Sayak Valencia’s research results on work conditions. Necropolitics and Gore Capitalism disrupt the Marxist model of production-consumption – the world of work is undergoing a radical change
What has happened to work in the capitalistic system? Work conditions, hyperconnected body and necropolitics
«Work less, work all, produce what is necessary, redistribute everything». This is the slogan of the labor struggle and the conquest of labor rights that has regained strength. A banner with this slogan appeared in Italy, emphasizing the need to create an organized front for the common good through income redistribution in a necropolitical moment. This phrase has also been taken by figures like Christophe Roux. A French blogger in the telemarketing and self-help industry, who appropriated it to provide advice on becoming better freelancers or entrepreneurs.
What has happened to work? The answer is neither easy nor quick because traditional work still exists. Albeit increasingly with worse working conditions, while deregulated work is glamorized with an aesthetic veneer that blurs the boundaries between work, life, and leisure, creating a seamless chain between these elements. This aesthetic transvaluation, produced to seduce and be applied to work, goes beyond the reductionist perspective defended by some labor theorists, where aesthetics is interpreted simplistically.
Ethical entrepreneurship and the cosmeticization of work
This aesthetic design applied to contemporary work is related to sensitivity, understood as the capacity to create consensus. Even in a non-verbal manner or perhaps, nowadays, especially in a non-verbal manner. It is not surprising to question the concept of work. As salaried work with dignified labor conditions is disappearing, and in counteroffensive, there is a reinforcement of a certain polarization towards aesthetics concerning elements such as fatigue, precariousness, effort, physical wear, exploitation, and other unglamorous features traditionally linked to labor. By aligning with aspirations of the neoliberal order, current work focuses on visual fascination. In the digital era, we are facing the cosmeticization of work.
The most exalted aspiration of this order glorifies unregulated free time and encourages us to join the ranks of influencers, podcasters, Instagrammers, YouTubers, etc., as a magical formula to access the utopia of making easy money with little effort. By hyperconnected body, we mean the fusion of information systems and the semiotic materiality of the body. The body becomes a techno-organic organism that produces grammars and processes experiences of hypermediation. It incorporates new mandates about work, which also reproduce old stereotypes of gender, race, class, and consumption.
The concept of current work has been reconfigured, mainly following the logics of boundless entrepreneurship. Far from the modern idea of ethical entrepreneurship. Reinforced by what Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik called capitalistic subjectivity, linked to the capitalist order that produces human relationships and the individual’s relationship with the world and themselves, even in their unconscious representations.
A definition of Gore capitalism and necropolitics: working class conditions disrupts the Marxist model of consumption
Now that Gore Capitalism1 disrupts the Marxist model of consumption, the world of work is undergoing a radical change. A change comparable in scope to the great change that occurred with the industrial revolution. Contemporary work, despite being promoted as dematerialized, focuses mainly on the image of the body.
Or rather, on the ontologization of the image of the body, where the image itself becomes key. Both at an axiological and market level, than what it seeks to represent. The image of glamorous and effortless work has become a central figure in thinking about the expanded forms of salaried labor, which oscillate between endless digital economy entrepreneurship and the consolidation of criminal economies that promise rapid and fierce access to much needed and desired money.
Gore capitalism – a new form of domesticity that emerges from the images themselves
In this context, the body is the medium and the message in contemporary work, as it produces technical semiotic codes that customize content on networks and create market niches that feed neoliberal economies. We could say that in these new attention economies – that base their rentability in the capacity of catching our attention and get us to invest our time and money to consume their products – the meaning of the body shifts and acquires a redefinition around consumerist cult, becoming a mass communication medium that, in turn, reconfigures a new gender domesticity, «a new form of domesticity that emerges from the images themselves», images that no longer only provide choices of lifestyles, but become mandates about our lives, infinitely adapted to the models of the market of images, mandates that search to create an obedient and easily manageable society.
The capture of the sensitive regime and «the creation of a neoliberal common sense» that the Mexican theorist Irmgard Emmelhainz defines as the infiltration of the neoliberal mechanisms that govern all areas of life, anchoring new forms of totalitarianism by taking root in life, sensibility and the distribution of the sensible and distributing them as if it were the only possible option, proposing it as the global common sense that uses cosmetics – in ambiguous (dis)connection with politics – is disseminated through culture, fashion, art, architecture, and mass media. To clarify this point further, I draw inspiration from architect Beatriz Colomina, who suggests that after World War II, architecture/buildings became a mass communication medium.
femininity as performance, a shift towards erotic capital – about female working class conditions
We understand that these same elements of cultural reading, combined with all the gadgets and virtual internet platforms that represent the body as a marketable commodity, construct it and use it as a corporalized screen that retranslates contents from mass media and becomes a kind of human poster where logics of advertising, surveillance, aesthetics, gender binarism, racist, sexist, and aporophobic policies, as well as contemporary resistances, converge.
The transformation of the body into a disruptive message, which was already happening in performance art and crystallized in Extreme Body Art, has been challenged by new actors, especially feminized ones, who are not only using their bodies as objects of transformation but are also reconfigured bodies whose message relates to the new desires imposed by the (neoliberal and heteropatriarchal) market and speaks of a fluidification of the scopes of categories such as eccentricity, gender as performance, and plasticity.
Erotic capitalism: against working class conditions, the cosmeticization of work
In contemporary capital production practices, femininity as performance has become work, a place of self-production where social capital shifts towards erotic capital, Catherine Hakim proposes as those attributes such as beauty, sexual attraction, personal image, vitality, charisma and all those characteristics that make us attractive to others and can get us additional advantages within the market. Erotic capital plays a role in contemporary work because it can be transformed into economic capital and meet the demands of hyperconsumption in today’s neoliberalism.
This reflection does not seek to celebrate the perpetuation of gender stereotypes and sexism that objectifies feminized bodies. On the contrary, it shows how a practice that could be read simplistically. And associated only with superficiality and celebrity culture has many facets connecting it with a broader political and economic cartography. It speaks of the restructuring of the concept of work, economic stability, body commodification, materialization of binary biopolitical ideals of gender and sexuality, the embodiment of cosmeticization spread by mass media, and physical security for many feminized individuals today. This relationship between cosmeticization of work and the hyperconnected and prosthetic body in the digital era shows us a renegotiation and monetization of the hyperfeminized ideal that turns femininity into a market niche and a job for certain populations to increase economic capital through erotic capital.
The condition of women in the work field – hypersexualized bodies negotiate better economic conditions
Erotic capital should be valued for two reasons. Economic and social upward mobility for groups with limited access to economic, social, and human capital. Including adolescents, young people, ethnic and cultural minorities, disadvantaged groups, and immigrants. The use of erotic capital as a value of exchange for the female population.
Instead of making a critique of the transformative power of erotic capital, which is monetized through the cosmeticization of work, from a transfeminist perspective, we agree with Hakim that the transformation of women’s bodies is not merely a submissive acceptance of heteropatriarchal beauty and femininity models. In the case of certain global media figures such as the Kardashian family, the prosthetic incorporation of hyper-sexualized fantasies of male heterosexuality involves the accumulation of assets within the sexual economy in the digital era.
These hypersexualized and hyperfeminized women are keen readers of their time and contemporary labor demands of neoliberalism. Their bodies and physical appearance are tools that help them negotiate better economic conditions within the global context.
What is the current condition of women in the work field? hypersexualize bodies and Gore capitalism
Women who adopt the role of incorporating prosthetic and surgical elements into their bodies that hypersexualize them are desessentializing femininity, as they denaturalize female bodily attributes that are heralded as natural and show that femininity today is increasingly becoming a profession. In the g-local context, these figures are paradoxical, as they are objects of desire and nodes of influence for populations that identify with them to varying degrees.
They are also controversial because, through the reproduction of gender stereotypes, they seem to socially reaffirm that economic success can only be achieved through aesthetic transformation and the visual reinforcement of the binary and heterosexual order. In the aforementioned context, questions about work and its transformation become socioculturally relevant. This is due to the direct influence that aesthetics and cosmetics have on the production of market niches. And the transformation of our working bodies into new brand-subjects. Ultimately, there are no definitive answers to the shifts in contemporary work. Nevertheless, the utopia stated in the phrase «work less, work all, produce what is».
Gore Capitalism – the working class conditions in the era of capitalism
1 I propose Gore Capitalism as the reinterpretation of the hegemonic and global economy in (geographically) frontier. And/or economically precarious spaces. We take gore from a film genre that refers to extreme and blunt violence. With gore capitalism, we refer to the explicit and unjustified bloodshed. To the high percentage of viscera and dismemberment, often mixed with organized crime. The binary division of gender and the predatory uses of bodies. All this through the most explicit violence as a tool of necro-empowerment. We call necro-empowerment processes that transform contexts and/or situations of vulnerability and/or subalternity into the possibility of action and self-empowerment but that will reconfigure them from dystopian practices and perverse self-affirmation achieved through violent practices.
