Beyond Repression: Reflections on Phoebe Moore’s Chapter

Moving beyond the current research on affect and platform capitalism, this paper invites readers to engage more deeply with those literatures, from social and clinical psychology to psychoanalysis, that look at the intimate correspondence between social structures and ‘structures of feelings’, between social and economic conditions and the individual psychic and affective plane. I argue that understanding more clearly the affective contours of alienation in platform capitalism is crucial if any projects of emancipation is to succeed. This requires us to move beyond the relatively simple category of ‘repression’ and consider how complex emotional, psychological and affective dynamics whirl together in the neoliberal workplace. If in the conditions of global post-Fordist capitalism, ‘the struggle will always be a combination of exodus and desertion’, as argued by Negri, what does it really mean to affectively desert the neoliberal workplace and to psychologically refuse its command?