6 July 2010: "Hot altbaguette Am Appy employees forced to sweep streets in front of store"

This post is about the formal subsumption of labor. In an era of increasingly immaterial labor, in which the lines between consumption and production have become subtly and not so subtly blurred, and in which the means of production increasingly consist of the elaboration of social relations in themselves, Carles is concerned to delineate the contours of what is held to constitute "real labor." Labor is no longer confined to certain specific sites of production, but has a tendency to spill out into the street, as it were, as the occasion that has prompted Carles's analysis in this instance demonstrates.

In fact, in a curious inversion brought on by the conditions of postpostmodern valorization of capital, and the increasing importance of ideational capital over the circulation of commodities to the valorization process, labor time spent within the confines of mandated work discipline has come to be experienced as not "real labor": inside the retail space of service production, workers can spend their time

Spending all day wasting time, hanging up t-shirts, folding clothes
listening to buzztunes
flirting
not doing real work

In other words, they can extend their sense of identity without risk, buffered by the institutional confines of the wage relation. Formal working time is to be "wasted" from the subjective point of view of the worker, a luxury she does not have in the informal working time that begins once she clocks out, and the production of identity becomes "real".

Carles uses the attack on the retail space (both specifically and generally) by anarchist agitators to demonstrate the collision of the informal and formal work spaces and the dislocation and alienation that ensues. "I didn’t sign up for this /I didn’t sign up for the terrorism," Carles imagines the average narcissistic service worker protesting, though the identity of the terrorist in this construction is purposely ambiguous. In one sense, the employee did not want to be subject to terrorism, both the terrorism of exploitation within the construct of normalized relations of production under capitalism, and the terrorism of being subject to attack as the attractive face of consumer capitalism to its enemies. But in the more important sense that Carles is particularly concerned to articulate, the employee is appalled to discover, in the confrontation with the aftermath of anti-globalization protest, that she has been recruited by her employer to be a terrorist herself, a subject position in no way mitigated by the seemingly civic duty she performs in "cleaning up the street" -- itself laden with many metaphoric overtones along the lines of those explored in the 1976 film Taxi Driver, in which a reactionary xenophobe yearns for a "real rain/reign" to cleanse the urban scene.

Such is the fate, Carles suggests, of all employees who seek to assimilate the power of corporate brands to their own identity: "My life is hell /I started working at Am Appy to be a part of the brand." But being part of the brand means subsumption under the brand, and a surrender of autonomy: "Doesn’t matter how premium I am /How well my personal brand fits the corporate brand/ Feeling like a slave." Despite the pervasive ideological assertions to the contrary, personal and corporate brands are not commensurate; they don't "fit" together but instead resolve themselves to a master/slave dialectic with no possibility of synthesis. The "premium" identity is unmoored from the measures of value created with in the space of production and is instead arbitrated in the inescapable labor of self-creation, which is subject to increasing levels of volatility. And there is to be no comfort found in the old certainties of work, as Carles points out: "Might apply at ________" he imagines the employee telling herself, but the blank space no longer serving as infinite possibility but a reminder of how all subject positions within the world of production are reducible to the same nullity.