Linguistic labor makes work and life inseparable under post-Fordism
Evidence
Work and life become inseparable. As Christian observed, this is in part because labour is now to some degree linguistic, and it is impossible to leave language in the locker after work. Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, punctiform. As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems. To function effectively as a component of “just in time production”, you must develop a capacity to respond to unforeseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability, or “precarity”, as the ugly neologism has it. Periods of work alternate with periods of unemployment. Typically, you find yourself employed in a series of short-term jobs, unable to plan for the future. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1404
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The insight that labor became linguistic and therefore cannot be ‘left in the locker’ — that capital literally follows workers into dreams — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting diagnosis of why contemporary burnout and precarity feel inescapable.
- STORYSTEM: Strong seed for fiction about a worker whose dreams themselves become audited or productive — capital colonizing the unconscious through linguistic labor.
- XREF: connects to: In post-Fordism communicating is itself the work — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 72; Post-Fordism internalized class antagonism into individual worker psychology — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1405; Results-only work culture dissolves the boundary of the workplace — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 90 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Post-Fordism internalized class antagonism into individual worker psychology
#expands(0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1405 - Results-only work culture dissolves the boundary of the workplace
#corroborates(0.78) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 90 - Postmodern mental fragmentation internalizes social division of labor into cognition itself
#expands(0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 789 - The left’s failure was lacking an alternative modernity, not Fordism’s end.
#complicates(0.72)