Immaterial labor is an academic term used to describe the affective and cognitive commodities produced by work that exist outside the traditional wage-based consideration of labor as a material-commodity-producing activity, as well as the activity of producing this new form of commodity.
Contents
Studies of immaterial labor have included analysis of commodities produced by work amidst the internet, although immaterial labor is understood as a concept pre-dating digital technologies, specifically in the performance of gender and domestic roles, and other aspects of affective and cognitive work.
Themes commonly associated with immaterial labor in the context of the internet include: digital labor, commons-based peer production, and user-generated content production, which might include open source, free software, crowdsourcing, and flexible licensing agreements, as well as the collapse of copyright amidst the ambiguities of sharing creative works in the digital age, digital care work, and other conditions produced by participation in social environments within the digital, knowledge economy.
History
The term immaterial labor was coined by Italian sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato in his 1997 essay "Immaterial Labor", published as a contribution to Radical Thought in Italy and edited by Hardt and Virno. It was re-published in 1997 as: Lavoro immateriale. Forme di vita e produzione di soggettività. (Ombre corte). Lazzarato was a participant in the Autonomia Operaia group as a student in Padua in the 1970s, and is a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes.
Post-Marxist scholars including Franco Berardi, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Judith Revel, and Paolo Virno, among others have produced scholarship unpacking immaterial labor outside the traditional understanding of labor as a commodity-producing activity.
Texts
Feminism
Feminism adopted discussions of immaterial labor to describe the alienating conditions and labors pertaining to the performance of femininity and domestic roles. The social-wage campaign, Wages for housework, co-founded in 1972 in Italy, by Selma James called for a wage for domestic work amidst the uneven and gendered privatization of the labor of social production, where traditionally feminine roles like care work are undervalued.
Post-colonial feminist writer Lisa Nakamura, and others have described immaterial labor in the performance of online identity, and racial identity and identity performance, or "avatarization of the self".
Consent
Consent agreements or contracts between social media and user-generated content platforms and their users have been proposed as a way of minimizing immaterial labor by allowing users to have more control over the use and circulation of the content, data, and metadata they produce.
Creative works
The idea of "creative labor" has been analyzed in the context of immaterial labor.
It has also been argued that the ubiquitous sharing enabled by the digital age has made it harder for artists and creators to claim authorship of their works, creating an inevitable situation of immaterial labor in the participation in many online platforms.
Material vs. immaterial labor debate
The question of the material nature of digital and affective labor has been consistently used to problematize the idea of immaterial labor. Critics of the term have argued that, although labor might produce affective and cognitive commodities that can be defined as immaterial labors, it nonetheless is always embodied, maintaining correlates in the physical, material world.
Autonomist feminists have also taken issue with the use of the word "immaterial" to describe affective and care work, which necessarily maintains an affective and embodied component.