“Irene ist Viele” refers to Helke Sander’s film Eine Prämie für Irene [A Bonus for Irene] (1971), in which the voiceover says “Irene ist Viele” (Irene is many). In the film, the figure of Irene stands for the many factory workers who are single mothers. Eine Prämie für Irene was one of the first films in Germany to suggest the interrelations between the public and the private spheres. “Irene ist Viele” was also the title of a film program I curated together with art historian Rachel Mader in the Shedhalle Zürich in 1996, in which films by feminist filmmakers from Germany and Switzerland were reviewed and reevaluated together with the filmmakers. Helke Sander was part of this important event that also tried to bridge older and younger generations.
According to a 2004 study by the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics (BFS), two-thirds of all unpaid work is performed by women. This corresponds to an equivalent of 172 billion Swiss Francs or 70 percent of the gross domestic product. In the future, unpaid work is to be economically evaluated on a regular basis. Although this calculation, based upon an estimation of market costs, is necessarily inexact, this sum corresponds to nearly the entire yearly wages of employed workers in Switzerland.
Mascha Madörin, “Der kleine Unterschied in hunderttausend Franken,” Widerspruch 31 (1996): 127–142. See also Pauline Boudry, Brigitta Kuster, and Renate Lorenz, eds., Reproduktionskonten fälschen! Heterosexualität, Arbeit und Zuhause (Berlin: b_books, 1999).
Contemporary production models are characterized by their transformation of workers’ learned skills not used in the workplace into a productive force. The post-operaistic theorists in France and Italy have shown that all immaterial and affective work gains significance in post-Fordist production. With investigations into the reorganization of the automotive and textile industries in northern Italy and the image industries in Île de France, these theorists of “immaterial work” have also shown that communication and subjectivity are not only components of postindustrial, informalized, and informal production, but also themselves become an applied process in the industrial sector and the scene of new struggles. See also Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterielle Arbeit. Gesellschaftliche Tätigkeit unter den Bedingungen des Postfordismus,” in Umherschweifende Produzenten. Immaterielle Arbeit und Subversion, ed. Thomas Atzert (Berlin : ID-Archiv, 1998), 39–52, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
Affective and communicative interaction and the creation of sociality and subjectivity never become economically valuable, but are rather always valuable for life itself. The social doesn’t stop when one leaves the workplace, whether this be at home or in the office, and thus it can also never fully be absorbed by capital, since affects cannot be exclusively industrially organized (even if this is attempted in the image and film industry). If immaterial work, interaction, and communication can become a resource for accumulation, or even become a commodity, then this means that a vital aspect of the work force can no longer be clearly determined through measurements such as working hours, price comparisons, or possessions. The subjectivity of the workers doesn’t end in an imaginary factory, but has rather a further effect on different social processes which are not only marked by their economic value, although they can, in the reverse argument, generate it. This also means asking how we ourselves reproduce or bring about the conditions that we criticize. See the project Atelier Europa, which I developed together with Pauline Boudry, Brigitta Kuster, Isabell Lorey, Angela McRobbie, and Katja Reichard, in which we carried out a “militant investigation” with cultural producers; see also Be Creative! The Creative Imperative, which I organized with students and theorists for the Museum of Design, Zurich, →.
The film is the expression of these demands for (self-)representation which emerged from the struggles against the exercise of control over subjectivity and are and were central to both the social and global emancipation movements.
It was Marx’s achievement to have analyzed the abstraction process in which work is transformed in the capitalist accumulation into labor (Arbeitskraft, lit. work-force): into a seemingly measurable size. Capital doesn’t buy all the necessary and living work, nor even the social, cultural, and spatial conditions to afford them, but rather a time-energy-money equivalence, in which life-sustaining activities are unnamed but apparently included. Labor was therefore also bought in the time of industrialization as a pre-produced commodity, in which the actual production relations which produce the commodity labor remain hidden. Thus capital in the time of industrialization had command over care work, communication, and lifestyle.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
This missing perspective refers to the “becoming-subject” of factory work as a masculine muscular body with white skin, which would have to be analyzed in order to make a complete critique of the discipline and the making-effective of the body and its exploitation—up through existential destruction in the time of industrialization.
Today, this means that migrants are underpaid to perform the remaining non-prestige care work so that the men and women wrapped up in their wage work or prestige work can carry out their paid or unpaid status work. Care work, which under traditional gender regimes was coupled to the subject position of the housewife, is now bought as a service on the market, or pushed upon those who can’t buy it. After finishing cleaning and care work, the servant cannot afford a servant of his/her own who would perform this work in their own home.
Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth,” in Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 2 (May, 1993): 198–227, 203f. Foucault’s conception of governing as “determining the conduct of individuals” focuses on how “the contact point where the individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves.” Foucault’s argument is that, by means of these so-called “technologies of the self,” a much more profound integration of the individual into power takes place, without which the functional modes of modern Western society are difficult to imagine.
Originally “Schaffung der Wahrscheinlichkeit,” in Michel Foucault, “Das Subjekt und die Macht,” Jenseits von Strukturalismus und Hermeneutik, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1987), 255.
See G. Günter Voß and Hans J. Pongratz, “Der Arbeitskraftunternehmer. Eine neue Grundform der Ware Arbeitskraft?,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Soz-ialpsychologie 50, no. 1 (1998): 131–158.
The effects of this acceleration and its attendant standardization are especially clear in the service sector, the care economy, and the entire health and social systems that come under the constraints of quality management and increased efficiency as well as austere fiscal policy. The same is also true according to the Bologna negotiations for the education system of the entire European Union.
See a collection of texts devoted to this question, Norm der Abweichung, ed. Marion von Osten (Vienna: Springer, 2003).
Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, Der neue Geist des Kapitalismus (Konstanz: UVK Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2003).
See Yann Moulier Boutang, “Neue Grenzziehungen in der Politischen Ökonomie,” in Norm der Abweichung, 251–280. This crisis becomes clear, for example, in the suggested VW pay scale introduced in 2003 by Peter Hartz, member of the Volkswagen board and the personification of labor market reform. Here Hartz establishes the so-called “job family,” in which the different levels of a production process should now be viewed and paid as an “organic whole” of various productive forces. From a designer to a mechanic to a painter, a job family is a team brought into a dependence that is “productive” for the individual but nonetheless negative. We also see the crisis of the definition of necessary work in the discussion over a guaranteed income—in which the production of life as necessary prerequisite for a work life or an unemployed existence are considered.
Translated from the German by Jennifer Cameron