In the December 2010 meeting we are watching selected fragments from The Century of the Self, chosen by a reading group member. This 4 hour documentary film by Adam Curtis proposes that the theories of Sigmund Freud have been employed in politics and business during the last century and have had a profound effect on society. In preparation for this session, we are reading the first pages of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972), in which they begin to detail their ideas on ‘desiring-production’.

We are also reading Affective labor (1999) by Michael Hardt. In this essay Hardt describes affective labor as work that produces something immaterial, such as a service, knowledge, affect or ‘care’ and he claims that this kind of labor has now become the dominant mode of production of our economy.