Event Details

Prof Karen Dale (Lancaster University) will present in this Baltic Session. All are welcome to listen and engage in the discussions either in person in the venue: (First Floor, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art) or to tune in online via Teams (Meeting ID: 368 055 427 420 / Passcode: nNtziF).

Abstract:

Although organisation studies have paid attention to the effects and experiences of work on the human body, this has primarily and understandably focused on the body of the individual worker. In this seminar I consider the need to also consider the collective body

of labour, and how we might do this by drawing upon the work of Guery and Deleule, in The Productive Body (1972/transl. 2014). This short book is of particular interest because it is one of the few references made by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish, 1977) to other work from which he found inspiration. Guery and Deleule’s work centres on a productive ambiguity between the body of an individual worker and the collective body of labour (corps/corpus). They argue that capitalism’s construction of a ‘productive body’ squeezes out awareness of the social and collective nature of work (the ‘social body’) in favour of a sense of the individualised, ‘biological body’.

Guery and Deleule, writing in the early 1970s, and aiming to extend the work of Marx in Capital Volume 1, on the nature of the human body in capitalist production, do not directly address the characteristics of contemporary labour. However, I argue that their analysis

speaks to conditions of work which, for example, rely on greater immaterial skills, the subjectivization of the worker, and more intensive cultures of performance management. They provide us with tools to unpack Virno’s argument that “in post-Fordism the general intellect is not fixed in machines, but in the bodies of workers”. I further suggest it might be used to reflect on our own relation to our work as academics, particularly in the context of our ‘love for research’. In their introduction to the English translation, Barnard and Shapiro

characterise Guery and Deleule’s use of the productive body as a “tactical intervention”, which holds out the possibility of recognising the collective and embodied conditions of contemporary labour and thus a different way of responding to and resisting them.

Karen Dale is a Professor of Organisation Studies at Lancaster University. She has researched and written on embodiment, including Anatomising Embodiment and Organisation Theory; about architecture, space and organisation, including The Spaces of Organisation and the Organisation of Space: Power, Identity and Materiality at Work with Gibson Burrell, and Organizational Space and Beyond: The Significance of Henri Lefebvre for Organization Studies, jointly co-edited with Sytze Kingma and Varda Wasserman; and on contemporary work, in Experiencing the New World of Work, edited with Jeremy Aroles and François-xavier de Vaujany.