The passionate temperament of employment, now richer than both the Marxian thesis of naked exploitation and its continuation in the sociology of Fordist consumption implicitly assumed

The desire to find employment should no longer be merely a mediated desire for the goods that wages circuitously permit buying, but an intrinsic desire for the activity for its own sake

[...] if the act of giving consent is the authentic expression of a freely self-determined interiority, then consent does not exist. If it is understood as the unconditioned approbation of a subject that proceeds only from itself, then it does not exist, for heteronomy is the condition of all things, including all human things, and no action is such that anyone could claim it entirely as his or hers. [...] The idea of their freedom is merely the effect of a deficient capacity of intellection and the truncation that results from it. Incapable, for obvious reasons, of tracing back the infinite chain of antecedent causes, they record only their volitions and their actions, and take the shortest path, which consists in considering themselves their true source and only origin. [...]

[...]

The question of the authenticity or the ownership of desire vanishes once the subjectivist point of view is abandoned and attention is turned outside, to the infinite concatenation of causes, since it is equally true that, being exogenously determined, none of my desires is of my doing, and that as the very expression of my conative force, each of my desires is indisputably mine. And this is where the idea of consent begins to founder, shipwrecked together with its opposite, alienation. For if to be alienated is to be prevented from proceeding from oneself and to find oneself instead chained to an ‘other than oneself’, then alienation is merely another word for heterodetermination, namely, for passionate servitude, the human condition itself (governed by passive affects). If alienation is determination by the outside, nothing is outside alienation [...]

[...] Was not capital’s claim to a part of the revenues originally justified by its willingness to assume economic risk, with employees abandoning a part of the added value of their labour in exchange for a fixed remuneration, shielded from the vagaries of the market? Yet the new structural conditions endow the capitalist desire with enough strategic latitude that it is able to decline to bear even the weight of cyclicality, pushing the task of adjusting to it onto the class of employees, precisely those who were constitutively exempt from it. [...]

But this ‘of our own accord’ merely an actantial indication; it has nothing to say about everything that preceded it.

[...] Value and meaning do not reside in things but are produced by the desiring forces that seize them: ‘We neither strive, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it.’ This statement certainly exemplifies the unsettling strangeness of Spinozist thought and its power to confound our most solid habits of thought, since, in inverting the connection between desire and value, it ruins any possibility of an objectivism of value. Value is not an intrinsic property of things, to which desire, as mere acknowledgment, must simply conform; conversely, our desire is not a simple effort of orientation in a world of desirables that are objectively already there. [...]

[...] Coercion and consent are forms of the lived experience (respectively sad and joyful) of determination. To be coerced is to have been determined to do something but in a state of sadness. And to consent – to consent to follow, in the sense of the sequor of the obsequium – is to live one’s obedience, but with its intrinsic burden relieved by a joyful affect.

In each person, the valorisation of things, the spontaneous creative activity of the conatus, is structured under the influence of a set of axiological schemes and already constituted valorisations

Ethics, III, 9 states that, fundamentally, it is in desire’s own investments that the valorisation of things originates

[...] because it is removed from the concrete appreciation of capital, the conatus of financial capital has contact with absolutely nothing beyond the surplus value that flows back to it. It can therefore form no other desire.

This threat of dereliction in the service of a foreign desire, the threat of the expenditure of the power of acting as pure loss – though obviously the ‘loss’ is never pure, if only because at the very least the expenditure brings in a salary – can be countered in the end in a very limited number of ways, in fact in only two. One can admit it to oneself, with the consequence of having to choose between resignation (real life is elsewhere, in the other eight waking hours), or even the depression captured by the expression ‘a life wasted making a living’, and, the antagonistic option, rebellion and struggle (the trade union on the inside, politics on the outside): ‘the greater the sadness, the greater is the part of a man’s power of acting to which it is necessarily opposed.’ Alternatively, unable to face the too painful fact of one’s dereliction, the subject strives to ‘imagine those things that increase or aid one’s power of acting’, thus repelling the spectre of sad dejection with the arms of re-enchantment, namely, by recreating a desire of one’s own, aligned with the master-desire yet distinct from it. This enables the recuperation of an idiosyncratic meaning that can overcome the void of abstract labour; an object-desire is reconstructed under the effect of a meta-desire for living happily, or at least with joy, or at any rate not meaninglessly. Thus re-concretised and newly charged with desirability, albeit through the very effort of the meta-desire for joyful life, abstract labour can be minimally reappropriated. And so we see employees finding an interest, and subsequently satisfaction, in tasks that they would in all probability deem profoundly uninteresting were they freed from material necessity.

treating them as a metamorphosis (by sublimation) of the fundamental demand for love

even aside from this apodictic derivation

there is no need to pass through an ontogenetic hypothesis in order to account for demands for love addressed within social universes such as employment

Among the many objects of desire [...] one finds not only strategic interests such as seeking promotion, receiving a raise, or beating competitors, but also the pursuit of the joy stemming from being loved by a superior, that is, loved both by a particular individual and by the institution (a great amorous power) through one of its representatives. [...] In any case, the love of the boss-master, in the form of the search for recognition, has its rightful place in the passionate complex of employment as one of the forms of its specific ‘alienation’ – that is, as ‘consent’, since this love is a source of joyous affects. But by the same token it is also a source of co-linearisation, since, by its very nature, the passionate mechanism of the demand for love leads the seeker to do what brings joy to the giver, hence to embrace/anticipate the latter’s desire in order to conform one’s own to it. As lines of dependence are also lines of dependence for recognition, the alignment of the subordinate with the superior, who is already aligned in the same way, is inscribed in the general structure – hierarchical and fractal – of passionate co-linearization.

a subject remaining ‘separated from itself’, in the mysterious form of being ‘a stranger to oneself’ that pre-Althusserian readings of Marx sometimes revisit.

[...] Already little inclined to think of themselves as determined, desiring individuals are even more disposed to consider themselves the origins of their desires when both the complexity and the evanescence of the causal process that would have to be grasped make it particularly easy for them to remain unconscious of their desire’s determination. Here there is neither localised amorous dependence nor personalised affective mimetism, but the unremitting process of innumerable exposures to social influences, at times infinitesimal, at times brutally decisive (experienced as a ‘revelation’), for the full length of a trajectory of existence. By a truncation that optimises the cognitive economy, the fact of the felt desire imposes itself, alone, on consciousness, allowing the imagination to yield to the illusion of self-determination and the originary will. Those who love an activity – sales (‘for the contact with clients’), auditing or financial analysis (‘for the precision’), services (‘for the relational quality’) – or a sector – oil prospecting (high-risk venture), aviation (high tech), civil engineering (working outside) – or who seek the prestige of business accomplishments – success as measured by the job status, the monetary reward, or the executive lifestyle (burning the midnight oil, travel, sharp suits, deluxe accessories) – always speak of ‘my choice’, what ‘I enjoy’, ‘my’ lifelong vocation, and it matters little that the accumulation of affect-imbued images that constituted these things as objects of desire, and determined the enlistment through these choices of employment, came entirely from outside. The fact remains that these desires, induced from outside but turned into authentic internal desires, determine joyful commitments when they are given an opportunity for satisfaction by the line of employment that corresponds to them. In an expression that is now common despite meaning nothing at all, individuals ‘fulfil themselves’, which really means that they fulfil their desires. [...] Having incurred this desire – evidently tailored for the organisation but now made their own – the individuals ‘consent’, and set themselves in motion joyfully, of their own accord.

Such complexity poses a challenge to synoptic presentation

The neoliberal enterprise now seeks full alignment and the annulation of the drift

[...] It is a safe bet that if one day, following a change in customs and regulations, prostitution leaves the underworld to become an official trade, any company entering that market will expect its employees to kiss, and then to love, for real. Neoliberal capital is the world of the girlfriend experience.

[...] Performance artist Julien Prévieux provides a fine example with the letters of non-application that he sends in response to job offers: ‘I write to you following your ad in the journal Carriers and Jobs. I swear I never did anything wrong … I don’t do drugs. I love animals. I don’t steal. I buy mass-produced goods like everybody else. I exercise to keep healthy. Later I would like to have a kid or two and a dog. It is also my intention to become a property owner and buy stocks. I have witnesses who saw me not doing anything. I don’t know what I’m guilty of. I don’t know why you want to punish me with forced labour on databases … I kindly ask you not to hire me.' [...] It is worth noting that, except for the punch line, Prévieux’s letters of non-application are less the declaration of a specific interest than the affirmation of an overall social normalisation, put forward as a generic predisposition to the life of employment, incidentally an illustration of the congruence between employment for wages and an entire social order. We do not live merely in a capitalist economy, but in a capitalist society.

[...] Those who consent are no freer than anyone else, and are no less ‘yielding’ than the enslaved; only, they have been made to yield differently and thus experience their determination joyfully. There is no consent, in the same way that there is no voluntary servitude. There are only happy subjections.

who would deny the existence of constructivist projects of desire

[...] What makes the constructivist agency a focal point for very intense affects of hate is the possibility of ascribing the conditioning to a local, identifiable cause, one that is thought to be free (the Party, the State, the Central Planning Committee), and to which a contingent intentionality can be imputed. In contrast, capitalism’s market forces, despite grinding people down no less violently, appear as a ‘systemic effect’, thus unassignable, without a centre and without deliberate design behind them; they seem almost like a necessity, which for Marx was the essence of commodity fetishism, and thereby conducive to all the rhetorical strategies that depoliticise things by naturalising them.

Utterly without a telos, it is so vast and, crucially, so diffuse, so devoid of a centre

that intermediate historical phase of larval and inchoate individualism

[...] it would be quite something if at the end of the introspective analysis of their ‘lack of empathy for subordinates’, difficulty in ‘managingit would be quite something if at the end of the introspective analysis of their ‘lack of empathy for subordinates’, difficulty in ‘managing relations with superiors’, ‘difficulties communicating’ or ‘stepping up to meet challenges’, the long process of ‘self-improvement’ brought some coachees to the critical realisation that the situations in which they had been put were at times simply impossible, so that – the ultimate failure of coaching – they would turn against the capitalist enterprise when the goal was only to turn them inward.

[...] As if to confirm the hypothesis of universal passionate servitude, the most surprising thing is that companies (sometimes) open their doors to cameras, no doubt because the filmmakers were persuasive enough, but also under the effect of a kind of perfectly innocent good conscience, whose source is management’s own straightforward assent to what they do – unaware of any blatant affective instrumentalisation or mental manipulation, thus seeing no reason to dissimulate. This primary adherence reveals how much the conditioners are themselves conditioned and steeped in the same imaginary and the same passionate universe as those on whom they impose their desire, thus providing another powerful illustration of Bourdieu’s remark, that the dominators are dominated by their very domination.

the Church looks askance at excesses of zeal: the word for clerical normality, ‘idoneity’, designates the optimal point between necessary and excessive commitment

[...] Yet co-linearisation, especially when it is as marked with intentionality as neoliberal alignment is, can never fully dodge its saddening part, not so much because of the initial heterogeneity of desires and the fact that one desire aims at pulling the other in its direction, as because this reduction of one desire to the other does not take the form of a ‘free’ proposition, but always relies on an impending threat. Of course employees can be induced or led to be passionate about management auditing, the sale of forklifts, or catalytic cracking; of course they can seize all the opportunities for joy that the enterprise takes care to present them with – promotion, socialising, or the promise of ‘self-fulfilment.’ Yet despite all that, every now and then they can harbour other thoughts.