Contenu du sommaire : Travail et domination

How does Marx refer to Work and to Domination ?
The interpretation of Marx's references to work and to domination is a vexed question. Can we say that Marx criticises capitalism in terms of its effects on work ? Or does he criticise capitalism from the standpoint of those subject to domination, and with whom his position is one of solidarity ? Or does he elaborate a description of the unprecedented transformations brought about in the relations of power, which the category of domination is unable to apprehend effectively ? The article argues that these differences in interpretation are actually based on a series of false oppositions. Marx's aim is in effect to articulate the question of the domination of work and the question of domination at work, insofar as he accords a position of political centrality to the connection between domination and work.

Is the Notion of Domination a mere Fiction in Sociology ?
The aim of the article is to reappraise certain contemporary usages of the notion of « domination » in the field of sociology. Starting out from the place and content of social critique, the article demonstrates that domination can either be recognised as a legitimate category in the sociological description of the social world or, on the contrary, be regarded as a “fiction”, a metaphysical invention on the part of the sociologist. The aim is thus to understand how the concept of domination can enable us to carry out a reflexive reappraisal of the theoretical and practical functioning of “theory” in sociology.

Kafka and the Work of Domination
Is it reasonable to look for an apprehension of the practices of domination in the œuvre of a writer ? To be more specific, in the writings of Kafka whose short stories and novels are characterised by their formal innovations and their break with the codes of realist narration ?The social and historical analysis of his work clearly demonstrates that Kafka constantly strove to elucidate the mechanisms of the domination which he personally had suffered from (in his relationship, both admiring and conflictual, with his father), and which he had been able to observe in various professional contexts : the family clothes-shop, the bureaucratic world of an insurance company dealing with accidents at work, the companies he visited as an assessor of the professional risks to which workers were liable through their contact with machines, or the family asbestos factory. Through his representation of a range of situations which are oppressive, alienating, and frequently humiliating, to which the dominated parties participate, involuntarily and frequently unconsciously, Kafka was proceeding with his vast enterprise aimed at self-knowledge and the knowledge of inter-human relations.

The Question of Workplace Resistance in the French Sociology of Work
The modernisation of the process of production and labour which, until recently, had aroused responses of indulgent enchantment, is today the object of a sustained sociological critique. This aim of the article is to examine the theoretical orientations which focus their attention on domination in work and which consider the workplace as a steel cage. A different approach is put forward here, one built around the concepts of subsumption and workplace resistance. Analysis centred on the question of domination frequently tends to neglect the possibility of micro-practices, regarding them as a contribution to the fluidity and overall efficiency of work. The perspective adopted here is a different one. The article argues that spaces of autonomy still exist in the workplace. Though limited, these spaces are real. In addition, everyday workplace solidarities are a reality. It is thus important not to equate workplace solidarities with other types of informal behaviour. Such resistance is intimately bound up with the nature of wage-labour, understood as a coercive activity subject to the logical of value-creation.

Work and Experience of Domination in Contemporary Neoliberalism
This paper seeks to study the contemporary forms of domination at and through work, by focusing on subjective experiences of work. Against the background of Marx's analysis of the manyfold nexus between social and political domination in general and domination at work, I begin by drawing in broad strokes the general picture of current experiences of work emerging from the contemporary French sociology and psychology of work. Related to this rich literature but also contrasting with it, the psychodynamic approach developed by Christophe Dejours seems particularly significant, notably because its provides a consistent model explaining the links between subjective experience, social interactions beyond work, material conditions of production, and broad cultural and political factors. From the psychodynamic model arises an original analysis of the current forms of domination and alienation at work, one, I argue in conclusion, which could substantially inform the current attempt to develop a new “social philosophy”.

On Domination and its Denial
This article explains how corporate management and shareholders gradually succeeded in introducing new modes of domination designed to counter the wave of worker insubordination in the post-1968 period. It shows how the systematic individualisation of the management of wage-earners, placed in a situation of mutual competition, the pressures exerted on them through the procedures of individualised objectives and permanent evaluation, and the orchestration of the objective and subjective contingency of workers, transformed the conditions of wage-employment. From a condition which could be inscribed by those subjected to it within a horizon of collective resistance, domination came to be experienced as a plight of personal suffering. Such trends are not however irreversible, insofar as the logic of individualisation and contingency now tends to come into conflict with other factors, such as the attachment of wage-earners to their work.

The Personalisation of Domination in Labour Relations : women workers in maquilas and women in domestic service in Latin AmericaThe continent of South America is characterised by a huge diversity in the forms of employment and labour relations prevalent there. The comparison between two situations which would appear to be unrelated, that of workers in the maquiladoras of Central America and domestic employment in the continent's southern cone, enables us to highlight the centrality of hierarchical labour relations and the personalisation of domination, a dimension too often neglected in studies of domination linked to work. The article begins with a presentation of these two work environments. It then goes on to address the personalisation of domination relations, examining the hypothesis that, far from being a characteristic of certain “archaic” forms of work and employment, paternalism is in fact a dimension deeply rooted in the most contemporary and dynamic modes of labour relations, both in the “North” and in the “South”.

Rethinking the “Epistemological Break” : Reading Marx with and against Althusser
The article critically reconsiders Althusser's thesis that there is an “epistemological break” in the work of Marx taking place in 1845/46. It is argued that there can indeed be found an important break in Marx at this time, but that it cannot be conceptualised as an “epistemological” passage from ideology to science. Instead, this break should be considered as a purely philosophical one, as a transition from a young-Hegelian to a realist social philosophy. The first part of the article offers a critical re-reading of the young Marx. The second part analyses the entanglements of social philosophy, the philosophy of history and social science haunting Marx after 1845/46. The intention is not to dismiss out of hand Althusser's interpretation of Marx's work. The aim is rather to clarify it from the perspective of current debates within the philosophy of science, ethics and social theory.

The Misadventures of Critique. Reflections from the Work of Jacques Rancière
The article puts forward an argument which has two stages. It begins by an acknowledgement of the criticism addressed by Rancière to a postmodern mode of social critique which basically explains that if social critique is no longer effective, it is because the system subjected to the critique has the capacity to digest all the various types of criticism which can be levelled against its actual mode of operation. The conclusion to be drawn from this can only be that the status of such a discourse is a paradoxical one, insofar as it denounces the illusions of critique while preserving its own position as a lucid agent of critique. The article then seeks to formulate its reservations concerning the position of Rancière, when the latter argues that the paradox or contradiction exposed in this respect is in fact inscribed in social critique from the beginning, in other words since Marx. The article demonstrates that the critical procedure, as envisaged by Marx, in no sense posits a hierarchical distinction between the lucid critic and the mass of those to whom the social critic addresses a discourse explaining the causes of the illusions of which they are inevitably the victims.

Critique and subjectivation. Foucault and Butler on the subject
In her paper “What is Critique ? An Essay on Foucault's Virtue”, Judith Butler reads Foucault's “What is Critique ?” According to Foucault, critique is a practice of desubjugation of the subject, which would provide for it a certain form of autonomy. But what kind of autonomy is really possible for the subject, when Foucault rejects the notion of the sovereign subject ? Butler's reading wants to solve that difficulty in Foucault's position with the notions of virtue and of speech acts. But Foucault tends more to consider the courage of the truth (parresia) as a critical mode of philosophical intervention in politics, and he thinks of it as a virtue or as an êthos. Butler's conception of the subject refuses the whole notion of an originary freedom and she prefers to think an agency which would take place in the context of the subjectivation itself, where being produced as a subject is originally being subjected to different modes of interpellation by the norms. In reading Althusser's conception of ideology with Foucault's desubjugation, she considers the critique as the critique of norms of recognition and the subject as vulnerable.