Affective labor

Affective labor is a term identifying work carried out in specific historical contexts that is intended to produce or modify affective experiences in people. Although its history is as old as that of labor itself, affective labor has been of increasing importance to modern economies since the emergence of mass culture in the nineteenth century. The most prominent institutionalized form of affective labor is perhaps advertising, which typically attempts to make audiences relate to products through particular effects. But there are many other areas in which affective labor figures prominently, including service and care industries whose purpose is to make people feel in particular ways.

Hardt and Negri on affective labor

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have begun to develop this concept in their books Empire (2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004).

In their recent work, Hardt and Negri focus on the role affective labor plays in the current mode of production (which can be referred to as "imperial," "late capitalist," or "postmodern"). In this passage from Multitude they briefly define their key terms:

"Unlike emotions, which are mental phenomena, affects refer equally to body and mind. In fact, affects, such as joy and sadness, reveal the present state of life in the entire organism, expressing a certain state of the body along with a certain mode of thinking. Affective labor, then, is labor that produces or manipulates affects.... One can recognize affective labor, for example, in the work of legal assistants, flight attendants, and fast food workers (service with a smile). One indication of the rising importance of affective labor, at least in the dominant countries, is the tendency for employers to highlight education, attitude, character, and "prosocial" behavior as the primary skills employees need. A worker with a good attitude and social skills is another way of saying a worker adept at affective labor”" (108).

The most important point in their scholarship with respect to this issue is that immaterial labor, of which affective labor is a specific form, has achieved dominance in the current mode of production. This does not mean that there are more immaterial laborers than material laborers, or that immaterial labor produces more capital than material labor. Instead, this dominance is signaled by the fact that, in developed countries, labor is more often figured as immaterial than material. To illustrate the significance of this claim, they draw a comparison between the early twenty-first-century and that of the mid-nineteenth-century, famously engaged by Karl Marx, in which factory labor was dominant even if it was not the form of labor practiced by the most people. One popular, albeit slightly less than perfect example, of this might be that, whereas Fred Flintstone, as an average American, drove a crane in a quarry, Homer Simpson sits at a desk and provides safety.

External links

• An Essay by Michael Hardt on Affective Labor