CARTOGRAPHY OF NEW WORK - A MAP TO PRECARIOUS LIFE

This research project started immediately after the initial two-year long Economy and Social Theory lecture series, as its next step, to deal specifically with the displacement into knowledge and attention economy, or into immaterial labour and production, which we thought received still too little attention of the Economy and Social theory project: the paradoxes of new work and immaterial production could not be understood with the concepts of modern sociology, economics, management theory or political theory. By these paradoxes I mean for example the strange condition where I am expected to put into work more and more of my “soul” – my thoughts, tastes, emotions, memories, relations – while at the same time the magic of work, the security and predictability it once offered, has lost all its credibility. I, for example, a pretty educated, yet not so young Dr.Sc.(Econ.) anymore, have never had a longer than one 3 year employment relationship, while most of them, if I have had any, have always been cut in six month deals after another. And still I and my family feel that I only work. To understand the transformation of work and production we need concepts which go beyond the industrial welfare and wage work society.
There is no doubt that the paradoxes biopolitical economy cause problems to the old meanings, distinctions and approaches as if it did not fit within the boundaries of normal world and common opinion. In economy where value is produced by action rather than work, by words and images rather than machines, where products are “communicative acts” rather than actual material things and where tools blend in human abilities and memory, it no longer makes sense to use concepts that separate “economy” and “life”, “management” and “philosophy” (or words and things, action and work, spirit and matter, mind and body, subject and object) at the very moment when the analysis of economy ought to combine them. The understanding of the dynamic of the creation of value and its control requires new conceptual openings, new tools of thinking, new theory of economy, new philosophy of management.

RELATED PUBLICATIONS

Mikko Jakonen, Jukka Peltokoski, Akseli Virtanen (eds.) Uuden työn sanakirja [The Dictionary of New Work - A Map to Precarious Life]. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto 2006, Polemos-series, 500 p.

General Intellect: Vasemmisto etsii työtä. Helsinki: Like Publishing 2008.