C

A
ON AFFECTIVE LABOR IN POST-FORDIST ITALY
ANDREA MUEHLEBACH
University of Toronto
History tells us that it is by no means a matter of course for the spectacle of
misery to move men to pity.
Hannah Arendt, o r.c!o.c
It was mid-2003, and I was attending a volunteer training class offered by
the Catholic organization Caritas in an old-age home on the dreary outskirts of the
northern Italian city of Milan. A Caritas representative was holding the workshop
for about 30 elderly volunteers who spent time with those unfortunate souls who
rarely had visitors, feeding them, caressing them, taking them for short walks. At
one point, the representative asked the volunteers what they had to offer that was
distinct from the services of the professional nursing and doctoral staff. Without
hesitation, the group called out, Love! The lady sitting next to me tapped me on
the armand pointed toward a nurse sitting in front of us. See, she said, that nurse
over there treats the patients very badlyfor her this is just a c/, and she doesnt
care at all. This class was part of Caritass larger attempt to foster a citizenship that
claims responsibility for recogniz[ing] and promot[ing] the dignity of the person
through public action.
1
Good citizenship, it seems, relies not only on the capacity
to enunciate ones interiority in contexts such as that of the training class but also
on the ability to engage in specic acts of other-recognition and action.
Two years later, I found myself in the classroom of a high school in Milan,
this time watching Michele, the head of a nonprot organization called Passo dopo
cut1ur+t +:1urototoc1, c! 2o, io. :, v2 i::: o+o, c!.. i::: :.:+o C
2:: /, |.
+....o +|.cc!c..o! +c..o.c +!! ..| .....1 oi ::::::.:+o2::
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:1
Passo (Step by Step), train a group of students as volunteers. As Michele put it to me
later, his organization was dedicated to steering teenagers toward citizenship and
growth. Michele had the students watch a slideshow of people impoverished, old,
lonely, addicted to drugs, hungry, missing limbs. I want you to watch these images
closely, Michele said. Watch them with your eyes o1 with your hearts. He then
asked the students to write down their emotional responses and to read their
responses out loud. The students spoke of anger, pity, and compassion. Michele
posed a central question, which he asked of all classes I watched himteach: Who do
you think should intervene in these situations? The students almost all mentioned
the state. But Michele only partially agreed. Thats true, he said, but at the same
time, public authorities should c de-responsibilize me. Some students nodded.
That is why we are here. We want to talk about coresponsibility.
I witnessed these scenes while conducting research on the highly moralized
forms of citizenship that are emerging while the provisioning of social services in
Italy is being privatized. These forms of citizenship are generated by what is by
nowa huge national push toward a culture of voluntarism (.o!o.o 1.! c!co..oc),
promoted in a particularly avid manner in the region of Lombardy, where Milan is
the capital. During the 16 months of eldwork in which I tracked the production of
this cultura del volontariato, I was struck by the fact that many of the pedagogical
moments I witnessed, including the two sketched here, hinged on the wedding
of proper affect and action to good citizenship. The subjecthood promoted was
presumed to be animated by a specic internal disposition that would translate into
publicly useful activityspecically, unremunerated labor performed in the social
service sector.
2
Many teachers asked their trainees to demonstrate the capacity to
depart fromtheir innermost being, as Michele put it to me later, and to participate
in the creation of a public that bound strangers to strangers through proper affect
and ameliorative action.
This labor regime is heavily mediated by the Italian state, which has begun to
redeploy affective labor across public and private domains, shifting responsibility
away from women as the sole presumed affective laborers in the domestic sphere
toward a summoning of so-called passive populations (in particular, unemployed
youth and retirees) as affectively laboring citizens. Since capitalisms inception,
such labor or care work has either been called (by Karl Marx) non-work (Hardt
and Negri 1994:78) or the perverted and parasitical labor of groups such as
menial servants who fail to artifactualize their productivity (Smith 1976:351ff.).
The fact that the state publicly values and deploys care work today is unusual for a
society that has taken such work for granted for years.
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ON AFFECTIVE LABOR
I visited the Milanese high school in 2005 because it was a member of the
program Cittadinanza europea attiva e solidale (CEAS, Active and Solidaristic
European Citizenship) initiated by the Agenzia per le Organizzazioni Non Lu-
crative di Utilit` a Sociale (Agenzia per le ONLUS; National Agency for Nonprot
Organizations of Social Utility). The school was approached in 2003 by the regional
public educational authority, the Ufcio Scolastico per la Lombardia, which asked
whether the school would help promote voluntarism. Not only were several teach-
ers trained to obtain the skills to introduce students to the cultura del volontariato
but students also received course credit for taking volunteer classes and engaging
in volunteer activities through the school. The Agenzia per le ONLUS aims to
produce nonindifferent citizens (cittadini non indifferenti) and a citizenship to
be lived with the heart (una cittadinanza da vivere con il cuore).
3
The Ministry
of Labor and Social Politics recently announced that voluntarism, whose primary
services consist of listening, support, and moral assistance, has exploded by 152
percent since 1995 (Osservatorio Nazionale per il Volontariato 2006:46).
The affectively laboring public is to a large part wrought out of already available
religious-cultural meanings and practices and is steeped in Italys long history of
the Catholic Churchs (and later Fascisms) massive solicitation of sacricial feeling
and action in the name of the public good.
4
But what I want to focus on here is
the fact that citizens across the generational spectrum are being summoned into
accruing recognition not through waged but through unwaged labor, not through
the production and trafc of tangible goods but through the production of good
feeling. How are we to understand the emergence of an unwaged labor regime
that hinges on the public production and promotion of affect? I argue that such
state-mediated intimacy must be situated within the context of new forms of
exclusion and dispossession that have come to haunt the Italian body politic. In
2005, President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi called voluntarism a primary citizenship
duty (dovere) in a televised year-end speech, explaining that a constructive
spirit of civil solidarity was emerging spontaneously in Italy in response to the
problems posed by globalization.
5
I show that compassionate labor operates not
as a mitigating force against but as a vehicle for the production and maintenance
of a new exclusionary order. This order is reproduced and maintained precisely
because it hinges on a fantasy of spontaneously available public feeling.
The task of this article is twofold. First, I show that unlike the affective (or
emotional) labor that is today key to capitalist value production (Hochschild 1983;
Hardt 1999; Hardt and Negri 2000), the affective labor explored here is valued
by the state and other social actors because of its presumed capacity to foster
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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:1
noncommercialized social bonds. Put differently, one might argue that while the
exible wage labor regime relies centrally on sentiments such as fear, opportunism,
and cynicism (Virno 1996:1316), the unwaged labor regime relies on good
feelingtrust, reciprocity, magnanimitywhich are considered essential to the
social contract in a disarticulated society (Caltabiano 2002:1921). But a public
thus produced is at best a partial one. It unites citizens through the particularities of
cosuffering and dutiful response, rather than the universality of rights; through the
passions ignited by inequality, rather than presumptions of equality; and through
emotions, rather than politics (Arendt 2006:8587). It thus differs quite profoundly
from its FordistKeynesian forebear.
At the same time, this public arises not ex nihilo, nor can it be understood
in terms of a mere mobilization of already available Catholic traditions. Instead,
the feelings that animate this public are harvested from emotional sensitivities that
were, at least partially, forged during Fordist times. In fact, peoples yearnings
for a central aspect of Fordist social belongingwaged labor and the public status
thus affordedare mobilized by the state in the form of an unwaged affective
labor regime.
6
This labor regime is a means for some marginalized members of
Italian society to approximate a form of social belonging institutionalized and
cultivated during the Fordist erathe capacity to belong and be useful to the
world through waged work (Castel 1996). In this approximation, Fordism is
both revived and undone. Fordism is thus less helpfully thought of as an era
past than as a locus of sensibility and yearning that leaves crucial traces in the
neoliberal present. It survives not just in the form of dilapidated industrial ruins
that dot the outskirts of cities like Milan but also in the structures of feeling
around which social relations and senses of self were organized. A focus on post-
Fordist affect (Berlant 2007) allows us to move beyond well-worn analyses that
conceptualize the neoliberal present in terms of a radical historical break and toward
considerations of the present as fundamentally intertwinedwithandevendependent
on sensitivities generated in the past. Fordism, in short, must be examined as both
an era past and an era with an afterlifeas a ghostly presence, even as its absence is
proclaimed.
There is no question that neoliberalization has fundamentally reworked
Fordist-Keynesian infrastructures, social relations, and subjectivities (Brenner and
Theodore 2002; Harvey 1990; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). But an analysis of
peoples affective resiliencetheir left over feelings, so to speakindicates that
our analytics of rupture must also be accompanied by an awareness of what remains.
For Fordism was as much a politicoeconomic and spatiotemporal arrangement
62
ON AFFECTIVE LABOR
(Brenner 2004; Harvey 1990) as it was an affective form. Not only did this
epoch wed strong interventionist nation-states to Keynesian economic and wel-
farist policies but it was also a mode of living and of thinking and feeling life, a
psycho-physical nexus generated out of the biggest collective effort to date to
create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched
in history, a newtype of worker and a newtype of man (Gramsci 1997:302305).
For Antonio Gramsci, Fordist affect was organized around ascetic self-denial such
as Prohibition and heteronormative monogamy. For Robert Castel, it was oriented
around the desire for well-being or the feeling of middle classness and futurity
that came with new consumption patterns and social insurance (Castel 2003). The
Fordist feeling I want to focus on here, however, is yet another one, namely, the
Fordist laboring subjects access to a form of belonging that was public in distinct
ways (Castel 1996). This feeling was generated out of the public status that workers
were afforded the rst time in capitalisms history; it created a citizenship that was
also an affective state, where attachments take shape (Berlant 2007:274). This
sense of a generation or of a period will not quite go away and might in fact often
only hover at the very edge of semantic availability (Williams 1977:131). It is
this sense that is put to work in the post-Fordist affective labor regime today.
This is not to say that Fordism was everywhere the same, especially not
in Italy, with its highly differentiated politicoeconomic landscape. In fact, only
northwestern Italy was organized around large-scale heavy industry, while the
central and northeastern regions were centered on small-scale industrial production
(Blim1990:10). Similarly, while the national projects of social democratic Western
European states hinged on classic Fordist policies of full employment and the full
utilization of capital resources, Italys economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s
relied on a mixture of Christian democratic (Van Kersbergen 1995) and laissez-faire
policies (Lumley 1990), specically, on the exploitation of impoverished southern
Italian peasants who worked in a low-wage, high-unemployment regime actively
pursued by leaders preaching a policy of deation and containment of demand.
This regime ended in the 1970s only after an explosion of workers strikes led to
the consolidation of some of the institutions considered paradigmatic of Fordism,
at least in the countrys northern and central regions (Ferrera and Gualmini 2004).
There, some of the Fordist institutions most mourned by many Italians todaysuch
as strong welfare provisioning and, more important for my purposes here, a stable
work regime that wedded work to rights and public statustook hold. It is such
affective attachments, arising out of the Fordist coupling of labor and public status,
that interest me here. Their lingering existence speaks to the fact that some Fordist
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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:1
institutions remain forceful as people attempt to recapture and reiterate Fordist
forms and feelings of recognition and belonging.
This piece is inspired by others who have insisted that all great transformations
must be affective in order to be effective (Mazzarella 2009:299; see also Richard
and Rudnyckyj 2009; Rofel 2007; Rutherford 2009; Shever 2008; Stoler 2004). I
hope to contribute to this debate by tracking the social life of a particular affective
formthe desire to be publicly recognized for ones workacross two eras and
by exploring how this desire is put to work through compassionate modes of
citizenship. Compassion is, of course, also an emergent topic in anthropology.
Yet compassion is almost always considered as something that bears down on
undesired noncitizen populations (refugees, immigrants, and the recipients of
humanitarianaid), that is, onthe bare life that disturbs the tranquil life of the citizens
polis (Fassin 2005; Ticktin 2006). This article, in contrast, suggests that the polis
cannot be understood as a zone protected from the violence of humanitarianism,
a sphere where the happy few stand in tense relation with the wretched of the
earth (Fassin 2005:381). Rather, compassion, intrinsically linked to exclusion, has
made its way into the very heart of citizenship making itself.
RELATIONAL LABOR
The rise of barely remunerated or unremunerated forms of work must be
situated within the context of the crisis of work (Le Guidec 1996) as well as the
crisis of the state, which today deploys cheap labor in privatizing welfare and care
sectors (Brin Hyatt 2001; Kingsher 2002; Milligan and Conradson 2006). Many
authors have commented on the arrival of capitalism without work (Beck 2000;
Castel 1996, 2003; Rifkin 1995). For them, the crumbling of Fordist work regimes
represents an ontological rather than a mere economic challenge because labor is
more than physical work performed (Castel 2003:368); it is more than a vehicle for
material stability. Instead, previous work regimes created the very conditions for
social belonging; they provided a collective identicatory framework that served as
a social coagulant (Caltabiano 2002:33). What is at stake, then, is the relationship
of citizens not only to work but also to the world as such.
In Italy, the specter of a society without work has had a number of Italian
sociologists produce a set of reections infused with both anxiety and utopic
promise.
7
The argument is always the same. Giuseppe Gesano, former director of
research at the Italian National Science Foundation, sums it up when he writes that
the current jobless society remains overly committed to a theory of work as mere
merchandise to be sold on the market (Gesano 1999:136). Instead, the social
64
ON AFFECTIVE LABOR
contributions made by new forms of work such as voluntarism go far beyond paid
activity (Gesano 1999:136) and are in fact central to the social glue in ways that
work proper is not anymore (Caltabiano 2002:33). Massimo Lori from the Italian
National Institute of Statistics (Istat) argues that the inefciencies of Taylorism and
its excessive emphasis on rationality have led scientists to value newkinds of work
such as house- and volunteer work (Lori 2002:69). Pierpaolo Donati, a former
president of the Associazione Italiana di Sociologia (ItalianAssociationof Sociology),
writes in a Catholic vein against a purely economistic and secular conception of
productivity and for forms of productivity more social and sacred. He adds that
the end of modernity will bring professions where the purely material aspects will
be taken over by machines, while the real human activity will be the relationship
(Donati 2001). I found that the public value now bestowed on new forms of work
was also reiterated by volunteers, who often referred to their work as relational
labor (!oc.c ..!o..co!.)
These shifting conceptualizations of labor and value evoke the ghost of Hannah
Arendts uoo cc1..c, which lamented capitalist modernitys glorication of
labor and the loss of the kinds of action that used to dene what it meant to
be human (Arendt 1958). Like Arendt, the scholars writing in this vein aim to
rid society of its reliance on vulgar materialist utilitarianism, favoring instead an
extraeconomic world of public relationality. Capitalism, the argument goes, has in
its crisis produced its very opposite: the possibility of unalienated labor that does not
estrange humans from themselves and others but unites them through new modes
of relationality. But in contrast to Arendts argument that social bonds are best
forged by political institutions, rather than by mechanical activity, these sociologists
seek not a political but a relational publicnot the cultivation of the polis but
the valuation, even sanctication of the kinds of work that Arendt associated with
the private (etymologically related to the term 1....1) oikos (Arendt 1958:58). It
is these acts of care, usually associated with the oikos and its animating sentiments,
that have today become a most valued public good.
This utopia of relationality is sketched in the ethnographic scene at the start of
the article. The culture of voluntarism, and the kinds of affective capacities it is said
to rely on, is key to the making of what neoliberal reformers in Lombardy call (in
English) the welfare (or caring) community. This is part of a larger European trend
toward the privatization of social services through the introduction of nonprot and
voluntary activity (Ascoli and Ranci 2002). The so-called third sector has ourished
in Italy,
8
which today uses 82 percent of its national social service budget to fund
nonprots (Ranci 2001:79). What distinguishes the Italian case is that it relies so
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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:1
extensively on voluntarism. Almost one-quarter of all nonprot organizations rely
exclusively on this remarkable social army (Ranci 2001:7576).
This massive mobilization of relational labor is achieved through consistent
state intervention. Italy is the only country in Europe that grants voluntary orga-
nizations a special juridical status by offering tax relief and subsidies difcult to
obtain for nonprots employing paid staff (Ranci 2001:76). Many associations rely
on private support in addition to signicant amounts of state funding (Ranci 2001;
Osservatorio Nazionale per il Volontariato 2006). Passo dopo Passo, for exam-
ple, was funded in large part by Lombardys Directorate General [for the] Fam-
ily, Conciliation, Integration and Social Solidarity (Direzione Generale Famiglia,
Conciliazione, Integrazione e Solidariet` a Sociale), although it also receives private
donations.
9
Voluntary associations are overseen by numerous national and regional
observatories and agencies and have been subject to huge amounts of statistical
reporting. Istat is only one of many bodies that have begun to produce numbers,
graphs, and typologies of volunteering, all of which are crucial to shaping the ways
in which citizens are understood by public authorities and have come to understand
themselves. Such interventions are typical of neoliberal governance in that they
pair the states commitment to privatization, devolution, and the empowerment
of citizens with the retrenchment of state power through new regulatory mech-
anisms (Wolin 1989:170). State withdrawal, it seems, requires orchestration, an
orchestration that demands state mediation.
The utopia of relational labor is largely wrought out of Catholic cultural
traditions despite the third sectors steady secularization (Ranci 2001:77). The
two pedagogical scenes sketched earlier, for example, represent attempts to bring
inner disposition and intention into harmony with ameliorative public action.
Both thus gesture toward the logics of Catholic confession in their alignment of
intention with action (Foucault 2003:172175). Many Italians I met also believe
that voluntary labor comes with the capacity to re-create fragile social bonds
because it is an expression of the spirit of gifting or .oo. o, a concept key to
Catholic theology. Indeed, a key law (Legge 266/1991) regarding volunteering
states that it is personal, spontaneous, and free (.oo.c).
10
This law has
established numerous mechanisms to ensure that volunteer organizations will not
merely proclaim but will explicitly operate according to nonprot motives. The
spirit of gifting thus became entrenched not just in the law but in the statutes
and everyday practice of volunteer organizations. The concept of gratuit` a is
also circulated widely in public cultural discourse. The Charter of Values on
Volunteering (Carta dei valori del volontariato) is posted on government Web
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ON AFFECTIVE LABOR
sites and those of many voluntary organizations and was studied closely in several
volunteer classes I attended. One volunteer trainer asked his trainees to reect
on .oo. o and to imagine it as absolute relationality. I witnessed other attempts
to stabilize and entrench the spirit of nonremuneration among volunteers. I, for
example, was instructed to sign an oath at the beginning of a class in which I declared
that my voluntary activities were gratuito because volunteering is intrinsically
incompatible with any type of remunerative work. By such gestures, volunteers
are asked to articulate and inscribethrough their signatures, for exampletheir
commitment to love, compassion, and the gift.
In short, Italy has seen the rise of a whole range of state-mediated institutions,
policies, and pedagogical interventions that attempt to standardize the volunteer as
a normative moral subject governed by reliable forms of affect. These interventions
have created a regime in which unwaged labor is wedded to intense moralization,
even sanctication. Such interventions resonate with Pope John Paul IIs insistence
that society needs to convert to the idea of unselsh giving and authentic love
to oppose a world dominated by a logic motivated exclusively by the pursuit of
prot and gain at any price.
11
As policy makers, state reformers, sociologists, and
even the pope agree, post-Fordist solidarity should be wrought out of feelings of
compassion and care. Affective labor remedies not material poverty but collective
relational crisis. It restores not economic wealth but the foundations of public
morality. It is the unwaged participation of citizens in affective voluntary action
that is considered key to societal stability. And it is unwaged labor that has become
an exemplary act of citizenship.
The fantasy that the newlaboring utopia is spontaneously available because it
is already engrained in the hearts of sensitive citizens represents a disavowal crucial
to the post-Fordist welfare community, one reproduced as much by Michele as by
President Ciampi and by state lawas much as by expert sociologists. Feelings appear
as fetishes in that many commentators endow them with a life and magic of their
own. Even though this labor regime relies on a theory of gifting that its promoters
say results in thick human sociality, the theory of gifting promoted here is in fact
non-Maussian in that it imagines gifting to be spontaneously willed from within the
sovereign subject. It is non-Maussian in that it disembeds exchange from its social
context (particularly, violent ones; Marcel Mauss, after all, argued that gifting
allowed for the avoidance of war [1990:82]) and presents exchange not only as
private, personal, andfree but alsoas moral because animatedby feelings suchas love
and compassion. This disavowal makes relational labor appear as an inaugural act
of generosity, without any past or future (Bourdieu 1972:171172). It disembeds
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such labor from loss and dispossession and unhinges it from post-Fordist mourning
by presenting it as naturally owing from marginal populations that lack the public
status provided by work.
Yet such acts of disavowal are also actively performed by volunteers them-
selves, who often emphatically deny that what they are doing is work. Even as they
call their work !oc.c ..!o..co!., they insist that it is not work but a commitment
(No, non ` e lavoro, ` e un impegno!), propelled by their conscience and sense of
duty. You can always c go to work, as one volunteer, Silvana, puts it, but with
volunteering, you cant not go! Volunteers emphasized the intense pleasures and
bonds they felt as volunteers. They seldom lingered on the kinds of exclusion that
often moved them into these activities in the rst place. They thus participated in
an erasure crucial to the building of the post-Fordist public, one that allows for the
magical translation of the crisis of work and social belonging into what appears as
a social opportunity, the sublimation of new forms of exclusion into a fantasy of
good feeling. As I will now show, the very citizens summoned into the affective
labor regime are in fact newly dispossessed. Their labor is enabled by the privileges
of good feeling while simultaneously being grounded in a logic of despair.
MOURNING WORK
Not all citizens are equally summoned into affective labor. Often, marginal
populations, particularly unemployed youth, early retirees, and pensioners, bear
the burden of providing such labor. Construed as passive in public cultural dis-
course, many expect these useless of the world (Castel 2003:368) to transform
their passivity into sacricial feeling and action. These groups are only precariously
linked to the labor market, hovering at the margins of salaried employment, the one
activity that used to guarantee membership in the FordistKeynesian community.
Their insertion into the unwaged labor regime allows them to be established as
central to the production of a post-Fordist public and to thus acquire some symbolic
social belonging.
Many volunteers gladly, perhaps even gratefully, let themselves be marshaled
into relational labor, not because of spontaneously available affective dispositions
but because they mourn the absence of work and the kinds of public recogni-
tion it afforded. One such group was the Association for the Self-Management
of Services and Solidarity (Associazione per lAutogestione dei Servizi e la Soli-
dariet` a or AUSER), founded in 1992 by Europes largest trade union, Spi-Cgil,
the pensioners union of the exCommunist Italian General Confederation of La-
bor (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro or CGIL).
12
AUSER is, like
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ON AFFECTIVE LABOR
Micheles organization, partially funded through regional and municipal funds. It
draws on the free labor of about 40 thousand citizens active in more than a thousand
neighborhood associations across the country. Many of its volunteers are motivated
by a profound sense of loss that emerged directly from the post-Fordist crisis of
labor.
13
The volunteers I worked with were middle-aged women and men who were
part of a huge wave of workers left unemployed after many of Milans factories
downsized in the 1990s. They were situated precisely at the cusp of a revolution
that shook post-Fordist societies more generally and that saw the waning of waged
labor as a foundational vehicle for social recognition and cohesion (M eda 1996).
Many workers struggled with their sense of self. As the organizations regional
director Sergio Veneziani put it to me, they spent a lifetime constructing their
sense of self through work. All of a sudden, they found themselves without a
function. They passed from a model of an active life of relationships to a life of
absolute non-usefulness. Existential crises were brought on by nancial ones. The
fate of these early retirees mirrored the fate of all those outside of protected labor
regimes, for they had access to only a defective and discriminatory basic protection
(Triletti 1998:179) and very few opportunities to reenter the labor market. They
found themselves in limbo because pension reforms mandated that retirees under
the age of 65 could not qualify for pensions (Ferrara and Gualmini 2004).
One volunteer, Giuseppe, recalled to me the terror of losing his job. Unem-
ployment had been hugely consequential, not just for him but for his entire family.
It involved a distinctly post-Fordist amalgamation of nancial and existential loss,
a painful reshufing of scal and familial obligation as well as the interruption
of normative cycles of reproduction. My taped interviews with him are broken
by silences, in which Giuseppe choked back furtive tears as he recalled his most
difcult years. He was one of the old guys (o..oc.) who were forced to retire
from factory work at the age of 50. He had tried to resistbut failedbecause he
wanted to continue working until his wife was old enough to receive her pension.
Giuseppe seemed to have worked off the books for a friend for a few yearsblack
work, !oc.c ..c, as Italians call itbut he still recounted not only extraordinary
nancial difculties magnied by recent pension reforms (Ferrera and Gualmini
2004:109115) but also his inability to help his daughter, who also struggled to
nd work. Italys youth today faces a harsh exible labor market and unemploy-
ment rates as high as 60 percent in some parts of the country (Blim 2002:138). As
rst-time job seekers, they have no entitlement to state benets and rely mostly
on dwindling intergenerational nancial resources (Ferrara 2000:172; Blim 2002).
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Although Giuseppes daughter was lucky enough to have a 16-hour-per-week job
while all of her colleagues were hired only on a temporary basis with no benets,
no 13-month salary, no paid holidays, she cannot afford to rent an apartment, let
alone invest in a house. Giuseppes terror came from a sense of lack paradigmatic
of the post-Fordist affect I want to outline herelack of work, lack of scal se-
curity, lack of futurity, lack (on both his and his wifes part) of the means to help
their daughter acquire a household and thus social status.
People like Giuseppe felt no less beleaguered once they started receiving
their pensions because Italian public cultural discourse frequently represents the
elderly as a burden to society and as devouring economic resources and absorbing
social and health services (AUSER 2001:5). Volunteers are well aware of this
discourse. I often encountered volunteers who perceived themselves and their
work in precisely such terms. One woman described volunteering as an act of
caring for oneself and of not becoming a 1./c!...oa weakness to society.
Voluntarism, she continued, laughing nervously, was good for the government
health system, which is kept from spending too much money on us. In fact, our
volunteering has quite an economic benet for society!
These were the everyday moments in which rights-bearing citizens trans-
formed themselves into the weak links in an already-strained chain. They found
themselves not just materially dispossessed but dispossessed of the assurance of
dignity in the public realm. An article in a magazine published by cc1o..o,
Italys employers union, puts it bluntly, If older people want to count more,
they need to saddle themselves with their corresponding responsibility: of work,
learning, volunteering, and so on (t. o 2003:63). This quid pro quo logic satu-
rates the media landscape and circulates widely in the Italian public cultural sphere
(Greenberg and Muehlebach 2007). As Fivol, the Italian Foundation for Voluntary
Service, puts it, activities such as volunteering allow pensioners to ..o. citizens
in every respect even as they age (Fivol 2005:9, emphasis added). Italian retirees,
in short, are faced with public exhortation to perform their duties as citizens,
rather than to claim their rights. Social inclusion and status hinge on the willingness
to commit to relational labor, rather than on the insistence that retirement is an
entitlement after a life of work. They remain citizens only under the condition
that they continue to be active and redeem themselves through a continued
commitment to some sort of publicly useful activity.
Yet dignity can be redeemed and repossessed, and the elderly are actively
invited to engage in these acts of redemptive repossession. The Lombardian mu-
nicipality of Vimercate, for example, sent out thousands of letters to pensioners,
70
ON AFFECTIVE LABOR
inviting them to not remain insensitive to the needs of the weak and to provide
services ranging from transportation to affection and friendship for the frail,
old, disabled, and young. The municipality wanted to involve all those human
resources that were still fully energetic so as to o11 o!o. c |... ..... (Fivol
2005:29, emphasis added). Today, more than a third of all volunteer organizations
that provide health and social services are staffed by people of 50 years of age and
older. They represent a new subject and voice in the market of solidarity and a
catchment area full of potential (Fivol 2005:6, 31). This is the curious paradox
of affective labor, which revalues dispensable populations as indispensable. Indeed,
the dispensability and indispensability of these populations are indistinguishable in
this regime; the worthless to the world produce its greatest wealth.
When I visited the volunteers at the local AUSERofce in Sesto San Giovanni,
a working-class town just outside of Milan, I would always encounter two men,
NulloandFrancesco, sitting behinda desk, working at a computer. Nullo, theninhis
seventies and the president of the organization, always came to the ofce dressed in
a suit and tie. He did much of the public relations work with the towns government
and local businesses and constantly sought out new sources of funding, projects,
and partnerships with the local municipality. Francesco, then vice president, was
usually involved in the scheduling and management of the sometimes dozens of
volunteers who circulated through the ofce on any given day to staff the phone
service (a .!.cc o..c) for an afternoon or two, to provide transport to and from
the old-age home, or to conduct home visits among or run errands for the elderly
living alone somewhere in the neighborhood. I watched many of them tirelessly
invest hours, sometimes full days, in the organization, which provided a myriad of
services, including those to the very old who lived alone.
These people had all been classic Fordist citizen-subjects, members of the
FordistKeynesian salaried society, in which labor guaranteed rights, benets,
and wider societal participation through consumption, housing, education, and
leisure. Labor was the primary vehicle through which social identity and commu-
nal integration were achieved (Castel 2003:303304; M eda 1996:633). Early to
midcentury collective bargaining and ensuing labor rights allowed workers to leave
the precarious zone of the market, a zone of no dignity, no social recognition, no
political existence (Castel 1996:617), for a zone of universal public recognition
through employment. In Arendts terms, the slaves peopling the bare, shadowy,
private realm of the oikos came forward into the public as rights-bearing social
citizens (Donzelot 1993; Marshall 1950; Rose 1996). This move from individual
contract to public status was achieved through lawa set of public regulations
71
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:1
that predated and transcended market transactions (Castel 1996:618). Work now
ceased to be conceptualized as a mere individual act and instead came to be under-
stood in terms of its abstract social function, a collective social act that transcends
the particular nature of the tasks carried out by individuals (Castel 1996:619). It
was precisely this moment of abstraction that let to the differentiation of waged
work from housework and the formers entry into the public domain. Labor law
came to recognize the generic utility of a workers activity in the same way as
civil law recognizes a citizens generic membership in the community (Castel
1996:619).
This is not to say that the Fordist era was idyllic. It came, of course, at
the cost of workers subordination. Work remained a source of alienation and
exploitation. Further, work and its concomitant rights and recognition were not
accessible to all. The overwhelming majority of Italian women did not work in
the guaranteed labor market. As housewives, they enjoyed the rights of social
citizenship only indirectly, through dependents benets (Ferrera and Gualmini
2004:36; Lewis 1992, 1998), while in some parts of Italy women (and children
and retirees) worked illegally in the shadows of an undocumented labor regime
of small-scale industrial production (Blim 1990:11).
14
The Fordist public was thus
partial in its own way. But work in the guaranteed labor market was also a vehicle
for what welfare theorist Esping Anderson calls decommodication, that is to say,
a means through which less alienated lives could be lived. Basic benets, such as paid
holidays, had the effect of emancipating workers from total market dependency
and of facilitating the de-proletarianization of the workers status, such that their
relationship to work began to approximate what privileged strata had enjoyed for
decades and even centuries (Esping Anderson 1990:4547).
15
In sum, it is ironic
that Arendts lamented laboring society was the most decommodied society
industrial capitalism ever knew.
Fordist workers public dignity had already begun to crumble when AUSER
volunteers lost their jobs in the 1990s (Mol e 2008). Many volunteers looked back
on the end of their working lives with bitterness and shame. One interlocutor
said that he hated being treated like a little piece of waste paper that was simply
thrown away when he lost his job in his late 50s: I told myself that I still had lots
to offer. Others talked about the emotional toll of feeling cut off and described
the loss of work as a moment in which they ceased being properly social beings,
disembedded fromsocial relations and previous forms of recognition. Indeed, there
is a widespread sense in Italy that the loss of work equals social death: a loss as
painfully existential as it is economic (Mol e 2010).
72
ON AFFECTIVE LABOR
The mourning this process set in motion was thus not for work per se but
for the feelings of public status and recognition that Fordist work entailed. And
voluntarism helped AUSER members recuperate or at least approximate Fordist
feelings of belonging and recognition. Indeed, the fact that unremunerated activity
is in Italy legally recognized endows it with a public personality never granted to, for
example, houseworkand this despite a long history of radical Italian feminismthat
called for salaried housework (Bono and Kemp 1991:260272). Indeed, almost all
volunteers, male and female, engage both in (publicly recognized) voluntarism and
in the hidden work of private care (caring for grandchildren, elderly parents, ailing
spouses). But the point is that this latter affective labor has never been recognized
by the state, while the former now is.
Further, the legal recognition of voluntarism has come with a basic benet
ordinarily granted only to waged workinsurance. According to Legge 266/1991,
all voluntary organizations are obliged to insure their members against accidents
and sickness that arise in connection with their activities. Many volunteers pointed
out this fact to me with pride. They similarly noted that their contracts with the
municipality allowed reimbursement for expenses such as gas. We know that
volunteers are not paid in any way, Giuseppe said to me, but there are some
costs that should be taken care of. Like waged labor, affective labor was thereby
dignied insofar as it became a source of (at least minimal) rights and remuneration
(Castel 1996:620).
The public recognition that volunteers accrue derives also from the technoc-
racy of virtue that has sprung up around this phenomenon. AUSER Lombardy, for
example, produces reports crowded with numbers and graphs that, for example,
calibrate the exact amount of hours its seven thousand volunteers spend provid-
ing services (AUSER Lombardia 2003). Such calculations of affective labor are a
primary means through which citizen-volunteers present their work as commen-
surable with other kinds of work.
16
They present themselves as having a place in
society, one amenable to calculation and, hence, public valuation.
There are more ways through which affective labor has come to resemble
waged labor. Quite apart from the fact that everyone involved in the sector insists
that this new labor regime requires skills (hence, the training classes taken by
the majority of volunteers), the everyday lives of the volunteers often resemble
the working world in rhythm, regularity, and performativity. The labor of these
volunteers, for example, had a xed rhythm (ofces are open all year, even over
Christmas, which enabled volunteers to uberperform their usefulness through al-
most unlimited ofce hours) and a professional space (an ofce that was successively
73
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:1
upgraded between 2003 and 2005 to include an ever-expanding number of new
computers and phones). Their activities were also endowed with a gravitas usually
reserved for waged labor when people like Nullo came to work in a suit and
tie; such gravitas is usually associated with being seen and recognized in public.
Voluntarism allowed these people to leave an otherwise entirely private life, for
the privation of privacy, as Arendt puts it, lies in the fact that private man [..]
does not appear, and therefore it is as though he did not exist. Indeed, to remain
private is to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life: to be deprived
of the reality of being seen and heard by others (Arendt 1958:58).
Voluntarism allows volunteers to stage what appears to be a nostalgic scene of
social usefulness and public utility, one that uncannily approximates Fordist work
in its public recognition, legal sanctioning, insurance, and rhythm and regularity.
In these moments, Fordism survivedin the everyday gestures of those who wear
their suits as they go to work and carefully note down the exact times they spend
while on the job. And yet, the channeling of the Fordist desire for public status
into unwaged activity undoes the very equation on which the Fordist social contract
hinged. For those populations hovering on the margins of the labor market, affect
and affective labor are a currency through which they acquired some belonging
and social utility. Affect and affective labor become a means to trafc in feeling in
exchange for the approximat[ion of a] feeling of belonging to a world that doesnt
. . . exist reliably anymore (Berlant 2007:277). Instead of purchasing rights through
work, as under Fordist work regimes, post-Fordist volunteers acquired some sense
of social belonging and public dignity with their unwaged labor; they are citizens
included in the partial public through the states recognition of their labor.
POST-FORDIST COMPASSION
The great irony unfolding here is that the desire for work and public recog-
nition propels volunteers into the production of a public that is partial at best. As
Arendt puts it, forms of human sociality that hinge on compassion are nonpolit-
ical and nonpublic because the common good is founded on nothing more than
individuals willingness to feel and act on feeling. Such socialities enjoin people
in an immediate, intense space of cosuffering and affective communion, and they
encompass these people in a relationship not based on universalistic rights but on
particularistic, voluntaristic, face-to-face actionnot on politics but on emotions
(Arendt 2006:8687). Indeed, the post-Fordist public depends on the collapse of
private and public, the ooding of the public with private emotion. Such emotions
are by denition incapable of transcending individual will and predilection (Berlant
74
ON AFFECTIVE LABOR
2004; Rutherford 2009:7); they therefore produce a public that is particular rather
than universalist, voluntaristic rather than structured around legally guaranteed
rights. In contrast to FordistKeynesian social citizenship, the post-Fordist public
assumes bonds between citizens not because they are equal in status or because
they inhabit the same public as irreducibly social citizens. Rather, the public is built
out of cosuffering and citizens acting on suffering. It is thus built out of relations
between parties that are, by denition, unequal.
The compassionate public also relies on a particular laboring subject, one that
desires and takes pleasure in working for nothing, for free. This public thus weds
hyperexploitation to intense moralization, nonremuneration to a public fetishiza-
tion of sacrice. Jacques Donzelot detects a shift in the way European states have
tried to change peoples relationship to workfrom pleasure through work to
pleasure in work; fromFordistKeynesian work as drudgery and yet also a means
for pleasure (free time, paid holidays), toward post-Fordist, neoliberal work as a
good in itself: a means towards self-realization rather than as an opportunity for
self-transcendence (Donzelot 1991:251). The partial public I describe here relies
precisely on such a subject, one that desires and seeks pleasure in unwaged labor.
In Italy, one can read this neoliberal conation of toil and redemption in distinctly
Catholic terms. Pope John Paul II writes in a 1981 encyclical to/c.. i.... that
man who endures toil in union with Christ collaborates with the Son of God
for the redemption of humanity. Work is a good thing for humanity, the encyclical
states, because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his
own needs, but he also achieves fulllment as a human being.
17
Yet, in conclusion, I dont want to leave the reader with the sense that this
good-faith economy works only to conceal the despair on which it is built. These are
not just myriad acts of collective misrecognition that repress objective exploitative
truths (Bourdieu 1972:171172). The economy of good feeling is more than an
ideological smoke screen or a psychological palliative. Rather, it is a profoundly
indeterminate space of both love and loss, pleasure and pain, compassion and
exclusion. Feminists have in their focus on care work long insisted on treating
feeling not as epiphenomenal to larger questions of economy and society. Instead,
they have taken seriously the simultaneity, reality, and social efcacy of both (Balbo
1982; Bono and Kemp 1991). I want to end this article with this simultaneity and
with the statements made by people like Silvana, who said about volunteerism,
You cant not go! The emotional ties built through voluntarism have a potency
that should not be underestimated. The fact that the public produced through these
acts is partial does not make the acts themselves so. Dismissing volunteer work
75
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:1
as such trivializes the enormous energy volunteers expend toward weaving often
very tight networks of sociality and intimacy between themselves and those in
need. Affective labor exists as a curious double. Like wage labor, it is a complex
composite of exploitation and salvation, exclusion and utopia, alienation and new
forms of sociality.
ABSTRACT
1|. o...!. .!c.. |. .c!. |o .co.c !o, . |. /o.!1. c o ctc.1.
!o/c.. o/!.. . io!, i, .!c.. |c |. o. |o o1. .co.c .c1o...
|.co| . .... c c!oo., !o/c., |. .... |c |o .co.c c..o. c
o o ..o. c... oo., /o o o .|..!. c. |. .c1o..c o1 o..o.. c
o . ..!o.co., c.1.. .....!, /..oo. . o!!c c. |. ...... c o oo, c
co.co!, oo.!o/!. o/!.. .c.c +.... !o/c. . o 1....1 c. c o..., c.
o..o!...1 ./.. c io!.o c..., /..oo. . o!!c |. c o.c.o. |. c.
c c..o! /.!c. |o o ...o!!, ..o.co!...1 o1 .o!.o.1 .|. tc.1.
c.....|o c |. .oo.., c /.!c c o1 /. o/!..!, ...c...1 /, |. c.!1
|.co| o.1 c.| tc.1. |o o.o. c o o ..o o, /o o o c/.. c 1....
o1 co.. |o .!! ..o. o.| c..o! c... o .c!. o. c ...oo.. c. o
!.o o.c.o. tc.1. c. o1 ..!. c o/.!., o1 /.!c.
Keywords: unwaged labor, post-Fordism, compassion, exclusion
NOTES
+.|c!.1. Research for the article was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation
for Anthropological Research. I would like to thank audiences at the University of Toronto, Duke
University, the University of Chicago, and at the 2009 AAAs for their thoughtful responses, as well as
friends and colleagues Nusrat Chowdury, Naisargi Dave, Andrew Gilbert, Jessica Greenberg, Kregg
Hetherington, Noelle Mol e, Valentina Napolitano, and Anwen Tormey. Their insights and support
have been indispensable. I am also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their engaged
readings, as well as to Anne Allison and Charles Piot for their excellent editorial advice. I am, nally,
most indebted to my many friends in Italy who so graciously shared their time with me.
1. See http://www.caritas.it/15/29/chisiamo.asp, accessed June 29, 2010.
2. The Italian state only recently deemed social service sector jobs, including voluntary labor,
socially useful work. See the Decreto Legislativo No. 468/1997, entitled Work of Public
Utility (Lavori Socialmente Utili). I refer to this work as labor in that it results not in
material artifacts, but in seemingly more ephemeral social forms and relations that are most
paradigmatically found in the social reproductive activities of the private oikos (Arendt 1958).
3. The conceptualization of citizenship as heartfelt comes from the title of a conference
held by the Agency in Milan on December 4, 2004. See http://www.famiglia.regione.
lombardia.it/cnv/041205.asp. Last accessed May 9, 2004.
4. See Victoria De Grazias (1992) account of the Fascist mobilization of sacricial feeling and
action. Fascism drew on an already existing rich Catholic heritage of charitable institutions
that the post-Fascist welfare state also went on to depend on. The nonprot sector continues
to be dominated by religious organizations; Catholic groups operate 70 percent of Italys
old age homes, 50 percent of its private hospitals, and 60 percent of its vocational training
centers (Ranci 2001:76). It is this Catholic spirit of voluntarism(as well as, increasingly, leftist
76
ON AFFECTIVE LABOR
institutions of social solidarity such as unions [see Muehlebach 2009]) that the neoliberal state
draws on.
5. The speech is available online at http://www.quirinale.it/qrnw/statico/ex-presidenti/
Ciampi/cia_a_neanno.htm. Accessed June 29, 2010.
6. I use the phrase unwaged labor regime because many social actors increasingly recognize
unwaged labor as publicly valuable, and because this labor is systematically extracted by the
statethat is to say, fostered, encouraged, and marshaled into social service provisioning.
7. In Italy, social science is generally regarded to be a highly politicized process. Social scientists
are a major part of the political landscape in that they are expected to conduct research that
will benet a particular cause (Kertzer 1980:21). The sociologists mentioned here all have
close ties to the Italian policy world, which is also heavily invested in translating the crisis of
work into social opportunity.
8. The idea of a middle-of-the-road Third Way between the savage market and the excessive
state has become a crucial metaphor for western European states as they engage in the often-
controversial task of privatizing their social service apparatuses. Third Wayism has allowed
for privatization to appear as a benign move as public social services are privatized onto what
is, correspondingly, called the Third or Tertiary Sectorthat is, the nonprot and volunteer
sector. The shift toward the nonprot and volunteer sectors is often considered to be a soft
version of privatization because policy makers represent nonprots as social actors willing to
take into account considerations about the quality of services they provide (Ascoli and Ranci
2002:15).
9. Micheles organizationas well as Michele as one of two paid staff membersare thus
not easily identied as representing either the public or private domain. This is not a new
phenomenon in the Italian context, where the provisioning of welfare has always been marked
by profound collusions between public and private actors (Ferrera 2000:170).
10. See Article 2 of the Legge quadro sul volontariato (Legge 266/1991). Available at
http://www.fondazionepromozionesociale.it/L266_91.html. Accessed July 1, 2010.
11. John Paul II, Osservatore romano, February 13, 2002, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/
john_paul_ii/audiences/2002/documents/hf_jpii_aud_20020213_en.html.
12. I have written elsewhere about how these leftists felt that voluntarism allowed them to
reanimate Communist passions and to participate in the production of a nonalienated public
amid neoliberal reform (Muehlebach 2009).
13. In 2005, the state initiated a yearlong volunteer national civil service for youth between the
ages of 18 and 28. It advertised this civil service as a vehicle toward citizenship responsibi-
lization and personal growth. But the message hovering between the lines of this initiative is
that it ts neatly into another problem plaguing the body politic. Italy has one of the highest
youth unemployment rates in the industrialized world. As rst time job seekers, they have
no entitlement to support and rely mostly on intrafamilial nancial help (Blim 2002; Ferrera
2000:172). For them, the service offers a chance to earn a small sumof money while participat-
ing in what is ambivalently framed as educational experience and solidaristic citizenship duty,
training and quasiwork. State ofces were created to help young volunteers nd jobs in the
nonprot sector after their yearlong engagement. Yet many fear that these youths will enter
a vast pool of part-time, low-wage service jobs that they will have difculties transitioning
out from. I would thus argue that the sense of loss I document for an older generation is not
unknown to the younger generation at all. Having been plunged into an increasingly precarious
labor market, Italys young are daily confronted with a two-tiered labor force where an ever
shrinking number of privileged (often older male) workers with safe-guarded contracts work
in the same workplace as short-term workers (Mol e 2010:42). They are thus daily, directly
confronted with Fordist work forms that they themselves have no access to. One might thus
argue that the senses of loss documented here exist in multiple variations across generations.
They get cultivated and reproduced through public forms of collective memorialization and
mourning (see, e.g., the Quando Scadi campaign in Mol e 2010). Although post-Fordist
affect may take on many forms because different groups are differentially marginalized, it in
this case is always directed toward a desired Fordist objectthe stable work regime and the
forms of security and recognition it entailed.
77
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:1
14. See also Silvana Patriarca (1998) on the problematic nature of Italian occupational statistics.
15. Gsta Esping Anderson describes de-commodication as the guiding principle and goal
of mid- to late-20th-century western European social democracies and labor movements
(1990:44).
16. As the authors of one report note, the free labor provided by organized solidarity (i.e.,
voluntarism) in Lombardy equals that of 16,500 full-time employees (Fivol 2005:1).
17. The encyclical can be accessed online at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/
encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens_en.html.
i1.c. :c.: co!o.o! +|.cc!c, has published a number of articles on affect, including
Danilyn Rutherfords Sympathy, State Building and the Experience of Empire (2009), Joseph
Mascos Survival Is Your Business: Engineering Ruins andAffect inNuclear America (2008),
and Didier Fassins The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectication through Trauma
in the Israeli-Palestinian Conict (2008).
co!o.o! +|.cc!c, has also published articles on post-Fordism. See, for example, Melissa W.
Wrights Desire and Prosthetics of Supervision: A Case of Maquiladora Flexibility (2001),
Anne Allisons Cyborg Violence: Bursting Borders and Bodies with Queer Machines (2001),
and Diane M. Nelsons Stumped Identities: Body Image, Bodies Politics, and the Mujer Maya
as Prosthetic (2001).
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