Living Labour

This article attempts to place the energy-intensive project of mechanizing interpretive labour known as artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of the longer trajectory of post-18th century industrialization and the capitalist appropriation of human and nonhuman work. Using the mechanization of recognition as a case study, it proposes viewing AI as a set of entropic, globally-distributed machines for labour exploitation linked to particular geographic patterns of colonialism and ecological fatigue. In particular, it examines the contradictory relations through which the 'dead labour' crystallized in recognition machine networks must constantly recruit and degrade enormous quantities both of the 'living labour' of human recognition and of thermodynamic energy to perform its repetitive predictive tasks. As with the 19th-century industrial revolution, it argues, the geography of this process is better understood by treating energy not as a singular resource extractable from a variety of sources and then used up at various points of an essentially invariant landscape, but as the political reorganization of entropy gradients and exchanges across the borders of nonequilibrium systems. The article's purpose is to encourage activists and researchers to have more confidence in challenging the assumptions through which AI is usually defined and to provide a new perspective on the 'digital natures' it produces.

Cet article s’efforce de clarifier un certain nombre d’enjeux méthodologiques et conceptuels que soulève la tentative de penser la politique à partir de la perspective du travail vivant. En préambule, afin d’éviter des confusions ultérieures, une analyse formelle des différents sens de « politique » est proposée. La politique est définie comme l’ensemble des problèmes qui se posent dès lors que des vies individuelles séparées tentent d’organiser en commun une vie en commun. Quatre grands types de problèmes peuvent être identifiés à partir de cette caractérisation, lesquels ne se réduisent pas aux questions concernant l’origine et la justification du pouvoir, ou la structure des institutions de gouvernement. Après une brève description du paradigme du travail vivant, centrée sur les textes de Marx et Dejours, ce paradigme est mis en œuvre pour apporter des éléments de réponse aux questions politiques identifiées lors de l’analyse préliminaire. On y montre d’abord comment les grandes normes de la vie sociale (égalité, liberté, solidarité) voient leur contenu transformé dès lors que les agents sociaux sont considérés dans leur rapport au travail vivant.  La perspective du travail vivant permet aussi d'affiner l'ontologie sociale à travers laquelle les problèmes du vivre ensemble sont considérés. En effet, elle projette une grille d’analyse sur les partitions de la société dont un élément structurant majeur est constitué par les conflits autour du travail. Enfin, l’expérience du travail vivant est une condition de la vie démocratique car elle est le lieu où se produit de manière privilégiée l’acquisition de dispositions et capacités individuelles qui peuvent former un sous-bassement prépolitique déterminant à la vie en commun, mais qui sont aussi directement mises en oeuvre dans l’élaboration de décisions collectives.

This paper seeks to clarify some of the methodological and conceptual stakes involved in the attempt to think about politics from the point of view of “living labour”. In order to avoid confusions further down the track, a formal analysis of the different possible meanings of “politics” is proposed. Politics is first defined as the series of problems that arise when separate individual lives attempt to organise a common life in common. Four types of problems can be identified on the basis of this initial definition, beyond the questions concerning the origin and justification of power, or the structure of the institutions of government. Following a brief characterisation of the paradigm of living labour, with reference to key texts by Marx and Dejours, this paradigm is then put into practice to provide initial answers to the questions raised in the preliminary analysis. First, the meaning of the fundamental norms of social life (equality, liberty, solidarity) is transformed from the point of view of living labour. Secondly, the implicit social ontology on the basis of which political questions are raised is also altered if viewed from the perspective of living labour, as social partitioning acquires a more specific dimension once conflicts around work are taken into account. Finally, the experience of living labour is a condition of democratic life as it determines the acquisition of personal dispositions which represent not only a prepolitical foundation of democratic activity, but are in fact directly involved in the actual process of collective decision-making.