Artur Szarecki

The book "Somatic capitalism: The body and power in corporate culture" attempts to trace and analyze how the transformations in modes of production and the development of management knowledge throughout the twentieth century affected the forms and understandings of human labor under capitalism, and how these processes reflected back on the working bodies. The underlying theme is of the advancing colonization of life by capital. Contrary to the proclamations of creative economy as unrestricted liberation of creativity, innovation and communication, the book argues that at the turn of twenty-first century work still leaves a demonstrable, albeit less traceable, mark on the human body.

The introduction attempts to map the area of study that extends between the concepts of “corporate culture” and “management discourses,” and to outline the main features of the employed approach, i.e. cultural analysis.
The first chapter, "Modes of control over body and the labor process," elaborates the theoretical infrastructure of the book based on the writings of Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, as well as subsequent developments of their oeuvre within the tradition of cultural studies, critical theory, and contemporary postmodern left. The theoretical concepts inform the periodization of capitalism into three hegemonic constellations comprised of management discourses and corresponding practices of regulating the human body. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution factory discipline and direct supervision are employed in order to regulate actions and constitute the docile body of the worker as a primary object of control. After the second world war the emphasis shifts on the professional body of the manager, normalized through self-governance in respect to image. Finally, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, corporate governance is extended onto the social body of the corporation by directly affecting organizational culture.
The second chapter, "Somatic engineering," comprises an in-depth description and analysis of Taylorism as a mode of disciplinary control in which the working body is disassembled and reduced to quantitative correlates and their combinations. These practices are labeled as somatic engineering, i.e. the employment of technical and scientific knowledge in order to produce, modify and maintain cost-effective working bodies. The subsequent argument demonstrates that Taylorism does not boil down to ideological discourse, but constitutes a complex apparatus of governance that operates simultaneously at multiple levels: from the ways of performing work, to the procedures of selection and training of workers, to the structures and internal logic of the organization. Similar results were accomplished by Henry Ford who relied, on the one hand, on technological control of the assembly line that structured the mode of production in such way as to produce docile bodies, and, on the other hand, on innovative social policy that was supposed to tamper with human souls. What ultimately connects both modes of corporate control is a conjunction of rationalization in regard to the movements of body parts with biopolitical management that manifested itself — in case of Taylor — in the attempts to convert embodied knowledge of the workers into abstracted knowledge of expert systems, and in case of Ford — in the attempt to interfere with the private lives of his employees.
The third chapter, "The political anatomy of the manager," examines the growing importance of management work in corporate culture after the second world war. Elaborating the concept of managerial implosion, it demonstrates how a mobile location within organizational structure and the immaterial nature of work has rendered the manager as a figure existing simultaneously in the sphere of production and the sphere of consumption. This double articulation necessitated new mode of corporate control based on self-control and seduction, most fully expressed in the concept of management by objectives developed by Peter Drucker. The commodification of the working body was, therefore, no more dependent on use-value, but rather on symbolic value — if the body of the physical worker was constituted through its alignment with the industrial mode of production, the body of the manager was construed by the marketing gaze and conceptualized primarily in visual terms of self-presentation, appearance, image and gender.
The fourth chapter, "The culturalization of the working body," takes up the issue of transformations in the relationship between the body and work in the final two decades of the twentieth century, when the concept of “organizational culture” has gained its momentum. The causes of increased interest in culture by management theorists and practitioners were related to, on the one hand, the countercultural legacy that problematized success in terms of community and self-fulfillment, rather than just profit, and, on the other hand, the extraordinary achievements of Japanese companies allegedly conditioned by their distinct management style. These beliefs furthered the colonization of the working body by market forces, as the control was extended to encompass not only the behavior and appearance, but also “internalized” mental and affective states as well as their embodied expressions. The new mode of control was most fully expressed in the fetishism of nonverbal communication and the growing importance of emotional labor that together constituted biopolitical corporate governance. It operates by subjecting life to business calculation and employing acquired knowledge to transform and regulate the very being of workers.
The concluding remarks point to the development of a new form of therapeutic capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century that attempts to respond to the growing problems generated by biopolitical management — depression and burnout as emerging embodiments of affective and cognitive alienation — by proliferating practices associated with psychological counseling, such as coaching, mentoring or wellness. Paradoxically it results in extending the corporate governance over the entirety of life. In the new culture of work every fiber of an organism has to be active 24/7 and its performance is unceasingly monitored and accounted for by ubiquitous and dispersed audit systems.

Mad Men to wielokrotnie nagradzany serial telewizyjny, ktorego akcja rozgrywa sie w latach sześcdziesiątych, ukazując codzienne zycie pracownikow fikcyjnej agencji reklamowej Sterling Cooper, ulokowanej na nowojorskiej Madison Avenue. Środowisko to przechodzilo wowczas radykalną transformacje, ktora polozyla fundamenty pod kapitalistyczną mitologie kreatywności. Oryginalnośc Mad Men polega jednak na tym, ze serial unika powielania wiekszości klisz skladających sie na obraz pracy kreatywnej, zamiast tego ukazując ją jako nieodzownie uwiklaną w cielesne doświadczenie – doznania, afekty i formy wiezi spolecznej, oraz instytucjonalne struktury wladzy – podzialy, hierarchie i formy wyzysku. Perspektywa ta umozliwia wyprowadzenie krytycznej analizy pracy kreatywnej, wskazując, ze rzekomo minione formy eksploatacji są we wspolczesnym kapitalizmie wciąz obecne, ale zarazem podatne na zmiany.

In contemporary neoliberal capitalism, sound is increasingly employed to modulate the affective tonalities of environments and, as a result, attune bodies to everyday habitual regimes of conduct. In this paper, I argue that comprehending this new mode of sonic governance requires going beyond cultural theories that approach politics in terms of a symbolic struggle over meaning. Instead, I attempt to analyze Coffitivity – a web service that transmits recordings of ambient noise from coffee shops in order to boost the creative capabilities of workers – according to posthegemonic theory, positing it as a sonic apparatus designed to modulate the affective environment in such a way as to habituate the distributed multitude into a regime of ubiquitous work. Consequently, I claim that posthegemonic analysis can provide insights into the potential of sound to immanently modulate the field of embodied interactions, thereby contributing to the development of new techniques of power in contemporary neoliberal capitalism.

The article employs post-hegemonic theory to reframe how power operates within online cultures. To that end, it investigates a digital marketing campaign for a Polish clothing brand, Reserved, and its reception in social media. Examining over one thousand comments on Facebook, it argues that while the initial viral success abruptly turned into public outcry, the actual response was much more varied, encompassing a multiplicity of different feelings and immediate orientations, not necessarily congruent with the backlash. In this sense, the shifting balance of power was not contingent on the emergence of a public consensus that challenged corporate hegemony, but pertained to the arrangement of affective intensities to habituate the multitude to the networked media environment. Consequently, the article approaches Reserved’s campaign and its online reception as involving a series of corporeal attunements that re-territorialized multiple and incongruent affective flows into established ...

In this paper, I argue that the implicit or explicit dependence on hegemony theory within popular music studies has resulted in diminishing the relevance of the aural dimension of culture and neglecting a wider consideration of the political effects of sound. Instead, I advocate a turn towards posthegemonic theory which employs vocabularies of "affect," habit," and multitude" to account for the physical effects of sonic intensities without trying to collapse them into meanings. Offering a brief analysis of two contrasting examples of popular music practices in a corporate environment-company song and lip dub-I demonstrate how posthegemonic approach might extend the analytical capacities of popular music studies by providing ways of thinking and doing politics that are not dependent on establishing consent or exercising coercion, but rather on immanent processes that are activated and reproduced beneath consciousness.

In the 1990s Poland, a young generation of musicians attempted to reinvent jazz in a spirit of playful experimentation. Miłość, meaning ‘love’, was one of the pivotal bands in this movement, which came to be known as yass. Filip Dzierżawski’s documentary of the same title offers a candid look on the intimate and difficult relations between Miłość’s musicians, as they discuss a possible reunion in 2008. As such, it provides an opportunity to reflect on how the emotional bond that connects them impacts their music and their capacity to play together. Therefore, in this paper, I employ affect theory to provide a rereading of the film’s plot and audiovisual content. Specifically, I argue that through its combination of archival footage, interviews, and depiction of real-time interaction during the band’s rehearsal, Dzierżawski’s documentary encourages us to think of music making in terms of affect, that is, as emerging from intensive relations between different entities as they come into contact and undergo a series of transformations in their capacities to affect and be affected by each other and their environment.

In contemporary neoliberal capitalism, sound is increasingly employed to modulate the affective tonalities of environments and, as a result, attune bodies to everyday habitual regimes of conduct. In this paper, I argue that comprehending this new mode of sonic governance requires going beyond cultural theories that approach politics in terms of a symbolic struggle over meaning. Instead, I attempt to analyze Coffitivity – a web service that transmits recordings of ambient noise from coffee shops in order to boost the creative capabilities of workers – according to posthegemonic theory, positing it as a sonic apparatus designed to modulate the affective environment in such a way as to habituate the distributed multitude into a regime of ubiquitous work. Consequently, I claim that posthegemonic analysis can provide insights into the potential of sound to immanently modulate the field of embodied interactions, thereby contributing to the development of new techniques of power in contemporary neoliberal capitalism.

The article concerns the ways sound can afford the formation and recomposition of affective publics by acting directly on bodies, prior to the discursive framing of acoustic experience. In particular, it focuses on a violent altercation that broke out during a live hip hop concert in Poland in 2009, arguing that the deployment of sound might have affectively primed the audience to participate in the incident. In this sense, sound is conceived as a complex of intensive forces that pass across and in-between bodies triggering immanent processes of emergence and structuration, thus affording incipient and fragmentary publics to come into being.

The prevailing accounts of voice within cultural studies often centre on issues of political representation and authority, bypassing the material aspects of voice and ensuing political effects thereof. By analysing a violent incident during a hip hop concert in Poland, this paper attempts to provide a post-hegemonic account of the politics of voice. It traces the circulation of sonic intensities comprising the event – including the sonority of voice, its electric amplification and the rhythmic organisation of verbal interactions – arguing that they directly modulated the behaviour patterns of the audience via affective transmission. Furthermore, the concept of habit memory is employed to indicate the limits of contagion. The paper thus rereads the outbreak of violence in terms of resonances that occur beneath the level of discourse, immanently restructuring the encounters between bodies.

POST-VERNACULARITY: AFFECT AND POWER IN NETWORKED CULTURE

The paper aims to theorize vernacular resistance in a networked culture. Analyzing the case of a digital marketing campaign prepared for the Polish Ministry of Interior, it argues for a systemic approach to cultural resistance as a dynamic process emerging from continual recombinations of discursive and affective flows. The campaign video generated numerous critical responses in the media as well as a series of vernacular remakes on YouTube. However, despite the ‘subversive’ qualities exhibited, many of them actually furthered social hierarchies by reconnecting with dominant cultural formations. Therefore, in a networked environment, organized by non-linear dynamics and complex interactions, vernacular resistance is impossible to locate and discern. However, it might persist in the multidirectional and largely accidental modes of propagation that reconfigure socio-cultural assemblages in unpredictable ways.

Artykuł podejmuje tematykę wielorakich powiązań pomiędzy muzyką a procesem pracy w kontekście korporacyjnych praktyk kontroli nad ciałem. Przywołując piosenkę śpiewaną przez pracowników hipermarketu Auchan, wskazuje, że wspólne śpiewanie może być rozpatrywane jako technika mobilizowania produktywnych mocy ciała i zestrajania ich z wymogami porządku instytucjonalnego. Przypadek ten analizowany jest w szerokiej ramie historycznej, obejmującej zarówno kapitalistyczne, jak i socjalistyczne reżimy władzy oraz odpowiadające im praktyki regulowania ciała pracującego za pośrednictwem muzyki.

In recent years the "hipster" became one of the most prominent characters in popular culture, articulating a new logic of fashion. The paper tries to analyze the phenomenon by connecting it to the structural transformations of capitalism at the turn of the 21st century. It positions "hipsterism" as a new cultural dominant corresponding to the arising hegemony of finance capital. The paper argues that the hipster, just like a stock broker, speculates on the future value of cultural forms by appropriating them and subjecting to the new logic of fasion based on ironic meta-consumption, retro fetishism, and coolness.

The emergence of new forms of intellectual and creative labor in the second half of the twentieth century was increasingly accompanied by the development of new ways of organizing based on flexible specialization and information technologies, and new techniques of management oriented towards winning the “hearts and minds” of employees. The paper describes this conjuncture in terms of emotional control and argues that it has become an essential part of governance in the late capitalist corporate culture. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s theoretical oeuvre, the paper focuses on the developments in management thought and corresponding practices of governing and regulating the working body. It argues that the emergence of “organizational culture” discourse in the late 1970s and early 1980s was crucial in developing the tools to directly tamper with the emotions of employees. In result, the power exerted over the working body was extended to encompass not only behavior or appearance but also “internal” feelings and their corporeal expressions.

The appearance of a new music format, the mp3 file, resulted in the sense of serious crisis of musical culture, which manifests itself not only in a drastically decreasing number of records sold but also in a widespread belief about the trivialization of musical experience. In this essay I am trying to account for these processes of dematerialization of music media by employing the category of the listening body in order to depict how the listener becomes involved in the process of listening by various media. Therefore I am trying to present the crisis related to the digitalization of music as a network of multidirectional flows between the development of sound recording technology, transformations of space in which the process of listening takes place and bodily practices of music reception. As a result I conclude that a key transformation related to the appearance of mp3 files regards conceptualization of the listening body, which ceases to be perceived as a tool for consumption of the selected musical offer and becomes coordinated with a complex phonosphere remaining beyond individual control.

The theoretical absence of the body in reference to analyzing work is based on several assumptions about the transformation of Western societies in the late twentieth century: the shift from manufacturing to creative economy, from production to consumption, from manual to mental work, etc. The ideology of late capitalism relies heavily on the image of disembodied worker whose performance employs not muscle force but pure knowledge. However, the body does not vanish from the practices of cognitive work even if it disappears from its representations. In this paper I want to elaborate on how the changes in labour process in the late twentieth century have affected the working body and vice versa. I will employ the concept of managerial implosion to account for the dedifferentiation of production and consumption and show how it leads to a new form of commodification of the body. The emphasis is no longer put on its use-value (i.e., function) but rather on its symbolic value (i.e., form). By reviewing some of the conceptualisations of managerial work I will argue that controlling impressions and creating an aura of success constitute new ‘techniques of the body’ in cognitive capitalism leading further to its exploitation.