Affective labor

Affective labor is work carried out that is intended to produce or modify emotional experiences in people. Coming out of Autonomist feminist critiques of marginalized and so-called "invisible" labor, it has been the focus of critical discussions by, e.g., Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Juan Martin Prada, and Michael Betancourt.

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 visible institutionalized form of affective labor is perhaps advertising, which typically attempts to make audiences relate to products through particular effects. Yet 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. Domestic work, frequently ignored by other analysts of labor, has also been a critical focus of theories of affective labor.

The phrase affective labor, seen broadly, has its roots in the Autonomist critiques of the 1970s, in particular those that theorize a dynamic form of capitalism that is able to move away from purely industrial labor. In particular, the "Fragment on Machines," from Marx's Grundrisse, and conceptions of immaterial labor decentered the focus of labor theory and sparked debate over what constituted real labor:

No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing (Naturgegenstand) as middle link between the object (Objekt) and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.

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