2-5 Subjects and Alienations of Affective Labor, or Theoretical Grounding for Study of Psychotherapist as Affective Laborer

2-5 Subjects and Alienations of Affective Labor, or Theoretical Grounding for Study of Psychotherapist as Affective Laborer

2-5 Subjects and Alienations of Affective Labor, or Theoretical Grounding for Study of Psychotherapist as Affective Laborer

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References

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  1. The anthropological evidence for genders between, beyond, and outside what Stern and many other western theorists still consider the natural gender binary/polarity is so robust that a website has been published by the American Public Broadcasting Service to compile these data in order to familiarize the public: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/two-spirits/map.html
  2. This specifically modern social construction of man/woman with their correspondent qualities, and the reasons being related to the rise of capitalism, is argued brilliantly in Sylvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (2004).
  3. It is not clear to me that this is the form of capitalism that we are existing within currently, but it seems to be better than “late capitalism” in that it recognizes that this phase of capitalism could and probably will merely be a phase in a series of phases in capitalism’s existence in our historical world. This counter’s the messianic diamat (dialectic materialism) of so many Marxists who believe that there will be a final phase (a late capitalism?) of capitalism which will finally results in a synthesis of its internal contradictions, ushering in the communist utopia. It very well may be the case that the production of semiotic chains, communication and affect production, done in intellectual or immaterial labor is indeed the most valorized, dominant, and productive of capital (exchange value/dead labor) form of production in this phase of capitalism.
  4. It is incumbent upon this analysis of affective labor to define what affect is. Patricia T. Clough writes that affect is best defined by “critics and theorists who, indebted to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson, conceptualize affect as pre-individual bodily forces augmenting or diminishing a body’s capacity to act” (2003, p. 1). This is precisely what Berardi has in mind when he speaks of “the soul.”
  5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) makes clear the stratification of “the west” and it’s political/cultural Other. Spivak’s work thus challenges any author’s ability to speak of “the West as Subject.” Some post-Marxists, including Silvia Federici, are able to successfully speak of Anglo-Euro-American culture and capitalism as a subject with multiple historical varieties while not losing sight of those types of labor which do not fit in as nicely to theories of late-capitalism (e.g., there are still many housewives in traditional marriages in the U.S. and there are various types of slave labor in most locations throughout the world). For an example of her synthetic work along these lines, see Federici’s works in the collection Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (2012). Still, the communicative logic of semiocapitalism, which is its defining characteristic, inflects many more labors than just ‘white collared’ jobs. In Toyotism, factory workers are encouraged to engage in teams and be generous with suggestions for improvements to their work and the factor in general.

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