nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

Work, professionalization and the production of knowledgeMore, perhaps, than most neoliberal cities, London is characterised by an incitementto productivity, especially among those privileged enough to enjoythe cultural capital of intellectual, as opposed to manual labour. 9 If you stopyou are lost, if you slow down you are likely to feel guilty, and if not, someonewill unknowingly remind you that you ought to be... You are not supposed towaste your time: you have to insert everything you do, no matter how pleasurable,into a working or investment framework. While for most the incitementis that of the boss and his productivity measures, and of colleagues identifyingwith boss and measures, for more and more these pressures are deeply internalised,the measures constructed by ourselves. Everything has to be usefulin some way, even the conversation with your friends in a pub: you can get toknow about new conferences you could apply for, you might do some extranetworking, you can practice your social skills, or you just take a break to bemore productive once back at your computer. In the London of mass youthunemployment, precarity and intense competition, our careerist behaviourrarely results in a career, but it is rather the minimum expected by employers.We are mostly under and struggling against this aspect of the regime ofproductivity, according to which we are something like an agent of capitalization,an investor in our own human capital, a channel that sucks all theinputs available around us in order to nourish our career, our job, the newproject we are working on, the PhD dissertations we are writing. We learnhow to turn everything, even what at first sight seems banal and irrelevant,into something useful – at least we are supposed to try. This logic spills overfrom work to life to politics, and easily adopts the language and adapts to theethics of these respective spheres. You don’t necessarily have to think everythingin terms of career-building and competition: it might be a collaborativecultural project, it might be even activism, a cause that you fight for togetherwith your comrades. We are always subjected to the pressure of turning everythingwe do into a working object or a working process, into somethingthat complies with a working practice that we internalise, that is producedwith and through a neoliberal subjectivity.And so, activism becomes a second or third job, beside those we do alreadyin order to survive: you end up trying to fight one kind of hyper-productivitywith another kind of hyper-productivity, having to play both ofthem at the same time. You might end up burning yourself out. You writeabout Guattari in your dissertation and this becomes yet another commodity,you ‘sell it’ as a product for conferences and publications, whilst the impactof the encounter with Guattari in your life is decreasing, if it ever was more,34