#labor-power

This project is a clue to understanding why so much of the philosophical and religious speculation of the 16th and 17th centuries consists of a true vivisection of the human body, whereby it was decided which of its properties could live and which, instead, had to die. It was a social alchemy that did not turn base metals into gold, but bodily powers into work-powers. For the same relation that capitalism introduced between land and work was also beginning to command the relation between the body and labor. While labor was beginning to appear as a dynamic force infinitely capable of development, the body was seen as inert, sterile matter that only the will could move, in a condition similar to that which Newton's physics established between mass and motion, where the mass tends to inertia unless force is applied to it. Like the land, the body had to be cultivated and first of all broken up, so that it could relinquish its hidden treasures. For while the body is the condition of the existence of labor-power, it is also its limit, as the main element of resistance to its expenditure. It was not sufficient, then, to decide that in itself the body had no value. The body had to die so that labor-power could live.

The more the measure of value becomes ineffectual, the more the value of labor-power becomes determinant in production; the more political economy masks the value of labor-power, the more the value of labor-power is extended and intervenes in a global terrain, a biopolitical terrain. In this paradoxical way, labor becomes affect, or better, labor finds its value in affect, if affect is defined as the ‘power to act’ (Spinoza). […] The more the theory of value loses its reference to the subject (measure was the reference as a basis of mediation and command), the more the value of labor resides in affect, that is, in living labor that is made autonomous in the capital relation, and expresses – through all the pores of singular and collective bodies – its power of self-valorization.

Instead of looking to the body-as-organism to actualize labor-power, we are proposing that a dynamic, indeterminate matter is presently being configured in capitalism with corresponding techniques of administration aimed at a level below, above, or perhaps beyond that of the bounded body-as-organism [...] We are proposing that there is an abstracting of affect to affect-itself, which disregards the bounded-ness of the human body, thus troubling the conceptualization of the body as the body-as-organism