011. G. Simonetti, La letteratura circostante, il Mulino, Bologna, 2018. G. Simonetti, “Gli effetti di realtà. Un bilancio della narrativa italiana di questi anni”, in S. Contarini, M. P. De Paulis, A. Tosatti, Nuovi realismi, Transeuropa, Massa, 2016, pp. 149–166. L. Somigli (ed.), Negli archivi e per le strade. Il ritorno alla realtà nella narrativa di inizio millennio, Aracne, Rome, 2013. P. Steffan, “Gli scrittori veneti e il lavoro. La ‘lingua-lavoro’ dei poeti nei narratori degli anni 2010”, in C. Baghetti (ed.), Notos, n° 4, Letteratura e lavoro in Italia. Analisi e prospettive, 2017, http://www.revue-notos.net/?page_id=1506 T. Toracca, “Flessibilità e precarietà nella letteratura italiana contemporanea: Personaggi precari di Vanni Santoni”, in N. di Nunzio, S. Jurišic, F. Ragni (eds), “La parola mi tradiva”. Letteratura e crisi, Università degli studi di Perugia, Perugia, 2017, pp. 53–66. V. Trevisan, Works, Einaudi, Turin, 2016. A. Trocchi, “Temi e miti letterari”, in A. Gnisci (ed.), Letteratura comparata, Mondadori, Milan, 2002, pp. 63–86. S. Valenti, La fabbrica del panico, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2013. P. Volponi, Le mosche del capitale, Einaudi, Turin, 1989. Vv. Aa., Maledetta fabbrica, Stampa alternativa, Viterbo, 2010. Vv. Aa., Allegoria, n° 58, year XX, July–December, 2008. Wu Ming, New Italian Epic. Letteratura, sguardo obliquo, ritorno al futuro, Einaudi, Turin, 2009. Wu Ming 1, “Noi dobbiamo essere i genitori”, on Carmilla online, https://www.carmilla online.com/2008/10/08/noi-dobbiamo-essere-i-genitori/ (last consulted on 5. 11. 2018). D. Zito, Robledo, Fazi, Rome, 2017. E. Zucchi, “Padri e figli nel romanzo degli anni Zero. Considerazioni critiche sul ‘complesso di Telemaco’”, in Allegoria, n° 75, year XXIX, January–June, 2017, pp. 7–22.

Chapter 13

I can quit whenever I want The academic precariat in Italian cinema Alberto Baracco

Introduction In July 2017, Massimo Piermattei, a researcher at the University of Tuscia, in a letter sent to the newspapers to explain the reasons that had led him to leave academia after several years spent in teaching and research, observed: I was a historian of European integration, I am 39 years old and I have decided to quit the university […] All those reforms that were proclaimed that were supposed to reward merit […] reforms that only wound up penalising the most vulnerable […] The bit about merit is a cloying refrain: the scarcity of funds and positions in academia has started a war between insiders and outsiders and, even worse, between have-nots […] What remains unacceptable and disconcerting, at least for me, is the waste of talent of a multitude of young scholars […] All those people I met in my ten years at the university. All that talent, that potential to innovate their fields, research, teaching methods. How angry I feel seeing them, seeing us, wither, vanish, leave. Today I am one of them […] I am leaving mainly for a question of dignity and justice […] As Paul of Tarsus wrote to Timothy, words that I hold dear: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” I can quit whenever I want. (Piermattei 2017, 15–26, translation mine) Piermattei’s letter elicited numerous comments and once again stimulated public debate about the state of malaise in academia, a condition that appears to affect not only Italian universities but the academic world as a whole. Over the last decade, scholars in Europe and the United States have drawn attention to working conditions in universities and, particularly, to the rise of a new academic precariat. With different approaches and key concepts, such as neoliberalism, competitiveness, and occupational identity, their studies have focused on an academic context marked by the crucial, problematic dualism between those who hold stable, wellpaid positions and those who are forced to accept frustrating, lasting instability and insecurity. It is in terms of this divide, conceptualised by scholars with the

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term “dualisation” (Standing 2009, 2011, 2014; Pulignano, Meardi, and Doerflinger 2015; Isidorsson and Kubisa 2018), that analysis has focused on a new class of precarious academic workers subject to hyper-flexible, unstable contracts, with irregular hours, low pay, and no benefits. This academic precariat is deeply marginalised despite the fact that it represents a fundamental part of the university system, performs vital tasks, and makes an outstanding contribution to teaching and research. What is interesting in the current situation is that this divide is largely structural, in the sense that the academic system simply could not work without the large supply of these so-called outsiders who appear to be ready to accept any kind of employment contract. In this regard, in some way anticipating the themes of film representation, Alexandre Afonso (2014) observed that the academic job market is structured in many respects like a “drug gang” which relies on a shrinking core of insiders and an expanding mass of outsiders: a rank and file of drug dealers hoping to become drug lords.1 In this scenario, precarity appears to be precisely the condition that pathologically sustains the current academic model.

1. The neoliberal paradigm Many scholars have identified the origin of this phenomenon in the legitimation and implementation of neoliberal policies in higher education (Giroux 2013, 2014; Courtois and O’Keefe 2015; Gill 2016; Giroux and Samalavicˇ ius 2016; Gupta, Habjan, and Tutek 2016). In the past twenty years, in spite of the prolonged economic crisis that has especially hit Europe, and some critical voices that have been raised against it, the neoliberal paradigm has become omnipotent and omnipresent (Clarke 2008), also deeply influencing the academic context. In one of his articles against the neoliberal university, Henry Giroux (2013) observed, “The mantras of neoliberalism are now well known: government is the problem; society is a fiction; sovereignty is market-driven; deregulation and commodification are vehicles for freedom; and higher education should serve corporate interests rather than the public good” (Giroux 2013, 4). For neoliberals, education and knowledge are commodities that individuals should purchase in the marketplace for their own benefit. Over the last twenty years, the university has become an institution whose mission is to facilitate the production of specific research outputs and skills, in keeping with a commercial perspective which considers the production of knowledge instrumental to economic impact on the marketplace. According to Giroux, central to this neoliberal turn in higher education is “a market-driven paradigm that seeks to eliminate tenure, turn the humanities into a job preparation 1

More recently, however, in a comparative study on the variety of academic labour market in Europe, reflecting on dualisation, Afonso (2016) observed, “patterns of dualization have been mediated by different organizational features. As such, it is difficult to speak of one European labor market in the light of the striking differences in terms of access and career progression across countries” (Afonso 2016, 820).

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service, and transform most faculty into an army of temporary subaltern labor” (Giroux 2013, 5). Precarity is considered by Giroux as a weapon used both to exploit these temporary workers and to suppress dissent by keeping them in a constant state of fear over losing their jobs. As Andrew Whelan (2015) laconically observed, precarious academic workers are “‘YIYOs’ – ‘year in, year outs’” (Whelan 2015, 131), who are paid an hourly rate under fixed-term contracts, and are often re-hired for a number of years and kept in a prolonged state of fear and instability. On the surface, this academic precariat, consisting of highly educated workers that play their roles in one of the most elitist sectors of society, appears to be somewhat different from the typical precarious worker. Nonetheless, while it maintains its specificity, this growing group of underprivileged academic workers suffers the same frustration and anxiety as other precarious workers, in a condition that goes beyond the boundaries of the workplace, negatively affecting their private lives and personal relationships, and producing a sort of “precarisation of existence” (Deranty 2008; Fumagalli and Lucarelli 2010; Bozzon et al. 2017). Recent works have analysed the distinctive features that characterise this new class of academic workers, and three different aspects have been repeatedly highlighted: first, the weakening of the boundaries between work and other life spheres, in an ambiguous exchange between vocation and precariousness; second, an escalation of competition and increasing pressure on academic workers in quantitative and qualitative terms; and third, the precariousness of contractual forms and working conditions, with low or no remuneration. Regarding the last point, on several occasions in recent years, The Guardian reported on the widespread use of “zero-hour contracts” at UK universities.2 These are contracts which do not specify the number of hours expected of the academic worker, and basically imply that workers need to be available to the employer whenever there is work. As Emanuele Toscano et al. (2014) emphasised in their study on the precariat of research, the academic world seems to be increasingly relying on a work force of scientists and specialists who often can barely make ends meet – a sizeable number of individuals forced into situations in which they lack adequate space and resources to work, an academic world based essentially on underpaid or free work: the case of some Italian universities that have offered symbolic contracts for one euro per year is a notorious example (Cerino 2010).

2. Italian cinema and the revenge of the precarious researcher This academic precariat has also become the subject of film representations. Over the last few years, some popular Italian movies – such as Into Paradise (Into 2

For example, in 2013, in an article in The Guardian, Harriet Swain wrote, “The extent of casual contracts in universities has come to the fore following freedom of information requests by the University and College Union (UCU) on zero-hours contracts. The union found more than half of the 145 UK universities that responded, and twothirds of the further education colleges, said they used these contracts, which do not guarantee work and can deny holiday and sick pay” (Swain 2013).

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Paradiso 2010, Randi), Unlikely Revolutionaries (Figli delle stelle 2010, Pellegrini), Some Say No (C’è chi dice no 2011, Avellino), and especially the very popular trilogy by Sydney Sibilia, I Can Quit Whenever I Want (Smetto quando voglio 2014; Smetto quando voglio: Ad honorem 2017; Smetto quando voglio: Masterclass 2017),3 have offered interesting depictions of these precarious academic workers, with a particular emphasis on the effects that such unstable working conditions produce on their personal lives. Effectively and trenchantly, often adopting a comic-grotesque style, these movies convey the state of uncertainty that characterises the existence of this academic precariat. The lack of an adequate, reliable source of income and the perceived labile boundary that separates unstable working conditions from unemployment, forces the precarious worker into a state of permanent dependency. A vulnerable, anxietyridden class of workers emerges: impotent, frustrated individuals who live in a state of permanent incompleteness, subjugated by a prolonged “not yet”, which leads them to continuous projection of their own expectations into the future. “I have been calm for eleven years, teaching for you, doing exams and research that you sign as your own […] I cannot work for free my whole life!” is what Samuele, one of the protagonists in Giambattista Avellino’s movie Some Say No, replies to the professor who tells him that he has once again failed to be awarded a tenure-track position. A very similar situation is represented in the first film of the trilogy I Can Quit Whenever I Want, when the protagonist Pietro Zinni, a neurobiology researcher, finds out that his contract will not be renewed: Professor, does this mean no long-term contract? They won’t even give you a year’s contract! PIETRO: Those 500 euros a month kept me going Professor! I’m 37, what can I start doing now? PIETRO:

PROFESSOR:

Pietro’s upset expression is quite eloquently and ironically opposed to the manifest lack of concern of the professor who is on the phone confirming the booking of a mooring place for his boat. Through its grotesque style, the scene again proposes the dualisation schema and the contraposition between those who have stable positions and exert power and those who remain subjugated by the indefinite prolongation of their precarious conditions.4 3

4

The movies cited are part of a broad popular strand of contemporary Italian cinema which has created trenchant portrayals of the world of precarity and unemployment in movies such as A Whole Life Ahead (Tutta la vita davanti 2008, Virzì), The 1000-Euro Generation (Generazione 1000 euro 2009, Venier), Intrepido: A Lonely Hero (L’intrepido 2013, Amelio), and Do You See Me? (Scusate se esisto! 2014, Milani). For a more extensive discussion on the subject which broadens the issue to encompass European cinema, see Alice Bardan’s essay, “The New European Cinema of Precarity: A Transnational Perspective” (Bardan 2013). In this regard, however, from a different perspective and by detecting the “constitutive separateness” that characterises all academic workers, due to cognitive and creative

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The first aspect that these movies underline is the prolonged duration of the state of subjugation and patient acceptance in which precarious academic workers remain awaiting a better future, before deciding that it is time to react. What the films reveal is what scholars have described as the “passion trap” (Murgia, Poggio, and Torchio 2012; Busso and Rivetti 2014) and the “internalization of responsibility” (Hawkins, Manzi, and Ojeda 2014), two psychological mechanisms which serve to explain why precarious researchers meekly accept unfavourable job conditions that negatively affect their wellbeing and private lives. According to Pellegrino (2016), it is difficult for a precarious academic worker to take a position against these dynamics because recognising these forms of exploitation would oblige them to cut their ties with relational processes and conditions to which the worker is closely linked, even though they know they are being underpaid (Pellegrino 2016, 60). These representations highlight the vulnerability of working conditions in academia, especially with regard to social welfare and pension rights, with a deprivation which affects these workers not only in the present but will also have deeply negative effects in the long run. On film screens, the precarious researcher is always represented as someone who is over thirty and realises that relatives and friends the same age as they are, who have followed non-academic careers, have steady, well-paid positions. As a confirmation of this film representation, the available data on Italian academic staff indicate that the average age of precarious researchers is now over 35. Despite their age, in the university context they are often optimistically labelled early-career researchers. Through the comparison with more stable work situations and more established and identifiable careers, film representations emphasise the marginality and the characteristic “anomie”5 of the position to which precarious academic workers are relegated, which even makes it difficult to exactly define their condition (Pellegrino 2016, 57). What emerges is a new type of educated precariat who, according to Standing (2014), “experience in their irregular labour and in the lack of opportunity to construct a narrative for their lives a sense of relative deprivation and status frustration, because they have no sense of future” (Standing 2014, 8).

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processes which are conducted in almost individual, autonomous forms, Vincenza Pellegrino (2016) suggested that there exists a symmetry between the emotional conditions of stable workers and those of precarious workers, and observed how difficult it is in analysing working conditions in academia “to conceptualize power,” and consider them through “a class political discourse ‘precarious against non-precarious’ […] precisely because of the ‘fragmenting’ nature of production processes” (50, translation mine). “Anomie” is one of the four terms Standing (2011) used to identify the “dangerous” class of precarious workers. In this regard, Standing wrote, “The precariat experiences the four A’s—anger, anomie, anxiety and alienation” (Standing 2011, 19). And, with regard to anomie, he observed, “anomie is a feeling of passivity born of despair […] Anomie comes from a listlessness associated with sustained defeat, compounded by the condemnation lobbed at many in the precariat by politicians and middle-class commentators castigating them as lazy, directionless, undeserving, socially irresponsible or worse” (Standing 2011, 20).

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The prolonged uncertainty of the working conditions in which these researchers are forced to operate goes beyond the boundaries of the workplace and negatively affects their lives outside the university. In this regard, a second aspect that emerges in film representations is what scholars have called “domestication” (Bologna and Fumagalli 1997). There is no clear separation between work and private life, and there are no separate times and places. This is shown to have a negative impact on social relationships, especially on the relationship with the partner. As some recent surveys have noted (Times Higher Education 2016), academia creeps into the couple relationship and becomes an ever-present third party. Not having a fixed schedule often means the adoption of a long-hours culture (Currie, Harris, and Thiele 2000), being available on demand and working evenings, weekends, and holidays, in order to meet deadlines, satisfy the increasing demands of the academic institution, and try to construct a competitive curriculum. Working conditions such as these severely undermine the individual’s ability to create stable couple relationships and make long-term plans and investments, and also make it unthinkable to decide to have children. This problematic condition is well represented in Sibilia’s movie I Can Quit Whenever I Want, in which the protagonist Pietro maintains a difficult relationship with his girlfriend Giulia because of his precarious university job. After years of sacrificing and scrimping, constant worry about whether or not they would be able to pay their bills, Pietro cannot bring himself to confess to Giulia that his contract has not been renewed and lies that he has been given tenure: I wanted to talk to you for a minute … Are there problems with your contract? PIETRO: No. It’s just that the new contract has kind of … GIULIA: Did they give you a new contract or not? PIETRO: If you want a simple yes or no … GIULIA: Yes or no? PIETRO: Yes! Yes … and a full-time contract. I wanted to surprise you, but you spoiled it. PIETRO: GIULIA:

As some scholars have observed, domestication is one of the aspects that transforms the academic precarious worker into a sort of microenterprise6 (Armano and Murgia 2014) that must always be willing to work.7 The term “Uberfication of 6

7

As the two authors argued, the emphasis is on “a work condition that has only the constraints of an enterprise, because it is the individual worker who must assume, subjectively and creatively, enterprise risk” (Armano and Murgia 2014, 105, translation mine). To describe the alienating conditions that characterise this “cybertariat”, a new advanced form of proletariat without regular working times and schedules, Pellegrino (2016) identified it as “a multitude of intellectuals constantly connected, even deprived of travel time, sleep, food in autonomy from the machine,” which is involved in a continuous work process (Pellegrino 2016, 58–59, translation mine).

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the university” (Hall 2016) has been adopted to define a context in which precarious researchers are forced to become “micro-entrepreneurs of themselves”, within a public sector that increasingly apes the private sector and for conditions that contradictorily seem to identify a status of self-employed-but-dependent worker, who must continually imagine new strategies to resist and remain active in the market. In this light, it appears to be obvious that the stress generated by such alienating conditions and the current difficulties of the “academic market” force many of these so-called microenterprises to quit. In Piermattei’s book Smetto quando voglio (Piermattei 2017), published after his open letter, the author refers to them as “the Spoon River of failed academics” (Piermattei 2017, 40), people who leave university in their thirties and are certainly not in a good position to find a new job. In this regard, in Sibilia’s movie, the dialogue between Pietro and his two friends, both former researchers in the humanities, is ironically indicative: Guys, I have a court order to pay, they’re going to seize my things, and it’s all really stressing at home! […] This is pathetic! I mean, look at yourselves! I don’t want to end up like you! Internationally acclaimed Latin scholars standing in a gas station working for a Singhalese guy who pays you cash. While in the past, having an academic degree was an effective means of social liberation and upward mobility, today it appears to offer faint hope and often does not help the degree holder to find a better job and improve their quality of life, but instead becomes a useless (or even negative) element. As Piermattei (2017) observed, for the labour market, a PhD is not the demonstration that you can manage a project, organise your work, and innovate your sector of activity: it is another useless piece of paper, an error of youth (Piermattei 2017, 23). Similar considerations are humorously expressed in a dialogue in Sibilia’s movie, when Andrea, a former scholar of cultural anthropology with important international publications, before deciding to join “the gang of researchers”, is fruitlessly trying to get hired by a scrapyard owner: You are a graduate. I’m not a graduate. SCRAPYARD OWNER: I was clear. I don’t take graduates. ANDREA: I’m not! I got kicked out of middle school for selling dope. SCRAPYARD OWNER: You can’t be trusted. ANDREA: Why would I be here, then? SCRAPYARD OWNER: You are the third this week. ANDREA: I’m not a graduate! … All right, I am, but it was a youthful mistake that I regret. I’m asking to renounce my academic qualifications. In two weeks, I’ll be back to grade 5 level. SCRAPYARD OWNER: You get your hands dirty here. ANDREA: That’s why I’m here. SCRAPYARD OWNER: I don’t need people who are always reading. Is that clear? SCRAPYARD OWNER: ANDREA:

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Another aspect that in film representation sadly characterises the academic context is widespread nepotism and a systematic cronyism. These are aspects that in film narratives give rise to the criminal ventures of the pirates of merit (Some Say No) and the gang of researchers (I Can Quit Whenever I Want). What has a negative, decisive impact on the film characters’ lives is the fact that the few, coveted positions that exist are filled not by evaluating applicants’ curricula, but on different criteria. For this reason, the first point of the pirates of merit’s manifesto is “to bring down the regime of string-pullers”, fighting those who are stealing their lives. As the pirates proclaim, “Merit theft is life theft, they’re not only stealing your job, but your dreams, your children, your dignity, everything”. And it is a phenomenon that unfortunately is not merely the fruit of author’s imagination, as is attested by recent news and expressed without reticence in the testimonies transcribed in Piermattei’s book. In this regard, Filippomaria Pontani argued that this does not necessarily mean that the person selected is the worst candidate, but that “there can be candidates with better academic qualifications than the predetermined candidate (because, any way you look at it, there is always a predetermined one) that have very little chance of success […] That is the reason why often the number of candidates in these competitions is fewer than 2” (Piermattei 2017, 117, translation mine). These considerations to some extent evoke the depressing image of the department chair in Some Say No who, fearing a possible investigation, in an attempt to destroy the evidence of myriad rigged competitions, almost incredulously exclaims, “There must have been one regular competition at least!” Pontani’s simple, provocative question is, “Why not base recruitment on direct cooptation?” (Piermattei 2017, 121). From a different perspective, Pellegrino (2016) observed that, opposed to the rhetoric of curriculum that you have to put up with, “selection is transformed into a long ritual of behavioural belonging to the context”, through practices which verge “on the edge of irrationalism” (Pellegrino 2016, 55). The focus of assessment therefore moves from competence and ability to “evaluation of endurance”, and to similarity between those who hire and those who are hired. Pellegrino argues that this creates “a contradictory ambivalence between demand for creativity and autonomy, on the one hand, and for institutionally appropriate behaviour on the other” (Pellegrino 2016, 56, translation mine). Thus, for Pellegrino, precarious academic workers experience totalizing working processes, which are based on the passion trap rather than on coercive exploitation, and produce convergence in behaviour, language, and desires (Pellegrino 2016, 57). If adaptation to context and the stressful conditions of prolonged precariousness is one of the possible options, a range of different strategies can be adopted, including abstention and attack (Feldman and Sandoval 2018). It is this last form of reaction that prevails in film representation, with openly deviant behaviour. Almost confirming the adjective “dangerous” which Standing (2011) used to denote this new class of academic precariat, beyond their ironic style, all the Italian movies considered here show how the prolonged penalizing situation leads precarious researchers to seek revenge by engaging in unethical, illegal activities.

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Through kidnapping, harassment and stalking, or the production and pushing of new psychotropic drugs, the grotesque solution that film indicates to this bunch of over-thirty precarious researchers without a future is a venture into the world of crime. If years of study and research have not allowed them to get steady well-paid positions in academia, they can at least enable them to carry out a lucrative criminal activity. Faced with the social injustice suffered within the university context, the ethical question seems less important than a deep desire for revenge, which somehow appears to be justified. After all, they are university researchers not criminals. “I’ll spare you all the lectures on the ethical level, because I abandoned ethics when they kicked me out of the university. I’m being practical. I don’t want to go to jail!” This is how Sibilia’s movie character Alberto, the former microbioloby researcher working as an off-the-books dishwasher, laconically answers Pietro, who proposes they produce a new psychotropic molecule. Pietro’s reply is quite clear: “Alberto, criminals go to jail, are you and I criminals? I make a molecule that’s not on the ministry’s list and you produce it. Together we make the best substance ever and we do it all legally […] You’re a university professor and you don’t deserve this life!” It is time for them to get what they deserve, Pietro argues. The issue of merit therefore shifts from the level of acknowledgement to the level of claim, from confidence in the university and its rules to a more pragmatic, albeit deviant approach. Film seems to justify this criminal behaviour as a legitimate reaction to what they have undergone and a way for these precarious academic workers to get what they already richly deserve. Obviously, the issue cannot be reconsidered here on a purely moral or ethical level. Rather, it is necessary to recognise that in the mutual symbolic relationship between film and reality, satire goes straight to the heart of the problem, and shamelessly reveals the anomalies and contradictions of the academic system we are part of. With its comic-satirical register, film interrogates us directly and irreverently about the quality and value of the academic world. Through paradoxical representations, film unmasks this world’s contradictions and forces us to distance ourselves from it. Satire eschews both the pessimism of impotence and fear of condemnation, calling for urgent solutions. It is only film, but it can move critical thinking and stimulate action. Based on these film representations, a final reflection can be made. As numerous surveys have also confirmed, many precarious academic workers describe their condition with negative terms such as “depressed”, “frustrated”, or “disillusioned”, and, according to Max Haiven (2014), academia no longer appears to be an “ivory tower” but rather an “ivory cage”. Possible organizational solutions should be grounded in the awareness that these precarious researchers are not mere providers of labour, producers of publications, projects and lectures, flexibly fluctuating in time and space, but whole subjects with concrete needs of their own operating in an academic context in which the boundary between work and life is intrinsically blurred. An oft-quoted passage from an article by Toni Morrison seems to me to still be pertinent to the current university situation:

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If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or ménage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us. (Morrison 2001, 278)

Bibliography A Whole Life Ahead [Tutta la vita davanti]. 2008. Directed by Paolo Virzì. Italia: Motorino Amaranto, Medusa Film. Film. Afonso, Alexandre. 2014. “How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang” (March 11). Accessed December 11, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2407748 Afonso, Alexandre. 2016. “Varieties of Academic Labor Markets in Europe”. PS: Political Science & Politics 49(4): 816–821. Armano, Emiliana, and Annalisa Murgia. 2014. “The Precariousnesses of Young Knowledge Workers. A Subject-Oriented Approach”. In Precariat: Labour, Work and Politics, edited by Matthew Johnson, 102–117. London: Routledge. Bardan, Alice. 2013. “The New European Cinema of Precarity: A Transnational Perspective”. In Work in Cinema: Labor and the Human Condition, edited by Ewa Mazierska, 69–90. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bologna, Sergio, and Andrea Fumagalli, eds. 1997. Il lavoro autonomo di seconda generazione: scenari del postfordismo in Italia. Milano: Feltrinelli. Bozzon, Rossella, Annalisa Murgia, Barbara Poggio, and Elisa Rapetti. 2017. “Work–Life Interferences in the Early Stages of Academic Careers: The Case of Precarious Researchers in Italy”. European Educational Research Journal 16(2–3): 332–351. Busso, Sergio, and Paola Rivetti. 2014. “What’s Love Got to Do with it? Precarious Academic Labour Forces and the Role of Passion in Italian Universities”. Recherches Sociologiques et Anthropologiques 45(2): 15–37. Cerino, Giulia. 2010. “Cercansi docenti a contratto Salario: 1 euro al mese. Lordo”. La Repubblica, October 28. Accessed December 11, 2018. https://www.repubblica.it/ scuola/2010/10/28/news/docenti_a_contratto-8519119/ Clarke, John. 2008. “Living with/in and without neo-liberalism”. Focaal 51(June): 135–147. Accessed December 11, 2018. https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/focaa l/2008/51/focaal510110.xml Courtois, Aline, and Theresa O’Keefe. 2015. “Precarity in the Ivory Cage: Neoliberalism and Casualisation of Work in the Irish Higher Education Sector”. Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies 13(1): 43–66. Currie, Jan, Patricia Harris, and Bev Thiele. 2000. “Sacrifices in Greedy Universities: Are They Gendered?”. Gender and Education 12(3): 269–291. Deranty, Jean-Philippe. 2008. “Work and the Precarisation of Existence”. European Journal of Social Theory 11(4): 443–463. Do You See Me? [Scusate se esisto!]. 2014. Directed by Riccardo Milani. Italia: Italian International Film, Rai Cinema. Film. Feldman, Zeena, and Marisol Sandoval. 2018. “Metric Power and the Academic Self: Neoliberalism, Knowledge and Resistance in the British University”. tripleC 16(1): 214–233.

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Fumagalli, Andrea, and Stefano Lucarelli. 2010. “Cognitive Capitalism as a Financial Economy of Production”. In Cognitive Capitalism and its Reflections in South-Eastern Europe, edited by Vladimir Cvijanovic´, Andrea Fumagalli, and Carlo Vercellone, 9–40. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Gill, Rosalind. 2016. “Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia”. Feministische Studien 34(1): 39–55. Giroux, Henry A. 2013. “Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University”. Truthout, October 29. Accessed December 11, 2018. https://truthout.org/articles/publi c-intellectuals-against-the-neoliberal-university/ Giroux, Henry A. 2014. Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Giroux, Henry A., and Almantas Samalavicˇ ius. 2016. “Higher Education and Neoliberal Temptation: An Interview with Henry Giroux”. Eurozine, May 4. Accessed December 11, 2018. https://www.eurozine.com/higher-education-and-neoliberal-temptation/ Gupta, Suman, Jernej Habjan, and Hrvoje Tutek. 2016. Academic Labour, Unemployment and Global Higher Education: Neoliberal Policies of Funding and Management. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Haiven, Max. 2014. “The Ivory Cage and the Ghosts of Academe: Labor and Struggle in the Edu-factory”. Truthout. Accessed December 13, 2018. http://www.truth-out. org/news/item/23391-the-ivory-cage-and-the-ghosts-of-academe-labor-and-struggle -in-the-edu-factory Hall, Gary. 2016. The Uberfication of the University. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hawkins, Roberta, Maya Manzi, and Diana Ojeda. 2014. “Lives in the Making Power, Academia and the Everyday”. ACME 13(2) (January): 328–351. I Can Quit Whenever I Want [Smetto quando voglio]. 2015. Directed by Sydney Sibilia. Italia: Ascent Film, Fandango, Rai Cinema. Film. I Can Quit Whenever I Want: Masterclass [Smetto quando voglio: Masterclass]. 2017. Directed by Sydney Sibilia. Italia: Groenlandia, Fandango, Rai Cinema. Film. I Can Quit Whenever I Want: Ad Honorem [Smetto quando voglio: Ad Honorem]. 2017. Directed by Sydney Sibilia. Italia: Groenlandia, Fandango, Rai Cinema. Film. Into Paradise [Into Paradiso]. 2010. Directed by Paola Randi. Italia: Acaba Produzioni e Istituto Luce Cinecittà. Film. Intrepido: A Lonely Hero [L’intrepido]. 2013. Directed by Gianni Amelio. Italia: Palomar. Film. Isidorsson, Tommy, and Julia Kubisa, eds. 2018. Job Quality in an Era of Flexibility: Experiences in a European Context. New York: Routledge. Morrison, Toni. 2001. “How Can Values Be Taught in the University?” Michigan Quarterly Review XL(2) (Spring): 273–278. Murgia, Annalisa, Barbara Poggio, and Nicoletta Torchio. 2012. “Italy: Precariousness and Skill Mismatch”. In Precarious Work and High-Skilled Youth in Europe, edited by Manuela S. Lodovici and Renata Semenza, 71–111. Milano: Angeli. Pellegrino, Vincenza. 2016. “Lavoro cognitivo, passioni e precarietà. Per una ‘resistenza relazionale’ alle forme di cattura del sistema produttivo”. In R/esistenze precarie. Lavoratori universitari e capitalismo cognitivo, edited by Vincenza Pellegrino, 40–68. Verona: Ombre corte. Piermattei, Massimo. 2017. Smetto quando voglio. Padova: libreriauniversitaria.it edizioni. Pulignano, Valeria, Guglielmo Meardi, and Nadja Doerflinger. 2015. “Trade Unions and Labour Market Dualisation: A Comparison of Policies and Attitudes towards Agency

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and Migrant Workers in Germany and Belgium”. Work, Employment and Society 29(5) (October): 808–825. Some Say No [C’è chi dice no]. 2011. Directed by Giambattista Avellino. Italia: Cattleya. Film. Standing, Guy. 2009. Work After Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class. New York: Bloomsbury. Standing, Guy. 2014. A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. New York: Bloomsbury. Standing, Guy. 2015. “The Precariat and Class Struggle”. RCCS Annual Review 7 (October): 3–16. Swain, Harriet. 2013. “Zero hours in universities: ‘You never know if it’ll be enough to survive’”. The Guardian, September 16. Accessed December 11, 2018. https://www. theguardian.com/education/2013/sep/16/zero-hours-contracts-at-universities The 1000-Euro Generation [Generazione 1000 euro]. 2009. Directed by Massimo Venier. Italia: Trio International, Andrea Leone Films, Rai Cinema. Film. Times Higher Education. 2016. “Married to The(ir) Job: Living with an Academic”. Times Higher Education, October 20. Accessed December 12, 2018. https://www.timeshigh ereducation.com/features/married-to-their-job-living-with-an-academic#survey-answer Toscano, Emanuele, Francesca Coin, Orazio Giancola, Barbara Grüning, Francesco Vitucci, and Claudio Riccio. 2014. “Ricercarsi – Indagine sui percorsi di vita e lavoro del precariato universitario”. Accessed December 11, 2018. https://iris.unive.it/retrieve/ha ndle/10278/3684125/95221/Ricercarsi.pdf Unlikely Revolutionaries [Figli delle stelle]. 2010. Directed by Lucio Pellegrini. Italia: Pupkin Production, ITC Movie, Warner Bros. Film. Whelan, Andrew. 2015. “Academic critique of neoliberal academia”. Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology & Cultural Studies 12(1): 130–152.

Chapter 14

Refusal of work in Italian literature From Vogliamo tutto by Balestrini to Works by Trevisan1 Silvia Contarini

Salaried work, the coveted “permanent job”, seems to be object of all desires in a country such as Italy, which nowadays suffers of unemployment, flexibility and insecurity; the big national success of the movie Quo vado (2016), starring the actor Checco Zalone and directed by Gennaro Nunziante is therefore emblematic. But yet, not too many years ago, this kind of employed work was strongly disputed, especially in the two decades following 1968. One of the most accomplished literary expressions of the radical criticism of this kind of work is undoubtedly Vogliamo tutto by Nanni Balestrini (1971). Forty-five years after the latter, the novel Works (the Italian title!) by Vitaliano Trevisan (2016), which has been greeted with rather good critical success, has been interpreted as both a book about the precariousness in Italy and the expression of the refusal of work;2 the vision of work which is actually expressed is complex and sometimes ambiguous, but symptomatic anyhow of the current cultural and political climate. Our aim in this study is to compare and analyse the above books, which in their own way represent the sort of Italian fiction novels which focus attention on the company, the economy and the work and also consider the antinomy between the praise and the criticism of the value of work, namely the refusal of work.3 We mean, in this 1

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Le citazioni, quando non diversamente precisato, sono da noi tradotte e il riferimento va all’edizione in lingua originale menzionata in bibliografia. The quotations, when not otherwise specified, are translated by us and the reference goes to the original language edition cited in the Bibliography. See especially Cortellessa A., “Vitaliano Trevisan, da dove viene”, 13 June 2016, Le parole e le cose, http://www.leparoleelecose.it/?p=23386; Pannella C., “La vita è un lavoro da sbrigare, scrivendo”, October 2016, L’Indice, https://www.lindiceonline. com/osservatorio/economia-e-politica/vitaliano-trevisan-works/; Polenchi F., “Gli straordinari di Vitaliano Trevisan. Una lettura”, 21 September 2016, Alfabeta2, http s://www.alfabeta2.it/tag/vitaliano-trevisan We would like to clarify right away that refusal of work can be shaped differently according to the culture and the age; with respect to this chapter, we can stick to a general definition: “Refusal of work is behavior in which a person refuses regular employment”. That definition is taken from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Refusal_of_work. This Wikipedia page exists in English, Russian, Japanese,

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work, to go through the abundant literary production of those years, which has already had a long and remarkable tradition, based on the so-called “industrial literature” of the sixties, and which has met a new wave of literary texts of the new century.4 It is the passage of time from Vogliamo tutto to Works which will allow us to underline the epochal change on the concept of work and the way we relate to it. It would be appropriate to go back in time to 1948 and keep in mind the first article of the Italian Constitution: “Italy is a democratic Republic, founded on labour”. The juridical and political comments about this general principle, which grants to labour the role of the founding element of the Republic, have been and still are different, diverging and numerous,5 but a point of agreement at least allows us to affirm that this constitutional specificity expressed, in 1948, the idea that work is a positive instrument. In other words, a sort of right to exist thanks to one’s own contribution. This same logic that determines that it is labour that makes a citizen, not personal fortune nor titles nor his income, was already firmly anchored in a book, which itself contributed to the founding and the development of the industrial bourgeoisie and its values: Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi (1881). Indeed, a wooden puppet, in order to be transformed into man – a man integrated in the society and an honest man – must stop to wander around at leisure and start learning to work and craft himself thanks to it. The aim of this novel, which is undoubtedly pedagogical and instructive, is the education to obedience, the respect of rules and normality and at the same time the stigmatization of idleness and marginalization. The exclusion from society is the consequence of an individual responsibility: the answer to Pinocchio who states “I wasn’t born for work” is: It is the duty of everyone else to work; and should they not work, and suffer from hunger, so much the worse for them […] Aren’t you ashamed? Instead of begging in the streets, why don’t you look for work and earn your own bread! […] Good boys love to study and work, whereas you […] A man, as a

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German and Spanish, with different contents, but strangely enough, it doesn’t exist in Italian, whereas the importance of the Italian operaismo and the thinking of the autonomy area (Tronti, Negri, Virno, etc.) about the political theorization of refusal of work are evident. Allow me to mention: Contarini S. (ed.), 2010, Letteratura e azienda. Rappresentazioni letterarie dell’economia e del lavoro nell’Italia degli anni 2000, Narrativa, n. 31/ 32; Contarini S., Jansen M., Ricciardi S., (eds.), 2015, Le culture del precariato, Verona, Ombre corte. See also Chirumbolo P. 2013, Letteratura e lavoro. Conversazioni critiche, Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino. For a wide critical and literary review, see Condello A., Toracca T., 20 March 2016, “Lavoro, identità: riflessioni tra letteratura e diritto”, Il ponte, https://www.ilponterivista.com/blog/2016/03/20/lavor o-identita-riflessioni-letteratura-diritto/ The different subjects are summarized and elaborated in Urbinati N., 2017, Costituzione italiana: art. 1, Roma, Carocci.

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rule, whether he’s born rich or poor, must do something in this world, to be kept busy, to work… No one can find happiness without work. (Collodi, [1881] 2014, 36–39) In short, hard work, sacrifice and respect for rules are the key to social integration, which is there for everyone who is willing to obtain it. Generations of Italians have grown up with these values, deeply inscribed not only on the paper of the Constitution and the book, but in their culture after the unification of the country and the first Republic. When has there been, if there has been, an inversion of trend towards this approach? It is not difficult to note how, in recent years, it is the precariousness of labour which is the main worry, especially among young people, has become the object of studies and research, together with various literary, documentaristic and artistic representations.6 This would probably lead us to think that the breaking point, unintentional and not deliberate, from the vision of labour as a basis for one’s existence and for its enhancement, would be situated at the beginning of the years from 2000, when the transformations which impacted the functioning of the work market have generalized flexibility, precariousness and unemployment. The problem is that the recent literature about work often claims labour as a right, asserts its nobility, provides man with his dignity even when this means weariness and sacrifice (the mines, the factory, the farming), to the point that, in many books, we feel a sort of nostalgia for the old world of work.7 In short, if there has been a breaking point, if a different vision of work has established itself that has to be searched for elsewhere, it is at the moment of the development of the disputing and the new political movements which followed the years following 1968. It is hardly surprising that this political and cultural rupture towards the value of labour has found a strong expression in a book inspired by the “Hot Autumn” of 1969, which was published in 1971, right after the big wave of industrial literature from which, after all, it is set apart. That book is is Vogliamo tutto by Nanni Balestrini,8 which is a very important book for various reasons, among which is the experimentalism of the literary forms which is actually an experimentalism on the narrative and on the word of the lower class, because Balestrini chooses to have a worker-speaker – it’s not anodyne! Balestrini gets even further into the worker’s 6

7 8

The first literary texts, often mentioned, are Pausa caffé by Giorgio Falco (2004), Tu quando scadi, racconti di precari (2005), Cordiali saluti by Andrea Bajani (2005), Mi chiamo Roberta… by Aldo Nove (2006), Il mondo deve sapere by Michela Murgia (2006), Vita precaria e amore eterno by Mario Desiati (2007). There are numerous contemporary and later publications, sometimes in the form of collections of tales, accompanied by movie adaptations or by independent movie productions. Two significant examples are Addio. Il romanzo della fine del lavoro by Angelo Ferracuti and La dismissione by Ermanno Rea. It is interesting to notice that there are two English translations, both very recent, which underline the topicality of the book: the first (2014, Telephone Publishing Melbourne) preserves the Italian title, followed by the subtitle The novel of Italy’s hot autumn; the second (2016, Verso Books) is published with the title We want everything.

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mind and lets the stream of his “consciousness” flow, or rather the progressive self-consciousness of the exploitation of his worker condition. Therefore, in the break from the literary codes, by using verbal material as much as the positions of the worker towards the dominant ideology, we can read a text whose rhythm is punctuated, paradoxically, by the absence of punctuation; and it is at the same time a story of life, a document, a testimony, a manifest, which sometimes sounds like a pamphlet. The narration, in first person (without any explicit sign of autobiographism) follows the events live, and marks the milestones of the political maturing and emancipation of the protagonist, an immigrant from southern Italy, a labourer at Fiat, who starts off by claiming better work conditions and ends up by refusing work as such: In fact it’s a shit like all work in fact it’s worse. Every day here they speed up the line. A lot of work and not much money. Here little by little you die without discerning. Which means that it is work that is shit all jobs are shit. There’s no work that is good it is work itself that is shit. Here today if we want to get better we can’t get better by working more. Only by the struggle not by working more that’s the only way we can get better. (Balestrini, [1971] 1999, 40) On the one hand is the dissociation between life, the desire of life and the possibility itself of living; and on the other hand is labour, associated with death and destruction, which gradually becomes a collective breakthrough, of all the workers: what did not make a difference was our will, our logic, our discovery that labour is the only enemy, the only illness […] And the fights against labour I had struggled by myself, resulted to be fights that we could all struggle together and therefore win. (Balestrini, [1971] 1999, 56) And moreover: “Comrades, let’s refuse labour. We want all power, we want all richness […] we must fight in order to stop working […] we must fight against a State based on labour” (Balestrini, [1971] 1999, 79). What does the worker say? That there is a basic incompatibility between life – today we would call it bìos – and labour; and that the integration in the system and the respect of rules end up by destroying human vitality and potentialities. What has been expressed by Balestrini through his labourer, fifty years ago, has been politically voiced by the philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato in his work Marcel Duchamp and the refusal of work; this is what he furthermore states regarding the specificity of the Italian situation: The refusal of work has been mainly practiced in the sixties. It’s an important political and analytical level. If the Italian Marxism still circulates around the world, the one that has taken as main category, the refusal of labour, whereas the rest of Marxism has sanctified labour. In all the other democracies, we thought

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we could affirm that mankind realization is achieved through work. The Italian Marxism is the only one to state: “this is not how things go, on the contrary: we must leave the idea that mankind realization and subjectivity relies on work”. (Lazzarato, 2014b, 4) This was the position of autonomia, as it is also remembered in the recent volume, Il rifiuto del lavoro. Teoria e pratiche nell’autonomia operaia (Ovidi, 2015). Another contribution to this ongoing debate comes from the publication, in 2017, of the volume Quarant’anni contro il lavoro by Bifo, the philosopher and “cultural agitator”9 who was one of the protagonists of the counterculture movement during the years following 1968. The book, which gathers various texts published between 1977 and 2015, opens with a poem by Nanni Balestrini emblematically titled Settanta ancora (The Seventies Again). Throughout the text Bifo insists on the existential, personal, joyful, and liberating dimension of the “refusal of work” which was born out of the contestation movements preceding 1968 and thus acquires also political strength (isn’t the private perhaps political?). The title of the volume underlines the importance that the refusal of work has had in Bifo’s thought and in his entire life for the past four decades. In a video where Bifo presents this book,10 he claims that for centuries we have been fixated with the idea that those who don’t work can’t eat; however, in our contemporary world, where there is not enough work for everybody, we need to separate the right for survival from the obligation to work. By using “us” as a generational attribute, he refers to those forty years during which “we” didn’t work, but lived freely enjoying a lot of things; in other words, according to his liberating and utopic vision, it is possible to be happy only if we liberate ourselves from the blackmail of the pay cheque, of the wage labour, of competition, i.e. from capitalism. Bifo alternates profound critical analyses with provocative expressions, such as this one: “Refusal of work means very simply: ‘I don’t want to go to work because I prefer to sleep’” (Bifo 2017, 326). As another example of that cultural climate, we could also mention Andrea Pazienza, legendary author of comic strips which were formed in the political and cultural melting pot of the 1977 Movement. He was stating that in his life he would avoid working as far as possible and that he was, however, an interpreter of “the scene of the seventies in which he found himself living, and that he was absolutely hostile to obligations, contracts, deadlines and at large to anything that would smell of work” (Toni, 2017). Or we could mention direct reports by the main protagonists of the movement, for example an interesting pamphlet in electronic format, Disoccupate le strade dei sogni, Set the streets of 9 This is how its editor (https://not.neroeditions.com/autori/franco-bifo-berardi/) and Italian Wikipedia defines him (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco_Berardi). 10 https://www.deriveapprodi.com/2017/06/franco-berardi-bifo-parla-di-quarantannicontro-il-lavoro-video-ii/

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dreams free. A contribution to the selfmanagement of memory, created on the occasion of the celebration of twenty years following 1977, in 1997 by the excomrades of the Circolo del Proletariato Giovanile Cangaçeiros di Torino. In chapter 4, in a section titled The refusal of work, we can read these kind of statements (we have selected three): At the beginning of ’77 I quit my job. Work had become incompatible with the rest of my life, it would burn out too many physical and mental energies. The big debate which was arising about refusal of work helped me to find the courage do try it and therefore for a few years, I put into practice one of the dearest passwords to the movement: take our life back. […] One of the discoveries of ’77 is that one is not a political subject only for the work he does but also for the needs he expresses. […] For me, work, since when I’ve been working, is always been something I did not enjoy. Work marks a distance with my life which I measure with the time I spend and the money I get … Still nowadays if I was asked: is there any job you’d prefer, I swear, I wouldn’t know what to reply: I would not like to work. (Maggio et al, 1997) The above statements are words which express the same vision of life we found in Bifo and also in Nanni Balestrini’s worker in Vogliamo tutto. This combination of elements allows us to assume that there was a significant diffusion of that culture, especially among the younger people, the protesters, the proletarians, the artists, the marginals, the committed ones, etc. We can also observe that this way of life asserts itself in both wings of the movement: the creative, irreverent, transgressive one and the pure, hard, militant one. It is a different line which is drafted in opposition to Pinocchio’s moral line and to the Constitution, in order to affirm that the refusal of the bourgeoisie and its values can be performed first of all by questioning labour and the basis of the system, and by affirming that man, far from fulfilling himself in his job and in the system integration, and far from finding dignity in his job, can reach freedom and joy only when he has freed himself from the obligation of working, an obligation which makes him obedient and subordinate. Work does not make man free! Refusing to work means avoiding submission. We have seen several signs indicating that in recent years this attitude has strengthened, at least in the theoretical debate resumed by the protagonists of the seventies or by their faint imitations and probably in a concession to the new debate about universal income which, indeed, dissociates work from income.11 11 In addition to the two publications already indicated, Ovidi and Bifo, we would like to mention the series of interviews published in 2015 in Alfabeta: https://www.alfabeta2. it/categorie/rifiutodellavoro/, about the refusal of work in the view of autonomistic

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Literature, on the other hand, does not seem to be reactive in this frame work. Can we consider Works, by Vitaliano Trevisan, a book against work? We don’t think it has been written with a protesting approach, given that it expresses an ambiguous position about the relationship of the protagonist with work, as we will now see. Before that, however, we would like to point out that a similar position can be found in another novel, published by the same publisher, one year after Works: and that is Ipotesi di una sconfitta, by Giorgio Falco (2017). Both tell the stories of sons, who fail in all their attempts to fulfil themselves through work, but in the end they achieve fulfilment through writing, unlike their parents whose lives have been marked by work, perhaps not prestigious, but carried out with honesty and which has given them dignity and social integration. The publisher’s presentations aim to locate these two books within that literary tradition which starts with Volponi, Ottieri and Bianciardi;12 however, we don’t think that the above works can be easily placed among the literary industrial production of the sixties, nor in the current production about the end of industrialization and precariousness; nor to a greater extent in the less followed line of the refusal of work: they are actually symptomatic of a cultural and social climate in which we could define identity crisis, discomfort, individual failure.13 If we look more closely at the Trevisan book, we see that it reads as an autobiography, more precisely as a memoir, in which the author tells us about his twenty years of insignificant jobs, of the numerous and various working experiences, before asserting himself as a writer. At first glance, the protagonist’s ups and downs seem to be more related to a sort of refusal of work than to an imposed precariousness; to man “sentenced” to work:14 and political key; see also: “Il rifiuto del lavoro. Teoria e pratiche nell’Autonomia operaia”, 21 September 2015, InfoAut, https://www.infoaut.org/segnalazioni/il-ri fiuto-del-lavoro-teoria-e-pratiche-nellautonomia-operaia. The coincidence of the debate about the universal income, does not seem accidental. 12 From the cover flap of Ipotesi di una sconfitta: “Only by narrating the 20th century epopee, can Falco fitness its gradual disintegration, through his own countless professional experiences […] An endless chain of jobs which he started and then lost […] this is also the intimate, surgical even comic, story of a slow training to become a writer. And the way a man can live without being unable to adjust. By entering a big literary tradition which spreads out from Volponi to Ottieri and Bianciardi, Giorgio Falco writes a fantastic novel about work, which from epic narration develops into a failure chronicle.” 13 In this context, the protagonists of those two books, who live these experiences of work failures mainly in the eighties and nineties, can be listed in those categories of “inepts” finally achieved by Emanuela Spinelli in her Una ribellione mancata. La figura dell’inetto nella letteratura di fine Novecento (2017, Verona, ombrecorte). 14 From the cover flap of Works: “The very human condemnation of work, for Vitaliano Trevisan starts when he is fifteen […] The author starts a career which is dotted of false starts: from laborer to sailing boats manufacturer, from waiter to surveyor, from unemployed to ice cream vendor in Germany, from warehouseman to night watchman, up to drug dealing and theft, ‘a business which complies with the fucking market rules’”.

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Well, you feel like working? I can’t say I remember that, but in front of evidence, I may certainly have said so, as well as later on, dealing with this stupid question, which would often occur during my lifetime, I would have always said yes, not because I really felt like working, but simply because I always needed to. (Trevisan, 2016, 150/8870) The protagonist, indeed, always manages to find a job, rather quickly, which shouldn’t be surprising in the region of Veneto where the unemployment rate is very low, and where work is “religion” (Trevisan, 2016, 139/8870). The protagonist, however, complains about it, regrets having being employed and not being able to drift away: Why do I always find a job? Why don’t they leave me to drift away peacefully, to become a tramp? One of the possibilities I was considering: which I’m still considering: Then I don’t have the courage: I recall my father, Arthur the policeman, his uniform always impeccable; and my grandfather, his dignity when wearing his festivities suit. Nonsense, which I always recall. (Trevisan, 2016, 7215/8870) Trevisan recreates a well-known vision: one either works and is fit and respected, or does not work and becomes marginalized and an outcast. The two male models, father and grandfather, which he does not question – he actually respects them – are way too strong and do not allow him to deliver a fundamental criticism about the work value. We notice that his protagonist manages twice to obtain a permanent job, he can therefore come out from precariousness and enjoy good conditions of work. On various occasions he claims he loves his job, especially when he works manually together with his team where there is a good fellowship spirit; indeed, a very masculine one. He has another problem: he doesn’t feel fulfilled in any of his jobs because he wants to be a writer, that is the job he wants, and he wants it even before starting to write, it is his ambition, a deep desire, the purpose of his life. Therefore, the narration of his jobs ends at the same moment he asserts himself as a writer. The jobs he has had would only respond to materialistic survival needs; and he had managed to survive when these needs were provided for by his mother first and then his wife, or even the drug dealing (which the narrator would not consider a job). In other words, there isn’t a criticism of the neoliberal society, nor of the economic model of the Italian northeast and even less of the precariousness. It is not a criticism of the exploitation, but the story of the unsuitability of the protagonist to the “alimentary” work, which he needs to perform at the expense of his literary vocation. He wants to write and not to have a salaried job. His ups and downs are expressed in the literary form which falls within the tendency to

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realism,15 common in the most recent literature and which appeals to evidence, inquiry, memoires, etc. Some critics have praised the modernity of the book, the innovative contribution and the impact of the breaking of the linguistic codes; however, these aspects do not seem very obvious. It is another important element which makes a distinction between Trevisan’s book and Balestrini’s novel Vogliamo tutto, which is defined by significant research of the literary material and by a real formal and linguistic break-up. In conclusion, the numerous literary works which deal with the question of labour, published in Italy in recent years, are mainly focused on (against) the precariousness and the difficult conditions of work; they demand work, regret its disappearance, even when this was hard and heavy, by actually reintroducing the idea historically anchored in Italian culture that man cannot exist without labour; without labour he no longer has dignity nor individual value. There is as well another vision, the opposition to labour, although less visible; after its expansion in the seventies it resurfaces in these years of crisis. In Vogliamo tutto, the refusal of work would become the principle of life, and there was no solution other than a radical change to a system based on the requirement of work to justify one’s existence and to guarantee survival. In Works, the protagonist who is – at least on the generational and cultural level – the legacy of that refusal of work, is not interested in the matter of class nor in the criticism of the system; it is his individual problem, which has after all an individual solution – the artistic career – a solution which is obviously possible only for those who have vocation, talent and some sort of luck. While in Vogliamo tutto a new form of group consciousness would take shape through the refusal of labour, in Works the camaraderie and the old paternalistic corporation are almost idealized, and rather the new rich class with its predatory manners and also the social-welfare public administration are considered negative. In other words, if it is true that Works is rooted in those 1960s and 1970s years so well outlined in Balestrini’s novel (and in different terms by Bifo, Pazienza and Lazzarato and Cangaceiros), his book, shaped today as an autobiographic memoir, deletes completely the political and collective dimension as well as the utopian and libertarian impetus by individualizing the refusal of labour and by making it a private matter. As if, without an artistic vocation, which justifies and explains the professional failures of the protagonist, the same fact of refusing labour, nowadays, would be indecent. As if, in the context of the “end” of labour, it is no longer a matter of claiming liberation from the bond of labour.

15 As we all know, the debate about the new realisms has been launched in the journal Allegoria number 57/2008, whose dossier Ritorno alla realtà. Narrativa e cinema alla fine del postmoderno (Back to reality. Narrative and cinema at the end of the postmodern), was edited by R. Donnarumma, G. Policastro, G. Taviani, and followed by many studies, among which we can point out Ipermodernità (R. Donnarumma, 2014) and Contarini S., De Paulis M., Tosatti A., Nuovi realismi. Il caso italiano. Definizioni, questioni, prospettive (2016).

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Bibliography Balestrini, N., [1971] 1999, Vogliamo tutto, Milano, RCS. Bifo, Berardi F., 2017, Quarant’anni contro il lavoro, Roma, Derive Approdi. Chirumbolo, P., 2013, Letteratura e lavoro. Conversazioni critiche, Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino. Collodi, C., [1881] 2014, The adventures of Pinocchio, translated by P.M.D. Panton; the Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi makes this text available on its website http:// www.pinocchio.it/pagine/traduzione_testo/Adventures_of_Pinocchio.pdf Condello, A., Toracca, T., 2016, “Lavoro, identità: riflessioni tra letteratura e diritto”, Il ponte, 20 March, https://www.ilponterivista.com/blog/2016/03/20/lavoro-identita -riflessioni-letteratura-diritto/ Contarini, S. (ed.), 2010, Letteratura e azienda. Rappresentazioni letterarie dell’economia e del lavoro nell’Italia degli anni 2000, Narrativa, 31/32, Nanterre, Presses Universitaires Paris Nanterre. Contarini, S., Jansen, M., Ricciardi, S. (eds.), 2015, Le culture del precariato, Verona, Ombre corte. Cortellessa, A., 2016, “Vitaliano Trevisan, da dove viene”, Le parole e le cose, 13 June, http://www.leparoleelecose.it/?p=23386 Falco, G., 2017, Ipotesi di una sconfitta, Torino, Einaudi. Lazzarato, M., 2014a, “Le refus du travail aujourd’hui”, Le printemps des Labo, 10 May, no. 2, http://www.cip-idf.org/IMG/pdf/le_refus_du_travail_aujourd_hui.pdf Lazzarato, M., 2014b, Marcel Duchamp and the refusal of work, Los Angeles, Semiotext(e). Maggio, M., Picciuolo, V., Pedone, M., Porta, R., Silvestrini, T., 1997, Disoccupate le strade dai sogni, http://www.strano.net/cangaceiros/welcome.htm Ovidi, O., 2015, Il rifiuto del lavoro. Teoria e pratiche nell’autonomia operaia, Roma, Bordeaux edizioni. Panella, C., 2016, “La vita è un lavoro da sbrigare, scrivendo”, L’Indice, October,, https:// www.lindiceonline.com/osservatorio/economia-e-politica/vitaliano-trevisan-works/ Polenchi, F., 2016, “Gli straordinari di Vitaliano Trevisan. Una lettura”, Alfabeta2, 21 September, https://www.alfabeta2.it/tag/vitaliano-trevisan Spinelli, E., 2017, Una ribellione mancata. La figura dell’inetto nella letteratura di fine Novecento, Verona, ombrecorte. Toni, G., 2017, Urgenze sovversive. “Perché la pazienza ha un limite, Pazienza no”, Carmilla, Milano-Udine, Mimesis edizioni, https://www.carmillaonline.com/2017/09/16/urgen ze-sovversive-perche-la-pazienza-ha-un-limite-pazienza-no/ Trevisan, V., 2016, Works, Torino, Einaudi. Urbinati, N., 2017, Costituzione italiana: art. 1, Roma, Carocci.

Chapter 15

Labour and identity in documentary web series on new Italian emigrants Monica Jansen

Introduction Giovanni Veronesi’s film Non è un paese per giovani (Veronesi 2017) could serve as an introduction to the topic of this chapter: the self-narrations of young Italians abroad in web series. Veronesi’s film combines the genres of comedy and coming of age drama, and springs from the life stories of young Italians abroad that were broadcast on Radio 2, by the director’s radio programme of the same title. In Veronesi’s film, about two Italian youngsters from Rome leaving everything behind to start a Wi-Fi enterprise in Cuba, real facts are inserted into the narration in the form of video messages sent by young Italians from all over the world, as such echoing the use that new migrants make of YouTube and Facebook in order to share their stories on various media platforms. The film criticizes the framing of these stories by public media in order to create an image of gain, rather than loss, of labour potential for the economic growth of a “Greater Italy”. This artificial optimism is mirrored in the plotline invented by the positive video message of the character in the film that eventually fails to construct a better life abroad, and disappears without leaving any trace behind. The film also deconstructs the master narrative that Italy’s new emigration would principally be one of “cervelli in fuga” (“brains on the run”). The characters in the film are fortune seekers without a clear professional profile, like the job they apply for. The comedy genre is used here to deconstruct certain preconcepts about workers and work, and to formulate a hypothesis on the transformation of labour into immaterial labour, and on the condition of non-labour. This transformation prospects non-labour, on the one hand, as a utopia – the idyllic setting of Cuba’s beaches in combination with a love story – and, on the other hand, as a condition that replicates the capitalist system of social conflict and exploitation. This ambivalence between the drivers of “forced” migration and “free” mobility also informs the narratives of documentary web series on Italians abroad, which were first produced online around 2013–2014, coinciding with the years of the highest figures of emigration from Italy. In around 2016, the format seemed to have reached its peak of popularity, and went in search of new formats of stories to

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narrate. Between 2016 and 2017, Johanne Affricot produced a new web series (Affricot 2018) for the TV channel GRIOT,1 on black Italian creatives abroad, entitled “The Expats”, thus also questioning Italian migrant identity.2 In fact, contemporary Italy should be conceived as a migratory “crossroads”, in the sense that the numbers of people who immigrate into the country and those who emigrate from it practically coincide (Pugliese 2018, 122);3 moreover, among those who emigrate there are many foreigners who have previously settled in Italy, and who decide to continue their migrant experience elsewhere, following routes that often coincide with those taken by the Italian emigrants (Pugliese 2018, 127). These documentary web series, produced between 2013 and 2018, can be analysed as examples of transnational life-writing that cross the borders between fiction and non-fiction. The interview format is often combined with metafictional reflections on mental and bodily displacement, and on cultural difference, and makes reference to the self-narrations of migrants in digital media. This chapter aims to compare the data that emerge from economic and sociological studies on new emigration from Italy with the narratives on the internet produced on and by these new migrants. The web series format allows the makers to frame these narrations between fiction and non-fiction, and thus to compare the hegemonic discourses on emigration and labour with the narrated autobiographical experience of living and working abroad. This approach also enables the examination of these stories as reflections on what it means to understand life and labour in a “postmigratory” perspective, that is to say, in narratives that are “united by a common attempt to overcome prevalent antagonisms and to examine strategies and concepts for a more inclusive world, built on the acknowledgement of the diversity and complex coexistence of people in contemporary societies” (Ring Petersen and Schramm 2017, 9).

1. Migration as expulsion: brain drain, gain or waste? Within the logics of migration as “expulsion”, that is, as a condition for capitalist expansion,4 brain drain is perceived in terms of a “gain”. This principle informs 1 2

3

4

GRIOT is “a creative and cultural platform celebrating Arts, Music, Style, Culture from Africa, its diaspora and beyond”. http://griotmag.com/en/about/ (Affricot 2018). “In the international community, the term ‘expat’ is often associated with white people who expatriate-emigrate for work-related reasons and are privileged because of that, while Africans and other nationalities are mainly called ‘immigrants’. […] The series aims at counterbalancing the lack of representation of Afro-Italians (and other people with multiple cultural backgrounds) in the Italian media” (Affricot 2019, 127). To this one could add that the Italian diaspora has produced over time “a population of an estimated 60 million descendants (Rapporto 2012, 2) scattered around the globe, a number curiously close to that of the residents of Italy in 2014 (almost 60 million)” (Fiore 2017, 9). “Migration […] is neither entirely free nor forced – the two are part of the same regime of social motion. The concept of expulsion simply means the degree to which a migrant is deprived or dispossessed of a certain status in this regime” (Nail 2015, 3).

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the master narrative on Italian new migration, which is often explained exclusively in terms of a brain drain. Indicative of this narration is the “Cartoline dall’altra Italia” web series, produced by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which started in 2015 (9Colonne 2015); the first season was about Italians abroad, and the latest season, in 2017, was exclusively about Italian researchers abroad. This approach, pointing out Italian “excellence”, furthermore coincides with initiatives of the Italian Institutes and Embassies abroad; an example of this is the 2017 issue of Cartaditalia, which is entirely dedicated to the new frontiers of Italian scientific research. The introduction to the volume stresses the high quality of Italian researchers, but also mentions the scarcity of job opportunities in Italy: The educational system that has produced these young researchers demonstrates that it is able to motivate young people and provide them with a solid foundation, enabling them to take on the most ambitious challenges. The scant resources allocated for scientific research and education in Italy, though clearly in some ways effective, do not, however, enable our young to fulfil their ambitions, nor, above all, do they enable our local companies to benefit, as they should, from all the technological and economic spin-offs. (De Biase 2017, 17) The issue of the present brain drain Italian economy is suffering from was first raised by a number of journalistic reports published between 2001–2002 and 2003, with alarming titles such as “Cervelli export”, “Cervelli in fuga” and “Cervelli in gabbia” (“jailed brains”) (Morano Foadi 2006, 212). Since then, different explanations have been given, especially from a socio-economic point of view, for the drivers and characteristics of this highly skilled emigration and, more generally, of the renewal of Italian emigration from 2010 onwards. Crucial in these studies is the year 2008, which coincides with the international financial crisis that hit Italy in a particular way, because it “aggravated […] the political and economic instability Italy has been struggling with since the early 1990s” (Tintori and Romei 2017, 50). In line with other Southern European countries, “Italy relied on labour market liberalisation to increase employment, foster productivity and restart growth”, and “the 2008 crisis provoked a substantial acceleration in this process” (Fana, Guarascio and Cirillo 2016, 79–80). The years 2013–2014, measured using the figures of the National Statistics Institute (ISTAT) for 2014–2015, contain the highest figures in the last ten years – 89,000 and 82,000 individuals, respectively – of Italian nationals moving their residency abroad, reaching 139,000 people in 2014 if we include foreigners leaving the country (Tintori and Romei 2017, 52). The ISTAT figures for 2016 register 114,000 Italian nationals moving abroad, meaning that this year marks the highest peak so far in Italy’s emigration since 1970 (Pugliese 2018, 10). This increase of emigration from Italy also shows the exceptionality of the country’s economy within Europe: “Italy’s was the only one to contract among major European economies, and in the first half of 2015 it grew at half the speed

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of the average of the Eurozone” (Tintori and Romei 2017, 50). The slow recovery of Italy’s economy – in 2015 unemployment slowly started to decline, dropping to 12% of the population (Tintori and Romei 2017, 51) – as well as the long-lasting problems of youth unemployment – in 2015 youth unemployment reached 41%, third in the Eurozone after Greece and Spain (Tintori and Romei 2017, 51), while this was less than 20% in 2008 (Minneci 2015, 175) – and of the gender gap – according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), nearly half of the Italian female population (45%) is inactive (Tintori and Romei 2017, 51) – is evidence of the fact that the reforms enacted since the 1990s have failed to reach their main goals. The job reforms of the Biagi law in 2003, the Monti-Fornero reform in 2012 and the Jobs Act in 2014, are all responsible for the creation of two parallel and unequal workers’ trajectories: one of permanent contracts dating to before the austerity politics, and one of flexible temporary contracts offered to those currently entering the flexible job market (Tintori and Romei 2017, 62). In sum, liberalizing the labour market has resulted ineffective to solve three specific and long-lasting structural Italian diseases: the under-representation of women and young people in the labour market; the North-South dualism, with the South lagging behind in terms of employment rates and industrial production; the overall weak Italian productivity dynamics compared to its main competitors. (Fana, Guarascio and Cirillo 2015, 3) In this light, the three main “hegemonic public discourses” on brain drain in the media seem to be in contrast with numerical and experiential data, which cover a much larger and transversal phenomenon. The first is a positive one, of the “new mobility” of the so-called “Eurostars”, “a generation of highly-skilled and intensely mobile people who are equipped to roam between ‘Eurocities’ and global capitals to make the best out of the ‘human face’ of globalization” (Tintori and Romei 2017, 58). The second, more pessimistic, is still focused on the young and talented, speaks of “forced migration” also in political terms, and presents the “fuga dei cervelli” as the only acceptable solution for the “best of Italy” (Tintori and Romei 2017, 58). The third discourse is the “brain drain frenzy” put forward by Italian newspapers, with a flood of reportages on talented Italians abroad and the parallel – albeit unintended – “legitimation” of anti-immigrant discourses in those same media (Tintori and Romei 2017, 59). What is missing in Italy is “brain circulation” (Minneci 2015, 173), notwithstanding the approval by Berlusconi’s government in 2010 of Law 238 and other similar initiatives, aimed at encouraging skilled EU citizens to come and work in Italy (Tintori and Romei 2017, 60), and due perhaps to the “insurmountable obstacles to gain access to the research system” for non-Italians (Morano Foadi 2006, 217). In Italy, the adoption of return policies has not been counterbalanced by retention policies, “aimed at giving a boost to certain sectors” (Minneci 2015, 176). Furthermore, as statistical

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data show, in Italy rates of unemployment among those with a tertiary education are not much lower than the unemployment rates of those without an education, and, compared to other developed countries, Italy does not export more graduates (Tintori and Romei 2017, 61). Hence, the young people who emigrate “are not necessarily skilled, or they don’t necessarily end up working in highly-skilled sectors” (Tintori and Romei 2017, 59). The idea that only highly-skilled young Italians leave the country – a phenomenon that public discourse explains positively as well as dramatically, namely in terms of a “gain” and a “loss” of talents – should therefore be corrected and, with it, also the assumptions for the pull factors for going abroad. Although according to the ISTAT figures of 2017 only 30% of young people older than 24 have a university degree, and 70% have a degree inferior to that, media discourses are monopolized by the former category (Pugliese 2018, 53). It is true that Italy is one of the countries that exports a large amount of talented people (Pugliese 2018, 73), but this is also a result of the fact that Italy’s enduring crisis has coincided with the recovery of economies in other European countries. Another novelty is the elevated presence of women – 45% of the total – who leave autonomously, and with the same profile as male emigrants of their age and education level (Pugliese 2018, 52). Although the emigration of young people prevails – in 2017, the Registry of Italians Living Abroad (AIRE) counted 39,000 individuals in the age group 18–34, and 27,000 in the age group 35–49, both of which are increasing (Pugliese 2018, 51) – this new emigration is also undertaken by a group of elderly people, who are mobilized by “sun migrations” or by reasons linked to better elderly care (Pugliese 2018, 60).5 In general, the drivers behind emigration are twofold, and can be linked to two recent developments: the process of European integration and the increase of EU mobility on the one hand, and the financial crisis of 2008 and its consequences at national and international levels, on the other hand. The first one is generally connected to different forms of “lifestyle migrations”, while the second is identified with those growing numbers of emigrants who leave because they need to find a job (Pugliese 2018, 58). This difference has also found expression in the concepts that are used to characterize free choice versus forced migration: “expat” versus “migrant”, “mobility” versus “emigration” (Pugliese 2018, 64, n. 1). Both motivations are often present at the same time, and mixed into the various typologies of prevalently young emigrants from Italy (Pugliese 2018, 62). Apart from the search for a better job, a general discontent also seems to prevail among young Italians, with working and living conditions in the homeland, as becomes clear from their self-narrations (Pugliese 2018, 63). This driver seems to be stronger than the fact that not all highly-skilled workers end up finding jobs at the level of 5

Recently also, the parents and grandparents of “cervelli in fuga” have organized themselves and created a blog: “Mamme di Cervelli in Fuga. Il blog delle mamme e delle famiglie dei nuovi expat”, https://www.mammedicervellinfuga.com/. This shows how Italian families are expanding beyond national borders.

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their qualifications. In the growing sector of catering and services (Pugliese 2018, 75), emigrants are hired on a fixed-term basis for low-qualified jobs and with minimum wages. But also at higher employment levels, short-term and low-paid jobs prevail because of the liberalization of the labour market in all European countries.6 In general, emigrants have to face atypical contracts that no longer guarantee the job stability offered by Fordism, and a job market that is characterized by this occupational dualism between high- and low-qualified work as well as by the generalized condition of precarity (Pugliese 2018, 77). This present phase could therefore be typified by the extension of the demand of labour and a reduction in its quality (Pugliese 2018, 79). However, the increasing amount of “brain waste” and underemployment of European graduates in their countries of destination (Minneci 2015, 174) cannot be explained as a result of precarity alone. The choice to accept jobs that are not on a higher pay level could also point towards changed expectations for the improvement of one’s existence, beyond job fulfilment. A recent empirical study on alternative emigration flows of highly-skilled young Italians in the Eurozone, not towards the “blue banana” (Northern Europe) but, instead, towards the socalled “red octopus” (Southern and Eastern Europe) (Minneci 2015, 178), shows that for these mobile subjects a higher quality of life is considered more important than better pay: “a growing number of […] professionals and academics may be pushed to leave because they do not feel that their potential can be fully realized in their country, rather than for fear of real unemployment” (Minneci 2015, 179). This means that the wide variety of destinations chosen by highly-skilled Italians cannot be reduced to the traditional “blue banana”, and thus does not entirely coincide with migrations for economic reasons (Minneci 2015, 179). In other words, “it is clear that the crisis tends to have a greater impact on workers who move for economic reasons, but it is less clear whether today highlyskilled workers are moving especially for these reasons” (Minneci 2015, 180). This trend – to value cultural drivers more than politico-economic conditions – has been identified with a new figure of the migrant, whose identity is not rooted in national identity but in a displaced form of ethnocentrism. These global nomads, or neo-nomads, perform an “expressive expatriation”: global nomads constitute a negative diaspora, as they see themselves as part of a trans-ethnic dispersion of peoples that despise homeland-centred identities. Their identity as a diasporic formation is not based on ethnic or national nostalgias, but rather on a fellowship of counter-hegemonic practice and lifestyle. (D’Andrea 2006, 102)

6

Cf. the casualization and precarization of university staff and its consequences (i.e. Loveday 2018).

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The annual Rapporto italiani nel mondo series produced by the Fondazione Migrantes, the pastoral organism of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI), which contains an analysis of ISTAT and statistics provided by AIRE, offers – in each volume – a special focus on new trends in Italy’s migrations around the globe. One of these is the emigration of “new Italians”, introduced in the 2016 issue with a contribution on an Italian Bengalese in London (Licata 2016, 18–19). The matter is discussed in the 2017 issue, with special attention being given to the departures of “new Italians”, identified as “mobile talents”. The emigration of these naturalized Italians is characterized as being “self-oriented” and not projected towards the improvement of the economic condition of the families of origin of these neo-migrants, as had often been the case with their parents (Licata 2017, 15). According to the 2016 ISTAT figures analysed in the 2018 issue, of 675,000 foreigners who became Italian between 2012 and 2016, 25,000 went abroad and 54.1% of these emigrated in 2016 (Licata 2018, 14). It is striking that the Fondazione Migrantes reports all stress the necessity of creating circular migration patterns.

2. The diaspora of Italians abroad in documentary web series One of the significant differences between “old” and “new” migration communities lies in “the new models of community narratives and socio-cultural discourses developed by Italian migrants thanks to an increasingly widespread use of the social Web” (Graziano 2012, 4). What is more, digital communication media allow for a growing interconnectedness, and convert the linearity of migration into the circularity of transnational movement (Graziano 2012, 4). The social web is predominantly managed by what Graziano calls the members of a “highly-qualified diaspora” (Graziano 2012, 20) which manifests itself as an “e-diaspora”, and is used not only to verbalize and share the experience of living and working abroad, but also to interact with the socio-economic discourse of the homeland and to express criticism on the pitfalls of its failing job policies. A difference should therefore be made here between government-monitored media, which fall under the “assistance” offered by national and regional institutions to Italians abroad (Tintori and Romei 2017, 59), and self-sponsored media of self-expression, some of which have been changed from blogs to book publications (see, for instance, journalist Cucchiarato’s Vivo altrove of 2010). “Newcomers” in the field of digital storytelling are the documentary web series on Italians abroad, which could be considered as a follow-up to the blogs and video interviews produced by the “brain drain frenzy” of the Italian media. The web series’ serial storytelling hybridizes the traditional languages of television and cinema with the interactive communication tools offered by the internet (in particular in its function as Web 2.0), both on the level of user-generated content and fandom, and on the level of its “viral” distribution (Lino 2016, 4–5). What is more, web series “are audiovisual forms on the Internet that are serial, fictional, and have the basic structures of a narrative” (Kuhn 2014, 143). This second

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definition stresses the fact that web series are fictional and serial. The web series considered in this chapter are limited to those conceived through the format of a video blog or documentary, but which could still be considered fictional if regarded as “pseudo-authentic”: “Pseudo-authentic web series imitate regular video blogging. They pretend to have been produced by normal amateur users. They are published on video-platforms like YouTube where professional, commercial and amateur users meet” (Kuhn 2014, 143). The hybridization of a professional production team from Italy with mobile subjects, within the setting of their destination countries, enforces the experiential truth of the life stories told, which can be shared on the web, but also creates a meta-reflexive level on the topic of mobility. The public is invited to switch between the interviewer, whose viewpoint investigates and experiences mobility from the outside, and the interviewees or protagonists of Italy’s new emigration; the characters are prevalently young, as are the viewers of these web series (Kuhn 2014, 145). The use of network capabilities is one of the main properties of web series (Kuhn 2014, 138) as it is of new emigration’s online community building (Pugliese 2018, 96). The short discussion that follows departs from the main discourses on Italy’s new emigration, its main characteristics and its evolution, and analyses the web series in parallel with a reflection on Italian mobilities: namely from the viewpoint of post-migrant narratives that are linked to – but also detached from – the concept of diaspora in their questioning “of belonging with others in the world” as an “active mode of worldmaking” (Ring Petersen and Schramm 2017, 9). “Cartoline dall’altra Italia” (“Postcards from the other Italy”) is a web series produced by the news agency 9Colonne (2015), in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These messages from “The other Italy” are presented on the Farnesina website as follows: The interviews of ‘Postcards from the other Italy’ give a dynamic, natural, practical and updated storyboard of the other Italy, the one beyond the national borders: the dreams, expectations, comparisons, joys and disappointments of young Italians who have opted for making an experience abroad, whether for will or for necessity, using their testimonials to maintain that unbreakable tie that links them to their Country of origin.7 The first episode, of the first series of 19 episodes, started on 15 June 2015, with Giacomo Lariccia, a musician and Italian singer living in Brussels, was followed on 2 August 2016 by a second series of 25 episodes. The last episode was recorded on 6 December 2016, telling the story of Giuseppe Rizzo, 32 years old, who started a business selling Sicilian focaccia in Singapore. Afterwards, 9Colonne produced five other series that are not reproduced on the Farnesina website, and which address the following topics: “La nostra lingua va di moda” (17 October 7

https://www.esteri.it/mae/en/sala_stampa/archivionotizie/approfondimenti/2016/ 11/cartoline-dall-altra-italia-a-bruxelles.html

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2016, three episodes); “Parlano i direttori stranieri dei musei italiani” (7–9 November 2011, seven episodes); “Italiani Brexit” (19 October–20 November 2017, ten episodes); “L’Italia nel futuro: parola ai nostri ricercatori” (23 November 2017–18 January 2018, 15 episodes); “Study in Italy” (19 June 2018, ten episodes). The format of these video interviews, recorded during this four-year production period, remained more or less the same and, as I have shown, is the object of parody in creative productions. A journalist, visible in the first episodes and subsequently only through a voiceover, conducts three- to five-minute interviews with an emigrated Italian, framed in an interior just as in a Skype conversation.8 The interviewee answers the questions in a fast rhythm, and while he or she speaks, data are projected in a column on the right with additional facts on the presented case; for instance, when interviewing Lariccia, a text appears saying that 35% of the population of Brussels is foreign. In the first two series of “Cartoline dall’altra Italia”, interviewees are all successful and representative of different sectors of the post-Fordist labour market. They also belong to the young emigrants covering both age groups, and their destinations reflect the global dimension of Italian migration that corresponds to the records of AIRE. The protagonists of the 2017 “L’Italia nel futuro” series, however, are all highly-skilled Italians, who seem to re-emphasize the “brain drain” discourse, but with an emphasis on Italian “excellence”, in accordance with the Cartaditalia volume mentioned above. The latest series on foreign students in Italy could be read as an attempt to address the issue of brain circulation. The focus on Brexit is telling for the strong presence of “old” and “new” Italian migrants in London – nowadays hosting more than 200,000 Italian people, the capital has become the symbol of the new wave of migration from Italy (Scotto 2015, 153) – and in the UK as a whole, which has also become the topic of the 2016 National Geographic web documentary, “Italians and the UK. Stories of Contemporary and Historic Italian Immigration in the UK” by Lorenzo Colantoni and Riccardo Venturi, supported by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.9 The award-winning documentary “Emergency Exit – Young Italians abroad”, produced in 2014 by writer and director Brunella Filì (b. 1982) (Filì 2014), attracted international attention to the “exodus” or “diaspora” of 90% of Italy’s graduates, in newspapers and television news shows.10 The project was followed, in 2016, by the web series “Emergency Exit”, of which three episodes can be watched online: the pilot episode on Brussels (private video), the first episode on Oman (open access) and the second one on Lisbon (private video). The web series project was sponsored by the Apulia Film Commission and by Ufficio Pugliesi nel Mondo, in 2015, and in each episode a number of the interviewed young 8 The only exception on this format is the most recent “Study in Italy” series, which has a more dynamic style. 9 (Lorenzo and Venturi 2016). 10 See the Press section of the press kit of “Emergency Exit”, http://emergencyexit.it/ images/docs/EmergencyExit_presskitENGNov2014.pdf

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migrants are from the Puglia region. Additionally, they are followed “on the road” during their trips back home, thus focusing on emigration from the South and stressing a regional identity.11 According to the director’s statement on the “Emergency Exit” documentary website, “[t]he film is the result of the urgent need for a not generic, in-depth analysis of the diaspora and its consequences, listening to those directly involved, on the spot, and by giving them a voice. What happened to Italy? Is it so hard to imagine a future here?”12 Filì, herself from Puglia, uses dramatic wordings, speaking of the lost generation under 40 that is literally “bleeding out of the country’s frontiers, without finding a return ticket”. Interviewed for The Guardian, while working on the documentary in 2013, she says that her generation has been forgotten and has no choice other than to look for a better life elsewhere: interviewer Lizzy Davies says that Filì “is at pains to stress that, for the people she knows, leaving was not something they did just to broaden their horizons or to take some time out of the rat race. To them, amid rising unemployment in a labour market already divided along generational lines, it felt a matter of basic necessity” (Davies 2013). The Lisbon episode of the “Emergency Exit” series, according to the synopsis on the website, is about love and the personal search for happiness. If the absence of work motivates the decision to leave, it is not possible to speak of emigration in terms of free choice. The conclusion to be drawn from these interviews should therefore be that the conflict between those expectations that were negated in the country of departure and fulfilled instead in the country of arrival, produces not only an exodus but also a fragmentation of identity, so radical in those who leave that it does not allow the interviewees to feel happy, even if they succeeded in finding a job. Interestingly enough, the three interviewees – Roberto from Rome and Clelia from Tuscany (both researchers), and Mino from Andria in Puglia (a self-made entrepreneur) – confirm this reading because of the contrast they experience between the working conditions they left behind, on the one hand, and the meritocracy within the university and the appropriate financing for starters they found in Portugal, on the other. However, one of them, Clelia, also mentions her choice to escape from the hegemonic, economic narrative in Italy that stresses the priority of finding a job, which risked influencing negatively her desire for self-fulfilment. By going abroad, she not only found employment, but also the opportunity and the room to create a better life quality for herself and Roberto. The same is true for Mino, who left a “permanent” job in Italy to join his girlfriend in Lisbon, and who succeeded in becoming self-employed through a project of his own invention. In this web series, the new mobiles focus on the affects that are involved in becoming transnational, and on the search for work as the experiment of Italian mobility. This makes it possible to view these young Italians – directed towards the “red octopus” of Portugal – as prototypes of those new migrants who, besides 11 http://www.emergencyexit.it/series.html 12 http://emergencyexit.it/english.html

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the need to find a job, give priority to self-orientation. Hence, they could maybe also fit into the category of “expressive expats”, even if not in the radicalized version of a “negative diaspora” made of “countercultural (nomadic) lifestyles” (D’Andrea 2006, 102, 100). The “Italiani all’estero” (“Italians abroad”) web series,13 hosted by the Neapolitan webzine Fandango.it, is written and presented by Ugo Capolupo, a Neapolitan filmmaker and also the producer of a candid camera series of social experiments in the style of Nanni Loy. The first season of this series started in October 2014, with five episodes on Italians living in Madrid, Dublin, London, Berlin and Paris, and continued with a second season of five episodes, located in the exotic destinations of Riga, Warsaw, Bucharest, Istanbul and Beirut, the last episode dating from December 2015. Capolupo himself is present as a fellow traveller and a reporter, equipped with those digital devices used by the migrants themselves to communicate in the e-diaspora. He listens with amusement and empathy, and places himself in the position of the interviewees; in the Istanbul episode, for instance, he declares himself to be an Italian abroad for one month as well. The Neapolitans featured in each episode are friends of the director or members of the same ethnic community, but they are also part of this new emigration of prevalently young, highly-skilled and creative expats who have a chance abroad to make their talents bloom, to start a family and to participate in the education of the next, post-migrant, generation. In each episode, the family formed in the country of arrival is presented as a snapshot of happiness, and as the proof that these emigrants are in the process of becoming transnational citizens. Professional and mental openness of the host society towards the newcomers is compared with a lack of recognition in the homeland. The Berlin episode shows, for instance, how this city fosters young creatives and facilitates gay parenthood. The Istanbul episode presents a single Italian mother and manager at the top of The Business Year global media group, who claims her successful career is the result of her skills being more appreciated in Turkey. Every episode ends with the question, “What do you think of Italy?”, which is answered in negative terms in relation to the immobile situation in the home country, but in positive terms when related to how the interviewees’ Italianess is admired and rewarded in the different destination cities, thanks to the myth of Italy. It seems that Italy’s is a problem of valorisation of talents, not one of resources. The format of filming Italians abroad “on the road”, instead of with classical video interviews, was first adopted in the 2013 web series “Vivo così” (Michelazzo 2013). It was hosted by the webzine Voglio vivere così, and was edited by Alessandro Castagna, written and directed by Michele Michelazzo and presented by Doris Zacconi. It consisted of three series of ten episodes on the cities of Barcelona (first episode broadcast on 7 January 2013), London (first episode on 18 March) and Berlin (first episode on 27 May), the three European cities with the largest Italian communities. In August 2016, a second “Vivo così” season on Italians in the world was announced on the website, but never realized. The “guide” 13 (Capolupo n.d.).

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in these sequences of three to four minutes is Doris Zacconi, a presenter of Radio Capital, who also comments on what she herself experiences as a mobile reporter, far away from her comfort zone. The genesis of the project reveals how this web series was conceived for the YouTube channel using a format that mixes fiction and real life, on the initiative of the website Voglio vivere così, which hosts stories and interviews with Italians abroad. As explained by Michelazzo, audiovisual media allow for a more dynamic and experiential approach: “The series I decided to realize is made by real persons who do not narrate themselves, but who live and interact with their own habitat. Those of ‘Vivo così’, in fact, are not interviews but encounters.”14 More than a community, these mobile Italians are presented as being selforiented, and the series shows that what they share is the experience of movement that affects their identity. The same is true for reporter Zacconi, who concludes the final episode of the Barcelona series by questioning who she is and responding to herself: “vivo così,” “I just live this way.” This is also true for “Cosa manca – Racconti da Londra”, a documentary web series in ten episodes directed by a young Calabrese filmmaker educated in the UK, Giovanni B. Algieri. It was produced and hosted in 2015 by the “polisblog” Blogo, screened in over 50 schools in Italy and eventually transformed into a book publication with the same title (Algieri 2015a, 2015b).15 Algieri, who – in 2013 – created, wrote and performed the comedy web series “Disoccupescion and Il Pizzo digitale”, together with the group The Solati – Terroni fuori sede, decided to focus on artists because creativity distinguishes all Italians living abroad, and because the artistic and cultural patrimony of young people is not being valorised enough in Italy.16 The real life testimonies narrated in the web series discussed so far are framed within different metanarratives on Italy’s new emigration, and can therefore be said to belong to the category of “pseudo-authentic” web series. Around 2016, the urgency of narrating Italians’ lives abroad through the format of “on the road” encounters seemed to have lost its appeal. A novelty was introduced in 2016– 2017, with Affricot’s web series “The Expats”,17 which produced six episodes on Italian Africans in New York and London. Its timing more or less coincided with the special focuses on “new Italians” in the Rapporto italiani nel mondo volumes discussed above. The series breaks with the limited vision of the Italian national or regional identity of the new emigrants, opening it up to the category of “new Italians”, which turns out to be unknown in Italy as well as in the countries of destination. The narrations of these young creatives, who are followed “strolling” in interaction with their new environment, are not just about the opportunities they found abroad to develop their talents, but mostly about their mixed identity: 14 https://www.voglioviverecosiworld.com/curiosita/il-web-e-grande/come-nasce-vivocosi-la-web-series-ideata-per-raccontare-gli-italiani-nel-mondo 15 Four episodes (1. Estro; 2. Passione; 3. Energia; 4. Ambizione) can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLywj7YUpuBqmhdy-Q6E-yKWuf Y18FGUQb 16 http://www.polisblog.it/post/348420/cosa-manca-racconti-da-londra-1-estro 17 http://theexpats.griotmag.com/en/about/

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being Italian and, at the same time, citizens of the world, they experience their diversity not by being subjected to racism, but rather as a privilege. Urban music is very present in these episodes, as an identity marker more than as a soundtrack, as in the web series “Italiani all’estero” and “Vivo così”. Cecile Emeke’s web series “Strolling”, on the African diaspora, may have acted as an example for Affricot. Emeke’s series also contains two episodes on the African diaspora in Italy, produced in October and November 2015, with the title “Passeggiando”.18

3. Labour, identity and the condition of post-migration If we consider the self-representations of new Italian migrants in these documentary web series, the government-sponsored “Cartoline dall’altra Italia” seems to be the least credible one; as I have mentioned, it is being parodied in fictional, audiovisual narrations. This format projects onto the interviewees, framed as representatives of the so-called “other Italy”, a life and job fulfilment that is seen as being complementary with the mission of the nation: to foster Italian young talents abroad. This representation is felt to be inauthentic because the emigrant’s identity cannot be reduced to a politico-economic driver, and because Italy is to blame for its failed retention and return policies. Work in these web series is identified, instead, as mobility in contrast with immobility, but also as the opportunity created by physical and emotional displacement. Mobility as a kind of affective labour not only changes the mentality of those who emigrate, but also of those who stay and experience it in the encounter with the “other Italy”. This dynamic view on work and mobility, which is represented by the web series’ “on the road” approach, gives another meaning to the repeated urge for Italy to create brain circulation and circular migration. Paradoxically enough, the alternative is embodied by the mobility of “new Italians”, whose hybrid identities enable them to feel themselves Italians and citizens of the world without experiencing their fragmented identities in terms of conflict but, on the contrary, in terms of gain. The focus on the interaction of the new migrants with their habitat, and on the stability they find in the families and friends made abroad, could be read as a plea to cast an aspirational eye on the future trajectory of migration, as a process towards a transnational condition of “post-migration”.

Bibliography 9Colonne. 2015. Cartoline dall’altra Italia, http://www.9colonne.it/category/1089/ca rtoline-dall-altra-italia Affricot, Johanne. 2019. “Johanne Affricot, culture curator, creative and artistic director, founder and creative director of GRIOT, president of LIT”. Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies 7(1): 125–129.

18 Episode 1, “afroitalians, italian citizenship, family sacrifices, lancôme & more”; episode 2, “italian colonial history, media, misogynoir, african diaspora & more”. http://www.ceci leemeke.com

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Affricot, Johanne. 2018. The Expats. GRIOT, https://theexpats.griotmag.com/en/a bout/ and https://theexpats.griotmag.com/en/watch/ Algieri, Giovanni B. 2015a. Cosa manca. I racconti da Londra. https://www.youtube. com/playlist?list=PLywj7YUpuBqmhdy-Q6E-yKWufY18FGUQb Algieri, Giovanni B. 2015b. Cosa manca. Cosenza: Pellegrini. Capolupo, Ugo. n.d. Italiani all’estero. Fanpage, https://youmedia.fanpage.it/user/Italia niAllEstero Colantoni, Lorenzo and Venturi, Riccardo. 2016. Italians and the UK. Stories of Contemporary and Historic Italian Immigration in the UK. National Geographic Italia, http://www.italiansandtheuk.it/en/ Cucchiarato, Claudia. 2010. Vivo altrove. Giovani e senza radici: gli emigranti italiani di oggi. Milan: Mondadori. D’Andrea, Anthony. 2006. “Neo‐Nomadism: A Theory of Post‐Identitarian Mobility in the Global Age”. Mobilities 1(1): 95–119. Davies, Lizzy. 2013. “Italy election: the ‘forgotten generation’ seeking opportunities abroad”. The Guardian, February 19, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2013/feb/19/italy-elections-young-people-emigration De Biase, Luca, and Romeo, Guido. eds. 2017. Cartaditalia IX(3), Nuove frontiere della ricerca scientifica italiana. Fana, Marta, Guarascio, Dario and Cirillo, Valeria. 2015. “Labour market reforms in Italy: Evaluating the effects of the Jobs Act”. LEM Working Paper Series, No. 2015/31, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Pisa. http:// hdl.handle.net/10419/148166 Fana, Marta, Guarascio, Dario and Cirillo, Valeria. 2016. “Did Italy Need More Labour Flexibility? The Consequences of the Jobs Act”. Intereconomics51(2): 79–86. Filì, Brunella. 2014. Emergency Exit – Webseries. http://www.emergencyexit.it/series.html Fiore, Teresa. 2017. Pre-Occupied Spaces. Remapping Italy’s Transnational Migrations and Colonial Legacies. New York: Fordham University Press. Graziano, Teresa. 2012. “The Italian e-Diaspora: Patterns and practices of the Web”. eDiasporas Atlas (April). http://www.e-diasporas.fr/wp/graziano-italian.html Kuhn, Markus. 2014. “Web Series between User-Generated Aesthetics and Self-Reflexive Narration: On the Diversification of Audiovisual Narration on the Internet”. In Beyond Classical Narration: Transmedial and Unnatural Challenges, edited by Jan Alber and Per Krogh Hansen. 137–160. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Licata, Delfina, ed. 2016. Rapporto Italiani nel Mondo 2016: Sintesi. Todi: Fondazione Migrantes/TAU Edizioni. Licata, Delfina, ed. 2017. Rapporto Italiani nel Mondo 2017: Sintesi. Todi: Fondazione Migrantes/TAU Edizioni. Licata, Delfina, ed. 2018. Rapporto Italiani nel Mondo 2018: Sintesi. Todi: Fondazione Migrantes/TAU Edizioni. Lino, Mirko. 2016. “Webseries, Original Series e Digital Series: le forme delle narrazioni seriali nel web”. Between 6(11). http://www.betweenjournal.it Loveday, Vik. 2018. “The neurotic academic: anxiety, casualisation, and governance in the neoliberalising university”. Journal of Cultural Economy 11(2): 154–166. Michelazzo, Michele. 2013. Vivo così: Gli italiani di Barcellona; Gli italiani di Berlino; Gli italiani di Londra. Voglio vivere così, https://www.youtube.com/user/voglioviver ecosiwrld/playlists

Labour and identity in web series 235 Minneci, Fabiana. 2015. “If there were a ‘Highly Skilled Red Octopus’? The Case of Italian Highly Skilled Mobility at Times of Crisis”. Economics and Sociology 8(3): 170–182. Morano Foadi, Sonia. 2006. “Key Issues and Causes of the Italian Brain Drain”. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 19(2): 209–223. Nail, Thomas. 2015. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pugliese, Enrico. 2018. Quelli che se ne vanno: La nuova emigrazione italiana. Bologna: Il Mulino. Ring Petersen, Anne and Moritz Schramm. 2017. “(Post-)Migration in the age of globalization: new challenges to imagination and representation”. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 9(2): 1–12. Scotto, Giuseppe. 2015. “From ‘emigrants’ to ‘Italians’: what is new in Italian migration to London?”. Modern Italy 20(2): 153–165. Tintori, Guido, and Valentina Romei. 2017. “Emigration from Italy After the Crisis: The Shortcomings of the Brain Drain Narrative”. In South-North Migration of EU Citizens in Times of Crisis, edited by Jean-Michel Lafleur, and Mikolaj Stanek, 49–64. Switzerland: IMISCOE Research Series. Veronesi, Giovanni. 2017. Non è un paese per giovani. Paco Cinematografica, Neo Art, Rai Cinema.

Chapter 16

Deux jours, une nuit and La loi du marché The tactical withdrawal of government and capital John Marks Introduction This chapter examines two recent French-language films that deal with the world of work: Deux jours, une nuit (2014) directed by the Dardenne brothers (Dardenne & Dardenne 2014), and La loi du marché (2015) directed by Stéphane Brizé (Brizé 2015). Focusing on two central characters, played by established ‘star’ actors Marion Cotillard (Sandra) and Vincent Lindon (Thierry), these films depict a profoundly individualised contemporary experience of work characterised by uncertainty, insecurity and isolation. They show how employees are routinely placed in competition with each other in order to find and to hold onto work, and also how their individual performance is closely monitored and evaluated. In this context, the possibility of collective action and solidarity is limited, and there is little sense of a co-ordinated identification of, and resistance to, injustice in the workplace. Didier Péron, writing in Libération shortly after La loi du marché had been favourably received at Cannes, identified it as a worthy addition to a new ‘film de crise’ genre (in which he included Deux jours, une nuit), and he pointed to two ways in which the films explore the individualising dynamics of the contemporary world of work. First, the ruthless social Darwinist, eliminatory logic that forces workers to compete against each other for a strictly limited number of permanent posts. Second, a new mode of organisation and power-dynamic that has replaced the more clear-cut opposition between capital and labour. In this new scenario, individuals are required to account for themselves and, crucially, to govern and manage their own relationships according to prescriptions of efficiency, performance and competition that they have not chosen but which they must adopt (Péron 2015). By concentrating on these individualising dynamics, the films depict what might be described as the tactical withdrawal of government and capital in the workplace. This withdrawal is conveyed visually in the abandoned, bleak landscapes of the films: the run-down, working-class ordinariness of Seraing in Deux jours, une nuit; and the simultaneously bland and vaguely menacing strip-lit interiors of the anonymous locations in La loi du marché. Managers in the workplace act and behave as local delegates of a remote economic rationale that cannot be

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challenged, and employees are left to ‘manage’ the situation as best they can. As Wendy Brown puts it in a general description of neoliberal governance: ‘Weak and tiny units of one bear choice without resources, responsibility without power, an entrepreneurial mandate, and an order of power nowhere in view and impossible to touch’ (Brown 2016: 9). Individuals must negotiate between themselves rather than with management to keep their jobs, and they are lured into evaluating each other as suitable candidates for employment or to be laid off. It will be argued here that much of the political impact and importance of the films lies in their attempt map this abandonment. Both films end on a similar note, as the main characters Sandra and Thierry walk away from the employment that they have secured at great personal cost. It is tempting to interpret these departures as the final acts of exemplary ethical dramas. Viewed from this perspective, Sandra and Thierry can be seen as noble, self-sacrificing individuals: they maintain their dignity and set an example to others by refusing to be complicit in a system that requires them to behave ruthlessly in order to survive and keep their jobs. Although this ethical interpretation of the films clearly has some validity, these departures can also be seen as more radical political gestures, in that they encapsulate the refusal of both Sandra and Thierry to perform as neoliberal subjects. Read in this way, the films give dramatic, narrative form to the neoliberal concept of human capital and the tendency for the workplace to become a domain of a new form of ‘private government’. In addition to this analysis of the films through the lens of neoliberal governance, the chapter will also consider the Lacanian social psychoanalytic themes of identification and fantasy. As capital and authority have withdrawn and the symbolic order collapses, so the panoptical gaze of the disciplinary regime has been supplemented by the lure of identification, encouraging individuals to scrutinise themselves and each other for signs of weakness, incompetency or inadequacy and to invest in external authority as a source of wholeness. As the chapter will show, one common tendency in workplaces where jobs are under threat is for employees to construct a fantasy of management as an all-powerful, capricious agency that must be appeased at all costs. Sandra, in particular, fights throughout Deux jours, une nuit to challenge these fantasies amongst her colleagues. It will be argued that Deux jours, une nuit and La loi du marché go beyond the realm of personal drama to show how workers are exposed to what Slavoj Žižek identifies as the ‘systemic violence’ of contemporary capitalism: the ‘selfpropelling metaphysical dance of capital that runs the show’, which is not readily attributed to identifiable agents (Žižek 2008: 11). Although capital as an organising and controlling force has a less tangible presence within these filmic landscapes than it would have had in the Fordist era, it still exerts control as a reference to spectral, global economic forces (the ‘law of the market’), mediated in the workplace by bland managerial newspeak and an overbearing surveillance infrastructure.

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1. Neoliberalism As indicated already, Deux jours, une nuit and La loi du marché must be read in the context of neoliberal governance. Neoliberalism as an ideological force has its origins in the thought of figures such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, and it has exerted a pervasive influence on macroeconomic management since the demise of the post-war economic settlement in the 1970s. As commentators such as Daniel Stedman Jones have pointed out, the use of the term ‘neoliberalism’ in recent times has sometimes become divorced from these complex origins and has been used somewhat reductively as ‘a catch-all shorthand for the horrors associated with globalization and recurring financial crises’ (Jones 2012: 2). Notwithstanding these reservations, there is also a large body of work that has made a convincing case that the core neoliberal values of a free market ideology based on individual freedom, limited government and the promotion of competitive markets at all levels of society have had a significant impact on the politics of work. For example, in a comprehensive recent account, P. Matthijs Bal and Edina Dóci have argued that neoliberalism is the dominant and pervasive ideological force in the contemporary workplace, highlighting three significant political components: instrumentality, individualism and competition (Bal & Dóci 2018). In a neoliberal economic context, labour is viewed by organisations in purely instrumental terms as a means of achieving profit maximisation and shareholder value. Similarly, employees are expected to conduct their relationship with the organisation that employs them and, crucially, with other employees, in equally instrumental terms. The ideal contemporary worker is entirely self-interested, pursuing a personal project of advancement and profitability that mirrors that of the organisation. Education, health and social security are no longer conceived of as rights, but as areas in which individuals can choose to invest their resources in order to reap future benefits. ‘Investments’ of this kind include university fees, health care and unemployment insurance and personal pensions. The focus on competition means that individuals must constantly find ways of making themselves employable: by building up CVs, learning new skills, and showing that they are more flexible, or simply cheaper to employ, than others (Bal & Dóci 2018: 539). As well as individualising the work contract and severely undermining collective representation and labour agreements, neoliberalism also gives rise to an intense focus within organisations on quantitative assessment, control and monitoring of employees. The overall effect of this ideological shift is the apparently contradictory model of workplace organisation as both hyper flexible and simultaneously profoundly bureaucratic (Bal & Dóci 2018: 540). Bal & Dóci also identify a series of ‘fantasmatic logics’, by means of which neoliberal ideology interpolates and appeals to individuals by offering a fantasy of entrepreneurial freedom and personal growth. This fantasmatic construction of freedom frames instrumentality, individualisation and competition as desirable, and it is bolstered by the meritocratic fantasy that individuals essentially ‘get what they deserve’, naturalising the idea that there will always be ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. In practice,

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neoliberal governance devolves large-scale economic problems such as unemployment to the local level, but it offers no possibility of collective resistance or political action. Instead, individuals must compete or ‘co-operate’ in order to find their own local solutions. As the following sections will show, the experience of work depicted in Deux jours, une nuit and La loi du marché corresponds in a number of ways to these key ideological features of neoliberalism. 2. Deux jours, une nuit In Deux jours, une nuit Sandra (Marion Cotillard), a young married woman with two children is about to return to work after a year-long period of sick-leave, having suffered from depression. Sandra’s vulnerability is conveyed largely through an intense focus on her bodily demeanour, a key feature of the Dardennes’ distinctive social realist style. Recovering from depression, she is generally tense and anxious, and at moments of heightened stress she suffers panic attacks, struggling to speak or even breathe in the stifling atmosphere of a summer heatwave. She is employed by Solwall, a small company manufacturing solar panels in an unnamed small working-class town in Belgium (several of the Dardenne brothers’ films are filmed on location in Seraing, near Lille). The factory manager, Dumont, has redistributed work in the factory amongst Sandra’s colleagues during her absence, and he is reluctant to allow her to return to work. Rather than taking the decision himself, he effectively shifts the responsibility to Sandra’s co-workers by asking them to vote to keep their annual 1,000-euro bonus and make Sandra redundant, or to allow her to be re-employed and forfeit their bonus. Initially, they vote to keep their bonuses. However, one of Sandra’s co-workers, Juliette, forces a second vote by raising suspicions that the plant foreman, Jean-Marc, has influenced the outcome. Sandra learns about the vote on a Friday, and the main action of the film takes place over the weekend, as she attempts to talk to her co-workers in order to persuade them to vote in her favour. She meets eleven of them in person, and she talks to others on the phone. The face-to-face encounters unfold in a variety of ways, and reveal much about the attitudes of her co-workers, as well as the conditions of their lives. The new vote goes ahead and is split eight–eight, at which point Sandra assumes that she has lost her job. However, the factory manager says that he would like to keep her on, particularly as he is impressed that she has demonstrated such tenacity in attempting to keep her job. He says that he will be able re-employ her in two months’ time when he intends not to renew a fixedterm contract. However, Sandra refuses this offer, saying that she doesn’t want to be kept on at the expense of somebody else being laid off. The film ends with Sandra talking on the phone to her husband Manu, who has steadfastly supported and encouraged her throughout, and to whom she says, with a smile: ‘We put up a good fight. I’m happy’. These closing scenes mark the culmination of a physical transformation in Sandra: in contrast to her state of hyper-alert anxiety and tearful confusion at the start of the film, she now appears to have regained some degree of equilibrium and control.

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As this short summary indicates, several of the key elements of neoliberalism outlined above feature in the film. In a general sense, as Luc Dardenne indicates, the social architecture of Seraing as it is depicted in the film reinforces a sense of individualisation and isolation. For example, the houses of Sandra’s co-workers are not connected to any communal living space, and the encounters emphasise the fact that each individual is preoccupied primarily with managing issues of debt, consumption and private life (Lowy 2016: 72). Focusing more specifically on the workplace, the possibility of making Sandra redundant is justified in instrumental terms by the need to remain profitable in the context of global competition. When, encouraged by her friend Juliette, she confronts the factory manager, he tells her that he has nothing against her personally, but that the company is being squeezed by competition from Asian solar panel producers. The mechanism of the vote, which Sandra’s co-workers do not seem to oppose in principle, neatly dramatises the condition of individualised competition with the workforce (Vidaillet 2016: 127). The narrative structure of the film, which follows a series of conversations between Sandra and her colleagues, emphasises the absence not only of solidarity but even more fundamentally of any shared language in which a sense of collective resistance might be formulated. Even when issues of injustice are raised, and also when Sandra manages to make a positive connection with a co-worker, the scope of their conversation remains limited. As Yoann Bazin emphasises, this absence of a political consciousness limits the workers’ capacity to escape the situation in which the boss Dumont has them trapped (Bazin 2016: 144). It is also significant, of course, that Sandra’s mental health is in a fragile state. In neoliberal terms, she is ‘underperforming’, and she is readily identified by coworkers as a potential scapegoat to be sacrificed in the interests of economic efficiency. It is notable in this respect that, as the Dardenne brothers have indicated in interviews, a key influence on Deux jours, une nuit was the case of a worker recounted in Pierre Bourdieu’s The Weight of the World (Bourdieu et al. 1999). This text recounts the bitterness and dismay of Hamid, a union shop steward at a Peugeot factory in France in 1990, when he finds out that an older employee has been fired after being isolated by his co-workers, who felt that he was slacking and costing them their bonuses. The fact that Hamid is shocked by this blatant lack of solidarity marks the episode as evidence of a turning point in social relations in the neoliberal era; of a growing individualism even amongst workers who are willing to undertake strike action. Some twenty-five years later in Deux jours, une nuit this individualism is now firmly embedded: it is formalised in the vote and it frames the justifications that some of Sandra’s co-workers give for voting to keep their bonuses. Willy, for example, sees his vote in what appears to be entirely solipsistic terms, refusing to acknowledge that his actions have any effect on Sandra: ‘I didn’t vote against you. I voted for the bonus.’ Even Sandra, speaking with her husband Manu, seems to have internalised this individualism as an inevitable reality of work in the current climate: ‘It’s normal. They want their bonus.’ In interviews, the Dardenne brothers have indicated that it was important for them to show how Sandra fights to keep going and overcome her physical and

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mental fragility and ultimately assert her visibility and legitimacy. In ethical terms, this successful attempt to make herself visible to others is also a gesture of refusal. Unlike Rosetta, the ‘good little soldier of capitalism’ in the Dardennes’ first major film (Dardenne & Dardenne 1999), Sandra refuses to enter into competition with her co-workers. By the end of the film she has managed to ‘defuse the competition’, as Luc Dardenne puts it (Stevens 2014: 66) In short, he sees her as promoting an embryonic form of solidarity amongst her co-workers (Lowy 2016: 66–67). Her basic political gesture, as the Dardennes emphasise, is to provoke a sense of empathy, inviting others to put themselves in her place, whilst she indicates that she can also understand their position. In this way, she is able to make the sort of ethical connection that is central to the Dardennes’ political vision. Her co-worker Timur, for example, expresses remorse that he voted for his bonus and failed to recognise the selfless support that Sandra had given him when he started working in the company. However, as indicated already, although this ethical focus is clearly important, there are other potential political dimensions to the film. Sandra’s encounters with her coworkers, whether they are successful or not in changing their voting intentions, serve to articulate and map a series of tensions and conflicts that would otherwise have remained unspoken. Viewed from this perspective, the ‘solidarity’ that she brings out is forged through the identification and articulation of conflicts rather than resulting from a straightforward recognition of shared interests. These conflicts may exist between individuals, as when a fight breaks out between Yvon and his son Julien, or within individuals themselves, such as Dominique, who says he cannot vote for Sandra but still hopes that she wins: ‘It will be a disaster for me if the majority backs you, but I hope for your sake they do.’ As indicated already, it is also significant that Sandra herself is fundamentally conflicted: throughout the film she expresses feelings of worthlessness, saying that she is ‘nothing’, that the foreman Jean-Marc is right in suggesting that she is ‘not up to it anymore’, and also blaming herself for causing the fight between Yvon and Julien. However, in the course of the weekend she comes to the realisation that Jean-Marc has exploited the vulnerabilities of some co-workers and the ruthlessness of others. This realisation, which leads Sandra to confront JeanMarc on the Monday morning of the vote, indicates that she has managed to address her own conflicted sense of self and, in the process, has forged some kind of political consciousness. Crucially, the conflicts that Sandra helps to bring to the surface are not straightforwardly settled or resolved, but they have been identified and articulated. In this way, she creates the conditions for what Chantal Mouffe has called an ‘agonistic’ relationship, in which the acknowledgement of conflict is central to the construction of a shared, genuinely political space (Mouffe 2005: 20). 3. La loi du marché La loi du marché focuses on Thierry (Vincent Lindon), a blue-collar worker aged 51 who has been made redundant and who is attempting to find work after nearly two years of unemployment. Shot in a quasi-documentary style with a handheld camera, the film follows Thierry as he looks for a job, manages his finances, and

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eventually finds work as a security guard in a supermarket. His search for work exposes him to the combined pressures of the intense competition of the job market and the stifling frustration of bureaucracy. For example, the opening scene of the film shows him explaining to a Pôle emploi (the French national job agency) interviewer that the training he has been sent on as a crane operator is unsuitable. Another scene shows a job interview conducted over Skype, in the course of which the interviewer tells Thierry in somewhat patronising tones that his CV needs more work and closes the interview by saying that there is ‘very little chance’ that he will be offered a job. In one of the most uncomfortable scenes of the film, we see Thierry as he is exposed to highly critical observations made by fellow job-seekers on his performance in a mock job interview. These episodes convey the strong sense of a rigid and unsympathetic bureaucracy that comprises a series of box-ticking exercises rather than any concerted effort to find suitable employment for individuals. Much of the dramatic tension of the film is generated by the fact that Thierry is unable, and also unwilling, to construct himself as a commodity in the job market. He does not conform to the prescriptions of entrepreneurial self-presentation that have become normalised as a mode of neoliberal governance. It is not only in his search for work that Thierry is exposed to a ruthless, market-driven, competition and the scrutinising gaze of evaluation. A bank employee attempts to sell him life-insurance at the same time as suggesting he sell his apartment to raise funds, and a potential buyer of his holiday home seeks to take advantage of Thierry’s need to sell in order to haggle over the sale price. The pervasive presence of evaluation and performance as a social norm is emphasised by the scene in which Thierry, his wife and son, have a meeting with a teacher at the son’s school. The teacher praises the son’s application and interest in his studies, but he expresses concern over a dip in his result in this crucial final year of school in which, he reminds them, the objective is to secure a university place. The only moments in the film which provide any relief and respite to this focus on performance are the brief scenes of relaxed conviviality – eating, conversation, spontaneous dancing – in the family home. When Thierry does find employment, it is as a store detective in a large supermarket. The in-store security cameras in the supermarket provide the means for the surveillance of both customers and co-workers. The oppressive, panoptical dimensions of this surveillance apparatus are emphasised when Thierry is told by the co-worker to look for behaviours that are not ‘normal’ – holding on to an item for too long, rather than putting it in one’s shopping trolley. He is effectively required to spy on fellow employees, and it is this aspect of the job that clearly prompts his decision to leave. As indicated above, the closing scene of the film shows him walking out on the job when, we assume as viewers, he feels he can no longer participate in using the in-store surveillance cameras to spy on the supermarket staff with a view to identifying minor infringements that will allow the store manager to fire employees for those minor infringements

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In contrast to Sandra in Deux jours, une nuit, Thierry is not an active political agent in the film. His reluctance to get involved in co-ordinated political action is signalled clearly at the beginning of the film, when he is involved in a tense exchange with former co-workers, one of whom feels that they should pursue a grievance against the employer that laid them off. Thierry, in contrast, insists that he wants to draw a line under the redundancy and ‘move on’. Unlike Sandra, there is little sense that he leaves behind him any nascent sense of a political community or consciousness amongst his co-workers. Instead, the political potential of the film as a critique of neoliberalism relies on the audience’s identification with Thierry’s taciturn refusal to be absorbed into the affective topography of the film, which recalls the zombified, deserted landscape of late capitalism evoked by Carl Cederström & Peter Fleming in Dead Man Working (Cederström & Fleming 2011). The majority of individuals with whom Thierry interacts appear variously as bored, ground-down, apologetic, or locked into a demeanour of lowlevel aggression. More often than not, they seem to be reluctantly performing according to a script. The cynicism of this scenario is conveyed in the hollow, unconvincing assertion of the workplace as a ‘family’ by the supermarket manager at the perfunctory retirement gathering for one of the supermarket cashiers. In this context, Thierry’s stubborn refusal to engage in market transactions, evaluation and surveillance constitutes a basic form of political resistance.

4. Human capital, private government, evaluation Having established some general features of the neoliberal governance of work in these two films, it is possible to go a little further in identifying more specific mechanisms. First, the films show how the employment contract between the individual, employer and state is now profoundly inflected by the neoliberal concept of human capital, according to which individuals are required to maximise their own value as potential employees: to invest in and speculate with their capacities and qualifications as capital. Taking her cue from Michel Foucault’s prescient early analysis of neoliberalism (Foucault 2008), Brown argues that neoliberalism is more than simply the imposition of free market ideology: rather it is a form of political rationality that ‘configures every kind of human activity in terms of rational self-investment or entrepreneurship’ (Brown 2016: 5). The social relations that structure the working lives of Sandra and Thierry are, in a profound sense, market relations. They are commodities in the job market, and they must sell themselves both to potential employers and, crucially, to co-workers. It is striking that much of the narrative in both films is concerned not with work as such, but rather with the work involved in securing and maintaining employment. The fact that both films feature relatively little obviously productive labour reflects the centrality of human capital as a feature of contemporary employment. In short, both Thierry and Sandra devote a good deal of time to the management of their own human capital. Throughout La loi du marché Thierry struggles to come to terms with the recurrent requirement for him to manage the different forms of

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human capital that are at his disposal: qualifications, material assets and ‘personality’. For example, in the course of a job interview conducted over Skype the interviewer indicates that Thierry should have taken responsibility for organising training himself to use new forklift technology. What makes these disciplinary techniques distinctively contemporary is the ways in which they are mediated through the therapeutic and responsibilising language of managerialism. In a more literal sense, Thierry is invited to speculate with his material assets – a modest family home and a static holiday caravan – in order get through a period of unemployment. Although Sandra clearly does not see it in these terms, her meetings with co-workers over the course of a weekend, which constitute the main body of the narrative of Deux jours, une nuit can be seen as an attempt to raise the stock of her human capital. She must persuade these co-workers to ‘invest’ in her as a colleague. This dynamic is confirmed by the reaction of the boss of the company, who indicates, as mentioned above, that he wants to keep her on partly because she has proven herself to be so tenacious in fighting to keep her job. The individualised working environments that Sandra and Thierry experience also illustrate in various ways the general concept of ‘private government’ that Elizabeth Anderson has recently elaborated as an analysis of the experience of work in the USA (Anderson 2017). In broad terms, Anderson argues that the dominant free market conception of employment as a relationship between employer and employee articulated in terms of freedom and private enterprise is entirely inadequate. The contemporary American workplace is, for most workers, a kind of ‘communist dictatorship’ (Anderson 2017: 39), in which employers have sweeping powers over workers’ lives and also their ‘private’, out-of-work conduct (Anderson 2017: 53). Much of her argument is based on the specificity of the standard ‘employment-at-will’ contract in the USA, but in a wider sense she emphasises the extent to which work in contemporary organisations entails subjection to dynamics of power and control that are increasingly intrusive, pervasive and, crucially, unaccountable. Elements of this kind of governance are clearly present in both films. The vote in Deux jours, une nuit and the surveillance apparatus in the supermarket in La loi du marché have unaccountable para-democratic and para-legal statuses: they are instruments of governance that appear to function entirely within the domain of the workplace without reference to external agencies. Lastly, the films show in various ways in which work seeks to regulate the demeanour, appearance and personality of individuals. As Hélène Picard points out, the mechanism of evaluation is deployed as a kind of perverse ‘democratisation’ of judgement, as in the scene of Thierry’s mock job interview. This incitement to evaluate and to be evaluated ultimately lends legitimacy to the mechanisms of human capital (who is worth what) and private government (evaluation as an internal, self-referential mechanism): The colonization of human relations by the economic logic of exactness is conveyed in both films through the staging of incessant appraisal situations: who is worth what exactly? Past experiences are discounted, and everyone is

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authorized, and even encouraged (in a vote, in the collective assessment of a job interview, etc.) to evaluate the individual (professional as well as personal) worth of others. (Picard 2016: 137)

5. Affect and fantasy Although the systemic constraints of neoliberal governance and disciplinary control provide a useful analytic frame through which to understand the contemporary experience of work, a perplexing set of questions still hang over both films. Why do individuals struggle to challenge the system within which they find themselves? Why do they accept the binary logic of competition, of ‘it’s either you or me’? Why do they internalise and apply the laws of the market so readily? One obvious answer, which clearly cannot be dismissed, is that in many ways they have no realistic alternative. They need to survive, pay their debts, ‘move on’, and build some kind of future. However, there is something more: an attachment to, and even an identification with, the demands and the perspective of capital. Why, for example, does one of Sandra’s co-workers say that he will work harder and take on more hours, even though he does not appear to be under the same material pressures as others in the factory? In order to attempt to answer these questions it is necessary to understand that the workplace no longer exerts control purely by means of disciplinary coercion, although, as indicated already, disciplinary elements are still in place. From the 1980s onwards there has been a much-discussed shift towards apparently more democratic, participatory modes of management (see Walton 1985). In this context, individuals are invited to identify with management and the company. This dynamic of identification is analysed at some length an influential article by John Roberts, in which he draws on themes inspired by Lacan in order to explore the role that the imaginary plays in mobilising identification as a disciplinary tool in organisations (Roberts 2005). He focuses in particular on the imaginary and the mirror stage as heuristic devices to gain some purchase on the ‘lure’ of identification in the contemporary workplace. For Lacan, the fact that the drive to construct a sense of wholeness and self-sufficiency is founded on images whose source lie outside the self creates a tension. Any sense of stability and wholeness is easily undermined if, for example, the gaze of the other is diverted elsewhere. In the context of the contemporary workplace as ‘family’ the employee is configured precisely as a child who is potentially jealous of attention given to other family members (Roberts 2005: 631). The positive connotations of familial nurturing and inclusivity are only superficial, since this individualising mode of management invites identification with ideals of performance, flexibility and autonomy that are ultimately destabilising. In the face of this threat of instability, the individual may engage either in self-blame or in scapegoating as a way of displacing perceived inadequacy. Pushing the analogy a little further, the workplace runs the risk of being caught up in the toxic dynamics of the dysfunctional family, in which resentful jockeying for attention and recognition is combined with the drive to

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identify family members who can be blamed for the anxiety and dissatisfaction that this scenario generates. This lure of identification is highlighted in a particularly uncomfortable scene in La loi du marché in which, as mentioned already, Thierry’s ‘performance’ in a mock job interview is assessed by fellow job-seekers. With rather alarming eagerness, they criticise his laconic, reserved demeanour and casual dress. As Hélène Picard notes, there is more than a hint of sadistic pleasure in their observations: ‘“well, he does not make me want to hire him”, “it doesn’t look like he wants that job!”, “I would not trust him … he should smile more”’ (Picard 2016: 137). Clearly, there is something more to these comments than a straightforward attempt to provide constructive criticism. It is significant in this respect that the remarks are addressed not to Thierry directly, but to the person leading the session, who appears largely as a disembodied voice off screen. They seem to be designed to find favour with the session leader, and they are symptomatic of an over-investment in the fantasy of the committed, dynamic job-seeker.

6. Symbolic authority A Lacanian perspective is also useful in analysing the ways in which individuals interpret and react to the fact that local management presents itself as merely a delegate of a more general and abstract ‘symbolic father’, of the ‘law’ of competitive markets, consumers and clients who must be served (Roberts 2005: 635). As capital has become more remote, employees take refuge in a series of fantasies, which prevent them from challenging the claims of management. As Bénédicte Vidaillet and Grégory Gamot have recently argued, the withdrawal of symbolic authority can create the fantasy of an all-powerful, inscrutable and capricious authority that must be appeased but which can never be satisfied. Paradoxically, the obliteration of symbolic authority does not free the subject, but rather releases the superego’s command to ‘enjoy’ (Vidaillet & Gamot 2015). They point to the prevalence of this fantasy in the research that they carried out on a French subsidiary of the American group Ronman. In this company, a series of reorganisations since a takeover in 1999 mean that the employees are no longer sure who is in charge of the company: it is not clear where information is coming from, statements are often contradictory, and there is a general sense of a confused and confusing reality in which everything is shifting. Statements are released and then retracted, and it is impossible to attribute these floating enunciations to a particular speaker. This collapse of symbolic authority promotes the overarching fantasy of management as ‘an unbarred and persecutory Other’, a ‘backstage’ agency which manipulates the employees with impunity like pawns in a game, and which has the power to close the plant at any time (Vidaillet & Gamot 2015: 1001). The employees are consumed with a sense of responsibility that they are not doing enough to save the factory, feeling that if it closes it will be their fault. Vidaillet and Gamot note that feelings of guilt are expressed in almost every interview that they carry out with the employees as part of their research. Ultimately, it is only by reinstating symbolic authority as a tangible presence with which the employees can

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engage that they feel empowered to act. In 2009 the Works Council exercised their legal right under French law to employ a certified accountant to provide an external assessment of the situation of the company, and to require local management to respond to this report: The goal seemed to be to position the staff representatives in relation to the local management team, to reintroduce a symbolic authority, which the law, the words of the external experts or of the institution (the court of law, the labour inspectorate, etc.) represent. The aim was to create a structured relationship between two, clearly identified, groups – a relationship governed by laws that existed prior to the implementation of this relationship and to reintroduce a place of enunciation. (Vidaillet & Gamot 2015: 1004) Although the company that Sandra is working for is not under threat of closure, there are clear similarities with the situation that Vidaillet and Gamot describe. The company’s boss is largely absent right until the end of the film, but he has established the rules of the game in which Sandra must fight to keep her job. Furthermore, he claims that the situation is not of his making: he is forced to impose these measures by the forces of global capitalism that lie outside his control. This tactical withdrawal provides a space in which fantasies of appeasement can proliferate. Over the course of the weekend that we see in the film, Sandra manages to do two things. First, she disrupts the construction of herself as a scapegoat. Second, she effectively reinstates a symbolic order. Although neoliberalism seeks to collapse the conflict between capital and labour by turning labour into a form of capital (human capital), Deux jours, une nuit and La loi du marché show that this conflict persists.

Bibliography Anderson, Elizabeth, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t talk About It) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). Bal, P. Matthijs & Dóci, Edina, ‘Neoliberal Ideology in Work and Organizational Psychology’, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, vol. 27, no. 5 (2018), pp. 536–548. Bazin, Yoann, ‘Why don’t employees collectively rebel against organizational injustice?’, M@n@gement, vol. 19, no. 2 (2016), pp. 140–145. Bourdieu, Pierre, et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, trans. Priscilla Pankhurst Ferguson, et al. (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). Brizé, Stéphane, La loi du marché (Nord-Ouest Films and Arte France Cinéma: 2015). Brown, Wendy, ‘Neoliberalism, Human Capital, and Austerity Politics’, Constellations, vol. 23, no. 1 (2016), pp. 3–14. Cederström, Carl & Fleming, Peter, Dead Man Working (Winchester, Hampshire: Zero Books, 2011). Dardenne, Jean-Pierre & Dardenne, Luc, Rosetta (Les Films du Fleuve: 1999). Dardenne, Jean-Pierre & Dardenne, Luc, Deux jours, une nuit (Les Films du Fleuve, et al.: 2014). Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, trans. G. Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

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Jones, Daniel Stedman, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press, 2012). Lowy, Vincent, ed, Dardenne par Dardenne: entretiens avec Michel Ciment (Brussels: Edition Le Bord de l’Eau, 2016). Mouffe, Chantal, On The Political (London: Routledge, 2005). Péron, Didier, ‘La loi du plus faible’, Libération (31 May 2015) https://www.liberation. fr/societe/2015/05/31/la-loi-du-plus-faible_1320411 Pialoux, Michel, ‘The Shop Steward’s World in Disarray’, In Pierre Bourdieu, et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, trans. Priscilla Pankhurst Ferguson, et al. (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), pp. 321–337. Picard, Hélène, ‘“Two Days, One Night and The Measure of A Man”. Subjective struggles in the contemporary world of work: Fighting for what?’, M@n@gement, vol. 19, no. 2 (2016), pp. 133–139. Roberts, John, ‘The Power of the ‘Imaginary’ in Disciplinary Processes’, Organization, vol. 12, no. 5 (2005), pp. 619–642. Stevens, Isabel, ‘“Woman on the Verge”, interview with Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne’, Sight & Sound, September (2014), pp. 65–67. Vidaillet, Bénédicte, ‘Two Days, One Night, or the objective violence of capitalism’, M@n@gement vol. 19, no. 2 (2016), pp. 127–132. Vidaillet, Bénédicte & Gamot, Grégory ‘Working and Resisting when One’s Workplace is Under Threat of Being Shut Down: A Lacanian Perspective’, Organization Studies, vol. 36, no. 8 (2015), pp. 987–1011. Walton, Richard, ‘From Control to Commitment in the Workplace’, Harvard Business Review, vol. 63, no. 4, (1985), pp. 77–84. Žižek, Slavoj, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008).

Chapter 17

When The Flash said: “We were all struck by that lightning” Work and contemporary superhero TV shows Mara Santi Introduction In the fifth episode of the fourth season of the TV show The Flash, two female characters, Caitlin and Iris, talk about their friendship. They regret that they have never been able to be more than “work friends” (season 4, episode 5 [26:41]) and that makes sense for the audience since they are two core members of the team that helps the series’ superhero. The fact is that Caitlin, a brilliant researcher who specialises in biomedical sciences, and Iris, a talented investigative reporter, have never shared one actual working day in their whole careers. How is it then possible that they define themselves “work friends” and that the audience does not find this awkward at all? The reason is that, during the three previous series, the superhero’s team and the superhero himself have been consistently depicted as staff members of a regular working group, regardless of their actual profession. Moreover, the activities they carry out in fighting crime have been depicted as a day-to-day job that takes place in a regular work environment, regardless of the exceptionally unreal nature of their tasks. In the first two sections of this article I provide a theoretical explanation of why contemporary TV series depict superhero adventures as realistic work activities. In the third section, I shed light on the main ways in which superhero adventures mirror contemporary real-life work experiences. Lastly, in the fourth section, I elaborate on a few points related to the European reception of these series.

1. Realism of an unreal world Barry Allen, the series’ protagonist, is struck by lightning on the night when the particle accelerator of S.T.A.R. Labs, the most advanced research facility of Central City, explodes and releases a wave of dark matter on the city. Due to the sum of these factors (lightning strike and dark matter), the accident turns Barry into a metahuman (a human with non-human powers) and gifts him with super speed. Because of the accident, Barry lies in a coma for nine months and during this period he is treated by S.T.A.R. Labs researchers. When he comes out of the coma

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and discovers he has become a speedster he starts cooperating with S.T.A.R. Labs in order to understand and master his powers. He soon realises his great potential, and when he decides to use his gift for the greater good he becomes The Flash, the superhero who protects Central City from other metahumans who have also been gifted with super powers, but who have become supervillains. The unreal life of the metahuman superhero blurs the boundaries between science facts and futuristic technologies and places the show in the realm of science fiction. To a certain extent, The Flash depicts a utopian posthuman reality where scientifically advanced competences and radical technological breakthroughs give birth to extraordinary individuals who look after human communities and protect them from unprecedented calamities. “Our city became ground zero for some pretty weird stuff” claims Central City’s mayor when he presents the city’s key to The Flash, “We got a new breed of criminal.” He adds “Men and women who defied not only our laws, but physics and reason. But we got something else, too. We got The Flash” (season 2, episode 1 [12:40–13:02]) Still, the technological manipulations that turn regular citizens into superpowered heroes or villains confront the audience with the unnatural ontology of posthuman characters because The Flash, some of his sidekicks and his antagonists are genetically-manipulated individuals who cannot be merely classified as human beings. They tackle the core of Sci-Fi’s long-standing obsession with posthumanity, which is “constituted of subjects who may no longer be defined by their vulnerability to the limitations of the flesh” (Hollinger 2009: 268). Hence, just like every Sci-Fi story, The Flash faces the existential question of what makes us human; for, whatever they are about, Sci-Fi stories are always “about the uncanny processes of denaturalization through which we come to experience ourselves as subjects-in-technoculture” (Hollinger 2009: 270). If the fictional pact allows the audience to push metahumans out of reality, and enjoy every single technoculture-overloaded episode, yet, behind the playfulness of Central City’s impossible world, the series depicts the audience’s actual anxieties for the promises and threats of socio-political powers granted by science and technology. Indeed, Barry is depicted as a threat himself: despite his kind heart and his good intentions, his choices frequently turn out to be wrong, and because of this he endangers Central City (sometimes even the world) and causes several casualties. At this point, why and, above all, how the audience should sympathise with a dangerous metahuman, is the logical question. Moreover, how is it possible for the ordinary audience to relate to the extraordinary hero? The question is of no small consequence since connecting to characters is a necessary process of media narratives where, “for entertainment to be able to exist, a basic need must be satisfied: the need to come into contact with or relate to media characters” (Igartua 2010: 347). It is well established that the audience anchors the reception of a story to its characters and that there are different ways in which the audience becomes

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involved and absorbed in a narrative via feelings of affinity and sympathy for the characters. At the highest mode of reception, the audience responds to characters by identifying with them. Identification “is a process that culminates in a cognitive and emotional state in which the audience member is aware not of him- or herself as an audience member, but rather imagines being one of the characters in the text” (Cohen 2001: 252). Before the audience can share the characters’ perspective, a closeness with the characters must be found. This means the process that leads to identification must be triggered and this happens through intermediate stages, where the audience does not internalise the point of view of the characters, but projects him- or herself onto the characters. Here realisation of a similarity with the characters is crucial. Since “identification requires audience members to imagine themselves as a character, similarity of audience members to characters should increase the likelihood of identification” (Cohen 2001: 258). It has been proved that, when looking for similarities to characters, the audience measures affinity with the characters as if they were real individuals confronted with real-life events. Hence, similarity is triggered by an assessment of realism, and perceived realism promotes identification. The most distinctive form of perceived realism is plausibility, which is detected by the audience when he/she believes that behaviours and facts could actually occur somewhere to someone in the real world (Hall 2003). Although perceived realism is not the only direct cause of identification, and the story’s likelihood “may not be sufficient to make a story emotionally involving” (Cho et al. 2014: 835), still plausibility has emerged as a strong predictor of identification and is “necessary to stimulate the audience’s emotional involvement in narrative messages.” (Cho et al. 2014: 843). In other words, the audience needs to relate the fictional world to reality, for perceived realism proves to be an (insufficient but) indispensable gateway to identification and where no identification is prompted, the story is a fiasco. As such, plausibility must be somehow displayed in the unreal world of superheroes too, and since leading characters of TV shows are essential to success, “it is appropriate to expect that a greater identification with the main characters […] will lead to greater enjoyment and affective impact.” (Igartua 2010: 352). With a view to prompt identification, contemporary superhero narratives basically display plausibility in both superheroes’ emotional connection with normal characters and their behaviour in work-related situations. The reality-gap between the non-human superhero and the audience has been filled in since the dawn of superheroes, first of all by crediting the non-human character with pronounced human feelings. For example, Clark Kent, the alias of the alien Superman, is in love with Lois Lane and this romance is a long-lasting trademark of the superhero’s stories throughout the decades and across media. Feelings of love easily trigger sympathy, but abused topoi may no longer be sufficient to attract attention. That is why the most successful and consistent strategy of authors is now to put superheroes’ at the centre of an environment where common social and emotional ties are displayed, and to magnify traits and

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experiences that the audience can immediately acknowledge as familiar, or equal to one’s average knowledge of everyday life. For this reason, contemporary TV superheroes play a pivotal role in a group which is held together not only by kinship and love, but also by professional relations. Non-extraordinary feelings and work interactions frame the extraordinary adventures of the so-called Arrowverse the last generation of DC Comics-inspired shows broadcasted by the CW Network: The Arrow (2012–2020), The Flash (2014–), Supergirl (2015–), Legends of Tomorrow (2016–). If the net of emotional relations that surrounds the superhero is less surprising, since it is the natural evolution of Superman’s love-topos, work environment and relationships are without any historical parallel in superhero narratives and mark an innovation in the genre. In what follows I elaborate on the implications of this epoch-making turn in superhero narratives.

2. The superhero goes to work As I said, Barry’s action can have catastrophic consequences. At the end of the first season, in an attempt to run back in time and save his mother from murder, he causes a gravitational singularity to open right in the middle of Central City. The singularity, which is the centre of a black hole, almost destroys the town and kills several citizens. Barry starts running inside the singularity but, as we find out in the first episode of the second season, he is not the one who saves the day. While asking Barry to keep on running to stabilise the singularity, his team analyses the situation, assesses the possible scenarios and another superhero, the metahuman Firestorm, takes over the task to close the singularity (and pays for his noble gesture with his life). And that is the point: in order to be the hero he is meant to be, The Flash needs someone who shares his responsibilities, provides him with external support and, most importantly, directs his powers and guides him. Barry finds all of this in a team composed of S.T.A.R. Labs researchers and other characters. It soon becomes clear that the activity of helping the hero is a full-time job to which the group’s members commit themselves day in, day out. It is not only that the personal interactions among the characters, their professional skills and their problem-solving techniques evoke in the audience ordinary work-related experiences. It is not only that on top of the emotional plausibility, the audience is compelled to acknowledge a professional plausibility too. There is more: the contemporary superhero cooperates with non-superheroes because he relies on their professional competences, as they provide him with intelligence, logistic, technical and scientific support. As comic book historian Alan Kistler says, there is a strong masculine narrative in the traditional comics idea that “it comes down to one man” who solves problems and “can’t rely on anyone else” but, as Kistler adds, “in the last couple of decades we have started realizing that that’s not really true” (season 2, DVD-Special feature Allied: The Invasion Complex [03:27–03:41]). Indeed, the complexity of the tasks

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faced by superheroes makes the old routine of the lonely hero no longer plausible and this is a huge change. For almost seven decades, along the Gold, Bronze, and Silver parts of the Modern Age,1 superheroes have mainly embarked on solo missions or have operated with superheroic sidekicks or partners. And never have Superman, Batman, Spiderman, The Flash or any other counted on normal people when fighting villains, and they have never been members of a team of regular characters. This characterises DC and Marvel icons in comics, as well as in film and television adaptations up to the 21st century. At dawn of the new century the superhero gains a team and this marks the beginning of a new age or, at least, a dramatic turn in the Modern one. 2.1 A superhero is worth nothing without his team Nothing describes how much the superhero needs his team better than the sequences when Barry runs after a villain or speeds up to prevent a catastrophe. When duty calls, Barry suits up and hits Central City’s streets while staying in radio contact with the Cortex, S.T.A.R. Labs’ monitoring centre, that operates as a headquarter. Those kinds of sequences are usually shot from a bird’s-eye view that gives an extended view of the city map. From this angle, the city looks like a chessboard where Barry rushes to reach his targets by following the instruction of the Cortex. When the required position is reached, Barry describes what he sees. The team then processes satellite and field data, coordinates the activity in the Cortex and on the field and instructs the superhero on the actions he has to undertake to defeat the villain and save the city. This is possible because S.T.A.R. Labs and the team have the know-how and the technologies that are necessary to tackle the problems the superhero has to face. In the first season, when it becomes evident that Central City is endangered by a new kind of criminality that regular police forces cannot defeat, Harrison Wells, the owner of S.T.A.R. Labs, says to Joe West, Barry’s foster father and a cop who will eventually cooperate with the team, that “You and I both know, we are the only ones equipped to protect Central City” (episode 2 [28:55–29:00]). The key term here is “equipped”. The extraordinary dimension of the threats requires not only the bravery of the superhero, but also technological tools and theoretical competences that make the power of the superhero effective. For example, the team instructs Barry to rotate his arms at super speed in order to create a vacuum that puts out a fire by sucking oxygen (season 1, episode 20), or to hit an evil man of sand with a lightning stroke, turning him into shattered glass (season 2, episode 2). Or, furthermore, the team develops a tachyon device (do not ask me what it is) that increases Barry’s speed fourfold (season 2, episode 18). The lesson here is that the human brain is a most powerful resource that complements superpowers. In season two, episode seven, Barry suffers a major 1

Respectively: 1938–1950, 1956–1970, 1970–1985, 1985–.

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setback as he is badly injured. When Caitlin is kidnapped he gets depressed because he is unable to help his teammates who keep fighting. Joe tries to bring Barry back on track and tells him: “You may not have your legs, just yet, but you still got that brain. Use it. Help us figure that out.” (season 2, episode 7 [15:49– 15:56]). In this case, while Barry is knocked out, it is the team’s scientific competence that rescues Caitlin. At the same time, when Barry runs without his team’s back up, he unfailingly fails. Those setbacks are caused by Barry questioning the most important thing he has learned about the team in the first season’s second episode, this is to say, as he puts it: “I may be the one in the suit doing all the running, but when I’m out there helping people, making a difference, you’re all out there with me […] we were all struck by that lightning” (season 2, episode 7 [37:27–37:44]). The fact that the metahuman superhero is anything but faultless does not mean that he endangers the universe day in, day out, but he certainly screws things up every so often. That makes of him a pretty unreliable hero, who can engage the reader’s sympathy even more than a flawless hero. This is a very typical process that, as Halpern (2018) shows, can occur even in the case of the most unreliable characters (Phelan 2007a, 2007b). But the consequences of the superhero’s weakness are measurable not only in terms of identification with the human-like character. If there can be no superhero without or outside the non-superheroic team, then it can be argued that the normal characters exert control on the non-human powers. This is also proved by the fact that the team is able to neutralise the superhero’s powers in more than one episode. In other words, teamwork is both a controlling factor and a means to normalise the exceptional powers, which fall back under human control. Superhero acts and merits are thus re-framed within a context which is much more human than before, and superheroes acknowledge the normal heroism of those many who put their skills and competences at the community’s disposal. 2.2 Superheroes and the audience of (highly) qualified regular employees The turn in superhero narratives also responds to the needs of the market on which the comics-inspired TV shows are placed. In 2014, when the first season of The Flash was aired, CW Network President’s Mark Pedowitz said he wanted to expand CW’s target audience “beyond the 18to-34 year-olds” and change the perception of CW as “a teenage-girl” network (Birnbaum 2014). With superheroes as part of the strategy to expand beyond the young female niche, CW does not target the Sci-Fi niche or the demographic of comic book readers, but the bigger piece of TV audience: the male demographic 18–49 age group.2 2

From a commercial point of view the number of viewers within the 18–49 age range (and its sub-spritzing) is more relevant than the total number of viewers because this group is the most coveted by TV advertisers.

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One year later, observers assess that “the CW under Mark Pedowitz has done a remarkably good job at going after some of the hardest to reach (and most prized by advertisers): young men.” Indeed, the audience map between September 2014 and February 2015 shows that The Flash ranged from 9-year-old boys to 49-yearold men (Metcalf 2015). In 2016 the show’s ratings confirm the trend and The Flash: surged to its top 18–49 rating since […] December 2014, placing second for its hour in the demo as well as total viewers. It also swelled by 25% in adults 18–34 […] racking up the show’s highest rating since its series premiere. In both adults 18–34 and men 18–34, the Scarlett Speedster delivered the top broadcast rating of the night. (Kissel 2016) Between 2014 and 2018 The Flash has been CW Network’s highest-rated show according to the Nielsen Rating, which registers a show’s success among a target audience and can thus be considered as a direct economic indicator of the effectiveness of what I have described as the process of identification. When a show is successful in developing identification and thus affection in the audience members, they consequently stay loyal to the product. The Flash scores particularly well among the core demographics and this means that the creators of the show target an audience which is composed of mainly middle-class well-educated employees or college students.3 It is most likely that these audience members, actual or future employees, invest a relevant part of their life in their jobs and studies. Thus, on the one hand, they can enjoy a story that challenges the competences they have acquired in college and, on the other hand, they are receptive to a story that depicts real work-related behaviours and environments. That said, a further aspect is essential. In order to understand where workrelated perceived realism is triggered, one has to take into account the narrative structure that characterises the TV show because, from a narratological point of view, series such as The Flash have a binary structure. On the one hand, there is the overarching narrative that covers the whole season and links different seasons together. This overarching narrative has its own main theme, typically, in the Arrowverse, the nature of power and the consequences of having power, which is a long-standing topic of superhero narratives since they appear in US comics. In every Arrowverse show this theme is linked to the heroes’ fight against one super-enemy, whose evil plan is so complex that it engages the heroes and their teams for the length of a whole season. On the other hand, there are the single episodes where teams and superheroes face a different threat every time, put him down and get their daily happy ending. The fight against those villains usually corresponds with the length of one episode and run 3

On the topic of the corporate professionals in superhero comics, see Smith 2009.

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parallel to the overarching narrative. Aspects of the main theme of the series are also developed in the single episodes, but every one of them has its own theme. This binary structure results from the evolution of episodic TV show of the 20th century into contemporary complex television (Mittell 2015) and has crucial consequences on the process of connection between audience and show. Indeed, authors deal with two different kinds of audience members: those who watch the whole series or at least one season of it, and those who occasionally watch one episode and could become absorbed in the story and thus become regular audience, but are not yet familiar with the show and still need to be involved. One single episode is not sufficient to see the whole picture of the overarching theme, which is too complex and also engages the audience on a pretty theoretical level, since it deals with the values of technoculture, political powers and individual responsibilities. Moreover, although the theme tackles one of the main issues of contemporary societies, it is not easily understandable and it is even less easily relatable to one’s everyday life. On the contrary, work-related themes are primary factors of perceived realism and can be an effective means of a plausible narration for the above described target audience. Therefore, to catch the attention of the occasional viewer and turn him/ her into a loyal viewer, authors have to deploy plausibility via (i.e.) work-related themes in every single episode. This is exactly what happens in The Flash. If audience members perceive realism, thanks to the themes of the single episode, and develop sympathy for the show’s character, they will then begin the process that eventually leads to identification with the narrative and this will guarantee the success of the show. For this reason, when superhero creators target an audience that goes beyond the traditional niche of Sci-Fi and comics fans, they open up their stories to global shared themes such as work.

3. Work-related themes Although several aspects of a real work environment and of professional behaviours are addressed in The Flash, I limit my analysis to only two main topics, namely teamworking and career development. The context in which the characters work is comparable to that of a (highly) technologic corporation, where high-level professional profiles are required and where employees have no nine-to-five jobs. Their routine is rather that of the project-oriented corporation that constantly operates under pressure and against strict deadlines. Even this world has changed in the last two decades. 3.1 Team working Do you remember the prototypical self-made man who dominated the corporate workplace drama back in the eighties, the most representative being, among others, The secret of my success or Working girl, respectively released in 1987 and

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1988?4 Well, forget about the lonely climbers, they are no longer the reference point. As I said, now it’s all about teams that have become commonplace since “organizations have recognized that teams can be more effective than the sum of the work from individuals, so they have shifted from individual tasks to team tasks.” (Salas et al. 2018: 594). The teams perform tasks that require a wide range of integrated competences and a close interaction among members, which means that the idea behind the TV show setting is exactly the same that causes teams to be the most strategic investment of contemporary corporations. Teams are not only vital to the development of (a superhero’s) technological tools because they can provide more scientific innovation than a single individual. Teams are also more likely than solo runners to find innovative solutions (Wuchty at al. 2007; Uzzi et al. 2013). The team on screen exhibits all the key factors of a regular corporate team. For example, team-Flash members believe that they can be effective, which means that they show “potency”. They trust “the team’s competence” and they feel psychologically safe, since they trust in “the members’ intentions” (Ilgen et al. 2005: 521–522). They are effective in planning since they “gather information that is available to the group members” and then they “evaluate and use this information to arrive at a strategy for accomplishing [their] mission.” (Ilgen et al. 2005: 524). Although team tasks and compositions can vary, teamwork competencies are always the same and can be reduced to three main issues: coordination, communication and adaptability. (Salas et al. 2018: 596). Coordination means establishing a shared mental model that puts teammates on the same page. This is why solo missions and individualistic behaviours of the superhero or of his teammates are always depicted as pernicious for the team and disastrous for those they want to help. Communication is necessary when “teammates with unique expertise should share information that is exclusively known to them yet critical for the team’s effort. This communication must be clear and understandable, avoiding jargon” (Salas et al. 2018: 596). This is no easy task given the scientific or para-scientific nerd-jargon that dominates the series, although it can be an occasion for funny moments of team building, for example when Cisco explains to his teammates the paradox of travelling though time via the examples of Back to the future and Terminator (season 1, episode 14 [09:34–09:46]). Adaptability is displayed, for example, where the series mirrors the fluid nature of teams and of team management in contemporary corporations. When problems grow in complexity (for example in the case of an Alien invasion, such as in season three’s eighth episode), the team’s members need to join forces with another superhero’s team. When characters of the Arrowverse team up, one talks about a crossover episode.5 A crossover brings to its logical consequences the idea that a 4 5

On American cinematic representation of labour, see Levinsons 2012. A crossover spans over more than one episode, but each of them belongs to only one series. In this case the crossover is composed of the eighth episode of The Flash’s second season and the eighth episode of The Arrow’s fourth season.

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hero’s solo mission is outdated and can be regarded as the television version of the Justice Leagues movies, where several superheroes are in charge of the defence of the planet, as Kistler points out (see above). In season two’s eighth episode, an Egyptian immortal arrives in Central City. This villain’s power goes beyond science’s borders and falls under the realm of magic and mysticism, so The Flash asks the help of Starling City’s hero, The Arrow, and his team, because they have the expertise to tackle this kind of problem. Since the two team members “had joined a newly formed temporary group, with fluid membership, which needed to develop rapidly into a high-performing unit to take on an unfamiliar project” (Edmondson et al. 2018: 347), it can be said that crossover tasks are cases of cross-boundary teaming, which is different from regular teams “that are well-bounded, reasonably stable, and functionally homogenous”. Cross-boundary teaming “is an increasingly popular strategy for innovation. In a growing number of cases, teams span organizational boundaries, not just functional ones, to pursue innovation” (Edmondson et al. 2018: 347). In this cases the abilities of the two teams’ leaders (The Flash and The Arrow) to manage the new group and the knowledge diversity of the teammates is the key to success (see also Tell et al. 2016). Bonding is a further team asset, because hard skills and competences are not all that matters: Bonding reflects affective feelings that team members hold toward each other and the team. Whereas trust represents a willingness to work together on the task, bonding goes beyond trust and reflects a strong sense of rapport and a desire to stay together, perhaps extending beyond the current task context. (Ilgen et al. 2005: 526–527) This happens, for example, when Cisco tells Caitlin and Wells that they do not have a life, respectively because of her work commitment (season 1, episode 12) and his problematic personality (season 4, episode 3). In these cases Cisco, who is the truest corporate man, fills the void in his teammates’ lives by offering them his friendship, and that improves the team’s global performance. The benefits of close, informal ties at work are well documented by scholars and taken for granted by practitioners, while only “a small, disparate body of scholarship suggests that workplace friendships have important downsides” (Pillemer and Rothbard 2018: 650). The mainstream perception is that friendship at work is healthy and it is of no surprise at all if a US TV show extensively promotes this idea and depicts super-heroic teams where friendship and spiritual kinship are at the core of team working. Indeed, “Americans tend to develop trust through friendship ties” whereas other cultures “typically develop trust based on how competent the other person is on a task” (Salas et al. 2018: 596).

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3.2 Career development A second main issue in today’s high-performing teams is leadership. There are different kinds of leadership and every leader needs to be trained to become an effective leader. Barry eventually becomes one, but I can assure you, he does not begin from the top of the managerial chain. When Barry realises he can become a superhero, he needs to learn the job. The ways in which he does so are practically the same we all experience in a normal work environment when we learn to manage our abilities and to fulfil our tasks. At the first stage the rookie needs a mentor who strives to maximize the potential of the newcomer and guides him/her along the learning process. Awareness of one’s own capabilities is the most important accomplishment at this stage because mentorship is about “empowering you to use your own gift to succeed on your own” (Barry, season 3, episode 12 [24:45–24:48]). At the second stage, after he/she has learned to master his/her skills, the mentee works at a higher level and can become, in turn, someone else’s mentor. Nonetheless, he/she still needs someone who shows him/her how to take the first steps to become a leader. This new helper does not necessarily have the same skills of the newly-promoted team member, but has experience and a vision, and leads the way by example. This helps the young leader to become self-aware because even the most skilled person needs to “keep learning, keep training, keep getting smarter” (The Arrow, season 1, episode 8 [25:22–25:26]), and this makes the difference between having powers but “running blind” and having the confidence to lead the action. At the final stage, the mature leader needs nothing but someone who inspires him/her. The inspirer is more of a life coach or a creative type, he/she shares no skill at all with the leader but is a visionary and projects the leader’s capabilities into the future. At this last stage, the professional takes on fully the responsibilities for his/her actions and perspectives and those of his/her team. One can track the three stages of the professional development I have described in the evolutionary steps that Barry Allen experiences in the first three seasons of the series. In the first season, Barry has just become The Flash and he starts collaborating with S.T.A.R. Labs. Although the team’s activity mainly evolves around him and his will to serve the greater good, he is nothing but the extraordinary talented newcomer in a team’s routine. Just like the other members of the team, he looks up to the owner and chief researcher of S.T.A.R. Labs, Wells, who becomes his mentor. As in real life, this mentor is an older, experienced colleague who has essentially the same skills as the young mentee. Wells, indeed, is not only a brilliant researcher who teaches the younger members of the group how to use their competences in science and technology to take down villains; it turns out that Wells is also a speedster, and thanks to his knowledge of these uncommon skills, he teaches Barry how to control and improve his own ability.

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In the second season, Barry inherits Wells’ property, becomes the owner of S.T.A.R. Labs and its facilities and thus also the employer of the team members who work in the laboratory. At this stage, Barry is the leader of a knowledge-intensive co-productive team, who combines “the roles of direction and contribution”. In other words, Barry is not only responsible for directing the team members’ activities, he is also “expected to contribute to project tasks” (Rahmani et al. 2018: 5234). One of the main challenges of these kind of leaders is how to “combine their contributing and directing roles”, which also includes how to use their authority. Barry displays a participatory team leadership “where the team leader only exerts contributing effort and gives the team members full discretion on their choice of efforts” (Rahmani et al. 2018: 5235). This kind of leadership is typical of small teams where the reward for the members’ participation in the tasks is sufficiently high “to provide incentives to the team members to voluntarily contribute to the project.” (Rahmani et al. 2018: 5245). Instead, when different groups team up, the work environment changes and the leaders must manage a large team and thus engage in more directive efforts, which implies both directing and contributing. In this case, Barry experiences a crisis since he is not able yet to be this kind of leader. Thanks to the support of the co-leader, The Arrow, he learns how to be a directive leader too. As is typical of this kind of leadership, he learns how to push members to perform better than they expected. In the third season, Barry’s leadership is still a work in progress, but not his capability as a superhero, which is solid and reliable. He does not need someone who explains to him how to do things (such as Wells in the first season) or how to behave (such as The Arrow in the second season), but he needs someone who brings up ideas that he can then implement. The difference between inception and execution are here depicted. The inspirer is not a scientist, nor a speedster, nor a hero, just a powerless person with a “crazy way of thinking” that helps out the team (Cisco, season 3, episode 11 [39:15–39:16]). The logic behind this career path, once again, is the logic that rules contemporary work environments, namely: no matter how skilled you are, you have to learn the job, and no matter how well you have done, you have to keep on learning; moreover, you have to be a team player and rely on your team whatever they are up to.

4. Europe If US superheroes have undergone significant changes in the last two decades, the European television market has changed as well. Right after the turn of the century, The New York Times reported that in Europe “American programs are experiencing a broader renaissance” that brought an impressive amount of US production to all the major European commercial channels. Apparently, since the 1980s, US television has not been so popular in Europe.

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This is a consequence of more extensive investments of US producers to target the European market and of European budgets’ contraction on internal productions. Because “broadcasters have to fill many more hours of air time as cable, satellite and digital channels proliferate. Buying the rights to American shows is much less expensive than producing original ones” (Pfanner 2006). As a result, in 2013, right before The Flash’s first season, the US “had an export-import surplus of $13.4 billion with Europe, where its key international customers reside (European Audiovisual Observatory [EAO], 2014)” (Esser 2016: 3585). US television expansion is also visible beyond Europe where The Flash, as well as the other Arrowverse’s TV shows, score very highly. In 2017, The Flash was ranked 7th in the top twenty of most popular shows at global level according to a ranking by Insider and Parrot Analytics based on the “average daily audience demand from all countries from January 1 to July 31, 2017” (Nededog 2017). Scholars have demonstrated that identification in media content can increase the reception of the message embedded in the content and thus that identification can enhance the persuasive effects of the media content. Given the successful trend of US superhero narratives, it would be interesting to assess whether, and if so, how, US storytelling is influencing European conceptualisation of work and superheroes. As Dean shows, Europe and the US historically do not share a common conceptualisation of heroism. First of all: The principal contrastive element in the Old World versus New World respect for hero has been difference between a spiritual, elitist emphasis in the European hero versus a material, popular emphasis in the American hero. In Europe, heroic status has mostly belonged to a chosen few; in America, it became a right. In Europe, it was a given genius (a force of nature); in America, it was an achieved goal (aspiration). Class and quality as opposed to identity and selfhood. (Dean 2008: 75) Second, the US has a very cohesive idea of heroism and heroes, whilst in Europe “there are national typologies, but no firm European heroic typologies as yet” (Dean 2008: 89). In sum, the contemporary trend of superhero narratives, as innovative as they are, meet the US idea of hero, and they even reinforce it, when they stress the component of work and professionality. US heroes and now superheroes too have always been and still are self-made men and entrepreneurs, responsible, thanks to their work, for their status as a hero (the pathfinder, the reformer, the salesman, the thinker, the politician, the soldier; Dean 2008: 87– 88). Europe, instead, is not only extremely receptive towards US narratives, but does not counterbalance US idea of heroism with an idea of its own. This may suggest that, on this matter, US cultural imperialism in Europe is likely to be particularly effective.

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Bibliography The Flash. Season one: first aired October 7, 2014–May 19, 2015. DVD/Blu-ray release: 2015. Season two: first aired October 6, 2015–May 24, 2016. DVD/Blu-ray release: 2016. Season three: first aired October 4, 2016–May 23, 2017. DVD/Blu-ray release: 2017. Season four: first aired October 10, 2017–May 22, 2018. DVD/Blu-ray release: 2018. Season five: first aired October 9, 2018–ongoing. Production: Berlanti Productions, DC Entertainment, Warner Bros. Television. Distribution: Warner Bros. Television Distribution. Birnbaum, Debra. (2014) “CW’s Mark Pedowitz Talks ‘Supernatural’ Spinoff, ‘Arrow’ and ‘Flash’ Crossovers”. Variety. July 18. https://variety.com/2014/tv/news/cw-superna tural-spinoff-arrow-flash-crossovers-mark-pedowitz-1201264617/ Cho, Hyunyi, Shen, Lijiang, Wilson, Kari. (2014) “Perceived Realism: Dimensions and Roles in Narrative Persuasion”. Communication Research. 41(6). 828–851. Cohen, Johnathan. (2001) “Defining Identification: A Theoretical Look at the Identification of Audiences with Media Characters”. Mass Communication & Society. 4(3). 245–264. Dean, John. (2008) “From distant heroes to intimate friends: media and the metamorphosis of affection for public figures”. Heroes in a Global World. Susan J. Drucker, Gary Gumpert (eds). Cresskill: Hampton Press. 67–98. Edmondson, Amy C., Harvey, Jean-François. (2018) “Cross-boundary teaming for innovation: Integrating research on teams and knowledge in organizations”. Human Resource Management Review. 28(4). 347–360. Esser, Andrea. (2016) “Challenging U.S. Leadership in Entertainment Television? The Rise and Sale of Europe’s International TV Production Groups”. International Journal of Communication. 10. 3585–3614. Hall, Alice. (2003) “Reading realism: Audiences’ evaluations of the reality of media texts”. Journal of Communication. 53(4). 624–641. Halpern, Faye. (2018) “Closeness Through Unreliability: Sympathy, Empathy, and Ethics in Narrative Communication”. Narrative. 26(2). 125–145. Hollinger, Veronica. (2009) “Posthumanism and Cyborg Theory”. The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Mark Bould, Andrew Butler, Adam Roberts, Sherryl Vint (eds). Abingdon: Routledge. 267–278. Igartua, Juan José. (2010) “Identification with characters and narrative persuasion through fictional feature films”. Communications. 35. 347–373. Ilgen, Daniel R., Hollenbeck, John R., Johnson, Michael, Jundt, Dustin. (2005) “Teams in Organizations: From Input-Process-Output Models to IMOI Models”. Annual Review of Psychology. 56. 517–543. Kissel, Rick. (2016) “Ratings: CW’s ‘The Flash’ Soars to Season Highs; ‘NCIS’ Shows Roll for CBS”. Variety. February 10, https://variety.com/2016/tv/news/ratings-cws-theflash-soars-to-season-highs-1201702218/ Levinsons, Julie. (2012) The American Success Myth on Film, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Metcalf, Mitch. (2015) “Audience Map: CW primetime”. ShowBuzzDaily. February 19. http://www.showbuzzdaily.com/articles/audience-map-cw-primetime.html Mittell, Jason. (2015) Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, New York: NYU Press. Nededog, Jethro. (2017) “20 most popular TV shows of 2017 so far”. Business Insider. August 5. https://www.businessinsider.com/most-watched-tv-shows-world-parrot-ana lytics-2017-7?international=true&r=US&IR=T#8-13-reasons-why-netflix-13

Work and contemporary superhero TV shows 263 Pfanner, Eric. (2006) “As U.S. Is Reviled Abroad, American TV Charms”. The New York Times. October 16. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/business/media/16tv.html Phelan, James. (2007a) “Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita”. Narrative. 15(2). 222–238. Phelan, James. (2007b) Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Pillemer, Julianna, Rothbard, Nancy P. (2018) “Friends Without Benefits: Understanding the Dark Sides of Workplace Friendship”. Academy of Management Review. 43(4). 635–660. Rahmani, Morvarid, Roels, Guillaume, Karmarkar, Uday S. (2018) “Team Leadership and Performance”. Management Science. 64(11). 5234–5249. Salas, Eduardo, Reyes, Denise L., McDaniel, Susan H. (2018) “The Science of Teamwork: Progress, Reflections, and the Road Ahead”. American Psychologist. 73(4). 593–600. Smith, Greg M. (2009) “The Superhero as Labor. The Corporate Secret Identity”. The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, Angela Ndalianis (ed.). Abingdon: Routledge. Tell, Frederik, Berggren, Christian, Brusoni, Stefano, Van de Ven, Andrew (eds). (2016). Managing knowledge integration across boundaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Uzzi, Brian, Mukherjee, Satyam, Stringer, Michael, Jones, Ben. (2013) “Atypical combinations and scientific impact”. Science. 342(6157). 468–472. Wuchty, Stefan, Jones, Benjamin F., Uzzi, Brian. (2007) “The increasing dominance of teams in production of knowledge”. Science. 316(5827). 1036–1039.

Chapter 18

‘A new name and a new job, that’s what he’d like’ Identity, labour and precarity, 1915–2015 Morag Shiach

This chapter analyses a range of cultural texts to stage an argument about the metamorphosis of labour, the construction of social identities in and through forms of labour, and the impacts of globalisation on the organisation and experience of work since 1915. The title of the chapter invokes a particular kind of longing for new forms of work and identity (‘a new name and a new job, that’s what he’d like’), which is expressed by a character in Trumpet, a 1998 novel by Jackie Kay (1998, 138). The primary narrative concern of Trumpet is with the life of a jazz trumpeter, Joss Moody, who is discovered only after his death to have been a woman, and the novel represents the impact of this posthumous revelation of a transformed gender identity from a variety of perspectives, including that of the trumpeter’s adopted son, Colman. Colman’s discovery that his father had been a woman leads him to ‘cast himself off’ from his friends, to ‘cast himself adrift’ (Kay, 1998, 137). It also leads him to a significant transformation of his relationship to his work. ‘For a year before his father died, Colman had been working as a courier on a motorbike. He liked it, wearing his big helmet. People made way for helmeted guys like himself … when he was a courier he felt liberated’ (Kay, 1998, 137–8). This sense of liberation through work is generated primarily by the fear that Colman’s work-uniform generates and the sense of power that this gives him, rather than by any articulated project of self-realisation. And it is achieved despite the fact that ‘the money was crap actually’ (Kay, 1998, 138) – ‘crap’, Colman suggests, because the modern city is so gridlocked that its communications networks have broken down and a courier cannot earn a decent living. Both of these suggest some distance from the narrative of self-realisation and self-improvement through the activity of human labour that underpinned the project of modernity. Colman’s immediate response to the shocking discovery of his father’s female identity is certainly to seek both solace and liberation through his work: ‘The day after Colman saw his father in the funeral parlour, he went into work. He thought it would keep him sane’ (Kay, 1998, 138). But his boss offers no real sympathy and Colman, angry at this lack of human feeling ‘just walked out’. Furious and alienated from his fellow workers, Colman muses: ‘a new name and a new job, that’s what he’d like. A new start in life’ (Kay, 1998, 138). The viability of such a ‘new

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start in life’ through the activity of labour is the key concern of the literary and filmic texts analysed in this rest of this chapter. The ways in which theoretical engagements with and close readings of literary texts can produce a rich historical understanding of how labour is experienced was explored in my study of Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890–1930, where I argued that: A number of insistent questions and themes emerge from these philosophical texts [about labour] – the defining aspects of ‘modern labour’ are found by many writers to lie in the division of labour: that increasing tendency to break labour down into ever smaller constituent parts … the interaction of this with increasing mechanization led many writers to anxious speculation about the alienating and destructive tendencies of modern labour. This anxiety about the subjective and social costs of mechanization is, however, met by a vigorous organicism that emerges in many of these philosophical texts. Here labour is understood as the energy of will, as the process of growth and creativity that drives both the individual and the human species. At its most extreme, this tendency develops into a vitalism that … sees labour as the space in which this vital energy could receive its fullest expression. (Shiach, 2004, 16) In extending my analysis in this chapter of the relations between labour and the sense of selfhood beyond the period of Modernism, it has been necessary also to extend the philosophical framing by which such an analysis is shaped. Specifically, this chapter will consider the conditions of postmodern labour, including the global organisation of work through a North/South division of labour, the increasing role of affective forms of labour, and also the precarious nature of the economic relations that characterise twenty-first-century work, including the forms of precarity that are shaped by technological innovations within the ‘gig economy’ (Morgan and Nelligan, 2017). In considering the significance of these fundamental shifts, and their impact on the ability of labour to underpin both individual and social identities, it will draw particularly on ideas and arguments about ‘immaterial labour’ such as those found in Maurizio Lazzarato’s (1996) essay, ‘Immaterial Labour’ or in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s study of neoliberalism and global capitalism, Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000). These texts stage a connected series of arguments about the relation between new forms of technology and new forms of labour, about the forms of economic fragility and precariousness experienced by those in work, and also about the centrality of ‘affective labour’ to the functioning of late-capitalist economies. The conference where the contributors to this volume first shared and compared their research findings was organised around the idea of a fundamental ‘metamorphosis’ in the experience of labour since the early twentieth century, and had as one of its key premises the importance of a new and rigorous interrogation of labour’s role in the creation of sustainable social and individual identities. I thus

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turn now first of all to a literary text that puts metamorphosis at its centre: Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella, Metamorphosis, reading it, unusually, as a text that is centrally concerned with labour. Metamorphosis famously begins with the transformation of Gregor Samsa from a travelling salesman into a kind of ‘monstrous vermin’. But what is less frequently noticed is that the representation of Gregor’s sudden metamorphosis into a creature with a ‘tough armoured back’ (Kafka, 2007 [1915], 75), is explicitly placed within the context of his experience of work: ‘Oh, my Lord!’ he thought. ‘If only I didn’t have to follow such an exhausting profession! On the road, day in, day out. The work is so much more strenuous than it would be in head office, and then there’s the additional ordeal of travelling, worries about train connections, the irregular, bad meals, new people all the time, no continuity, no affection.’ (Kafka, 2007 [1915], 76) Gregor’s work is represented as exhausting, repetitive, and strenuous, and thus has many of the characteristics of early-twentieth-century industrial labour. But it is also dominated by anxiety, caught up in systems of mass communication, and characterised by the loneliness, disruption, and excessive levels of change (‘new people all the time’) that are more typical of immaterial and postindustrial forms of labour. Both fear and vulnerability are generated by Gregor’s work. His parents owe money to the director of the company for whom he works, but he fantasizes that, ‘once I’ve got the money together to pay back what my parents owe him … Then we’ll have the parting of the ways’ (Kafka, 2007 [1915], 76). However, his altered bodily state makes going to work impossible, and the novella ends with a catastrophic deterioration in his finances. Gregor’s father pleads his case briefly when the chief clerk from his company comes to ask why Gregor is not at work, claiming first that Gregor is ‘not feeling well’ (Kafka, 2007 [1915], 81), and then asserting (by way of evidence for the uncharacteristic nature of Gregor’s indisposition), that ‘you know that boy has nothing but work in his head! It almost worries me that he never goes out on his evenings off’ (Kafka, 2007 [1915], 82). Gregor’s father becomes increasingly strident in his defence, invoking an idea of Gregor as conscientious, totally devoted to his work, and eschewing all forms of social interaction or pleasure. The chief clerk is not susceptible to such pleadings, noting instead that ‘we businesspeople often find ourselves in the position of having to set aside some minor ailment, in the greater interest of our work’ (Kafka, 2007 [1915], 82). The perfect employee, the chief clerk argues, must overcome any illness and ensure complete dedication to his work. He further warms to his theme of Gregor’s inadequacy as a worker, informing him that ‘your position is hardly the most secure … your performances of late have been extremely unsatisfactory’ (Kafka, 2007 [1915], 83). The precariousness of Gregor’s employment and the consequences of this for his family, are thus clear, and his inability to work is represented as at least as significant as the inconvenient fact that he has turned into some sort of insect. Both situations generate affective responses of fear, disgust, and denial within the novella.

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Gregor insists that ‘I like my work; the travel is arduous, but I couldn’t live without it’ (Kafka, 2007 [1915], 87), and that is literally true as he becomes increasingly alienated from both family and society, and rejected by them. Despite his hideous physical state, his family do initially make some attempt to accommodate him, and his father reminds himself that ‘in spite of his current sorry and loathsome form, Gregor remained a member of the family, and must not be treated like an enemy’ but rather ‘must be tolerated, simply tolerated’ (Kafka, 2007 [1915], 109). But his sister is forced to undertake exhausting office work to compensate for the loss of Gregor’s income, and so ‘no longer had it in her to care for Gregor as she had done earlier’ (Kafka, 2007 [1915], 113). She persuades her parents that Gregor needs to be ‘got rid of’ (Kafka, 2007 [1915], 119) and he is locked in his room. At that point, Gregor’s ‘conviction that he needed to disappear was, if anything, still firmer than his sister’s … his head involuntarily dropped, and his final breath passed feebly from his nostrils’ (Kafka, 2007 [1915], 122). Metamorphosis uses Gregor’s physical transformation to stage the impossibility of surviving as an autonomous human subject when functioning as a precarious and alienated worker. His metamorphosis into an insect is represented as a forced choice – he did not will it but nor does he repudiate it. It thus functions both as a metaphor for the inhuman forces that have acted on Gregor, and as a fantasy of escape from these forces. It is also ultimately the condition of his early and lonely death. The ‘irregular, bad meals, new people all the time, no continuity, no affection’ (Kafka, 2007 [1915], 75) which had characterised his work as a travelling salesman at the beginning of the novella are precisely paralleled in the conditions that lead to his death. After his care and feeding start to become erratic (‘irregular, bad meals’), and new lodgers have been moved in to generate additional income (‘new people all the time’), his family finally move beyond tolerance to active disgust (‘no affection’), and Gregor takes his final breath. Gregor’s fate can be read as emblematic of the alienating experience of work in the modern city. But there were other aesthetic and political framings in the early twentieth century that sought to recover an experience of labour as more constitutive both of the self and of the social. For example, two short films produced by the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit in Britain in 1939 are centrally concerned with the documentation of the lives of working-class communities, framing these in terms of the collective rituals and identities that sustain communities (If War Should Come, 2012). A Midsummer Day’s Work represents various forms of labour involved in laying an underground telephone cable in the Chilterns, while Spare Time explores how the interwar working classes occupied themselves when at leisure, and both offer a version of collective identities constituted through shared labour. The GPO Film Unit was established in 1933 to produce documentary films about contemporary Britain, as well as to develop a new cinematic form to evoke Britain’s national character (Anthony and Mansell, 2011). This Unit was built on the earlier work of the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit, established in the

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1920s and led by John Grierson, who offered a clear vision of the potential of documentary cinema both to educate and to promote social cohesion. As Grierson wrote in 1933: cinema lends itself to rhetoric, for no form of description can add nobility to a simple observation so readily as a camera set low, or a sequence cut to a timebeat. But principally there is this thought that a single say-so can be repeated a thousand time a night to millions of eyes. That … fact opens a new perspective, a new hope, to public persuasion. (Grierson, 1933/34, 120) For Grierson, both its reach (millions of eyes), and its stylised representation that adds ‘nobility to a simple observation’, make film a particularly persuasive and cohesive cultural form. When the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit was transferred to the GPO, the GPO was the largest employer in Britain. In addition to its role in postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications, it was also an important sponsor of scientific and technical research. Grierson was initially an influential figure in terms of both the style and the social values of the films produced by the GPO Film Unit, although he left the Unit in 1937 to be replaced by the Brazilian filmmaker, Alberto Cavalcanti. Cavalcanti, despite not being credited in the film itself, seems to have effectively acted as the Director of the 12-minute film, A Midsummer Day’s Work, which was released in 1939. The subject of the film, the laying of an underground telephone cable in rural England, is directly concerned with the ways in which the GPO worked to link communities through modern telecommunications. A Midsummer Day’s Work opens in Oxford, which the film’s voiceover tells us is associated with scientific research, with industrial manufacturing, and with the GPO. We see the midsummer sun, children playing, and cyclists in the street, and are then invited to witness the forms of labour that enable this version of provincial modernity: ‘Let’s see the cable layers at work’. The film follows the laying of the cable, capturing different elements of the work involved from initial planning to digging trenches, laying pipes, and joining cables. The narrative arc of the film, as well as its movement between different forms of work and visible expressions of community, stress shared experiences, the social relations underpinning work, and the benefits of modernity. The voiceover reminds the viewer that even as the teams involved in digging trenches or laying pipes pursue their collective labours, ‘around us the life of the country goes on’. The film shows us various images of agricultural labour to suggest that the modern world it represents is an organic development of the forms of work that have sustained the rural economy over many years. It thus both celebrates the forces that underpin historical change and simultaneously erases them in favour of a series of images of the British countryside and its communities as timeless. While representing technological change it says little about the changing patterns of work with which it might be associated. For example, despite the fact that around a third of women worked

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outside the home by the thirties, and the GPO was a significant employer of women, women play a very minor role in the film, appearing only in a small number of shots, and are not involved directly in any of the forms of work that the film explores. Spare Time was initially made to be screened at the New York World Fair, which opened in April 1939 and was designed to allow visitors to ‘look at the world of tomorrow’. This World Fair was a global showcase of technological innovation, which took place just on the cusp of the outbreak of the Second World War. Spare Time was directed by Humphrey Jennings, who had studied English Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he had also begun a doctorate supervised by the well-known critic and philosopher, I.A. Richards. Jennings was involved in a number of significant cultural and literary projects in this period, including co-founding in 1928 (with William Empson and Jacob Bronowski) the journal Experiment (a literary magazine that also engaged closely with contemporary science), co-organising the Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, and co-founding the innovative social science research initiative, Mass Observation in 1937. Jennings’s interests in sociology, documentary, and contemporary aesthetic innovations can all be seen within Spare Time, which focusses on how working-class communities associated with the steel, coal, and cotton industries spend their ‘free time’. The choice of these industries is striking as they are all characterised by heavy manual labour and (by the early twentieth century) relatively low levels of technological innovation. They are the old industries of Britain, which had grown rapidly throughout the nineteenth century in specific regions and cities. Jennings’s 14-minute film represents working-class life in such industrial communities, yet industrial landscapes and factories are only the backdrop to the story it tells. This is expressed most unambiguously in the film’s concluding remark that it is actually in their spare time that the working classes have ‘a chance to be most ourselves’. Industrial labour is represented as a barrier to individuals seeking to ‘be themselves’, which they achieve only in their own, (or ‘spare’) time and through activities such as playing darts, playing in brass bands, drinking in the pub, greyhound racing, pigeon fancying, cycling, football, visiting the zoo, playing the piano, communal singing, visiting the funfair, playing cards, amateur dramatics, gardening and ballroom dancing. Such accumulation of evidence for the richness of working-class culture interestingly prefigures a text such as Richard Hoggart’s 1957 study, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (Hoggart, 2009 [1957]), whose detailed picture of working-class culture and arguments about the threats this culture apparently faced were to provide an important strand of analytic thinking for the emerging discipline of Cultural Studies (Hoggart, 2009 [1957]). However, as a film to exhibit at a World Fair focussed on ‘the world of tomorrow’, Spare Time is perhaps surprising in its lack of interest in the ways that work itself shapes the lives of the communities it studies, and how this might be changing in the thirties as new industries emerged, and coal, steel and cotton began their decline. While it

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represents work as fundamentally shaping all of the communities it engages with (understanding ‘spare time’ as framed by shift patterns, for example), its commentary insists that ‘between work and sleep comes the time we call our own time’, and thus that authentic subjectivity is generated in a ‘between’ moment, outside the time of labour. The question of how the time of labour impacts on forms of subjectivity is also central within Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film directed by Chantal Akerman in 1975. It represents the life of a middle-aged widow who earns her living through childcare and through prostitution but spends most of her time completing time-consuming and repetitive domestic tasks. Jeanne’s existence is both economically and psychologically precarious, and is also locked into habits and routines that enable her to negotiate this on a day-to-day basis. The film presents Jeanne’s everyday activities in a style that is a distinctive amalgam of documentary and avant-garde filmic conventions. The stylistic markers of documentary include the temporality of the film’s narrative (which presents key activities in something close to real time) and its deployment of a static camera that allows some elements of the action of the film to happen wholly or partially outside the film’s visual frame. The avant-garde nature of the film finds expression in its undermining of the narrative techniques of classic cinema, its use of a limited colour scheme to connect disparate moments and actions both visually and thematically, its focus on the complex and largely unknowable subjectivity of its central female character; and finally in its close engagement with the nature of women’s labour – including affective labour, domestic labour and sex-work. As the film theorist and critic Jenny Chamarette has noted: There is something very subversive about watching a woman, in an old-fashioned housecoat, lovingly dusting the ornaments in her glass cabinet, preparing a fresh batch of coffee, anxiously peeling potatoes. … When her actions are projected on screen for over three hours, these minute actions of everyday domestic life, which are almost always hidden from view in the cinema, take on the most acute sense of formal perfection. The ultimate violent dissolution of these actions … makes it one of the most insurrectionary films about women that I have ever seen. (Chamarette, 2013) The ‘violence’ that Chamarette refers to here is Jeanne’s murdering of the third client who visits her for sex, which is represented in the film as simultaneously shocking and banal. The tiny changes to her routines and her gestures over the last forty-five minutes of the film build up a visceral tension that is closely mapped onto her body. Despite the description of Akerman’s cinematic style as one in which it appears that ‘nothing happens’ (Margulies, 1996), work, sex, and death are all powerfully present throughout the film, and the relations between them are what is at stake in the life of Jeanne Dielman.

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Jeanne’s isolation within her own home is clear, and is underlined by the stifling confinement of her body within the kitchen or the bedroom and within the frame of the film. At no point in the film is she seen as deriving pleasure or companionship through her work. This is particularly clear in the way her interactions with her sexual clients are represented – they barely exchange a word, and the encounter lasts exactly as long as it takes for her potatoes to cook on the stove. But it is also true of her work as a childminder – she opens the door to receive a baby from its mother (whom we never see) and the baby howls in protest every time Jeanne holds her. This is affective labour without affect, which gradually contributes to Jeanne’s psychological collapse as the film moves towards its ending – her highly structured routines begin to break down, she forgets things, she overcooks her potatoes, and then finally she murders her client. Before directing Jeanne Dielman, Akerman had made a shorter film in New York in 1973 called Hotel Monterey, where she presented glimpses of the lives of the inhabitants of a cheap hotel (Hotel Monterey, 1973). In this film, the camera moves up through the structure of a hotel building, often revealing empty spaces that acquire meanings only through their placing within the overall thematic and narrative concerns of the film. Similarly, Ali Smith’s novel, Hotel World also focuses on a hotel as the location for its fictional imagining of the connections between different characters’ working and personal lives (Smith, 2002 [2001]). It is a fantastical exploration of the interconnected lives of a series of individuals who work at the fictional Global Hotel. It begins with a series of epigraphs that situate both its stylistic and its formal concerns with death, the miraculous, and the mysterious, but also with history, including a quotation from the cultural theorist Charles Jencks: ‘Traditional religions emphasize constancy, the Modernists with their mechanistic models emphasize predictability, but the cosmos is much more dynamic than either a pre-designed world or a dead machine — each jump is a great mystery’ (Jencks, 1997, 7–8). Jencks offers a theory of cultural change that departs from what he describes as the ‘predictability’ of the modern machine (or even the Modernist machine) and that is more dynamic and energetic, with each ‘jump’ to a different cultural state being experienced as ‘a great mystery’. Smith’s novel draws on this idea of dynamic and energetic understanding of historical change (represented particularly through characters’ experience of work) and develops a narrative style that moves beyond ‘predictability’ to evoke something of the mysterious and the haunted. Hotel World is divided into different temporal phases and different grammatical tenses, from ‘past’ through ‘future conditional’ and finally to ‘present’. It begins with a section narrated by the ghost of a young woman (Sara) who briefly worked at the Global Hotel as a chambermaid, but died in a freak accident in a dumb waiter: ‘notorious, a tragedy, not-spoken-about, a shadow-story, my dying got into the papers one day and blew away the next, a hotel has to make a living’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 8). Her life is ephemeral and yet also continues throughout the novel through a strange ghostly narration, although the economic imperative of the hotel chain (‘a hotel has to make a living’) means that her death can never

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be fully or properly represented. Sara recounts the accident that killed her, describes her ghostly appearances to her family, and also describes an important moment of desire she experienced before her death: ‘Then I realised I had fallen, and it was for the girl in the watch shop’. ‘Falling’ takes on a number of meanings here associated with desire, morality, and the precariousness of the human condition that means a fatal fall is never far away. The fatal accident happens on Sara’s ‘first night at a new job’ at the Global Hotel after she climbs into a dumb waiter as a kind of joke, showing off to the fellow worker who had, ironically, offered to ‘show her the ropes’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 24). Sara haunts other characters in the novel, revealing parts of the story of her short life in episodic fragments. Finally, she sets in play the other stories and the other characters who all coalesce around the spaces and the routines of the Global Hotel: I have a message for you, I tell the black sky above the hotel, and the windows lit at half past four down its sides and back and front, and its doors that go round breathing the people in and out. Here’s a woman being swallowed by the doors … Her life could be about to change. Here’s another one inside, wearing the uniform of the hotel and working behind its desk. (Smith, 2002 [2001], 30) The episode that follows develops further the novel’s focus on the experience of women in the twenty-first-century city, focussing on a homeless tubercular woman, Elspeth (Else) who sits begging in her regular spot, ‘a good place here outside the hotel’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 35). The social networks associated with the hotel are extended beyond those who work there to include those who benefit more indirectly from its flows of capital. Else struggles to get enough money through begging to survive, however, and is subject to hostility from a range of voices that challenge her attempts to sustain herself on the street: from ‘Ever thought of working for a living? The rest of us have to. We can’t all just loaf around like you’ to ‘I’m telling you straight and I’ll only tell you once. You want a good raping, and you’re for it’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 43). Else locates and understands her own experience historically in this chapter (which is entitled ‘Present Historic’) musing that when she first encountered the concept of poverty at school it ‘was a word from history’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 44), something that had been addressed through philanthropy, and also through industrial reform: ‘The poor. What history worked to improve, to make things better for. But that was then. This is now’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 44). In the headlines of the newspapers she wraps around her feet, Else reads that Britain is ‘massively more unequal than 20 years ago. One in five people lives below the breadline’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 45), and reflects that the history she had understood as embodying social and economic progress has been reduced to a commodity to be consumed by tourists staying in the Global Hotel, as ‘actual history is gone’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 45).

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If history in the sense of a process of social and economic development has disappeared, history in another sense is very much at work for Else and for the novel as a whole. For example, the secretarial jobs that someone like Else might once have expected to secure have disappeared, and ‘they’re all redundant now, she thinks, all those scrtries. They’re history’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 47). Else’s economic and social position is inherently precarious: she has no regular work but lives instead off the proceeds of begging and occasional episodes of sex work. Unexpectedly, she is approached by the receptionist of the Global Hotel, who offers her a free bed for the night in the hotel. Else accepts, but then lands up running such a deep bath that she floods the room, with disastrous consequences (including the sacking of a chambermaid who actually bore no responsibility for the resulting flood). Lise (the hotel receptionist) is, like the tubercular Else, touched by illness, and the novel describes a future moment in which she will be suffering from an overwhelming and unexplained sense of fatigue, and an excessive level of anxiety, and thus unable to work: ‘Everything – cars, buses, work, shops, people, everything – other than this bed she was lying in was into a different tense now’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 88). This future version of Lise suffering from a postmodern form of neurasthenia shows her literally paralysed by the requirement to fill in the information needed for an Incapacity for Work Questionnaire (Smith, 2002 [2001], 86), not even having the strength to cross the room to pick up a pencil. Her illness is connected to the conditions of her work in the Global Hotel, linked both to the enervating effects of affective labour and the pernicious effects of growing inequality: When you work in a hotel, whatever it is you do – whether it’s smiling at guests on the front desk or spitting in food in the kitchen … presses you hard, with your nose squashed and your face distorted and ugly, right up against the window of other people’s wealth, for which employment you are, usually, quite badly paid. (Smith, 2002 [2001], 97) The narrative time of the novel returns to the present, where ‘Lise, behind Reception, is at work’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 101) and avidly and obsessively clock-watching. She is working in a corporate environment where staff wear uniforms and are observed by multiple surveillance cameras. Time drags painfully slowly – ‘6:53 p. m./Five hours to go … Lise is waiting for the next predictable point in the sequence: the time for her to go home’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 103). Her only sense of agency is derived from the small number of moments when she disobeys company policy and acts according to her own values: ‘Lise, by inviting a homeless person to reside in the hotel for the night free of charge, has probably broken all Global Quality Policy. In doing this, she has made herself feel better’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 115). Lise’s moments of resistance and happiness are fundamentally different from the Global Hotel Group’s own understanding of how

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work and happiness might be related, as its Quality Policy states that ‘if we can do things better and cheaper, we can handle growth more easily, have happier customers, happier staff and happier managers’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 117). This smooth and assured movement from cost-cutting and growth to happiness is not one that Lise, or any character in the novel, actually experiences. The final chapter of Hotel World is written under the sign of ‘The Present’, and revisits the thematic and narrative threads of the novel from the point of view of a narrator who offers an intensity of sensation and richness of image that echo Modernist narrative styles. It begins with an evocative description of a garden, ‘wet after last night’s rain’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 225), but then moves to a more documentary style of engagement with a diverse set of characters (who are also described as ghosts) briefly glimpsed in their daily routines, including at their work. We see ‘the lady who cleans the steps every morning … the checkout girls who work in the supermarket … the driving instructor … the woman who runs the café … the builder … the girl who works in the watch shop’ (Smith, 2002 [2001], 231–233). This is the same girl who was the object of Sara’s desire in the first chapter of the novel, which thus achieves a formal sense of closure by coming back to where it started. But the powerful forces that press upon the characters in the novel, leading to illness, death, homelessness and various forms of hopelessness continue to circulate in a way that is explicitly represented as a kind of haunting – the very last piece of text in the novel is ‘Wooooo-hoooooo/oo/o’, the voice of a ghost. Perhaps the ghost is the forces of globalisation, which present themselves only indirectly and opaquely, and remain outside the characters’ reach. Certainly the novel’s ghost is outside the characters’ understandings of the nature of history while simultaneously over-determining the minutiae of their working (or nonworking) lives. The final text to which I will now turn in conclusion is the film Made in Dagenham, which was released in September 2010, some six months after the end of a 13-year period of Labour government in the UK (Made in Dagenham, 2010). It portrays some of the events associated with a strike by women machinists in the Ford plant based in Dagenham, East London that took place in 1968. This strike was called in response to a process of job regrading, which had determined that women machinists’ jobs were unskilled, and thus liable to a lower rate of pay. The strike ended after three weeks, following agreement of an immediate increase in their levels of pay. This dispute has been seen as a key element in the political processes that led to the passing of the Equal Pay Act just at the end of another period of Labour government, in 1970. It is worth noting that the passing of this Act was also part of the UK’s preparations for entry to the European Community in 1973, since Article 141 of the Treaty of Rome required each Member State to ensure that the principle of equal pay for male and female workers for equal work or work of equal value was applied. Made in Dagenham presents both manual labour and collective labour organisations as affirming of communities and individuals. The careful evocation of period through costume, music and everyday objects, accompanied by the use of

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well-known British actors such as Sally Hawkins, Bob Hoskins and Miranda Richardson, creates that oscillation between familiarity and strangeness that is captured, for example, by Svetlana Boym’s theorisation of nostalgia as: ‘a sense of loss not limited to personal history. … Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values’ (Boym, 2002, 6–8). The mourning in this film is for the experience of industrial labour, collectivism, and community, and for what the film represents as a relatively homogenous working class (whose ethnic make-up is far from representative of Britain in the late sixties). Yet, the decline of this apparently desirable economic and cultural order is also visible within the film. Fordism as an effective modern form of industrial organisation is strikingly undermined when the wife of one of Ford’s senior managers points out that their management approach is no longer able to harness the productive energies of the workforce. Fordism is in decline, but the industrial and economic structures that will replace it do not form part of the film’s narrative world. Instead, the film ends with a return to the narrative and stylistic conventions of documentary, which has been such a persistent and pervasive form for the representation of labour. The complex patterns of identification with the strikers, the union activists, and the broader community that have been generated by the film up to this point, give way to an attempt to make history more directly present through the use of news footage and interviews with participants in the strike. This moves not only beyond nostalgia to sentiment, but also risks the erasure of history through its overly emphatic assertions. This final stylistic gesture both commodifies history and also disconnects it from experiences of labour in a globalised and precarious economy. It is important to remember that vehicle assembly ceased at the Ford plant in Dagenham in 2002, and that employment at the plant declined from 40,000 workers in 1953 to 3,200 by 2015. Identity, labour and precarity are all part of the contemporary story, and history, of how things are made in Dagenham, but only very partially represented within this film.

Bibliography A Midsummer Day’s Work. (1939). [Film], in If War Should Come: The GPO Film Unit Collection, vol. 3. (2012) [DVD] London: BFI. Akerman, C. (1977). ‘Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman’. Camera Obscura, 1(2), pp. 115–121. Anthony, S. and Mansell, J., eds. (2011). The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Boym, S. (2002). The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Chamarette, J. (2013). ‘Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’. [online]. Available at: http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/cteq/jeanne-dielman-23-quai-du-comm erce-1080-bruxelles/ [Accessed 26 October 2017]. Grierson, J. (1933/34). ‘Propaganda: A Problem for Educational Theory and for Cinema’. Sight and Sound, 3, pp. 119–121.

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Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hoggart, R. (2009 [1957]). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life. London: Penguin Classics. Hotel Monterey. (1973). [film] New York: Chantal Akerman. If War Should Come: The GPO Film Unit Collection, vol. 3. (2012) [DVD] London: BFI. Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. (1975). [film] Belgium: Chantal Akerman. Jencks, C. (1997). The Architecture of the Jumping Universe: How Complexity Science is Changing Architecture and Culture. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley Press. Kafka, F. (2007 [1915]). Metamorphosis and Other Stories, translated by Michael Hofmann. London: Penguin Books. Kay, J. (1998). Trumpet. London: Picador. Lazzarato, M. (1996). ‘Immaterial Labour’. In: P. Virno and M. Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 133–147. Made in Dagenham. (2010). [Film] UK: Nigel Cole. Margulies, I. (1996). Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hypperrealist Everyday. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morgan, G. and Nelligan, P. (2017). The Creativity Hoax: Precarious Work in the Gig Economy. London: Anthem Press. Nichols, B. (2001). ‘Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde’. Critical Inquiry, 27(4), pp. 580–610. Shiach, M. (2004) Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shiach, M. (2018). ‘Labour material and immaterial: A Modernist Perspective’. In: M. Waithe and C. White, eds., The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830–1930: Authorial Work Ethics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 292–309. Smith, A. (2002 [2001]). Hotel World. London: Penguin Books. Spare Time. (1939). [Film], in If War Should Come: The GPO Film Unit Collection, vol. 3. (2012) [DVD] London: BFI.

Chapter 19

In the name of a loss Work and the contradictions of contemporary literary imaginary Tiziano Toracca

Introduction In the last few decades, Italian literature has depicted work in very different ways but it has done so, substantially, always in the name of a loss. Observed from a certain distance, the image of the world of work emerging in many contemporary Italian literary works is that of an unrecognizable world. Not much, or not only, does it constitute the image of a world being torn up by conflicts and deep inequalities, at the mercy of interests, as well as of global financial and economic fluxes, invested by a new technological revolution – the so-called “documedia” revolution (Ferraris, 2018; Ferraris, Paini, 2018)1 – but also it seems to be a lost world, collapsed after the affirmation of the “planetary politics” (Bourdieu 1993; Beck, 1997; Bauman, 1998; Osterhammel, Petersson 2003). The diffusion and the central position reached by, within the literary field, the “precarious lives” of “precarious characters” (those called, by Luciano Gallino, the “deferred lives”: Gallino, 2014) is the most evident symptom of such a general and widespread sense of loss. Stable, certain and guaranteed work is an idea of the past. Social rights and class consciousness have evaporated. Subaltern classes live in a social desert and fight each other day after day (we are basically witnessing a sort of Hobbesian state of nature). From this point of view, the work that has provoked more debates and that has been most appreciated (originating as a blog and then subsequently becoming a script for theatre and cinema) is probably Il mondo deve sapere by Michela Murgia (Murgia, 2006). In the same time period, analogous attention and success have been experienced by Cordiali saluti by Andrea Bajani (Bajani, 1

On some aspects discussed by Ferraris, in particular on the “parasitic capitalism” that transforms consumers into workers, see also Hardt, Negri, 2000. The problem of the wealth produced by the “sweat of the otium on the forehead” is one of the core problems discussed in the mid-Sixties by Günther Anders in particular in the essay “Der sanfte Terror” (“The soft terror”) published in 1963 in Merkur and then, with an introduction written in 1970 in the second volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Of a new man with a passive psychical structure, oriented towards consumerism and not interested in the productive activities and in the political organization discussed by Lucine Goldmann, David Riesman and Jürgens Habermas, see Goldmann 1977.

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2005) and Mi chiamo Roberta by Aldo Nove (Nove, 2006), even though the best literary experiment has probably been Pausa caffè by Giorgio Falco (Falco, 2004). Yet the insistence on precariousness, though evident and typical (La Porta, 2000: 97–105; Contarini, 2010a; Turchetta 2011; Chirumbolo, 2013; Contarini, Jansen, Ricciardi, 2015; Toracca, 2017a; Baghetti, 2017; Ceteroni, 2018; Summa, 2018; Pegorari, 2018), is not the only symptom of such a general atmosphere of dismay. If we look at the representation of industry and of workers at the end of last century or at the beginning of the present century (contemporary Italian literature is now back to focusing on the depiction of factories and has started to do so significantly, as has been underlined by Panella after the disgrace of 2007 in the steelworks ThyssenKrupp in Torino: Panella, 2012), we realize that among the most important Italian novels on de-industrialization and on the crisis of the working class – i.e. the works of Paolo Volponi (1989), Antonio Pennacchi (1994) and Ermanno Rea (2002) – and the later novels, written by younger authors, for instance Francesco Dezio (2004), Giulia Fazzi (2005), Emanuele Tonon (2009), Silvia Avallone (2010), Alberto Prunetti (2012), Stefano Valenti (2013),2 there is a meaningful gap. The idea that work was an element of individual training and that industry could be an instrument of social and democratic development has now blurred. Although nasty, full of rage and disenchanted (Volponi) and although looking at the past (Pennacchi, Rea), the first authors describe the factory as a potentially identitarian apparatus and the workers as a crippled class, but still capable to act. They represent the factory in a dialectic way. Vice versa, the younger authors write about precarious work and oppression (Dezio), about sufferings and deadly insecurity (Avallone, Prunetti, Valenti), about annihilation and damnation (Tonon, Fazzi). They represent the factory in a univocal way, as if it was an enemy (Meneghelli, 2010; Fracassa, 2010; Panella, 2012; Marsilio, 2017). There are obviously some exceptions; for example, in Figlia di una vestaglia blu, Simona Baldanzi (2006) describes the factory as an apparatus of integration and solidarity (her mother used to work at Rifle), and in his reportages Angelo Ferracuti (2016) underlines the value of work and of the workers struggles. In one of the most recent novels about work (Targhetta 2018), the author portrays, perhaps unconsciously, a pressing nexus between the mortifying disfigurement of the landscape and the industrial past, which is represented by the Petrolchimico in Porto Marghera. The XX century industry, overcome by new forms of enterprise (in turn, and in their own way, alienating and inhuman) is a tragic monument, a dread, it is since the very beginning a list of people who died at work. By paraphrasing the famous formula expressed by Georges Navel (2004 [1945]) in Traveaux, the nexus between the labouring strain (industry conceived as a contraption of pains) and its political and social transfiguration (industry conceived as a device for redemption) has now unravelled (Gorz, 1997). In the most recent narrative, the “atrocious scar”, which for Franco Fortini – translator of 2

Valenti is less young than the others (born in 1964), but his novel (in which he speaks about the work of his father) goes in the same direction as the others cited above.

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Simon Weil – was objectively linked to mechanical and automatic work (Fortini, 2003),3 does not find relief nor redemption in a political and communitarian perspective. Class and class struggle are fragmented and atomized, the function of labour unions has become weaker, neo-liberist policies (following the interests of multinational corporations) have been imposed, the leftist parties have lost terrain and their values too have weakened, the political engagement has blurred. Not by chance, then, the symbolic dimension has registered the metamorphosis of work by adopting first and foremost, and abundantly, the metaphorical lexicon used in the last few decades by the social sciences. Words such as “risk”, “decline”, “end”, “precarization”, “instability”, “corrosion”, “(s)mobilization”, “disintegration”, “dematerialization”, “liquid society” – and thus all the keywords used in social sciences to evidentiate the most negative aspects of the transformation of work in the era of globalization – have entered immediately into the contemporary literary imaginary (Chirumbolo, 2013; Connell, 2017). Also at an intuitive level, it is easy to demonstrate that the sense of loss communicated by the literary texts (and of which the aforementioned keywords are all signals) refers to the main orders of problems which have emerged in and been discussed by sociology, economics and law: in other words, it refers to de-industrialization, de-localization of production, flexibility, deregulation and globalization of the job market, and to the digitalization of exchanges and of the economy (Rowthorn, Ramaswarmy, 1997; Munck, 2002; Flanagan, 2006; Held, McGrew, 2007; Toscano, 2007; Graham, 2018). From this point of view, it is important to make a couple of clarifications. Firstly, it is important to underline that the keywords used by social sciences and assimilated by literature do not describe the global process but describe only some, partial, consequences, that those processes have had on the economies of some European countries, and especially of southwestern Europe. The sense of loss that emerges, of which I am here debating (but the discourse is valid for any other element of the discussion) is well circumscribed geographically and it would be erroneous to categorize it as a western or – even worse – as a global paradigm. Secondly, given that, at least, the absolute peculiarity of each national legislation on work, welfare and social rights and services, we must consider that the impact and the meaning of the transformations change from context to context and that this can evidently influence the literary imaginary and the reception of the texts. The sense of loss which, according to me, characterizes the representation of work offered by many Italian novelists could, therefore, have no space or have a minor or marginal space within the literary field 3

In 1952, Franco Fortini published the translation of La condition ouviére by Simone Weil, which had been published a year before. In 1954, he published the translation of Prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain, which had been published in 1949. Both translations by Fortini are published by Edizioni di Comunità. In an article which appeared in Civiltà delle macchine in 1953, Fortini referred explicitly to Weil, and defined as “absurd” the “unqualified work”. Before this absurdity, he wrote, the only way out is a “minor humanity”, “the act of not thinking”, “not deciding” (Fortini, 2008 [1953]).

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of different geographical contexts (the Italian case, for example, shows a fundamental similarity between the interest of literature for the theme of work and the legal attention to the issue of labour: see: Toracca, 2017b). Many writers have appropriated the analyses and predictions expressed by the social sciences and some of them, beyond their professional experience, have conducted research to access data and information they then used in their creative works. Similar research experiences have been done not only by writers focusing on reportage literature, such as Marco Rovelli or Angelo Ferracuti, but also by “pure” novelists such as Giorgio Falco and Francesco Targhetta and, before them, by Ermanno Rea. As it is known, however, literary texts are by nature ambivalent and polysemic and they are not scientific texts. They cannot be treated as documents on the crisis of work (or on other themes) and they cannot be interpreted like all those discourses based on argumentation, reliability and scientific validity. The seasons in which Italian literature has focused more on work as a topic tend to coincide with those periods in which work has been at the centre of social conflicts and juridical reforms, but such an homology between the historical and the symbolic level does not allow the reading of literary texts as mere recordings of events. One of the major risks of thematic literary critique is to look – within the texts – for an explicit and coherent representation of a theme, overlooking and underrating the censorships, the voids, the shifts, the contradictions and the ambivalences proper of the literary imaginary. It is a comprehensible risk, if we consider today: (a) the centrality and the urgency of the theme of work in the public and media debate of the last few years, and therefore the pressure of other discourses on the aesthetic field; (b) the fact that some authors have surrendered, before others, to the “extortion of the theme”, by writing novels devoid of that ambivalence and of that problematic attitude proper and, instead, of literature and of art;4 (c) the fact that the two main elements of the narrative about work, the hybrid nature and the autobiographical origin of the texts (Contarini, 2010b; Panella, 2013), have contributed to reduce the weight of invention and thus, implicitly, the interest for the other subject as well as for the possible worlds (Pavel 1986; Simonetti, 2018). Many texts on work fall into the category of “non-fiction” and are characterized by a hyper-modern dialectic: the fear of a complete fictionalization of the world (a feat that emerged, legitimately, against the interpretation that postmodernism has given of “fiction”) – that fear corresponds to an explicit claim of the truthfulness of the narrative and of its “civil” load and power, as well as to a bigger preoccupation for documents, testimonies, proofs (Donnarumma, 2010; Donnarumma, 2014: 165–224). 4

This phenomenon, that we could define as the prevalence of the moral or ideological judgement on the aesthetic judgement, is visible in most of the anthologies dedicated to the theme of work and published in the last decade. A central aspect in the literary debate on work is that it has concerned the threshold between the editorial and commercial field (the trend of precarious life) and the properly literary field (the value of the novels concerning the precarious life).

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From this perspective, I would like to propose two hypotheses about the overall meaning of the representation of work offered by Italian contemporary narrative. The first hypothesis (1) is the following: the sense of loss that emerges from the texts on work does not coincide with the sense of loss described by the social sciences. Between the two fields there is a background similarity fostered by a series of historical and cultural circumstances, but the differences count more and the imaginary plays a different function at a different level. The disappearance described by the literary texts is not related to specific and particular aspects of the world of work, but to more general and universal aspects of human life. What got lost at the level of the symbolic representation is not, for instance, the right to strike, permanent work, the right to rest or to paid vacation, proportioned salary, nor some other specific element of that complex apparatus of guarantees and protections conquered and legally recognized in time. All these aspects, which are indeed specific and particular, are certainly present in the literary works considered and must not be underestimated, yet they remain in the background. Also when not explicitly cited or claimed, also when documented, these aspects all remain at the margins. They surround the space of the story as if they were landmasses, more or less as it happens to historical events in the historical novel or to concepts in the novel-essay. The sense of loss recounted by the literary texts is related to the more general and universal aspects of life, since literature is based on subjective judgments and subjective judgments portray work (inasmuch as any other experience) as other than itself. They make it infinite, they generalize it, they universalize it. They treat it, in other words, as a great metaphor and not as an argument or a theme. However singular and personal, the subjective judgment describes, expresses and interprets the happenings and the human relationships through a universal grammar: through figures, images or archetypes that everyone can understand easily and immediately. Work, in literature, is always someone’s work, the work of a subject, and it is always irreducible because it is always, also, other than itself. It is incalculable and incorrect because it implies feelings and emotions, irrational links, illogical and symmetrical links, i.e. a subjective capacity to make connections. If the knowledge offered by literature in relation to the transformations of work is more immediate and more easily comprehensible, thus, it is also more generic, imprecise and broad-spectrum. It does not speak about concepts (it does not explain), but it presents us with a concrete case from a personal perspective and for this, for the central role of the imaginary, it remains ambivalent. Someone’s work, his judgment, his experience, his personality, a language immediately comprehensible, flexible: as paradoxical as it may appear, literature on work does not speak about work. That is, literature does not speak about it objectively and does not speak about it clearly and openly. There is something more general and universal at stake, something less specialized and technical and more accessible from the perspective of common sense. Something, at the same time, less coherent and clear. For these reasons, the vanishing point of the various negative professional experiences represented in the literary field must be searched for – according to me – where the sense of loss is depicted otherwise, in more opaque and extended forms, and not as a loss of some right or of some specific guarantee.

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In the literary imaginary, work is not just an economic experience or a relationship of exchange, and the value that is produced by working does not only have economic relevance. What is at stake, on the contrary, is the principal anthropological experience of all individuals: in the literary imaginary, work is the symbolic epicentre of the existence of individuals. Obviously, in order to define an activity as work, it is necessary that such an activity is paid and thus it must produce value or interests – it other words, it must be somehow useful. And nevertheless, many symbolic aspects take part in that experience, which is not only an economic exchange. The literature on work attributes to work an extraordinary importance because in this literature, the role of the individual in the world is dependent on work: his self-representation, his public recognition, his participation to collective life. The individual’s rise but also his misery. For this reason, non-work produces less pain but more distress than exploitation. Work does not only dictate the rhythms of daily life and the schedule (the duration of actions, of relationships, of services), but it also determines the image that we have of ourselves and of others. It has a symbolic aura which cannot be eliminated. What counts more is what it means as such, as effort, as activity, as commitment, as production of value. The prior role conferred to what working means from a symbolic point of view, and thus first and foremost the prior role conferred to the link between work and social identity, between the I and the fact of being recognized by the others (Gorz, 2011 [1984]), between what one is and what one does, makes work an experience which is qualitatively different from the mere economic exchange. If the sense of loss that that we find in literary texts is depicted differently from the description that we find in the analysis of the social scientists, it is because it is depicted as a crisis of the symbolic dimension of work. The crisis of work entails an anthropological mutation. It could be defined through the figure of speech that expresses better than all the other figures the traumatic situations and the rift between different cultural eras (the main figure of speech of literary modernism) and that is to say through estrangement (Šklovskij, 2018 [1925]). The deconstruction of work prevents from feeling at home, from acting, from recognizing in oneself, in the others or through the objects. What the crisis has demolished (in the perception of many writers) can be represented by the image of a form of life that – thanks to the symbolic apparatus of work – used to appear as measurable and familiar. Thinking the world as one’s own world: this is exactly what unemployed, precarious workers, exploited, “protagonist-workers” (Woloch, 2003) of post-industrial literature can no longer do. The work of the past, which seems to be lost, is above all the world of a familiarity in which reality appears to be proportioned, measurable and recognizable, and the crisis of work is the crisis of this form of life. It is this enormity that marks the sense of loss and that pushes many writers to represent the contemporary by starting from their own professional experience. The frequent memory of the craft of their parents or ancestors, and thus the frequent regret for that routine-oriented work-life that – according to Sennet – allowed the fathers to live a “narrable” life (i.e. to have an identity, a morality, an idea of how to organize one’s own life and how to act in the world)

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in a completely different way if compared to the fragmented and thus “un-narrable” life of their sons, is related in particular to the feeling of having lost a certain intimacy with the world and with history (Sennett, 1988, 2000). This intimacy, on the contrary, existed earlier, and depended on the work understood as a symbolic apparatus. If we think of this sort of equivalence between working activity and pre-comprehension of the world, of work as a collective ritual of socialization, as the sacrifice that made the life of individuals socially meaningful, the regret for the working conditions – often inhuman and dis-humanizing – is only apparently paradoxical. Without considering regressive banalizations or misunderstandings, what appears to be lost is not permanent work but a form of life that the contemporary collective imaginary sees as threatened by the transformations of work. Something more generic and at the same time deeper: an anthropology. In The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, Franco Moretti interprets the rise of capitalism as the moment in which the possibility of and the search for an harmonious relationship between the individual and the world – and objective which was made possible through a form of pre-capitalist work: the type of work that we find in Goethe’s Meister, in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man or in Von Humboldt’s reflections, and a work which in its essence is pedagogical and aesthetic – does not disappear (as if it had become an adynaton), but it shifts into a sort of parallel area, following Moretti’s research on the “area of daily life” (Moretti, 1987: 37; Kosik, 1976). Daily life preserves the possibility of a harmonious relationship between the individual and the world because it emerges as a dimension within the world of “familiarity”: in other words, since it presupposes that the individual subordinates his activity (whatever it is) to the construction of a world of his own. The idea of daily life as the world of familiarity that Moretti proposes to explain the synthetic, harmonious and antidramatic vocation of the Bildungsroman, seems very useful to explain also the equivalence (which I propose here) between the crisis of the world and the loss of its symbolic dimension. The crisis of the symbolic dimension of work (that “enormity” mentioned above) entails, in fact, a crisis of the daily dimension of life. It prevents the individual from building a familiar world and thus from having a harmonious relationship with the world. Implicitly, I am trying to claim also something else: that there is a strict bond between the symbolic dimension of work and daily life, and that the second depends on the first. Conceived within a symbolic dimension – not only as an action necessary to survive and to produce value, but also as the cornerstone of social life – work reveals its “overabundance” (Marcuse, 2001) and achieves another task. In other words, it allows the individual to fabricate his own world: spaces, rituals, rhythms, trajectories, relationships. The world of familiarity thus appears as a synthesis of the Marxian dialectic between work as a necessity (effort, social duty, alienation) and work as freedom (self-fulfilment, formation, personal expression). I must admit that the idea of daily life thus formulated appears more and more as the best compromise formation between the opposite meanings that modern

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work has. In other words, this idea of daily life appears as the best compromise in relation to the constitutive ambivalence characterizing work after capitalism has become the main paradigm shaping human relations. The two meanings are wellknown and are recurring and inseparable themes also in Marx’s works (Marx, Engels, 1974); for Marx, work is a means to live and it belongs to the sphere of necessity but, at the same time, it is a vital need that, as such, transcends pure necessity (Andolfi, 2004).5 On the one hand, with the affirmation of the industrial society (de Witt 1973) work becomes the crucial experience of all life in society and of all social orders (the cornerstone of the ontology of social beings and of teleological action: Lukács, 1980) – since it produces the emergence of the figure of the citizen-worker on which, still today, most of European democracies are based. In the wake of the urban revolution started in the Middle Ages, with the emergence of the municipalities (Le Goff, 1980) and in the wake of the of the emergence of a spirit of capitalism which emanated from the protestant reformation (Weber, 2001, 2016), work became the experience which, more than any other, can give sense and attribute dignity to humankind by distinguishing humans from animals and by juxtaposing work to grace, and it becomes the experience which, more than any other, creates the possibility for, and legitimized the bourgeois revolution against, aristocracy (Beck, 2000). On the one hand, in a few words, it is only with modernity that work becomes an experience embedded with social and symbolic meanings.6 On the other hand, however, it is precisely the industrial society together with the capitalist system of production that makes work, and especially subordinate work, automatized and iterative work with machines – that makes this type of work an alienating and destructive experience, passive and functional only to an ideology of growth and of gain. As shown by Max Weber, the industrial revolution transformed first and foremost, and radically, the concept of subordination, i.e. the relationship between employer and worker. Workshop work or domestic work, though subordinate, still presupposed familiar relationships and were not exclusively economic. After the industrial revolution – that in Italy occurred, substantially, only at the beginning of the XX century (Musso, 2002) – subordination lost this “fluid” dimension and acquired scientific, quantifiable and measurable characteristics. The worker became more and more “workforce” (Ciccarelli, 2017) and work became 5 6

For Marx, this transfiguration of work from a category of the need for “personal manifestation” plays a decisive role, historically proper of capital (Marx, 1993). By the way: the idea that the premodern world, ancient and medieval, has represented a degrading activity, typical of slaves, and that it has not had other meanings (symbolic and positive) is probably too restrictive (see Arendt 1989; Gorz, 2011 [1984]; Tranquilli 1979). If we look at the representation of work in Works and Days by Hesiod, in The Clouds by Aristophanes, and in the Oeconomicus by Xenophon, things get complicated. Thinking then of the Middle Ages, and in particular of the Age of Commons, we cannot ignore the revolutionary function of the merchants and of the middle class as they were depicted as the main protagonists of, for instance, the Decameron by Boccaccio (see in particular Ehmer, Lis, 2016 [2009]).

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more and more a merely economic and instrumental activity. Inside this properly modern dialectics for which the struggle for work is always, also, struggle against work,7 the dimension of daily life (the possibility of giving to life such a dimension) constitutes, as aforementioned, a compromise formation. It is in fact a dimension that allows humankind to consider work in relation to his life despite work is submitted to an economic and instrumental ratio. It allows the contradiction of the nexus between work and the production of value, by preserving the idea that through work and in work it is still possible to express oneself and to build oneself a world and a future. The symbolic dimension of work is shaped in the daily dimension because it is on this terrain that makes one feel human and that is it opposed to work as alienation. Subject to the construction of a familiar world, work supports the capitalist alienation. The legal reforms promoted the protection of the most repetitive and mechanical jobs (for instance, interventions and reforms regarding production times) and, more generally, all labour law has done so, since their origins have had as a main task the tempering of the capitalist system of production and of the ideology of work as a mere production of capital (Anthony, 1977). An analogous objective (with the exception of the revolutionary ideals)8 has been that of class, of unions, of solidarity and working-class claims: compromise, temper, i.e. making all the crafts otherwise submitted to the capitalist logic (and thus alienating and inhuman) tolerable, more balanced, more human. As stated before, one of the most recurring aspects in the contemporary representation of work is the exploitation of the worker. This is probably the aspect that matches contemporary literature with the social literature that emerged in Italy between the end of the XIX century and the Forties of the XX century, a literature in which work was considered as a miserable experience, a characteristic of lower classes. While today exploitation embraces many categories of workers, from the migrant working in the fields up to the “human resource” who works in a computer company, in the literature of the last century and the first half of the XIX century there were mainly two forms of occupation: agriculture or mine work, mainly within societies that were still feudal and ferociously archaic (this is the case with Verga’s works and with some of Pirandello’s short stories or, later on, in the thirties, with novels such as Gente in Aspromonte by Corrado Alvaro, Fontamara by Ignazio Silone, or, even later, in a novel such as Le terre del sacramento by Francesco Jovine) and the “grey” work of the employee (in line with the developments of the French, Russian and American narrative of the XIX century: Balzac, Gogol and Melville). This is also testified by the works by Emilio De 7

8

I mean that the search for a satisfying job that can also emancipate, one capable of giving sense to life and to express all its symbolic force, coexists necessarily with the effort to contradict the economic rationality that shapes it after the affirmation of capitalism. For Simone Weil, the revolution is good when used against social injustice but it is a lie when used against the intrinsic unhappy of the working class subject (Weil, 2017 [1951]).

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Marchi and Delio Tessa but, above all, the works of some great modernist Italian and European authors (Tozzi, Pirandello, Svevo, Kafka, Joyce, Musil, Broch). Exploitation, then: work is not recognized and thus it does not correspond to what it is really worth. Workers are exploited because they are precarious, because they work illegally, etc. Exploitation, nevertheless, is not represented only as an economic imbalance (for which the worker does not receive a salary or guarantees adequate to his activity) but also as the consequence of a deeper logic which is typical of the capitalist system and of the division of labour. In line with the representation of work as a symbolic apparatus, exploitation is a consequence of the idea that it is possible to consider work in exclusively economic terms and that it is possible to treat the worker as a contractor or as a robot and not as a person. From this point of view, work intercepts also ethical problems, the two most dramatic of which, today, seem to be: the relationship between work and health, and the relationship between work and migration. There is a tragic analogy between the worker who pretends to work despite the fact that this work could be harmful (otherwise he would be unemployed) and the migrant who falls in the extortion of the foreman in order to survive and not to be repatriated. Both are obliged to negotiate inalienable aspects of their personhood. If today the Olivetti still represents an ideal model of the firm, it is not because inside the firm there were no contradictions (Picconi-Stella, 1972; Lupo, 2016; Saibene, 2017; Toracca, 2019), but because it tried to overcome those contradictions and to soften their consequences starting from a re-evaluation of work in “humanistic” terms. From this perspective, the autobiographical trait that characterizes many of the contemporary writings and texts on work could be also interpreted otherwise: not only as the need for a direct testimony and thus as the voice of those who have really and authentically lived what they narrate, but also as a claim, a demand for the value of the I as a singularity irreducible to an instrumental quantification. The prise de parole and the story-telling of one’s own experience would allow the narrator or the protagonist to rethink himself and to self-represent himself as an individual by claiming his unique value and his complexity against the principle of economic rationality typical of capitalism. The autobiographical story would seem to retrieve, in some sense, its classical origin and it could be read as a gesture of defence against the economic evaluation activated by the capitalist system and thus, implicitly, against the depreciation of the human being. Just like the accused used to read his autobiography to demonstrate his general goodness against the particular crime (Formisano, 2019 forthcoming), similarly the writer recounts his life to legitimize his incapacity to be in line, integrated, with the system. My second hypothesis (2) is the following: in some Italian works published in the last few years, the sense of loss abovementioned coexists with a sense of conquest. I must immediately admit that, more than a hypothesis, this is actually an impression, but nevertheless I think that in the most discussed and maybe the most beautiful Italian novels about work written in recent years – Works by Vitaliano Trevisan (2016), Ipotesi di una sconfitta by Giorgio Falco (2017) and Le vite potenziali by Francesco Targhetta (2018) – beyond the perception of the loss of a

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form of life, there is also an opposite feeling, indeed of a conquest. The idea of translating work into the symbolic cornerstone of life and to make of it the corerhythm of all existence are both ideas which are claimed and at the same time kept distant. They are both claimed but at the same time they let emerge a certain discomfort, indifference, fatigue, aspiration, certainly more unspeakable and disguised, to adapt to the crisis or to overcome it otherwise. In some way, the end of the symbolic importance of work is perceived as a positive thing. Absurd, maybe; or maybe, as I believe, it is the most incredible and disturbing aspect (because it is unspeakable) that can be inferred from these works, and one which concerns our time more directly. Daily life is no longer built as it was in previous times, and the absence of a symbolic cornerstone constitutes a possibility as well: what I name “sense of loss” is this genre of possibility which was unknown before. It could be, as I have stated (Toracca, 2017a) that precarious work, work without guarantees, not well paid, etc. – creates an obstacle for the Bildung of the main characters and that it condemns them to an unmeaningful life, always deferred, youthful, but it could also be that it is precisely that type of Bildung which the protagonists refuse and that they refuse it not only because they are obliged to, but also in exchange of something else. It could be, in other words, that such a form of life with a symbolic cornerstone (i.e. with a sense) is not only perceived as being something valuable which got lost and must be recuperated, but also a precious thing that got lost and must not be retrieved because its loss promises something else. In other words, here the sense of loss coexists with a sense of conquest. If it is true that there is a very strong bond between the symbolic dimension of work and the daily dimension of life, it is nevertheless also true that the harmony promised by such a bond cannot but be limited. The world is in fact familiar if its gets repeated, if it admits the possibility of what is “already known”, if earlier or later one is ready to elect the world as one’s own the world and thus to circumscribe it. Limits, bonds, borders, choices, obligations: work produces social identity and gives life a rhythm, a rituality and a daily meaning only if one is ready to accept limits, to establish bonds and borders, and to make choices. The inconfessable sense of loss emerging from the underground in these works is linked to a form of emancipation which used to be unknown because it was characterized by a sense of possibility and by a new sense of lightness. The authors-characters of Works and of Ipotesi di una sconfitta narrate their numerous professional experiences, from adolescence onwards, but they narrate in particular their exit from the world of work. Trevisan does so euphorically (each experience is, since the beginning, meaningful and “speaking” because it lives in the function of the final great transformation of the author-character: see Toracca, Santi, 2019), Falco does so in a dysphoric way (his exit from the world of work is perceived in any case as a defeat and the character does not reach any catharsis) but both (it can be read quite explicitly) narrate as if they were liberated from their past and in particular from the world of work. In Ipotesi di una sconfitta, the work of the father is an existential model which was abolished and nevertheless the author outdistances himself from it. The

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nostalgic feeling for that world that – despite the strain – was familiar because it was all built around work – the familiarity was the very object of the nostalgia – is counterbalanced by the consciousness of the absolute impossibility to live that past world. The character can no longer work as his father but at the same time does not want to. It should be sufficient to think of the way the feast for the retirement of the father of the boy is organized by his colleagues: a sad feast, grey, almost an early funeral. Despite the almost sacred importance of some rituals which remain imprinted in the mind of the character (the alarm in the middle of the night, the touching devotion to the firm), in the life and in the fate of the father there is something that does not work, something which is very sad and unrepeatable. The familiar – domestic world is a miniature, it is monotonous, constituted and delimited by bonds and relationships which are stable and closed. The main character of Ipotesi di una sconfitta is, instead, an individual who thinks and acts on his own, who is incapable of collaborating with the others, who is not willing to sacrifice himself like his father and who pretends more from his life. The type of harmony that could characterize the life of the father is no longer present because life can no longer rotate around work, nor is that model desirable. While a friend of his father, an ex-colleague who is still alive, feels sorry for the protagonist because he has no job and because he writes novels, we feel that the opposite is also happening and that the story and the vision of the world of this friend implicitly intercepts also that of the father and of a whole generation. It is, by the way, very meaningful that in Trevisan and in Falco the exit from the world of work happens in the moment in which the authors-characters establish themselves as artists. It is relevant, in other words, that the figure of the artist (actor and/or writer) is counterposed here directly to that of the worker. Writing is not only a new occupation, different from the precedent ones. It does not become part of the “record book of the precedent jobs” (“libretto di lavoro”) as all the other crafts represented or described before. It hypostatizes something else. To recognize each other and to be recognized as artists is the arrival point of the story, the point of no return, what makes it possible to exit the world of work and to finally become what one wants to be. The figure of the artist is opposed here to that of the worker for a precise reason: since it means independence and autonomy, management of time and space, freedom. But the conquered freedom is not that (as it could seem) of the autonomous worker as opposed to the subordinate worker, it is a qualitatively different autonomy, that acts against the work because it repels that idea that through work one can reach a certain harmony (the daily dimension of life, the familiar world) and thus, implicitly, because it refuses the idea that work is or must be the symbolic cornerstone of life. The identity is built, if it is ever built, elsewhere and each person can choose his own personal and social bonds, his own rituals, times, spaces, etc. The exit from work understood as the cornerstone of life also promises something; it not only causes unemployment, embarrassment or precarious life. The proof of such a conquest (that always coexists – I underline again – with a sense of loss) comes, according to me, from the insistence with which the main characters associate work and money. Trevisan does so from the

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beginning of the novel (the clou-moment of the novel, the “fall” of the protagonist, happens right when this equation between work and money takes advantage and infringes the idea that work is also a symbolic and identitarian apparatus), Falco does so in particular in the final part of the novel (for this reason he believes, he claims, that betting online can be considered work), but it is evident that for both of them work is necessary to earn money and that the individual cannot be educated nor can he build his own daily reality through his craft. The most successful character of the Vite potenziali by Targhetta (novel that already in its title recalls those lives which are doomed to remain incomplete) is Giorgio De Lazzeri because he is the most authentic one and at the same time the less subordinated to the idiosyncrasies for the author. And yet Giorgio De Lazzeri is also the character who travels the most, the more emotionally unstable, the more capable to disguise himself and ready to cynically grasp the chance to be someone else. Reflecting on the reasons of the betrayal of Giorgio De Lazzeri, Alberto Casagrande (president of the firm represented in the novel) thinks to himself: Internet has given to everyone the impression to live a shared life and to be more than what we actually are. How is it possible to accept the singularity of the old world after we have had access to the infinity of the possibilities offered by the new world? GDL had betrayed his, but simply because he had transplanted the virtual forma mentis in his usual world. (Targhetta, 2018: 188, my translation) To start again. This is precisely the point, not being limited by one’s own work and by that thread of relationships and trajectories established by the work (by the personal and the professional relationships); to be able to change and to live many different lives, to cut off the bonds, to create one’s own space, to manage one’s time. In a few words: to be capable of being who we desired to be, without necessarily choosing one fulcrum around which we must trace the perimeter of our life. The conquest that counterbalances the loss is the sense of freedom and possibility that stems from the break of the bond between work and social identity, between work and daily life. It is a new form of mobility, sustained by the idea that individuals can and must imagine themselves in a way that was unimaginable, with a freer and more open attitude. The sense of conquest I am talking about (and that in the cited authors coexists with the awareness that a form of life does no longer exist) could thus (and maybe) refer to that social transformation described with dread by Pasolini at the end of the sixties (Pasolini, 1999). To that transformation of the underclass, of the workers and of the farmers into little bourgeoisie, to the neo-secular hedonism provoked by the consumer society, to that anxiety (absolutely degrading for Pasolini because it is false, and imposed sneakily by a new power which is more fascist than Fascism itself: the anxiety to obey to an undeclared order) to be happy, free and original.

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Murgia M. (2006), Il mondo deve sapere – Romanzo tragicomico di una telefonista precaria, ISBN Edizioni, Milano. Musso S. (2002), Storia del lavoro in Italia: dall’unità a oggi, Marsilio, Venezia. Navel G. (2004 [1945]), Traveaux, Gallimard, Paris. Nove A. (2006), Mi chiamo Roberta, ho 40 anni, guadagno 250 euro al mese, Einaudi, Torino. Osterhammel J., Petersson N. P. (2003), Globalization: a short history, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Panella C. (2012), “Lavoro e mal di lavoro: il ritorno delle fabbriche nella letteratura italiana del nuovo millennio”, in “Cinquant’anni dopo: letteratura e industria”, in Levia gravia, n. XIV, pp. 291–325. Panella C. (2013), “Raccontare il lavoro. Fiction, reportage e altre formule ibride a confronto nella letteratura italiana dell’ultimo decennio”, in Somigli L. (ed.), Negli archivi e per le strade. Il ritorno alla realtà nella narrativa italiana di inizio millennio, Aracne, Roma, pp. 409–434. Pasolini P. P. (1999 [1975]), “Scritti corsair”, in Pasolini P. P., Scritti sulla politica e sulla società, Siti W., De Laude S. (eds), with an introductory essay by Bellocchio P., Mondadori, Milano. Pegorari M. D. (2018), Scritture precarie. Editoria e lavoro nella grande crisi 2003–2017, Stilo, Bari. Pavel T. (1986), Fictional Worlds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Pennacchi A. (1994), Mammut, Donzelli, Roma. Piciché B. (ed.), “Diritto e letteratura a dialogo nella tradizione italiana: Introduzione al volume”, in Forum Italicum, 53(2), pp. 201–231. Picconi-Stella S. (1972), Intellettuali e capitale nella società italiana del dopoguerra, De Donato, Bari. Prunetti A. (2012), Amianto: una biografia operaia, Agenzia X, Milano. Rea E. (2002), La dismissione, Rizzoli, Milano. Rowthorn R., Ramaswarmy R. (1997), Deindustrialization: Causes and Implications, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Saibene A. (2017), L’Italia di Adriano Olivetti, Edizioni di Comunità, Roma. Sennett R. (1998), The Corrosion of Character, The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, W. W. Norton, New York. Sennett R. (2000), “Street and Office: Two Sources of Identity”, in Hutton W., Giddens A., (eds), On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, Jonathan Cape, London, pp. 175–190. Simonetti G. (2018), La letteratura circostante, il Mulino, Bologna. Šklovskij V. (2018 [1925]), Theory of the Prose, Dalkey Archive Press, Champaign. Summa R. (2018), La Littérature italienne et le monde du travail aujourd’hui, L’Harmattan, Paris. Targhetta F. (2018), Le vite potenziali, Mondadori, Milano. Tonon E. (2009), Il nemico, ISBN Edizioni, Milano. Toracca T. (2017a), Flessibilità e precarietà nella letteratura italiana contemporanea: “Personaggi precari” di Vanni San\toni, in di Nunzio N., Jurišic´ S., Ragni F. (eds), “La parola mi tradiva”. Letteratura e crisi, Culture territori Linguaggi – CTL, Perugia, pp. 53–66. Toracca T. (2017b), “Labour between Law and Literature: Historical Similarities and Critical Propositions on the Present”, in Pólemos, n. 11(2), pp. 361–377.

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Index

Accornero, A. 86 Acosta, E. 15 Affricot, J. 222, 233 Afonso, A. 200 Agamben, G., 176 Akerman, C. 270, 271 Albinati, E. 187 Algieri, G. B. 232 Allen, B. 249, 259 Alston, P. 118 Alvaro, C. 285 Amato, G. 26 Amaya Castro, J. 136 Amelio, G. 202 Anders, G. 1, 32, 43, 97, 277 Anderson, B. 133,134,140 Anderson, E. 244 Anderson, J. 55 Andina, T. 82 Andolfi, F. 284 Anthony, S. 267 Anthony, P. D. 285 Anscombe, G.E.M., 147 Antonello, P. 185 Appleby, J. 47 Aquinas, T. 179 Arendt, H. 1, 32–42, 44, 86, 108, 180, 181, 284 Aristophanes, 284 Aristotle, 17, 40, 149, 173, 176, 177, 179, 180 Armano, E. 204 Arpino, G. 184 Arthurs, H. 120 Augustine, St. 40 Avallone, S. 187, 278 Avellino, G. 202

Bachimont, B. 102 Bacon, F. 75, 78 Baghetti, C. 190, 194, 278 Bailey, S. 82 Bajani, A. 187, 213, 277 Bakhshi, H. 57 Bakhtin, M. 171 Bal, M. 238 Baldanzi, S. 278 Balestrini, N. 184, 211, 213–16, 219 Balibar, E. 136 Balzac, H. 285 Bardan, A. 202 Barthes, R. 171, 172, 174, 175, 181 Bataille, G. 101, 102 Baudelaire, C. 102 Baudrillard, J. 97, 98 Bauman, Z. 1, 77, 277, Bazin, Y. 240 Beck, U. 277, 284 Beinstingel, T. 194 Bercusson, B. 113 Bernari, C. 183 Bertoni, F. 190 Bianciardi, L. 184, 217 Bifo Berardi, F. 76, 216, 219 Bigatti, G. 183 Bikialo, S. 194 Bilenchi, R. 183 Birnbaum, D. 254 Blommesteijn, M. 66 Boccaccio, G. 284 Bogg, A. 137 Böhm, F. 120, 121 Bologna, S. 204 Boltanski, L. 192 Boucher, G. 134

Index Bourdieu, P. 240 Boyde, P. 178 Boym, S. 275 Bozzon, R. 201 Brizé, S. 236 Broad, R. 135 Broch, H. 286 Brown, W. 237, 243 Browne, J. 116 Bruner, J.192 Busi, A. 184 Busso, S. 203 Butler, J. 136 Buzzi, G. 184 Caesar, G. J., 191 Calvino, I. 108, 189, 195 Cangaceiros, 216, 219 Cantù, C. 183 Capolupo, U. 231 Casagrande, A. 289 Castagna, A. 231 Cavalcanti, A. 268 Cederström, C. 243 Cerino, G. 201 Ceteroni, A. 278 Chamarette, J. 270 Chaplin, C. 76 Chiapello E. 192 Chicchi, F. 42 Chirumbolo P. 194, 212, 278, 279 Cho, H., 251 Ciccarelli, R. 20, 34, 38, 39, 44, 78, 284 Cirillo, V. 223,224 Clark, S. 57 Clarke, J. 200 Coccia, E. 100 Cohen, J. 251 Cohen, G. A. 126 Colantoni, L. 229 Collins, H. 115, 133–5 Collodi, C. 212, 213 Comberiati, D. 190 Condello, A. 212 Connell, L. 279 Contarini, S. 189, 191, 212, 219, 278, 280 Cortellessa, A. 211 Costa, V. 98 Cotillard, M. 236, 239 Countouris, N. 115, 124 Courtois, A. 200 Coutu, M. 115, 117

295

Crane, 147, 150 Cucchiarato, C. 227 Cukier, A. 80 Culicchia G. 184, 195 Currie, J. 204 D’Andrea, A. 226, 231 D’Antona, M. 115 Dante, 177, 178, 180, 181 Dardenne, J. P & L. 236, 239–41 Dastoli, V. 3 Daugherty, P.R. 53 Davallon, J. 102 David-Ménard, M. 159 Davidson, D., 147 Davidov, G. 115 Davies, L. 230 Davies, P. 118 De Amicis, E. 183 De Biase, L. 223 De Lazzeri, G. 289 De Marchi, E. 286 De Paulis, M. P. 189, 219 De Stefano, V. 117 De Vos, M. 47, 50, 54, 59, 155 De Witt, 284 Deakin, S. 115, 116 Dean J. 261 Dean, M. 64, 65 Debord, G. 98 Deleuze, G., 173 Deranty, J.P. 201 Derrida, J., 174, 180 Descartes, R. 1, 7, 9–12, 15, 17, 158–60, 162, 163, 165, 166, 173, Desiati, M. 187, 213 Dewey, J. 80 Dezio, F. 278 Di Nunzio, N. 192, Dóci, E. 238 Doerflinger, N. 200 Donnarumma, R. 184, 185, 190, 191, 193, 196, 219, 280 Duchamp, M. 214 Dujarier, A. M. 88 Dukes, R. 118, 120, 121 Edmondson, A. C. 258 Ehmer, J. 284 Ehrlich, E. 119 Eleveld, A. p. 63 Emeke, C. 233

296

Index

Engélibert, J. P. 194 Engels, F. 9, 17, 41, 126, 155, 156, 284 Ertscheid, O. 102 Esping-Andersen, G. 116 Esser, A. 261 Eucken, W. 120, 121 Falco, G. 194, 213, 217, 278, 280, 286–89 Fana, M. 223, 224 Farrell, G. 82 Fazzi, G. 278 Feldman, Z. 201 Ferracuti, A. 213, 278, 280 Ferraris, M. 3, 34, 77, 86, 88, 103, 106, 277, Fichte, J. G. 7, 9, 11–16, Filì, B. 229, 230 Fiore, T. 222 Fioretti, D. 183 Fitzpatrick, P. 135 Flanagan, R. J. 279 Fleming, P. 243 Formisano, M. 286 Fortini, F. 278, 279 Foucault, M. 1, 64, 65, 77, 176, 243 Fracassa, U. 278 Freedland, M. 115, 116, 118, 124 Freud, S. 87, 92, 163–66 Friedman, M. 238 Fudge, J. 119, 133–5 Fumagalli, A. 201, 204 Gallino, L. 277 Gamot, G. 246, 247 Gartner Inc, 53 Gates, B. 95 Gaudio, M. 12 Ghiotto, S. 59 Giglioli, D. 186 Gill, R. 200 Giroux, H. 200, 201 Gnisci, A.186 Goebbels, J. 107 Goethe, J. W. 283 Gogol, N. 285 Golding, C. 54 Goldmann, L. 277 Gorz, A. 1, 37, 38, 278, 282, 284 Graham, M. 85, 279 Graziano, T. 227 Green, S. 137 Grierson, J. 268

Guarascio, D. 223, 224 Guattari, F. 173 Guild, E. 133 Gupta, S. 200 Gurvitch, G. 119 Habermas, J. 277 Habjan, J. 200 Haiven, M. 207 Hall, A. 251 Hall, G. 205 Halpern, F. 254 Hardt, M. 265, 277 Harman, G. 100 Harris, P. 204 Hasenfeld, Y. 68 Hawkins, R. 203 Hawkins, S. 275 Hayek, F. 238 Hegel, G. W. F. 1, 7, 9, 15–17, 77, 80, 171, 174, Heidegger, M. 155, 176, 177, 179–81 Held, D. 279 Henry, M. 173, 174, 175, 180, 181 Hepple, B. 115, 125, 134 Hesiod, 284 Heyes, J. 117 Hobbes, T. 8, 23, 277 Hoggart, R. 269 Hollinger, V. 250 Hoskins, B. 275 Husserl, E. 158, 159 Igartua, J. J. 250, 251 Ilgen, D. R. 257, 258 Isidorsson, T. 200 Jablonka, I. 191 Jansen, M. 212, 278 Jefferson, T. 77 Jencks, C. 271 Jennings, H. 269 Jonas, H., 27 Jones, D. S. 238 Jovine, F. 285 Joyce, J. 172, 286 Jünger, E. 107, 108 Jurisic, S. 192 Kafka, F. 266, 267, 286 Kahn-Freund, O. 125

Index Kant, I. 12, 39, 94, 148, 158, 159, 160–165 Katz, L. 54 Kaupa, C. 121 Kay, J. 264 Kelsen, H. 121 Kenner, J. 114, 124 Kent, C. 251 Keynes, J. M. 81, 82, 95 Kirschner, P. A. 55 Klossowski, P. 101, 102 Knickrehm, M. 56 Kosik, K. 283 Koukiadaki, A. 117 Kountouris, N. 116, 126, 134- 135 Kretsos, L. 117 Kubisa, J. 200 Kuhn, M. 227–228 La Porta, F. 278 Lacan, J. 90, 159, 163–65, 237, 245, 246 Lafargue, P. 82 Lane, L. 251 Langille, B. 115 Langstaff, B. 133–134 Lawrence, M. 49, 56 Lazzarato, M. 214, 214, 219, 265 Le Friant, M. 117 Le Goff J. 284 Lecomte, F. 119 Lee, E. 113 Lejeune, P. 191 Lester, G. 115 Levi, P. 184, 191 Levinsons J. 257 Lévy, P. 77 Licata, D. 227 Lindahl, H. 135 Lindon, V. 236, 241 Lino, M. 227 Lis, C. 284 Lo Faro, A. 121, 126 Lødemel, I. 63 Lolli, M. 187 Loveday, V. 226 Lowy, V. 240, 241 Lucarelli, S. 201 Lukács, G., 174, 284 Luperini, R. 188 Lupo, G. 183, 286 Lyotard, J.-F., 175

297

Macpherson, C. B., 23 Macron, E. 78 Maggio, M. 216 Magnusson, L. 63 Malthus, T. R. 90 Mantouvalou, V. 115, 118, 134 Mansell, J. 267 Manzi, M. 203 Marazzi, C. 91 Marchese, L. 191 Marcuse, H. 283 Margulies, I. 270 Marinetti, F. T. 183 Marsilio, M. 278 Marston, G. 65 Marx, K. 1, 7, 9, 17, 41, 64, 80, 82, 85, 91, 94, 98, 107, 108, 126, 155, 156, 171–175, 178, 180, 214, 215, 283, 284 Mason, P. 78 Mason, L. 114, 119 Mastronardi, L. 184 Mattei, U. 82 Mazzoni, G. 193 McDonald, C. 65 McGaughey, E. 117 McGrew, A. 279 Mckee, K. 65 McKinsey Global Institute, 48, 49, 53, 57 McLuhan, M. 99 Meardi, G. 200 Melville, H. 285 Meneghelli, D. 278 Menger, P.M. 80 Merleau-Ponty, M. 141 Metcalf, M. 255 Michelazzo, M. 231, 232 Milani, R. 202 Minneci, F. 224, 226 Mittell, J. 256 Morano Foadi, S. 223, 224 Moretti, F. 192, 283 Morgan, G. 265 Morini-Bianzino, N. 53 Morrison, T. 207, 208 Mouffe, C. 241 Munck, R. 279 Mundlak, G. 133 Murgia, M. 188, 213, 277 Murgia, A. 203, 204, Murray, G. 117 Musil, R. 286 Mussgnug F. 185

298

Index

Mussler, W. 121 Musso, S. 284 Nail, T. 222 Nancy, J. L. 140–141 Nata, S. 184, 188 Navel, G. 278 Nededog J. 261 Nedelkoska, L. 48 Negri, A. 91, 212, 265, 277 Nelligan, P. 265 Nevitt, B. 99 Newton, I. 171 Nietzsche, F. 93 Nieuwenhuis, H. 125 Nörr, K. W. 121 Nove, A. 278 Novitz, T. 124 Nunziante, G. 211 Nussbaum, M., 192 O’Keefe, T. 200 Odysseos, L. 64 Ojeda, D. 203 Olivetti, A. 286 Origgi, G. 103 Osterhammel, J. 277 Ottieri, O. 183, 184, 217 Ovidi, O. 215, 216 Paini, G. 277 Palumbo Mosca R. 190 Panella, C. 278, 280 Parise, G. 184 Pasolini, P. P. 194, 289 Pavel, T. G. 192, 280 Pazienza, A. 215, 219 Peck, J. 134 Pedowitz, M. 254, 255 Pegorari, M. D. 278 Pellegrini, L. 202 Pellegrino, V. 203, 204, 206 Pennacchi, A. 184, 187, 278 Péron, D. 236 Petersson, N. P. 277 Petriglieri, G. 60 Pfanner, E. 261 Phelan, J. 254 Philonenko, A. 163 Picard, H. 244–46 Picconi-Stella, S. 286 Piermattei, M. 205, 206

Pillemer, J. 258 Pinker, S. 47 Pirandello, L. 285, 286 Pispisa, G. 190 Plato, 44, 145, 151–54, 180 Poggio, B. 203 Polenchi, F. 211 Policastro, G. 219 Posner, R. A. 126 Prassl, J. 116, 117 Propp, V. 195 Prunetti, A. 196, 278, Pryor, B. 133 Pugliese, E. 222, 223, 225, 226, 228 Pulignano, V. 200 Queiroz, B. M. 133 Quintini, G. 48 Ragni, F. 192 Rahmani, M. 260 Raimo, C. 184 Rainie, L. 55 Ramaswarmy, R. 82, 279 Randi, P. 202 Rea, E. 187, 213, 278, 280 Recalcati, M. 187 Regini, M. 116 Ricardo, D. 173 Ricciardi, S. 190, 212, 278 Richards, I. A. 269 Richardson, M. 275 Ricœur, P. 192 Riesman, D. 277 Rifkin, J. 82 Ring Petersen, A. 222, 228 Rivetti, P. 203 Roberts, J. 245, 246 Robinson, J. 90 Rödl, F. 118, 120, 124 Rogowski, R. 116 Rolf, D. 57 Romei, V. 223–25, 227 Romele, A. 33, 101 Rose, N. 64 Rothbard, N. P. 258 Rovelli, M. 280 Rowthorn, R. 82, 279 Rumor, M., 25, 27, 29–30 Saibene, A. 286 Salas, E. 257, 258

Index Salvini, M. 96 Samalavičius, A. 200 Sandberg, S. 104 Sandoval, M. 206 Santi, M. 287 Santoni, V. 192 Schaeffer, J. M. 192 Schiller, F. 92, 283 Schneider, N. 78 Scholz, T. 78 Schramm, M. 222, 228 Schützenberger, A.A., 25 Scopsi, C., 102 Scotto, G. 229 Searle, J. R. 151 Seghezzi, F. 58 Segre, C. 186 Sen, A. 116 Sennett, R. 83, 192, 283, Serkowska, H. 190 Serrano Pascual, A. 63 Severo, M. 101 Shiach, M. 265 Shook, E. 56 Sibilia, S. 202, 204, 205, 207 Silone, I. 285 Simondon, G., 91 Simone, A. 42 Simonetti, G. 189, 190, 280 Sinzheimer, H. 115, 118–121 Šklovskij, V. 282 Smith, Ad. 1, 64, 173 Smith, Ali 271–74 Smith, G. 255 Somigli, L. 190 Speedster, S. 255 Spies, H. 65 Spinelli, E. 217 Spivak, G. C. 136 Srnicek, N. 78 Staglianò, R. 76 Standing, G. 200, 203, 206 Steffan P. 194 Stevens, I. 241 Stewart, A. 134 Strauss, K. 134–135 Strawson, P.F. 145–150 Streit, M. E. 121 Summa, R. 278 Superman, 251–53 Supiot, A. 44, 59, 116 Svevo, I. 286

299

Swain, H. 201 Syrpis, P. 124 Targhetta, F. 278, 280, 286, 289 Tataryn, A. 135 Taviani, G. 219 Tell, F. 258 Terrone, E. 33 Tessa, D. 286 The Flash, 249, 250, 253, 255–59, 261 Thiele, B. 204 Tintori, G. 223–25, 227 Tiraboschi, M. 58 Toffler, A. 99 Toni, G. 215 Tonon, E. 278 Toracca, T. 192, 212, 278, 280, 286, 287 Torchio, N. 203 Tosatti, A. 189, 219 Toscano, M. A. 279 Toscano, E. 201 Tozzi, F. 286 Tranquilli, V. 284 Trevisan, V. 183, 185, 187, 189, 191–95, 211, 217–19, 286–88. Trickey, H. 63 Trocchi, A. 186 Tronti, M. 212 Tros, F. 114 Turchetta, G. 278 Turnbull, N.135 Tutek, H. 200 Urbinati, N. 212 Uzzi, B. 257 Valenti, S. 191, 278, Van Berkel, R. 65 Van de Vijver G., 158, 164 Van Parijs, P., 156 Vanberg, V. 120 Veblen, T. 101 Vecchi, B. 78 Venier, M. 202 Venturi, R. 229 Vercellone, C. 91, 93 Verga, G. 285 Veronesi, G. 221 Vidaillet, B. 246, 247 Virilio, P. 107 Virno, P. 212 Virzì, P. 202

300

Index

Volponi, P. 184, 217, 278 Von Humboldt, A. 283 Von Mises, L. 238 Walkley, Mary-Ann, 173, 180 Walton, R. 245 Watterson Bryant, C. 57 Weber, M. 83, 284 Weil, S. 279, 285 West, D.M., 155 West, J. 253 Whelan, A. 201 Wiggins, D., 149 Wilkinson, F. 115, 116 Williams, A. 78 Wilson, H. J. 61

Wilthagen, T. 114 Winick, E. 48 Woloch, A. 282 Wu Ming, 187, 191 Wuchty, S. 257 Xenophon, 284 Zacconi, D. 231, 232 Zalone, C. 211 Zito, D. 195 Žižek, S. 237 Zuboff, S. 104, 106 Zucchi, E. 187 Zuckerberg, M. 95