Labour as Commitement: Towards a Critique of the Autonomization of Work after the Third Industrial Revolution - 108-127

Abstract

Labour has, across culture, been an almost historical constant. While this may be affirmed, it is also true that the forms undertaken by it, as a social practice, have differed throughout historical periods. This metamorphosis of labour has not been a singular development—it has occurred materially, as part of a series of changes occurring within an ever-changing assemblage of interdependent social systems, effecting change upon them as well. Having said this, this essay will focus on the relationship between labour and identity, taken from a materialist angle. To begin, I will analyse the social character of labour as it appears in the wake of the third industrial revolution, with particular focus on the intensification of the autonomy of different fields of work, but also on the paradoxical way in which this autonomy supports itself by deferring to an apparently humanist discourse, by means of radical individualism—although the extent of this may be further discussed. As a response to this problem, I will outline the prolegomena of a theory on labour that follows the possibility of its own autopoiesis. This theory will follow a few conceptual lines, the most notable of which are the concept of the full body without organs, in the form that Deleuze and Guattari operate with, and the notion of commitment proposed by Negarestani in their Labour of the Inhuman.