The Worker Subjects

One of the more slippery signifiers in cultural and political theory is the "worker." Entire histories, epistemologies, political platforms, economies, and indeed states have been formed around the worker, and it is no exaggeration to say that the long worker century (longer than all those others that trespass beyond a hundred years) has been epochal in how we understand the human subject. Of course, that the concept of subject is so easily associated with the edifice of bourgeois thought (and white, male, European, too) has presented itself as a catechresistic nightmare for thinking the worker. Is she a mere epiphenomenon of bourgeois categories, a kind of anarchistic edge to cultural Cartesianism? Is the worker the great orphan of socialization, the passionate progeny of modernity disavowed by those who yet draw on her labor? Is the worker just an alibi of the male subject, something its logic requires but is actually positioned elsewhere, beyond its primary protocols, in some ontological wasteland that permits a contrasting fecundity to appear? But then we have killed the subject, have we not? We are always "after" it, beyond its "death," so sure of our demystification of its substance that it exists only as a ghost, a spirit, or, for the more materialist, an exquisite corpse. Could this be the trick of theorizing the worker: that she is so tied to the life of the subject that she has expired with the concept and, while work must be done to sustain species being, there is no subject form for the worker to inhabit? Humans still need food, water, clothing, and shelter; they might need smartphones, fiber-optic cable, and all kinds of energy, but these do not guarantee the worker as subject even if the worker facilitates all of it. If she is alive in her materiality and immateriality, the worker exists in modalities other than the subject, or at least in a subject other than what is given in theorization. To the extent the subject prescribes and/or underwrites the category of subjection, the worker is always a subject; to the degree the waywardness of the designation threatens all manner of elements deemed constitutive of what makes a human, the worker subjects the ways we ground the relation of work to the human to uneven but incessant interrogation. Is attention to worker subjects primarily a cultural practice, expressive discourses that undo the facts and fictions of worker existence? Is it a political lever, one that prizes apart the platitudes attending "representation" and the praxis of our collective endeavors? Is it first an economic category, one that comports with the labor relation as such and in that capacity is a key to the logic of capital and its dominance over the social order? Together, these questions constitute something of a dialectical weave, and one to be undone during Minerva's flight of history. Here I will concern myself with the cultural and philosophical elements not to revivify a subject made impossible in the discourse of science (a rescue akin to bringing back the manual typewriter), but to clarify as much as possible why the worker subjects all "metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties" to category confusion in its own name (when did the worker become as much a fetish as the commodity?). And this is an impasse we are not so much "after," but in.

The worker preexists its designation within modernity and, whether as serfs, slaves, servants, or staff, its genealogy traces who comes before the subject. My interest is primarily in what the worker signifies in the nexus of capital, labor, and revolution, for three reasons that seem to me to represent a major theoretical, cultural, and political challenge. First, the shift in the meaning of worker when figured into labor as relation has thoroughly changed the possibility of the human, a revolution that "subject" can at best only refract. True, the question of labor as relation is itself historical, but how we understand the worker derives from the substance of this relation which is not a type of worker or of labor but is, to borrow from Philip Levine, "what work is." Second, and following...