The Pathology of Communicative Capitalism

David W. Hill

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349577118, 9781137394774
• eBook ISBN: 9781137394781
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book diagnoses the social, mental and political consequences of working and economic organizations that generate value from communication. It calls for the role of communication technologies to be reimagined in order to create a healthier, fairer society.

1

Cognitive Labour

Abstract: This chapter explores the precariousness of contemporary labour, arguing that it is not confined to any given social class but is instead an inherent feature of communicative capitalism. Cognitive labour marks a shift in productivity from the body to the soul of the worker, expropriating mental energies as well as putting to work the subjectivity of the worker. It is argued that this is not confined to creative or knowledge work but is instead identifiable in all labour that is communicational, relational or affective. Such productivity is most effectively mobilised by networked technologies in ways that make it flexible, fragmented and insecure.

Hill, David W. The Pathology of Communicative Capitalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137394781.0003.

In his examination of the demonisation of the working class, Chavs (2012), the journalist Owen Jones sketches a broad picture of industrial decline in the UK, and with it the substantial replacement of manual work with something altogether less physical. Compared to coal mining or car manufacture, say, these present jobs – retail service, hospitality, care work, customer relations and so on – exert much less of a demand on the body, but they are also less secure, lower status and worse paid (Jones 2012: 145). It is important to consider how the effects of this shift – decreased job stability for many, the uncoupling of work from stable identity and any affective benefits that would previously have accrued, working poverty but also the increasing difficulty of matching work time to remuneration – play out in what has been called communicative capitalism. Most importantly, though, it is necessary to understand the move from physical to mental or cognitive labour since, it will be argued below, this is fundamental to the precarious conditions of work today. To take an example, this from Jones (2012: 147), there were, in the 1940s, almost a million people working down the mines in the UK; today, upwards of a million work in call centres. Jones (2012: 147) identifies in the call centre worker ‘as good a symbol of the working class as any’ but this can be extended further by identifying the call centre worker as emblematic of the deleterious aspects of work under the conditions of communicative capitalism.

The call centre worker is on the front line of customer relations providing a role that is, therefore, fundamentally social – work is social insofar as it captures forms of cooperation for production, even if there is little sense of dialogue (Virno 1996: 24) – and yet the conditions of their labour, as Jones describes them, are thoroughly uncivil. The job primarily entails communication and yet those doing it are dissuaded from communicating with one another, and little opportunity to do so will exist anyway as each worker is unavailable to the other by the presence of the headset through which they conduct their work. The employees’ computers do not simply facilitate their daily tasks but also monitor – inflexibly – their productive output and presence at the terminal, timing the duration of periods away from the screen. In some cases, Jones observes, workers must raise their hands to request permission to take toilet breaks, with only an arbitrary allotment of time allowed for such vital bodily functions. And the nature of communication is ultimately uncreative, as the working day consists of reading to callers (or those cold called) a predetermined script that forecasts their possible responses. Overall, the picture received is one of a divestment of autonomy facilitated by constant surveillance. As a workplace, the call centre exemplifies the transition from a Foucauldian space of discipline, to the society of control described by Gilles Deleuze (1992), where the enclosure of the factory is replaced by the modulation of the language of code enacted through the computer. Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) expands on this account of control when setting out what he describes as immaterial labour. This form of labour encompasses the informational and computer control – data-processing, knowledge-production, computational work and so on – but also a range of human activities that would not previously have been considered as work at all. As such, activities that now contribute productivity include communication, networking, care, intersubjectivity and social life in general. The objective – or at least the effect – of corporations of control is, then, for ‘the worker’s soul to become part of the factory’ (Lazzarato 1996: 134), as the social qualities of the employee are put to work. Lazzarato argues:

The management mandate to “become subjects of communication” threatens to be even more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between mental and manual labor (ideas and execution), because capitalism seeks to involve even the worker’s personality and subjectivity within the production of value. (1996: 136)

Our call centre worker, then, is not only subjected to domination exerted over their social existence by the environment of work – the regulation of breaks, the lack of opportunity for communality with fellow workers – but also finds their social nature put to work, a price placed on the appeal of their personality and the efficacy of their communicational ability for the generation of revenue. The scripting of calls constrains personality and communication within a pre-programmed mode, forecasting the conversation with the customer and undermining the employee’s autonomy in speaking. As Lazzarato explains:

The corporation, in certain cases (call centres), diagrammatically exploits even language, by reducing signifying semiotics to a means of signalling that simply triggers prefabricated address and response procedures. There is nothing of the dialogical event in the verbal exchange between employee and consumer. Words and propositions are the “input” and “output” of the machinic enslavement specific to service relations. (2014: 115)

That said, to what extent does such work constitute a form of cognitive labour? Jones (2012: 149) is probably correct in observing that call centres do not demand workers to think so much as communicate, and here it might be added that such communication is neutered of its spontaneous social nature. But when Mark Fisher (2011: 6) argues that ‘so-called “cognitive labour” has been overstated’, that ‘just because work involves talking doesn’t make it “cognitive”’ and that ‘the labour of the call centre worker mechanically repeating the same rote phrases is no more “cognitive” than that of someone on a production line’, a distinction ought to be made. As Christian Marazzi (2011a: 115) argues, the entry of communication into the realm of production is the exploitation of language, and linguistic ability is the most fundamental form of human mental capacity; in turn, cognitive labour can only be operationalised by communication, since workers cannot remain brains in vats. With cognitive labour it is its immateriality that is of primary importance, the way capital profits not from oil or gas or iron, but from the soul of the worker, that is, the social, human core of their being. If now the call centre worker has replaced the coal miner as a symbolic figure within communicative capitalism, it is their subjectivity that is now mined by corporations. The control exerted over the worker is directed at their cognitive faculties, even if one is tempted to say that the form of labour itself may be somewhat mindless.

To maintain that the call centre worker is emblematic of a kind of cognitive labour that takes place in communicative capitalism then what remains to be settled is quite what is and is not cognitive labour. To speak of the knowledge economy, or to understand cognitive labour as synonymous with the kind of knowledge work that is understood to take place in such economies, is to focus on one section of the economy at the expense of all others. This is what happens when the idea of a knowledge economy is conflated with Silicon Valley, losing sight of sectors that are no less immaterial. Similarly, to emphasise the information society is to run the risk of confusing information with knowledge, worse, reducing knowledge to information, and therefore of ignoring sectors of work that are reliant on knowledge which cannot be reduced to information (Moulier Boutang 2011: 40). Both draw the attention away from capitalism, specifically the form of communicative capitalism that orders the economic and social realities of labour today. Cognitive labour includes not only information workers – programmers, ethical hackers, financial traders and so on – but also service and hospitality workers, telephone hawkers, carers, and many more jobs besides. Marazzi (2011a: 94) identifies cognitive labour taking place where workers are no longer using machinery that is wholly external (such as factory equipment) but ‘technologies that are increasingly mental, symbolic, and communicative’, where value exists in the worker herself, ‘in her brain, in her soul’. Take the care worker: the valuable role performed here relies on a set of mental technologies organised around re-cognition of the vulnerable other, interpretation in the form of empathy, communication essential to negotiating ailments and also as balm to soothe them. Care work is a prime example of cognitive labour as a role that cannot (yet) be automated, that relies on the reflexive judgement of the human mind. The decline of industry has not led to a decline in live labour but rather, after mechanisation, a kind of globalised ‘Mexicanization’ (Marazzi 2011b: 91), that is, the proliferation of low-skilled, low-paid mental labour. Cognitive labour is a sliding scale of mental work, peaking with the technologists and the creatives and the traders of information, but bottoming out with forms of work whose basic tool is communication and which cannot yet be performed without the specific benefits of human intellect in its most general and unremarkable form. Language, emotion, empathy, recognition, communication: these are the required skills for labour in communicative capitalism. We are witnessing what Bernard Stiegler (2011: 21) calls ‘the proletarianization of the human mind’, or, more accurately, the extraction of value from the human nervous system. Mexicanization is the failure of autonomy over automation.

This process might be understood as creating what Franco Berardi (2009a: 8) calls a ‘cognitariat’, or a mass of mental labour that exists not as a collective – as a body of cognitive labour that can be organised – but as a mass of intellectual productivity that is created by individual and largely isolated workers. Another way of thinking of this kind of mass is as an archipelago of un-automated, non-autonomous labour, a cluster that can be utilised as a coherent whole but wherein each labourer or act of labour is an island to itself. Whilst all labour requires – and always has required – intelligence and is cognitive in nature, Berardi (2009a: 34) argues that today ‘cognitive capacity is becoming the essential productive resource’. It is no longer possible to see communication as something that merely happens alongside productive labour, as when, say, workers might steal snatches of conversation amongst themselves on the production line. Virno (1996: 16) goes so far as to say that chatter, once something seen by employers as idling and appropriate only at the end of the working day, is now regarded as being productive itself in the workplace – he is thinking here of the modern office – where gains can be made by a sort of chattering opportunism rather than mute instrumentality, problem solving and idea generation through a no-holds-barred group conversation. In the factory, amidst the loud machinations of heavy plant, communication was unproductive insofar as it would necessitate the shutting-down of the tools of labour so that workers could hear one another; now, it is not sustainable to oppose communicational – and relational – work to productive labour. Marazzi (2011a: 54–55) illustrates this point well with his example of UPS, the parcel delivery service in the United States. In an attempt at increasing the efficiency of deliveries, the number of drop-offs each driver could make per day, UPS decreased the amount of time each driver was allowed to take getting the parcel to the customer. This, effectively, was a rationalisation of the face-to-face, a decrease in the amount of driver-customer interaction at the doorstep. What UPS discovered was that less face-to-face time turns out to be inefficient; customers had valued the conversations with drivers, buying into a kind of affective relationship with the company through its employees, but also gleaning information about new services that they might use. In the end, UPS increased the amount of time given over to communication between drivers and customers, the lesson learned that talk may be cheap – in the sense that workers are not necessarily financially remunerated for this – but it is also productive. Unlike at the call centre, this communicative labour does not come uppermost on the job description, but it demonstrates how it is nonetheless significant in terms of profitability. Any kind of work that is relational mobilises language such that, most often, work is indistinguishable from speaking (Lazzarato 2014: 113).

That said, it is the development of increasingly effective information and communication technologies that takes communication from being a part of labour to being the primary productive resource. What Jodi Dean has called communicative capitalism, Berardi (2009a: 18) instead calls ‘semiocapitalism’, understood as a ‘fusion of media and capital’, where the communicational and relational capacity of the worker is made productive through cognitive labour. By focusing on the exchange and value of signs Berardi’s attention is primarily drawn to the dominance of forms of productive communication that are enunciated beyond the everyday language of sociability, an account that will be explored in Chapter 3 insofar as this less human form of communication runs against collectivity, solidarity and social empathy, and that is, here, useful for thinking about how immaterial forms of labour are abstracted from the body of the worker through technology. Berardi (2012: 19) writes: ‘The word is no longer a factor in the conjugation of talking bodies, but a connecter of signifying functions transcodified by the economy’. If cognitive labour is largely the sorts of tasks that are left over after automation, then through communications technologies is achieved an abstraction of communication from its intersubjective function, as those tasks increasingly involve communicating information over exchanging meaning. Ironically, the tasks left to humans by computers are carried out in such a way that we might speak of the automation of thought (Berardi 2012: 28); computers may not be able to do what we can do, but the way we do it is constrained into modes more readily recognisable as machinic than as human. In place of ‘the conjugation of talking bodies’, interrelation between workers, there is an abstracted co-operation of networked human brains – thought without a body, if only in the sense that the body gives way to an archipelago of cognitive energy. As Marazzi (2011b: 57) observes, this abstraction is vital for creating value ‘beyond the separation of company and territory, between public and private spheres, between individuals and organization’. Networked communication technologies dematerialise not only labour, but also the workplace (insofar as work no longer requires a dedicated space), the divide between working time and leisure time, between the company and its exterior.

This chapter has so far attempted not to ignore forms of work that do not meet some imagined expectation of creativity or minimum level of intellectual ability, focusing instead on communication as essential to productive labour. The argument here is that, in so far as the primary resource in this socio-economic environment is the general intellect of populations, the temptation to identify cognitive labour with any one, or narrow range of, sector/s of work must be resisted. However, in understanding the primacy of communication it is essential to look to work that is networked through communication technologies because the mass mobilisation of cognitive labour is unimaginable without the flexibility of work that this dematerialisation makes possible (Marazzi 2008: 150). The general intellect describes the collective knowledge and intelligence of a population or society in a given moment of time (see Virno & Hardt 1996: 262). The concept is adapted from Karl Marx‘s Fragment on Machines in the Grundrisse (1993), although no longer embodying his exact meaning, by thinkers such as Marazzi, Lazzarato and Berardi, put to work to describe the way that corporations today exploit distributed networks of labour, bulked out with reserve labour, in order to maximise productive efficiency, innovation and profitability. As Marazzi (2008: 93) defines it, the ‘entrepreneurial conjugation of the general intellect consists in transforming communication into an assembly line, turning speed and productive and distributive interconnection into commodities’. Yann Moulier Boutang (2011: 34) suggests more concisely that it consists of ‘creativity distributed through the entirety of the population’, understanding the general intellect as the primary resource for contemporary capitalism. The general intellect is a loose network of workers, increasingly accessible to corporations by networking technology. The employment of the general intellect is modular, the network allowing the corporation to access the productive power – communicat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Cognitive Labour
• 2  Communicative Disease
• 3  Social Anxiety
• 4  Pathological Development
• References
• Index