Feminism, Labour and Digital Media

Kylie Jarrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317517986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Soziale Aspekte in der Informatik

There is a contradiction at the heart of digital media. We use commercial platforms to express our identity, to build community and to engage politically. At the same time, our status updates, tweets, videos, photographs and music files are free content for these sites. We are also generating an almost endless supply of user data that can be mined, re-purposed and sold to advertisers. As users of the commercial web, we are socially and creatively engaged, but also labourers, exploited by the companies that provide our communication platforms. How do we reconcile these contradictions?

Feminism, Labour and Digital Media argues for using the work of Marxist feminist theorists about the role of domestic work in capitalism to explore these competing dynamics of consumer labour. It uses the concept of the Digital Housewife to outline the relationship between the work we do online and the unpaid sphere of social reproduction. It demonstrates how feminist perspectives expand our critique of consumer labour in digital media. In doing so, the Digital Housewife returns feminist inquiry from the margins and places it at the heart of critical digital media analysis.

1 Sexts from Marxists and Other Stories from Digital Media's Social Factory

DOI: 10.4324/9781315720111-1

Karl Marx has a rich second life on the web. The opening up of production and distribution tools associated with networked, digital communication systems has enabled dissemination of diverse Marxist, socialist and communist political perspectives in websites, blogs and online magazines or journals. From individual sites for political organisations to archives of Marxist literature (Marxists Internet Archive) to online versions of newspapers and journals such as Socialist Worker, it has never been easier to distribute information about Marxist politics and ideologies or to organise and engage others in political discussion. The Internet has also enabled more flippant engagements with Marxist thinking, ranging from Facebook pages where one can literally “like” Karl Marx himself, socialism or, indeed, capitalism, to Tumblrs such as Sexts from Marxists (in which quotes from Marxists are reconceived as tools for seduction), Marxist Cats (in which quotes from Marxist thinkers are superimposed over images of cats) or Marxwear (in which images of Karl Marx’s head are grafted onto fashion photographs), to the Socialist Meme Caucus Facebook community where users can share their comic interpretations of Marxian political perspectives. Digital media offers fertile ground for the expression and distribution of Marxist theory and praxis.

Digital technologies have been associated in practical and conceptual ways with resurgence in Marxist frameworks for political activism. In 1996, Manuel Castells linked the network structures of the Internet to the particular form of distributed political activity of the Mexican leftist political group, the Zapatistas. From the so-called anti-globalisation protests of the 1990s, through to the recent visibility of the Occupy movements and the “Arab Spring,” networked communication systems have been linked to transformative political change and credited (perhaps erroneously) with the capacity for radicalising individuals and collectives. While not all of the politics driving these protest movements could be described as formally Marxist, socialist or communist, there has nevertheless been a tendency to associate the network structures of the Internet with alternative modes of political organisation and control. The same idea has been applied to media institutions. Open source systems, peer-to-peer networks and open publishing models such as indymedia or Wikipedia arguably “advance principles of open access, free distribution, cooperative production, and common ownership of goods” that offer “alternative production models that undermine corporate power and suggest social spaces in which goods are jointly produced and freely distributed” (Fuchs 2008, 164).

There has also been a related reinvigoration of research into the political economy of media, but particularly of digital media. This is, in part, due to the rapid development of commercialised property on the web making the economic infrastructure highly visible. With companies such as Google reaching a US$400 billion market capitalisation in 2014 (Farzad 2014) and Facebook having one of the most valuable initial public offerings (IPO) in the technology sector with a peak valuation of US$107 billion (Pepitone 2012), the economic significance of digital media is obvious. It is not surprising then that there has been a renewed emphasis on critically exploring the political economy of these sites.

This emphasis intersects with the increased influence of the Autonomist Marxist movement, but particularly the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in interpreting recent economic and political trends. From their depiction of the shift from a process of capitalist imperialism to a state of Empire to their identification of the politics of multitude, Hardt and Negri (2000; 2005; 2009) are pivotal figures in understanding the fabric of contemporary society. The Western consumer society they depict is marked by the saturation of market imperatives throughout all facets of life; sociality is industrialised and industry is socialised. They have also provided the key framework for understanding how immaterial, cognitive and affective labour have become central to capitalism. This in turn has rendered these theorists and their interpretation of Marxist political economy vital for understanding digital media. Hardt and Negri, and various other theorists associated with the Autonomia movement, have provided the dominant framework being used to interpret the economic relationship between creative consumer activity and digital media economics. The figure of the Digital Housewife emerges partly because of the tools they provide for articulating unpaid and creative work undertaken in digital consumer contexts as labour. Their insights have also linked that labour to broader socioeconomic tendencies, providing for complex critical interrogations of such activity.

This chapter documents this intersection of Autonomist Marxism and digital media. It explores three key concepts – the centrality of immaterial labour, multitude and the social factory – and it then places the labouring consumer within those contexts. This consumer, though, is not yet the Digital Housewife. As I will go on to argue in the following chapter, feminist perspectives and insights relating to domestic work are neglected in this analysis. Nevertheless, to understand the Digital Housewife requires outlining the dominant theoretical concepts being applied to consumer labour, which means we must begin by understanding Autonomist Marxist thought.

Autonomia and Immaterial Labour

The Autonomia Operaia movement originates in 1960s labour protests by Italian students, academics, feminists, unemployed youth and factory workers. The original conceptual framework of the movement was of a non-hierarchical, non-unified organisational structure, focussed on struggle to re-define work rather than for better conditions and wages (see Wright 2002 and Lotringer and Marazzi 2007 for a rich engagement with the group’s history). It emerged out of the wider operaismo (workerism) branch of the Italian Left that analysed the nature of working-class life and struggle, but was more specifically focussed on the relative autonomy of workers from the dictates of capital and their ensuing capacity to effect change. It also emphasised the relative autonomy of these workers from the politics of the Communist Party and the trade unions (Cleaver 1979). Various wings of the Italian Left became radicalised from the mid-1970s with breakaway groups – in particular the Brigate Rosse or Red Brigades – engaging in direct action. The intensification of state suppression of Leftist opposition, but particularly of Autonomia, ultimately led to the arrest and incarceration of trade unionists and key members of the movement, including Antonio Negri.

More recently, Autonomia has regained influence, with key theorists such as Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato continuing to develop the Autonomist framework. However, this paradigm is most commonly associated with the work of Hardt and Negri and in particular the ideas developed across the three volumes of Empire (2000), Multitude (2005) and Commonwealth (2009). The name of the movement comes from the argument in the “fragment on machines” in Marx’s Grundrisse (1973) that describes the relative autonomy given to worker’s intellectual energies – the general intellect – through automation of labour processes. This idea is explored further below, but it is important from the outset to note that this interpretation of labour’s qualities has become increasingly influential as digital technologies, driven by the vital energies of creative, social labourers, have been integrated into post-Fordist capitalism. It has also emerged as a model for thinking about, and activating, the range of plural, disaggregated political movements such as Occupy or the anti-Austerity protests in Europe (Douzinas 2010; 2013; Thorburn 2012; Venn 2007) that have characterised political resistance since the 1990s.

In particular, the emphasis on the role of immaterial labour in capitalism articulated by Autonomist Marxists has been singled out for its explanatory power and used to re-conceptualise labour relations within digital media industries, providing explanation of the work of direct employees and consumers alike. Autonomia theorists argue for the centrality of knowledge, social relations and communication – the troika of affective immaterial products – within contemporary capitalism. In Empire, Hardt and Negri (2000) describe a new global economy where digital systems and technical innovation are at the core of the developed world’s economic growth. Akin to long-rehearsed arguments about the rise of post-Fordism (Amin 1997; Bell 1973; Castells 1996; Harvey 1990), Hardt and Negri point to the decentring of extractive and manufacturing industries and their associated industrialised, physical labour in favour of industries associated with symbol manipulation. Evidence of this trend is supplied in the growth of the service sector. Accurate statistics of the growth of such work are difficult to find, primarily due to problems of definition as well as uneven distribution at a global level. Nevertheless, in 2005 the OECD estimated over 70 per cent of total value-adding in that region was from areas defined as “services” and that the sector was responsible for the same percentage of total employment (Wölfl 2005).

Consequently, labour that generates non-material products – code, data, ideas, interpersonal relations, knowledge – has become an increasing source of value and central to market economics. Hardt and Negri (2005, 208–209) typify not only the products but also this kind of labour as “immaterial,” distinguishing two different kinds of work under the umbrella term. The first is that involving intellectual, cognitive or communication skills, while the second is affective work that involves interpersonal relations and emotion. They suggest that most contemporary work involves both kinds of labour. Digital media industries such as those associated with social media, but also those in the broader software and digital entertainment sectors, are exemplary of this trend in which production predominantly consists of symbol manipulation and the articulation of creative and intellectual energies (Lazzarato 1996). These are the inputs that generate the products of this sector and, as the rise of social media indicates, often continue to inform products as they further engage cognitive and affective energies in their consumption cycles.

More importantly though, Hardt and Negri suggest that while most workers today may not actually be involved in producing immaterial goods – globally, agricultural and manufacturing work remain central to employment – immaterial labour has become “hegemonic in qualitative terms” (2005, 109). The valorisation of this mode of accumulation has “imposed a tendency,” meaning that “today labor and society have to informationalize, become intelligent, become communicative, become affective” (2005, 109). There has been an increasing reliance on social relationships and communicative capabilities within factory walls. Cognition and affect generate value abstractly in the calculations of “human capital” that have become integral to the share price of most commercial companies. Furthermore, non-material processes have taken on renewed importance on the industrial factory floor as so-called “soft” skills, particularly those associated with communication, intellectual achievement and interpersonal skills, become vital to computerised industries. This restructuring of the capitalist mode of accumulation, the Autonomist Marxists argue, has lead to a fundamental restructuring of labour, emphasising immaterial activity such as cognition, affect and communication over physical activity (Virno 2004), even in industrial contexts.

As Berardi summarises: “Cognitive activity has always been at the basis of human production, including production of a more mechanical variety. There is no human labor process that does not imply the exercise of intelligence. But now cognitive capacity is becoming the essential productive resource. In the sphere of industrial labor, the mind was put to work as a repetitive automatism, as the physiological support of muscular movement. Today the mind is at work as innovation, as language and as a communicative relation” (2007, 76). In this context, labour-power (as potential energy) is no longer only associated with the force of the living body but with subjectivity, cognition and affect (Virno 2004). It has become immaterial. Because of its ability to capture the kinds of labour associated with consumer-driven, symbolic industries such as commercial digital media, the concept of immaterial labour has become a crucial prism through which to explore the labour of consumers and for understanding the Digital Housewife.

The Social Factory

Autonomist Marxists go on to argue that this re-organisation of labour around immateriality extends the influence of the capitalist mode of accumulation, especially its practices of expropriation and alienation. In immaterial capitalism, life processes often considered outside of capitalist logics, and necessarily so to maintain their validity, become re-organised so that they reflect the logics of industrialised capital. Most simply this occurs in the extension of the working day for those who do intellectual labour where “an idea or image comes to you not only in the office but also in the shower or in your dreams” (Hardt and Negri 2005, 111–112). Evidence of this industrialisation of sociality also comes in the form of the “presence bleed” generated by mobile communications technologies that blur boundaries between work and intimate personal life (Gregg 2011). It can also be found in ...