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Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Greene, Ronald Walter |
| Copyright Year | 2004 |
| Abstract | ed and captured to perform gendered, nationalized, and raced work—forms of work and labor that can create class structures and class forms, and can distribute bodies along the international division of labor. In other words, by focusing on communicative labor we can understand how communication makes possible the invention of class. As a form of constituent power, however, labor can never be reduced to its capture, command, and control by capital. For Hardt and Negri the cooperative potential of affirmative labor, or more specifically, the qualitative significance of communicative and affective labor, generates a productive excess impossible to calculate and control. The social force of labor “appears simply as the power to act. . . . Anything that blocks this power to act is merely an obstacle to overcome—an obstacle that is eventually outflanked, weakened, and smashed by the critical powers of labor and the everyday passional wisdom of the affects” (2000, 358). Living labor’s power to act demonstrates an ability to challenge and create new values. Therefore, rhetorical agency comes first; it realizes the value necessary for the current regime of capital and the values necessary to challenge the current regime of governance. What does this mean for the political dimensions of rhetorical agency? It means that politics cannot be disconnected from the sphere of bio-political production. To do so would be to provide a place where the revolutionary energy of communicative labor becomes harnessed to the 203 RHETORICAL AGENCY AS COMMUNICATIVE LABOR social division of labor. To take the example of free speech, when free speech becomes a political right disconnected from the constitutive power of labor, it becomes possible to balance the right of free speech against societal protection. In this way, the domain of the political-legal becomes a space for coercive restrictions on the constitutive power of labor. Being political, as Engin Isen highlights, is to disagree with the dominant regime of citizenship. Recall that the political dimension of communicative labor is built into bio-political production’s attempt to harness and capture the constitutive power of communication. As living labor, communication acts; there is no anxiety here about the status of rhetorical agency, because its action generates the value of living labor. Rhetorical agency is everywhere. To fully flesh out the politics of living labor requires a future study on how communicative labor provides new technologies and strategies for a temporal and spatial disagreement with the command logics of bio-po- |
| Starting Page | 188 |
| Ending Page | 206 |
| Page Count | 19 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1353/par.2004.0020 |
| Volume Number | 37 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://works.bepress.com/ronaldwaltergreene/10/download/ |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1353/par.2004.0020 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
