Phoebe Moore, The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts, Routledge: London and New York, 2017 (Hbk £105).
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RATING: 60
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This is a book of varied perspectives, thought-provoking juxtapositions, and, perhaps inevitably, rather loose ends; and it raises some important issues about the shaping of subjectivities in contemporary capitalism. Its focus is on new technologies and practices around tracking oneself and others, whether for self-improvement or the monitoring and surveillance of workers - think wearables such as FitBit; other devices, software packages and training programmes are available. Among them are Affectiva, which offers 'emotion analytics' with applications in advertising, brand management, robotics and healthcare, Cogito, which 'performs in-call voice analysis and delivers real-time guidance to agents and unprecedented insight to managers', and METT 3.0 and SETT 3.0, respectively Micro and Subtle Expression Training Tools, which for the knockdown prices of US$79 and US$59, or US$99 for the two, enable the buyer to recognise fleeting facial expressions (no more than half a second in duration) that occur when people deliberately try to conceal or unconsciously repress their emotions. The latter in particular might strike you as a scam (and it could be: see Leys, 2011); its intellectual author is world-leading scholar of emotion Paul Ekman, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco, and adviser to the US Department of Homeland Security among many other organizations; Cogito is a spin-off from the MIT Human Dynamics Lab; and Affectiva is the brainchild of Rosalind Picard, Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, director and founder of the Affective Computing Research Group, and pioneer of the discipline of 'affective computing'. This whole area, ‘at the nexus of business, psychology and neuroscience’ (Padios, 2017: 219) is a dubious one, especially when carried over uncritically into cultural theory. Moore engages with it only remotely, through the latter - Connolly and Massumi, for example, are mentioned in passing – so readers should be aware of the substantial positive, sceptical and critical literature (Hemmings, 2005; Papoulias and Callard, 2010; Leys, 2011a, 2011b, 2017; D'Mello et al, 2017; Palios, 2017).
In any case, it is certainly big business, and it could well be coming to a workplace near you, if it hasn't already, so we are indebted to Moore for throwing light onto it. Her principal new material on the tracking of workers by their employers comes from an experiment in Holland in which she was involved (Chapter 4), while self-improvers are represented for the most part by the Quantified Self movement that appeared in San Francisco a decade ago (Chapter 5). This makes for a relatively slender evidential base, but the field opened up is of importance. On the employer-worker side, Moore identifies 'an emerging metaphorical social pact that has not yet been agreed by all parties, those parties being workers as self-experimenters and precarious subjects; an ever-invisible management that is sometimes entirely machinic; and the specialists and inventors who develop and implement new technologies to measure our labour' (2-3). 'While the Quantified Self ideal starts with a sentiment and an ethos of self-empowerment,' she adds later, 'there is emerging evidence of an explicit set of corporate led gestures toward controlling the mind/body with management’s recognition of their inseparability, potentially subsuming any capability to act except in a corporate programme of efficiency and rational (masculine) affinities around production' (10). The juxtaposition of self-improvement and worker surveillance is revealing, as 'self-improvement', San Francisco Quantified Self Community-style, has a distinctly neoliberal feel, revolving as it does around self-knowledge and discipline for efficiency, productivity and profit when it is not simply earnest, naive and nerdy in the extreme. The loose ends are an inevitable consequence of engagement with recent and rapidly evolving changes across different contexts, occasional sudden and almost random changes of focus, and the inclusion of lengthy transcriptions of blog posts, documents and interviews with limited commentary. This makes the book more an assemblage than a linear text, but if you can embrace this feature, you will find plenty to think about.
Moore adopts a perspective which she describes as based in feminist new materialism and Marxist social reproduction theory, with Deleuze and Guattari and Hardt and Negri as major influences. She brings it to bear on the question of 'what the new digitalised, quantified world of work means for workers' (27), setting the analysis in an ambitious and wide-ranging philosophical and theoretical framework that embraces issues of Cartesian mind/body dualism versus Spinozan monism, the corporeal and affective 'turns', 'agile management systems', 'unseen labour', precarity and subjectivity. As regards the first of these issues, I don't regard Marx as a mind-body dualist, and I question Moore's assertion that orthodox Marxism (whatever that is) is 'steeped in Cartesian binaries' (81; see the discussion in Read, 2014, reviewing Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital). Come to that, I don't see why devotees of quantifying selves or others should be so regarded either: employers who track workers in an effort to extract the highest levels of output from them don't need to be committed, consciously or otherwise, to any particular view about the neurobiological processes involved or the ways in which they might be modelled, any more than ardent self-improvers do. So I set that aspect of her argument aside as an unnecessary distraction, especially as it can be argued that her own distinction between affect and emotion commits her to mind-body dualism (Leys, 2011b: 801).
The focus of the book, then, is primarily on the 'world of work', and Moore starts from the proposition that today, 'workers must be ready to change' (12). It is in the development of this point that the issues of subjectivity and affect come to the fore. As we begin to 'internalise the imperative to perform in new ways to become hire-able', she says, we 'go through a subjectification process, effectively becoming observing, entrepreneurial subjects, simultaneous to being constantly observed, whilst remaining objectified, working bodies' (15). This speaks, for her, to the employability agenda of the 1980s and onward, which revealed 'a process of intensified personalisation of subjectivity and individualisation of responsibility for being employable, leaving out social capital and class' (16) - a theme she addressed at length in earlier work (2010). Building further on this, she focuses on the tensions between autonomy and control arising from 'new technologies of measure which are now being introduced into workplaces' (ibid). The dark side wins hands down, and the potential for autonomy is swiftly dismissed:
'I argue that any authentic or self-selected type of self-hood and subjectivity is not permitted. The reasons for its abstraction, mawkishly but aptly put, are that labour power, once it informs person-hood, will contain elements of resistance to capital. So perhaps it is no surprise that there are only specific subjectivities considered available in the new Industry 4.0 world of work which must be aligned with labour processes: the entrepreneur, the ‘doer’, the ‘go-getter’. In our current work design experimentation phase of agility management systems outlined below, because technology advances and changes constantly, humans’ subjectivities are expected to be constantly adaptable, flexible, change-able. We are expected to embrace the specificities of idealised subjectivities and identify ourselves through a process of subjectification, consuming an identity of affective flexibility, and adopting it in full' (39).
Agile workers, as Moore terms them, 'are expected to self-manage the impact of constant change through emotional management and affective control. Managing change thus becomes an all-of-life responsibility, where wellbeing is a worker’s remit' (62); and '[t]he intention in management techniques using self- and other-tracking is precisely to capture and to prevent full affectivity, precisely because the communities which form, and a deep consciousness about the ‘self’ outside of prescribed versions, could result in collective resistance' (93). 'Work is now all-of-life' (112), and all-of-life surveillance reflects an attempt to 'capture and control all of life and works in conditions of precarity' (140; all emphasis original). This is a position that stems from seeing 'affect', as Hardt and Negri do, as the 'power to act' (93-4, and Negri, 1999: 79), and particularly of affective labour as 'itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities': 'the processes whereby our labouring practices produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself' (Hardt, 1999: 89; cf. Negri, 1999: 85); and she follows them too in seeing the danger of the 'absorption of all social life within capitalist production' (Negri, 1999: 83), and therefore seeing struggles around the production of subjectivity as crucial: 'affect must be controlled' (ibid: 87, emphasis original, cited here p. 111). At the same time, she does not see attempts to measure affect only as a strategy to manage resistance, arguing too that: 'As change and instability are both celebrated and imposed in agile systems, and workers’ resultant stress made possible, if not likely, affect is measured not to improve wellbeing as the metaphorical packaging of workplace wellness initiatives portray, but because organisations rely on healthy workers to function' (113); and more generally, of course, she recognises the drive to increase productivity as a central objective.
Well, what to make of it all? The first question that arises is a simple one: how much is new? Employers have always sought to increase productivity and to limit or prevent resistance, and if they have not always cared for the health of their workers, and some still do not, formal health and wellbeing programmes (which she mentions frequently but does not examine in detail) have been common for fifty years and more. Indeed, an 'all-of-life' focus that demanded a particular kind of subjectivity in and outside the workplace (and embraced the family and community as a whole rather than just the individual worker) was arguably much more prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth century than it is today, whether for the large proportion of the population in domestic service, or in the 'model' and company towns where forms of paternalism ranging from benevolent to authoritarian imposed sobriety, church attendance, domestic cleanliness and scrupulous child care, all backed by an intensive regime of surveillance (Herod, 2011; Jarrett, 2015: 56-8). As regards wellness, non-psychiatric industrial counselling programmes date back to 1936 (at the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Company) and spread around corporate America thereafter; in 1958 Polaroid employed professional social workers in order to 'maximize the human potential' of their workers; in the free in-house service introduced by the Northwestern Bell Telephone Company in 1970, over 90 per cent of (anonymised) users identified non-work issues around marriage, family and relationships as the reason for engagement (Staples et al., 1980); Johnson & Johnson (awarded the title of healthiest large company in the UK for its health and wellness programme in 2015) introduced a Live for Life worksite health promotion programme in 1979, and revamped it in 1995 to focus on self-responsibility and self-care (Ozminkowski et al., 2002). A questionnaire-based 'Stanford Presenteeism Scale' devised around the turn of the present century by a team from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine defined presenteeism as 'active employee engagement in work', and focused on 'cognitive, emotional and behavioral engagement during work' and 'work beyond the boundaries of normal working hours and the formal worksite' (Koopman et al., 2002:15). Such examples could be endlessly extended. The general point that emerges is that employers have continually innovated to take advantage of new techniques and technologies, and (quoting from a source on which Moore draws), that there is a 'long history of the incorporation of sociality, affect and care into capitalist economics' (Jarrett, 2015: 53). Jarrett consequently explores the immaterial labour of contemporary capitalism not as 'emblematic of a profound shift in the mode of accumulation ... [but] as a continuation of existing forms of exploitation, agency, and importantly, subjectification' (ibid).
What differences have advances in technology, communications, monitoring, quantification and big data analysis actually made, then, and what do they reflect? Marx argued in Capital that the 'possibility of varying labour' (the variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions) would necessarily become a 'general law of social production' once the world market was complete, as arguably it is today. The incessant drive of capital to revolutionise all aspects of social production through the introduction of machines, and therefore to 'view each process of production in and of itself, and to resolve it into its constituent elements without looking first at the ability of the human hand to perform the new processes' would lead, he thought, to 'the individual who is absolutely available for the different kinds of labour required of them ... the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity taken up in turn' (Marx, Capital (Penguin, 1976), 616, 618, my translation). This exactly captures what Moore describes as the 'agile management system' that 'gives the worker no choice but to be ... flexible and adaptable to a world of work that is incessantly changing' (58). But her account of the 'Agility manifesto' of 2001 (60-64) and the management practices it fostered has a much narrower focus, and leaves out of account the conjoint dynamics of technological revolution and global competitiveness, while the accompanying interview with a 'scrum master' (65-75) is focused on team-based software development as an example of project management, and conspicuously is about 'self-organizing teams' in this specific context, rather than surveillance and the gathering of quantified data, or the manipulation of affect.
Different circumstances apply to the other groups of workers considered. The 'gig' economy, on which Moore quotes Cherry (2011) as saying that professional tasks are 'broken down by their least common denominator' (156), fits into the framework 'varying labour' proposed by Marx. Competition is global (160-61). At the same time, the work offered on crowdsourced platforms such as Mechanical Turk involves little if anything in the way of affect, and the subjectivity it seeks and creates is simply that of the isolated worker willing to perform endless small tasks for wretchedly poor pay. Far from being an all-of-life commitment that involves the demonstration of investment of affect, the role of seeker of work on a cloudsourced platform depends only on the record of jobs previously performed. Your 'platform avatar', in other words, is precisely your up-to-date CV, and no more. The user of their services has no knowledge of their identity, location, gender, sexuality, appearance, preferences, habits, subjectivity or emotional attitude to the work they do, making them the epitome of the 'invisible worker', scarcely to be grasped in terms of the 'corporeal' and 'affective' turns. Warehouse and delivery workers using arm-mounted terminals or hand scanners have their workrate measured, in a Taylorist fashion, and combine speed-up with 'performance-related pay', leading to 'burn-out' (164). But again, this practice is as old as capitalism itself, and in fact pre-dates it: although the maintenance and reproduction of the working class is a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital, the individual capitalist does not respect the need for the labour force to reproduce itself either from day to day or from generation to generation. ‘It would seem,’ says Marx, ‘that the interest of capital itself points in the direction of a normal working day’ (Capital: 377). But ‘Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Capital therefore takes no account of the health and length of life of the labourer, unless society forces it to do so’ (ibid: 381). The use of wearables in professional settings is different again. This is where issues of subjectivity and affect are potentially crucial, but it is also newer and less widespread, so inevitably evidence of its deployment is as yet sketchy (165-6). Hence Moore explores the case of a quantified workplace experiment to which she was given privileged access in a Dutch office of real estate and work design consultants in the process of being overtaken by a multinational (166). This has advantages and disadvantages, and is quite illuminating, albeit in ways that don't have clear implications for the future of this kind of monitoring. In the experiment, thirty of fifty employees accepted an offer to wear FitBit Charge HR Activity Trackers, linked to individualised dashboards and RescueTime, and received workday lifelog emails asking them to rate their subjective productivity, wellbeing and stress. The company's intention was to help workers adapt to an agile working environment, and 'to see to what extent employees’ self-awareness, stress, wellbeing and ‘wellbilling’ (the amount of revenue an employee generates for the company), was impacted during the period of transition'. Of the thirty participants, 16 were interviewed twice, six once, and eight not at all; 21 took part in the first survey and seven in the second (with only three taking part in both); 17 agreed to partial release of FitBit data (daily step count and heart beat) and 16 shared subjective self-reporting, but only 4 shared Rescue Time data (only 8 used it), and no access was given to the data gathered by the company on whether improved activity led to higher productivity and billability (167, and Table 4.1, p.168). Use of the FitBit was sporadic, with three-quarters of staff losing interest in the project by the end. But whether losing interest in a voluntary experiment from which forty per cent of workers opted out at the start counts as resistance, as Moore suggests, is a moot point. It is not surprising, anyway, that there are no conclusive implications from the study.
Against this background, the verbatim texts of interviews with self-trackers that constitute Chapter Five throw additional light on the issue of subjectivity and the role that self-quantification might play in the voluntary construction of neoliberal selves. They are with 'extreme self-tracker' Chris Dancy; entrepreneur and founder of Beeminder, Bethany Soule; meditator and founder of Sublime.org, Robin Barooah; and 'Ian' (pseudonym), a London-based self-tracker who creates a complete archive of his own life by recording all his activities on a spreadsheet, minute by minute. Taken together, the interviews cover a spectrum of critical, indifferent and enthusiastic perspectives on what might be called neoliberal aspects of tracking (productivity, for example). Dancy is troubled by the way machines efface humanity; Soule appears to have had a fully developed neoliberal subjectivity before she applied the techniques of quantification, as the origin of Beeminder lies in the practice she and her partner developed of contracting to pay fines to friends if they fell short of stated productivity goals through procrastination (now users pay fines to them if they fall short), and she has no interest in tracking her emotional state (198); Barooah is more concerned with mood and meditation than productivity; and 'Ian' is a one-off, who tries to track everything, for no other reason than curiosity to know himself better, and describes himself as a data scientist pure and simple: 'If there is a way of knowing what I have done then I can gain insight into who I am' (204). So there is not much here that is related to precarity and patterns of work. The first three subjects have short talks easily found on the internet, which will help you to make a judgement. The four together do suggest that the world of quantified self-tracking is a rather rarified one.
In the conclusion, Moore notes that new uses of technology in the quantified workplace 'are part of an emerging form of neo-Taylorism which risks subordinating workers' bodies to neoliberal, corporeal capitalism' (211). Accepting that, the questons that remain are how much of a part they are, and whether their part will loom larger and extend its focus dramatically in the future. The distribution of wearables or hand-held devices to workers and the analysis of resulting data has certainly sharpened up neo-Taylorist tracking of efficiency in physical operations. But there is room for doubt as to whether the use of forms of tracking will become widespread in other areas of work, or whether it will make a serious impact in relation to subjectivity and affect in an 'all-of-life' context, where measures are crude (steps, heart rate) and intrusive (sleep patterns), analysis is complex and time-consuming, and the effort involved is of questionable value in the context of precarity, high staff turnover, and a ready supply of new workers driven by global competition. So the value of Moore's monograph is that it is early into the field, and as such it offers a research agenda rather than a final reckoning. A number of pointers to such an agenda emerge clearly. First, there is a need for careful consideration of what precisely it is that is new, and the theoretical framework within which it might be approached. I reject as rigidly stageist and determinist the fashionable tendency to equate Fordism with production and brute mindless labour, post-Fordism with consumerism and affect, and neoliberalism with entrepreneurialism and self-management, a frame to which Moore appears unduly hospitable. Second, there is a question mark over how what is new relates specifically to possibilities of quantification arising from new technology, rather than, say, to the generally much greater competitiveness of labour markets world wide. Third, then, it's probably wise to be sceptical for the time being both about the extent to which the required use of wearables as a specific management practice will spread, and how far it will enter into areas of subjectivity and affect. Fourth, though, there is value in being reminded, all the same, that there is a clear tendency in capital for all aspects of life to be brought under its logic; that unseen labour is a necessary prior for all capitalist production; that the capacities and limitations of the physical, material human body are central to any analysis of the production process; that capital is intrinsically a social relation to which affect in various dimensions is and always has been fundamental; and that precarity too has been an essential constitutive aspect of the capital relation from its inception. The forms that these phenomena take changes over time, and particularly so at present, and a focus on the issues Moore raises is helpful in thinking them through today.
Among other 'loose ends' that invite further research, the most significant concerns the gendered impact of these new technologies. Moore talks at the outset about corporate programmes of 'efficiency and rational (masculine) affinities around production', and adds that these devices and related practices 'quantify experience and perpetuate neoliberal capitalist inequalities and are symptomatic of burgeoning, gendered, globalising precarity' (10, emphasis mine), but she does not return to this theme. Cherry (2011: 973) does address it though: 'Given that avatar choice might be a poor proxy for real world identity, there is some hope that race and gender issues might be transformed - or become far less important - in virtual work'. The point that 'objective' forms of tracking work can eliminate some forms of subjective bias and reveal who actually does the work is a pertinent one, though not conclusive: Cherry adds that on the other hand, 'real world biases could easily become incorporated in virtual work' (ibid). Second, as noted above, Moore actually lays open a spectrum that goes from visible, embodied labour at one end, to invisible, 'disembodied' labour at the other. The latter theme, therefore, is one that invites consideration in the 'new world of work' (Crain, Poster and Cherry, eds, 2016). Finally, the 'quantified' factory or warehouse workers, and workers who similarly perform operations that are easily monitored and broken down into their smallest component parts, are precisely those who are most vulnerable to being replaced by robots or machines. In the end, the quantification of precarious work may just be a phase.
References
Bollmer, Grant David 2014, 'Pathologies of Affect', Cultural Studies, 28, 2, 298-326.
Crain, Marion, Winifred Poster and Miriam Cherry, eds 2016. Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World, University of California Press.
D'Mello, Sidney, Arvid Kappas and Jonathan Gratch 2017, 'The Affective Computing Approach to Affect Measurement', Emotion Review, DOI: 10.1177/1754073917696583.
Grossberg, Lawrence 2014. 'Cultural Studies and Deleuze-Guattari, Part 1', Cultural Studies, 28, 1, 1-28.
Grossberg, Lawrence, and Bryan G. Behrenhausen 2016. 'Cultural Studies and Deleuze-Guattari, Part 2: From Affect to Conjunctures', Cultural Studies, 30, 6, 1001-1028.
Hardt, Michael 1999. 'Affective Labor', boundary 2, 26, 2, 89-100.
Herod, Andrew 2011. 'Social Engineering through Spatial Engineering: Company Towns and the Geographical Imagination', in Oliver J. Dinius and Angela Vergara, eds, Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities, University of Georgia Press, pp. 21-44.
Jarrett, Kyle 2015. Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife, Palgrave Macmillan.
Koopman, Cheryl et al. 2002. 'Stanford Presenteeism Scale: Health Status and Employee Productivity', Journal of Occupational and Enviromental Medicine, 44, 1, 14-20.
Negri, Antonio 1999. 'Value and Affect', boundary 2, 26, 2, 77-88.
Izard, Carroll 2010 'The Many Meanings/Aspects of Emotion: Definitions, Functions, Activation, and Regulation', Emotion Review, 2, 4, 363-370.
Leys, Ruth 2011a. 'The Turn to Affect: A Critique', Critical Inquiry, 37, 3, 434-472.
Leys, Ruth, 2011b. 'Affect and intention: a reply to William E. Connolly’, Critical Inquiry, 37, 4, 799-805.
Leys, Ruth 2017. The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique. University of Chicago Press.
Moore, Phoebe 2010. The International Political Economy of Work and Employability, Palgrave Macmillan.
Ozminkowski, Ronald J. et al. 2002. 'Long-Term Impact of Johnson & Johnson's Health & Wellness Program on Health Care Utilization and Expenditures', Journal of Occupational and Enviromental Medicine, 44, 1, 21-29.
Padios, Jan 2017. 'Mining the mind: emotional extraction, productivity, and predictability in the twenty-first century', Cultural Studies, 31, 2-3, 205-231.
Read, Jason 2014. 'Of Labor and Human Bondage: Spinoza, Marx, and the “Willing Slaves” of Capitalism', Los Angeles Review of Books, 9 December, at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/labor-human-bondage-spinoza-marx-willing-slaves-capitalism/
Staples, L. F., Kelsey, J.E., and R.W. Thomas 1980. 'An In-House Counseling Program: The Northwestern Bell Telephone Company Experience', Journal of Occupational Medicine, 22, 1, 35-40.
In any case, it is certainly big business, and it could well be coming to a workplace near you, if it hasn't already, so we are indebted to Moore for throwing light onto it. Her principal new material on the tracking of workers by their employers comes from an experiment in Holland in which she was involved (Chapter 4), while self-improvers are represented for the most part by the Quantified Self movement that appeared in San Francisco a decade ago (Chapter 5). This makes for a relatively slender evidential base, but the field opened up is of importance. On the employer-worker side, Moore identifies 'an emerging metaphorical social pact that has not yet been agreed by all parties, those parties being workers as self-experimenters and precarious subjects; an ever-invisible management that is sometimes entirely machinic; and the specialists and inventors who develop and implement new technologies to measure our labour' (2-3). 'While the Quantified Self ideal starts with a sentiment and an ethos of self-empowerment,' she adds later, 'there is emerging evidence of an explicit set of corporate led gestures toward controlling the mind/body with management’s recognition of their inseparability, potentially subsuming any capability to act except in a corporate programme of efficiency and rational (masculine) affinities around production' (10). The juxtaposition of self-improvement and worker surveillance is revealing, as 'self-improvement', San Francisco Quantified Self Community-style, has a distinctly neoliberal feel, revolving as it does around self-knowledge and discipline for efficiency, productivity and profit when it is not simply earnest, naive and nerdy in the extreme. The loose ends are an inevitable consequence of engagement with recent and rapidly evolving changes across different contexts, occasional sudden and almost random changes of focus, and the inclusion of lengthy transcriptions of blog posts, documents and interviews with limited commentary. This makes the book more an assemblage than a linear text, but if you can embrace this feature, you will find plenty to think about.
Moore adopts a perspective which she describes as based in feminist new materialism and Marxist social reproduction theory, with Deleuze and Guattari and Hardt and Negri as major influences. She brings it to bear on the question of 'what the new digitalised, quantified world of work means for workers' (27), setting the analysis in an ambitious and wide-ranging philosophical and theoretical framework that embraces issues of Cartesian mind/body dualism versus Spinozan monism, the corporeal and affective 'turns', 'agile management systems', 'unseen labour', precarity and subjectivity. As regards the first of these issues, I don't regard Marx as a mind-body dualist, and I question Moore's assertion that orthodox Marxism (whatever that is) is 'steeped in Cartesian binaries' (81; see the discussion in Read, 2014, reviewing Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital). Come to that, I don't see why devotees of quantifying selves or others should be so regarded either: employers who track workers in an effort to extract the highest levels of output from them don't need to be committed, consciously or otherwise, to any particular view about the neurobiological processes involved or the ways in which they might be modelled, any more than ardent self-improvers do. So I set that aspect of her argument aside as an unnecessary distraction, especially as it can be argued that her own distinction between affect and emotion commits her to mind-body dualism (Leys, 2011b: 801).
The focus of the book, then, is primarily on the 'world of work', and Moore starts from the proposition that today, 'workers must be ready to change' (12). It is in the development of this point that the issues of subjectivity and affect come to the fore. As we begin to 'internalise the imperative to perform in new ways to become hire-able', she says, we 'go through a subjectification process, effectively becoming observing, entrepreneurial subjects, simultaneous to being constantly observed, whilst remaining objectified, working bodies' (15). This speaks, for her, to the employability agenda of the 1980s and onward, which revealed 'a process of intensified personalisation of subjectivity and individualisation of responsibility for being employable, leaving out social capital and class' (16) - a theme she addressed at length in earlier work (2010). Building further on this, she focuses on the tensions between autonomy and control arising from 'new technologies of measure which are now being introduced into workplaces' (ibid). The dark side wins hands down, and the potential for autonomy is swiftly dismissed:
'I argue that any authentic or self-selected type of self-hood and subjectivity is not permitted. The reasons for its abstraction, mawkishly but aptly put, are that labour power, once it informs person-hood, will contain elements of resistance to capital. So perhaps it is no surprise that there are only specific subjectivities considered available in the new Industry 4.0 world of work which must be aligned with labour processes: the entrepreneur, the ‘doer’, the ‘go-getter’. In our current work design experimentation phase of agility management systems outlined below, because technology advances and changes constantly, humans’ subjectivities are expected to be constantly adaptable, flexible, change-able. We are expected to embrace the specificities of idealised subjectivities and identify ourselves through a process of subjectification, consuming an identity of affective flexibility, and adopting it in full' (39).
Agile workers, as Moore terms them, 'are expected to self-manage the impact of constant change through emotional management and affective control. Managing change thus becomes an all-of-life responsibility, where wellbeing is a worker’s remit' (62); and '[t]he intention in management techniques using self- and other-tracking is precisely to capture and to prevent full affectivity, precisely because the communities which form, and a deep consciousness about the ‘self’ outside of prescribed versions, could result in collective resistance' (93). 'Work is now all-of-life' (112), and all-of-life surveillance reflects an attempt to 'capture and control all of life and works in conditions of precarity' (140; all emphasis original). This is a position that stems from seeing 'affect', as Hardt and Negri do, as the 'power to act' (93-4, and Negri, 1999: 79), and particularly of affective labour as 'itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities': 'the processes whereby our labouring practices produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself' (Hardt, 1999: 89; cf. Negri, 1999: 85); and she follows them too in seeing the danger of the 'absorption of all social life within capitalist production' (Negri, 1999: 83), and therefore seeing struggles around the production of subjectivity as crucial: 'affect must be controlled' (ibid: 87, emphasis original, cited here p. 111). At the same time, she does not see attempts to measure affect only as a strategy to manage resistance, arguing too that: 'As change and instability are both celebrated and imposed in agile systems, and workers’ resultant stress made possible, if not likely, affect is measured not to improve wellbeing as the metaphorical packaging of workplace wellness initiatives portray, but because organisations rely on healthy workers to function' (113); and more generally, of course, she recognises the drive to increase productivity as a central objective.
Well, what to make of it all? The first question that arises is a simple one: how much is new? Employers have always sought to increase productivity and to limit or prevent resistance, and if they have not always cared for the health of their workers, and some still do not, formal health and wellbeing programmes (which she mentions frequently but does not examine in detail) have been common for fifty years and more. Indeed, an 'all-of-life' focus that demanded a particular kind of subjectivity in and outside the workplace (and embraced the family and community as a whole rather than just the individual worker) was arguably much more prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth century than it is today, whether for the large proportion of the population in domestic service, or in the 'model' and company towns where forms of paternalism ranging from benevolent to authoritarian imposed sobriety, church attendance, domestic cleanliness and scrupulous child care, all backed by an intensive regime of surveillance (Herod, 2011; Jarrett, 2015: 56-8). As regards wellness, non-psychiatric industrial counselling programmes date back to 1936 (at the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Company) and spread around corporate America thereafter; in 1958 Polaroid employed professional social workers in order to 'maximize the human potential' of their workers; in the free in-house service introduced by the Northwestern Bell Telephone Company in 1970, over 90 per cent of (anonymised) users identified non-work issues around marriage, family and relationships as the reason for engagement (Staples et al., 1980); Johnson & Johnson (awarded the title of healthiest large company in the UK for its health and wellness programme in 2015) introduced a Live for Life worksite health promotion programme in 1979, and revamped it in 1995 to focus on self-responsibility and self-care (Ozminkowski et al., 2002). A questionnaire-based 'Stanford Presenteeism Scale' devised around the turn of the present century by a team from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine defined presenteeism as 'active employee engagement in work', and focused on 'cognitive, emotional and behavioral engagement during work' and 'work beyond the boundaries of normal working hours and the formal worksite' (Koopman et al., 2002:15). Such examples could be endlessly extended. The general point that emerges is that employers have continually innovated to take advantage of new techniques and technologies, and (quoting from a source on which Moore draws), that there is a 'long history of the incorporation of sociality, affect and care into capitalist economics' (Jarrett, 2015: 53). Jarrett consequently explores the immaterial labour of contemporary capitalism not as 'emblematic of a profound shift in the mode of accumulation ... [but] as a continuation of existing forms of exploitation, agency, and importantly, subjectification' (ibid).
What differences have advances in technology, communications, monitoring, quantification and big data analysis actually made, then, and what do they reflect? Marx argued in Capital that the 'possibility of varying labour' (the variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions) would necessarily become a 'general law of social production' once the world market was complete, as arguably it is today. The incessant drive of capital to revolutionise all aspects of social production through the introduction of machines, and therefore to 'view each process of production in and of itself, and to resolve it into its constituent elements without looking first at the ability of the human hand to perform the new processes' would lead, he thought, to 'the individual who is absolutely available for the different kinds of labour required of them ... the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity taken up in turn' (Marx, Capital (Penguin, 1976), 616, 618, my translation). This exactly captures what Moore describes as the 'agile management system' that 'gives the worker no choice but to be ... flexible and adaptable to a world of work that is incessantly changing' (58). But her account of the 'Agility manifesto' of 2001 (60-64) and the management practices it fostered has a much narrower focus, and leaves out of account the conjoint dynamics of technological revolution and global competitiveness, while the accompanying interview with a 'scrum master' (65-75) is focused on team-based software development as an example of project management, and conspicuously is about 'self-organizing teams' in this specific context, rather than surveillance and the gathering of quantified data, or the manipulation of affect.
Different circumstances apply to the other groups of workers considered. The 'gig' economy, on which Moore quotes Cherry (2011) as saying that professional tasks are 'broken down by their least common denominator' (156), fits into the framework 'varying labour' proposed by Marx. Competition is global (160-61). At the same time, the work offered on crowdsourced platforms such as Mechanical Turk involves little if anything in the way of affect, and the subjectivity it seeks and creates is simply that of the isolated worker willing to perform endless small tasks for wretchedly poor pay. Far from being an all-of-life commitment that involves the demonstration of investment of affect, the role of seeker of work on a cloudsourced platform depends only on the record of jobs previously performed. Your 'platform avatar', in other words, is precisely your up-to-date CV, and no more. The user of their services has no knowledge of their identity, location, gender, sexuality, appearance, preferences, habits, subjectivity or emotional attitude to the work they do, making them the epitome of the 'invisible worker', scarcely to be grasped in terms of the 'corporeal' and 'affective' turns. Warehouse and delivery workers using arm-mounted terminals or hand scanners have their workrate measured, in a Taylorist fashion, and combine speed-up with 'performance-related pay', leading to 'burn-out' (164). But again, this practice is as old as capitalism itself, and in fact pre-dates it: although the maintenance and reproduction of the working class is a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital, the individual capitalist does not respect the need for the labour force to reproduce itself either from day to day or from generation to generation. ‘It would seem,’ says Marx, ‘that the interest of capital itself points in the direction of a normal working day’ (Capital: 377). But ‘Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Capital therefore takes no account of the health and length of life of the labourer, unless society forces it to do so’ (ibid: 381). The use of wearables in professional settings is different again. This is where issues of subjectivity and affect are potentially crucial, but it is also newer and less widespread, so inevitably evidence of its deployment is as yet sketchy (165-6). Hence Moore explores the case of a quantified workplace experiment to which she was given privileged access in a Dutch office of real estate and work design consultants in the process of being overtaken by a multinational (166). This has advantages and disadvantages, and is quite illuminating, albeit in ways that don't have clear implications for the future of this kind of monitoring. In the experiment, thirty of fifty employees accepted an offer to wear FitBit Charge HR Activity Trackers, linked to individualised dashboards and RescueTime, and received workday lifelog emails asking them to rate their subjective productivity, wellbeing and stress. The company's intention was to help workers adapt to an agile working environment, and 'to see to what extent employees’ self-awareness, stress, wellbeing and ‘wellbilling’ (the amount of revenue an employee generates for the company), was impacted during the period of transition'. Of the thirty participants, 16 were interviewed twice, six once, and eight not at all; 21 took part in the first survey and seven in the second (with only three taking part in both); 17 agreed to partial release of FitBit data (daily step count and heart beat) and 16 shared subjective self-reporting, but only 4 shared Rescue Time data (only 8 used it), and no access was given to the data gathered by the company on whether improved activity led to higher productivity and billability (167, and Table 4.1, p.168). Use of the FitBit was sporadic, with three-quarters of staff losing interest in the project by the end. But whether losing interest in a voluntary experiment from which forty per cent of workers opted out at the start counts as resistance, as Moore suggests, is a moot point. It is not surprising, anyway, that there are no conclusive implications from the study.
Against this background, the verbatim texts of interviews with self-trackers that constitute Chapter Five throw additional light on the issue of subjectivity and the role that self-quantification might play in the voluntary construction of neoliberal selves. They are with 'extreme self-tracker' Chris Dancy; entrepreneur and founder of Beeminder, Bethany Soule; meditator and founder of Sublime.org, Robin Barooah; and 'Ian' (pseudonym), a London-based self-tracker who creates a complete archive of his own life by recording all his activities on a spreadsheet, minute by minute. Taken together, the interviews cover a spectrum of critical, indifferent and enthusiastic perspectives on what might be called neoliberal aspects of tracking (productivity, for example). Dancy is troubled by the way machines efface humanity; Soule appears to have had a fully developed neoliberal subjectivity before she applied the techniques of quantification, as the origin of Beeminder lies in the practice she and her partner developed of contracting to pay fines to friends if they fell short of stated productivity goals through procrastination (now users pay fines to them if they fall short), and she has no interest in tracking her emotional state (198); Barooah is more concerned with mood and meditation than productivity; and 'Ian' is a one-off, who tries to track everything, for no other reason than curiosity to know himself better, and describes himself as a data scientist pure and simple: 'If there is a way of knowing what I have done then I can gain insight into who I am' (204). So there is not much here that is related to precarity and patterns of work. The first three subjects have short talks easily found on the internet, which will help you to make a judgement. The four together do suggest that the world of quantified self-tracking is a rather rarified one.
In the conclusion, Moore notes that new uses of technology in the quantified workplace 'are part of an emerging form of neo-Taylorism which risks subordinating workers' bodies to neoliberal, corporeal capitalism' (211). Accepting that, the questons that remain are how much of a part they are, and whether their part will loom larger and extend its focus dramatically in the future. The distribution of wearables or hand-held devices to workers and the analysis of resulting data has certainly sharpened up neo-Taylorist tracking of efficiency in physical operations. But there is room for doubt as to whether the use of forms of tracking will become widespread in other areas of work, or whether it will make a serious impact in relation to subjectivity and affect in an 'all-of-life' context, where measures are crude (steps, heart rate) and intrusive (sleep patterns), analysis is complex and time-consuming, and the effort involved is of questionable value in the context of precarity, high staff turnover, and a ready supply of new workers driven by global competition. So the value of Moore's monograph is that it is early into the field, and as such it offers a research agenda rather than a final reckoning. A number of pointers to such an agenda emerge clearly. First, there is a need for careful consideration of what precisely it is that is new, and the theoretical framework within which it might be approached. I reject as rigidly stageist and determinist the fashionable tendency to equate Fordism with production and brute mindless labour, post-Fordism with consumerism and affect, and neoliberalism with entrepreneurialism and self-management, a frame to which Moore appears unduly hospitable. Second, there is a question mark over how what is new relates specifically to possibilities of quantification arising from new technology, rather than, say, to the generally much greater competitiveness of labour markets world wide. Third, then, it's probably wise to be sceptical for the time being both about the extent to which the required use of wearables as a specific management practice will spread, and how far it will enter into areas of subjectivity and affect. Fourth, though, there is value in being reminded, all the same, that there is a clear tendency in capital for all aspects of life to be brought under its logic; that unseen labour is a necessary prior for all capitalist production; that the capacities and limitations of the physical, material human body are central to any analysis of the production process; that capital is intrinsically a social relation to which affect in various dimensions is and always has been fundamental; and that precarity too has been an essential constitutive aspect of the capital relation from its inception. The forms that these phenomena take changes over time, and particularly so at present, and a focus on the issues Moore raises is helpful in thinking them through today.
Among other 'loose ends' that invite further research, the most significant concerns the gendered impact of these new technologies. Moore talks at the outset about corporate programmes of 'efficiency and rational (masculine) affinities around production', and adds that these devices and related practices 'quantify experience and perpetuate neoliberal capitalist inequalities and are symptomatic of burgeoning, gendered, globalising precarity' (10, emphasis mine), but she does not return to this theme. Cherry (2011: 973) does address it though: 'Given that avatar choice might be a poor proxy for real world identity, there is some hope that race and gender issues might be transformed - or become far less important - in virtual work'. The point that 'objective' forms of tracking work can eliminate some forms of subjective bias and reveal who actually does the work is a pertinent one, though not conclusive: Cherry adds that on the other hand, 'real world biases could easily become incorporated in virtual work' (ibid). Second, as noted above, Moore actually lays open a spectrum that goes from visible, embodied labour at one end, to invisible, 'disembodied' labour at the other. The latter theme, therefore, is one that invites consideration in the 'new world of work' (Crain, Poster and Cherry, eds, 2016). Finally, the 'quantified' factory or warehouse workers, and workers who similarly perform operations that are easily monitored and broken down into their smallest component parts, are precisely those who are most vulnerable to being replaced by robots or machines. In the end, the quantification of precarious work may just be a phase.
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