“You Are Not Independent in Any Way”: Biopolitics, Gig Economy Work and the Emergence of Illegible Antagonisms

Abstract

In this article, I examine the qualitative dimensions of gig economy work, labor power, and potentiality using two categories of biopolitical subjugation developed by Lazzarato (2012; 2015): social subjection and machinic subjugation. As Lazzarato defined and elaborated these techniques in the wake of the financial crisis, I also contextualize gig economy work as the evolution of economic processes that Marx and subsequent post-workerist scholars have analyzed, namely, circulation and formal and real subsumption. I claim that it is through Lazzarato’s two techniques of biopolitical subjection and subjugation that the gig economy attempts to manage workers’ subjective dispositions while extracting data for the intensification of the management of labor power’s alternate potentialities. In this way, I contend, the gig economy’s attempts at managing labor power both subject and set free a field of forces that, as Deleuze and Guattari have shown, are deterritorialized and reterritorialized, processes which open onto and reveal lines of flight or modes of resistance. Since the two processes of subjection/subjugation that Lazzarato develops are ultimately disjunctive and incompatible, I see a line of flight opening through the desubjectification of the ideal individualized worker, revealing horizons of resistance through the production of an illegible subject of labor power escaping the production of guilt and responsibility. I cose by connecting these claims to a gig economy worker, Willy Solis, whose experiences with gig economy work exemplify these dynamics.