Affective labour and alienation: Spinoza's materialism and the sad passions of post-Fordist work.

This paper examines the alienation entailed in contemporary emotional and affective labour and the ways this might be overcome. I identify the shifts in the nature and function of this labour since it first received attention by feminist and other scholars in the 1970s and '80s. And I point towards the emergence of contemporary struggles to limit the emotional intensity of the working day, similar in some ways to those Karl Marx once described around its length . My primary wager is that overcoming the forms of alienation at stake in the putting to work of personality, subjectivity, and self, need not be understood as a largely idealist question of ‘de-alienation’ or ‘de-reification’. Rather, drawing on Benedict de Spinoza's work on the body, mind, and affects, I suggest it is one of organising material encounters between bodies and their joining together through the construction of ‘common notions’, reason, and a more ‘real’ understanding of the social world as well as one’s location within it. I argue that, in approaching such a project, feminist and other methods of ‘consciousness-raising’ may prove of greater use than many traditional approaches to developing and delivering ‘class consciousness’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]