Abstract:
Contemporary western organizations are described by Hardt and Negri as involving
immaterial labor in the informationalized production of both goods and services. We examine
immaterial labor in relation to identity and sociality with a focus on the affectualization of
work. Drawing on Heidegger's idea of presencing, we explore the crises that workers face
when communicating and informating with people who favor different perspectives on work
and self. We argue that when people manage self and work through the increasingly speedy
re-semiotization of meaning and identity, there is a concomitant requirement for rapid cycles
of identification and disidentification. With the concentration of decisions about work and
identity into the here-and-now, presencing peels away taken-as-given avenues for action,
inviting new ones rapidly into being. People are called on to 'presence' not just knowledges
and selves, but sensibilities as to what it means to be human, while at the same time
negotiating the traces of older bureaucratic power structures. What emerges is a worker
identity located between the "the misery of power [and] the joy of being" (Hardt & Negri,
2000, p. 413).
