Abstract:
This essay proposes, through a theoretical critique, the development of the concept of corporactivity beyond the hegemonic representational sense of professional identification. To do so, it operates on the distinction between body and work organization, promoting an intercession between clinic of activity and schizoanalysis. It takes a paradox of activity of the urban bus driver, oscillating between politics of friendship and politics of control, between capital and unproductivity, between disunion and cooperation, to develop such problematic through the concrete situation of work. The support of the paradoxes of activity is affirmed as crucial in the composition of collective bodies of work.
Keywords:
body; drivers; work psychology; activity; schizoanalysis
Resumo:
Ensaia-se, por uma crítica teórica, desenvolver o conceito de corporatividade para além do sentido representacional hegemônico de identificação profissional. Para tanto, opera na distinção entre corpo e organização do trabalho, promovendo uma intercessão entre clínica da atividade e esquizoanálise. Toma-se um paradoxo da atividade do motorista de ônibus urbano, oscilando entre políticas da amizade e políticas de controle, entre capital e improdutividade, enfim, entre desunião e cooperação, para desenvolver tal problemática pela situação concreta de trabalho. Afirma-se a crucialidade da sustentação dos paradoxos da atividade na constituição de corpos coletivos de trabalho.
Palavras-chave:
corpo; motoristas; psicologia do trabalho; atividade; esquizoanálise
Résumé:
On essaye, par une critique théorique, de développer le concept de corporactivité au-delà du hégémonique sens représentationnelle d'identification professionnelle. Pour ce faire, on opère sur la distinction entre corps et organisation du travail, en promouvant une intersection entre la clinique de l'activité et la schizo-analyse. On prend le paradoxe de l'activité du conducteur de bus, qui oscille entre politiques d'amitié et politiques de contrôle, entre capital et improductivité, enfin, entre désunion et coopération, pour développer tel problèmatique par la situation concrète de travail. On affirme la crucialité des paradoxes de l'activité dans la composition des corps collectifs de travail.
Mots-clés:
corps; conducteurs; psychologie du travail; activité; schizo-analyse
Resumen:
Desde una crítica teórica, este artículo propone a desarrollar el concepto de corporactividad más allá del sentido representacional hegemónico de identificación profesional. Para ello, opera en la distinción entre el cuerpo y la organización del trabajo, promoviendo una intercesión entre la clínica de la actividad y el esquizoanálisis. Se toma una paradoja de la actividad del conductor de autobús urbano, que oscila entre las políticas de amistad y políticas de control, entre el capital e improductividad, en fin, entre la desunión y cooperación, para que se desarrolle el problema por la situación concreta de trabajo. Se afirma la crucialidad de la sustentación de las paradojas de la actividad en la composición de los cuerpos colectivos de trabajo.
Palabras clave:
cuerpo; conductores; psicología del trabajo; actividad; esquizoanálisis
We bring here a critical theoretical essay, i.e., a concentrated experimentation in terms of concepts, which aims to bring these intervention instruments to their limits. Considering these concepts as reality-building tools that change with their uses, transforming as they themselves transform reality, we sought to operate in their indefinable margins with concrete interventions. It is a research experience with bus drivers of urban public transportation as a source and a resource for the conceptual developments that we intend to operate through this essay. This work experience is discussed at the intersection of the fields of knowledge and practice of schizoanalysis (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972-1973/2010Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2010). O anti-édipo: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 1. São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1972-1973), 1980/1996Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1996). Mil platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia (Vol. 3). São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1980)) and clinic of activity (Clot, 1999/2006aClot, Y. (2006a). A função psicológica do trabalho. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes. (Trabalho original publicado em 1999), 2008/2010Clot, Y. (2010). Trabalho e poder de agir. Belo Horizonte, MG: Fabrefactum. (Trabalho original publicado em 2008)), which are under construction and development, allowing the conceptual inventions that we seek to arrange here. The concepts of body and organism are relocated due to this experience in analysis of work, aiming to address the workers corporation and the organization of work from the point of view of its construction and its behavior, and not so much from the formalization of identifying and defining criteria. The problematic field that is travelled and constructed is the collective work.
Body (and organism) of the work
The worker is a body. And, here, we do not mean an individual or a countable set, since these approaches would only allow us to see the driver's organism. The body is what permeates, as a way of life and work of the worker himself, any form of organization. This is a plan of constitution and consistency that goes beyond existence established by a group or subject. The body maintains the dimension of undetermined action, in other words, it is a plan or a pathway in which the always unfinished activity gains support. A worker's body is a world in itself, as well as a collective,
understood here as a multiplicity that develops beyond the individual, adjacent to the social, as well as beyond the person, along with pre-verbal intensities, deriving from a logic of affections that is more than a logic of well circumscribed groups. (Guattari 1992aGuattari, F. (1992a). Caosmose: um novo paradigma estético. São Paulo, SP: 34., p. 20)
The body is a cross of possibilities, while the organism is the establishment in the body of representational ordinations in certain relationships, settled and hierarchical in nature. The organism is the individual driver, regarding his gestures and what he must perform. It also consists of the mistakes he commits by not achieving the defined functions for his prescribed activities. It is also the illness that afflicts the worker when taken as an individual case. The organism is the group of professionals in their junctions as functional pre-established relationships between them and with other workers associated with their production, with the hierarchy of the company they worked at, with the client-user, and with society in its various organizations.
The view of the worker's body would be, before anything, the retinue of gestures, rations, errors and illnesses, paying attention to their production processes. The individualized products of work, from this point of view, are configured as effects of forces at work, the desires and impediments in formation with the action flow. It is about not being restricted to such effects or products, but accompanying their composition. The worker body is a multiple plane, which cannot be reduced to a distinguishable union of individuals, since it is the pathway itself for the creation of the collective, its means of development. The collective, breaking with the dichotomy between individual and society, functions as a production means of the ways of being, acting, expressing, living and living together. The body goes through organized interpersonalities, moving them by modulations of the acting subjectivity.
The sight of the organism is limited to the apprehension of the functions in their prescribing relationships and the representations in their totalities of real, in a transcendence that goes beyond the creative variations in a dimension that is more than the movement of life. The perspective of the organism implies representational thinking (Deleuze, 1968/2006Deleuze, G. (2006). Diferença e repetição (2a ed.). São Paulo, SP: Graal. (Trabalho original publicado em 1968)), which seeks to suppress the intrinsic variability of work. Through the representational perspective, the activity, with its variables caused by unforeseen forces in the real work, have their senses always evaluated from the view of the work organization, defined by the attempt to depart from the productive body. We must then seek a non-representational approach to the organizational complexity that does not end in dichotomizations (Lorino, Tricard, & Clot, 2011Lorino, P., Tricard, B., & Clot, Y. (2011). Research methods for non-representational approaches to organizational complexity: The dialogical mediated inquiry. Organization Studies, 32(6), 769-801.).
However, even the organism and its representational mode of expression are created by the body, they appear as a collective mode of operation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1996Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1996). Mil platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia (Vol. 3). São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1980)). To intervene in work organizations, we must start at the body itself, of its experimentations, creations and assessments. This is possible with the creation of rules, standards and therefore values, happening fundamentally in the collective body of work itself. The scientific organization of work (Taylor, 1911/1990Taylor, F. W. (1990). Princípios de Administração Científica (8a ed.). São Paulo, SP: Atlas. (Trabalho original publicado em 1911)) is established by identifying, judging, selecting, analyzing, imposing and overseeing standards that are invented in the work collective and expropriated by it. The contemporary forms of work organization based on teamwork deepen this exploration of collective creativity. The work psychology, questioning the centrality of the productivity concern that dominates organizational psychology, turns back to face the experience and the workers' lives. It is how the clinic of activity develops, one of the work clinics (Bendassolli & Soboll, 2011Bendassolli, P. F., & Soboll, L. A. P. (Orgs.). (2011). Clínicas do trabalho: novas perspectivas para compreensão do trabalho na atualidade. São Paulo, SP: Atlas.; Lhuilier, 2006Lhuilier, D. (2006). Cliniques du Travail. Paris, FR: Érès.), which will renew the question of collective in the world of work, from a trade genres approach.
Genre's social mediator is a set of common assessments of tacitly regulating personal activity. We could almost dare say that it is the "social soul" of the activity... In fact, genre can be defined as the set of activities mobilized by a situation, called for it. It is a subsidence and an extension of previous joint activities and constitute a precedent for the current activity; what was once done by generations of a given environment, the ways choices were always decided in this environment, the checks it proceeded with, the customs this group brings... It is a both type of union and a set of resources through which individual action is tested and evaluated, constituting therefore a set of driving forces for its development (Clot, 1999/2006aClot, Y. (2006a). A função psicológica do trabalho. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes. (Trabalho original publicado em 1999), pp. 42, 44, 48).
Therefore, the aim is to address the work activity, monitor and promote the development of the collective work dimension, woven into the professional genre. It is the creation of a corporactivity as mediating activity, which enables the creation of a productive collective. Composing the body as a means to the plural dimension of the activity is to support controversies that cause the work to differ, constituting a cross polyphonic zone whose emotional and expressive dissonances can produce and embrace the transformation of the work significances. The controversy is the source of the collective (Clot, 2008Clot, Y. (2008). Entrevista: Yves Clot. Mosaico, 2(1), 65-70. Recuperado de http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/mosaico/index.php/mosaico/article/viewFile/22/18
http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/mosaico/index....
).
Regarding corporation - usually referring to worker organizations external to the work itself, such as trade unions, associations and councils -, we seek to conceptually redefine itself as corporactivity in this essay, questioning what has been produced under the term as a professional collective closure regarding interests and purposes of a supposedly homogeneous group. Therefore, we should not define corporactivity through a supposed equality of interests, conditions or goals, but through a common environment marked by differentiation, tensional multiplicity in a productive body. It is the tensioning between the differences (promoter of differentiation) that constitutes multiplicity (Deleuze, 1968/2006Deleuze, G. (2006). Diferença e repetição (2a ed.). São Paulo, SP: Graal. (Trabalho original publicado em 1968)).
At the end of this passage, where we promptly present a series of problematic propositions about the collective dimension of work, it is worth noting that "it is always interesting, in the concept analysis, to go from very concrete, very simple situations, and not the philosophical background, not even the problems themselves (the one and the many, etc.)" (Deleuze, 1993/2007bDeleuze, G. (2007b). Carta-prólogo a Jean-Clet Martin. In G. Deleuze, Dos regímenes de locos: textos y entrevistas (1975-1995) (pp. 327-328). Valencia, ES: Pre-textos. (Trabalho original publicado em 1993), p. 328, italics in the original). It is necessary, therefore, to return to the concrete situation and, going from there, discuss this series of conceptual issues. Faced with the theoretical limits, "it takes practice to cross the wall" (Deleuze & Foucault, 1972/2006Deleuze, G., & Foucault, M. (2006). Os intelectuais e o poder. In G. Deleuze, A ilha deserta e outros textos: textos e entrevistas (1953-1974) (pp. 265-273). São Paulo, SP: Iluminuras. (Trabalho original publicado em 1972), p. 265). Thus, how to develop the concept of corporactivity by analyzing the activity of bus drivers?
Our research methodology let go of a structured method, to allow the expression of work in its singular variations, its own problems. The research path is created along with the workers themselves, through conversations in the daily work life, targeting the problems in the production, which the researcher cannot predetermine. Thus, we developed a cartographic approach (Passos, Kastrup, & Escóssia, 2009Passos, E., Kastrup, V., & Escóssia, L. (Orgs.). (2009). Pistas do método da cartografia: pesquisa-intervenção e produção de subjetividade. Porto Alegre, RS: Sulina.) to monitor work processes in the urban public transportation, without attempting to anticipate them or conform them to our expectations as researchers. Randomly, between the years of 2010 and 2011, we met some bus drivers through friends or colleagues in common between the researcher and the driver; some of these drivers accepted to talk about their work and, through them, we met other drivers who also accepted to participate. Talking about work does not, in our view, means seizing workers' representation of what they do, but arrange a collective device to promote work analysis that would allow us to transform it. The meetings occurred at random times and scattered places - morning, afternoon or evening, with varying durations between 30 minutes to 5 hours in bus terminals, especially in the bus station rooms, in the drivers or the researcher's residence, in psychology offices, in the public university, in the bus during traffic, on the streets or stopped at bus station terminals, in road unions, on streets and squares - in such a way that cataloguing them is somewhat difficult, due to the informality that characterized them. This dispersion is also how meetings between drivers occur on a daily basis. Notes regarding the experiences reported were taken after the meetings.
Among the problems that emerged during conversations between workers and researcher, collectivity at work stands out. This is an issue that arises in various meetings and permeates many experiences narrated by the drivers. It is a real work problem, whose concreteness derives from the insistence and propagation of the situation and not the particularities of each case. Being common among workers, repeating constantly in their daily work, so that it cannot be isolated as individual occurrence, we have a unique work situation - only the singular repeats (Deleuze, 1968/2006Deleuze, G. (2006). Diferença e repetição (2a ed.). São Paulo, SP: Graal. (Trabalho original publicado em 1968)) - by which a collective experience is established. We are then led to avoid trying to explain the concreteness of work through a comprehensive and detailed description of individual cases taken as examples - which would result in a feeling of deprivation and lack of reporting on what's real -, so that we can invest in building a paradoxical situation that can integrate the multitude of issues that permeate the work situation. It is worth noting that this approach we invested in is the results of the conversations with the workers, who narrate their work problems as paradoxes, i.e., how tense situations that force one to think, and for which there are a variety of possible solutions, but never definitive enough to extinguish the problem. Therefore, it is not about assuming a position of "conversationalist researcher in everyday life" (Spink, 2008Spink, P. K. (2008). O pesquisador conversador no cotidiano. Psicologia & Sociedade, 20(spe), 70-77. Recuperado de http://www.scielo.br/pdf/psoc/v20nspe/v20nspea10.pdf
http://www.scielo.br/pdf/psoc/v20nspe/v2...
), of seeking to establish the mental representations of the workers, but of drawing on informal dialogues, the movements of their own thoughts at work (a)parallel to the movements of the body, due to the incessant variations of the real (Deleuze, 1970-1981/2002Deleuze, G. (2002). Espinosa: filosofia prática. São Paulo, SP: Escuta. (Trabalho original publicado em 1970-1981)). It is, thus, the construction of a transdisciplinary way of knowing that it is "somehow reinvented with every concrete situation" (Guattari, 1992bGuattari, F. (1992b). Fundamentos ético-políticos da interdisciplinaridade. Tempo Brasileiro, 108, 19-25., p. 24). The paradox of corporactivity, shown below, is our attempt to express the concrete work situation by presenting the problem that crosses several occasions experienced by the workers.
The collective body of work of the urban bus driver
The driver I encounter in any corner, talk and laugh and play with. And the driver who talks, laughs and plays, goes and reports me in the driving. It is the driver who reports. And the driver that talks.
What is this body that plays and laughs when meeting colleagues on work breaks and even while working talks, but at the same time is configured as a body of intrigue, surveillances, competitions and disagreements that end sometimes badly, be it in fights between individuals or conflicts between groups? How to cultivate a friendship policy amid clashes so destructive that end in sinister disputes between drivers? The bus drivers developed this paradox as a work experience, as a problem that persists on a daily basis, with the solutions in constant need of being invented, though always a partial solution at that. So, experience is not taken as a property, as something lived, and its expression is not defined as a representation more or less faithful of what is lived. Linked to a representational logic, the experience is stagnant in its creative movement and is objectified as a static past. Going on the opposite direction of this logic, experiencing work is finding a way to express it, which enables the production of other senses, or rather other paths for the activity.
In this sense, it is possible to define the work activity as consisting of paradoxes, common everyday problems of workers who invent a multiplicity of outlets for them without resolving them once and for all. The paradox of corporactivity, presented here, is one of those problems that show up repeatedly in conversations with the workers, since they are recurrent also at work. Thus, the situation of the driver who reports does not imply a monolithic substantiation of the situation. "It is the driver who reports" consists in a state of affairs whose production processes are crucial to analyze. The reality are not the things themselves; it is built from the actions and thoughts that are produced together, as a collective assemblage that allows the differences not to be lost when denying other perspectives of production. "It is the driver who reports. And the driver who converses." The and works as evidence of productive connections between workers and summons the conflictualities to inhabit a common plane that may be confronted with each other and co-exist due to the difference, to call into question it is, which refers thought to representation, to a still image of a veiled absolute truth, and the action of a reality taken as real and ready, waiting only to be recognized.
On the other hand, in the ways of expression, in the dialogic multiplicities - which are not restricted to speech and language, dichotomized into individual and social -, the and is expressed as or, which "means a system of possible permutations between differences that always return..., shifting, slipping... That is how... the tiniest permutation must answer to the new situation or indiscreet questioner" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972-1973/2010Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2010). O anti-édipo: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 1. São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1972-1973), pp. 25-26). This indiscreet questioner is the collective production itself, a receiver of confrontations between the different ways of work produced by workers (Clot, 2008/2010Clot, Y. (2010). Trabalho e poder de agir. Belo Horizonte, MG: Fabrefactum. (Trabalho original publicado em 2008)) and the impersonal dimension of relationships (Deleuze, 1991/2007a) to make sure the confrontations are not reduced and are not cancelled out as individual disputes. That is why (Clot, 2008Clot, Y. (2008). Entrevista: Yves Clot. Mosaico, 2(1), 65-70. Recuperado de http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/mosaico/index.php/mosaico/article/viewFile/22/18
http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/mosaico/index....
, p. 66) insists that
the collective in the Clinic of activity is not composed because people agree to work together. I think that to build a collective, it is necessary to first have a very precise observation of the activity conflicts themselves, as well as know it, to pinpoint the disunity among workers. When we are able to find the points of discordance, the collective is created. The collective is not made of and is not created on union, but disunity. You can see, in the autoconfrontations I have showed, that it is precisely the reason they do not agree that, in a way, there is a great mobilization, subjective, intense and oftentimes, there is still a great pleasure in arguing. I mean that controversy is the source of the collective, not the other way around. It is not the collective being a source, but controversy being the source of the collective.
Clot formulates the collective dimension as a paradox of disunity, which allows the production of the collective. In the clinic of activity, it seeks to re-establish the "ordinary function of labor" (Clot, 2006bClot, Y. (2006b). Entrevista: Yves Clot. Cadernos de Psicologia Social do Trabalho, 9(2), 99-107. Recuperado de http://www.revistas.usp.br/cpst/article/viewFile/25969/27700
http://www.revistas.usp.br/cpst/article/...
, p. 106), which consists in the confrontation of different interpretations of the workers about their work. Clinic of activity is a methodological device
that would be the way to change the work psychology among workers, and vice versa, since this device allows workers, with work psychology, to develop their ability to act... That is why it is clinical, for it seeks to transform the situation (Clot, 2006bClot, Y. (2006b). Entrevista: Yves Clot. Cadernos de Psicologia Social do Trabalho, 9(2), 99-107. Recuperado de http://www.revistas.usp.br/cpst/article/viewFile/25969/27700
http://www.revistas.usp.br/cpst/article/... , p. 100, 102).
The work collective is formed, expands or retracts, in its power to act as it sustains controversies, to allow an expansion of the number of possible permutations due to dislocations and slips of the confrontation between the activity modulations. It corresponds to the controversy in the expressive plane, the affective dissonances in the corporeal plane. Returning to the legacy of (Espinosa, 1677/1983Espinosa, B. (1983). Ética: demonstrada à maneira dos geômetras. In B. Espinosa, Pensamentos metafísicos; tratado de correção do intelecto; ética; tratado político; correspondência (pp. 69-300). São Paulo, SP: Abril Cultural. (Trabalho original publicado em 1677)) and (Vygotsky, 1933/2004Vigotsky, L. S. (2004). Teoría de las emociones: estudio histórico-psicológico. Madrid, ES: Akal. (Trabalho original publicado em 1933)), (Clot, 2006cClot, Y. (2006c). Vygotski: para além da Psicologia Cognitiva. Pro-Posições, 17(2), 19-30. Recuperado de http://www.proposicoes.fe.unicamp.br/proposicoes/textos/50_dossie_clot_y.pdf
http://www.proposicoes.fe.unicamp.br/pro...
, p. 21) suggests that "affection must become the main chapter of Psychology" and the focus of clinic of activity interventions. Especially when considering the "risk of seeing affectivity become, in the work organization, the management of an object like any other" (Clot, in pressClot, Y. (no prelo). L'affectivité en activité. In J.-M. Barbier, & M. Durand (Eds.), Encyclopédie de l'analyse des activités (paginação irregular). Paris, FR: PUF., our translation).
In fact, affectivity has nothing of homogeneous... affection is the result of a conflict that puts the subject activity and his personal organization to the test, while emotion refers, above all, to the palette of corporeal tools through which the subject responds to a situation... Emotions, corporeally experienced by each person, does not fail to be socially constructed and shared - sometimes even contagious. This is the reason, no doubt, by which they end up being deeply sowed in feelings, i.e., the collective representations and social tools of thought that convey norms, ideas and values (Clot, 2008/2010Clot, Y. (2010). Trabalho e poder de agir. Belo Horizonte, MG: Fabrefactum. (Trabalho original publicado em 2008), p. 9).
Therefore, it is not about appealing to the constituted individual, but the subjectivity production processes built by affections as forces that intersect, rubbing against each other, not necessarily opposed to each other, prompting detours as the source of a multiplying and singular collective. Affective assemblages, fugue lines in the social body (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1996Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1996). Mil platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia (Vol. 3). São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1980)), are the very construction of the collective as a means for differentiation expressed by the constitutive controversies of the body of work.
Friendship and groupality policy at work
The work is not usually defined as a space for establishing friendships. Work does not aim to form friends, but to collectively produce something that will circulate beyond those established ties. However, we cannot conceive the work collective as previously given to production. It is necessary to think of ways of building relationships at work, i.e. friendship policies permeating it. Policies are power relationships that compose various subjects in a given situation. A friendship policy that may, or may not, develop into forms of relationships, is produced, first of all, due to the modes of existence.
On the other hand, we must consider the impasses of friendly policies at stake in the work of a driver, and that emerge in conversation between professional friends. There is a cheating policy, consisting of allegations passed on to the company and made by their own colleagues. It is not possible to reduce the work of bus drivers to such political games, which act as a set of practices, but we must consider them for they are part of daily work life as one of its constant problems. Some drivers told us, during the talks that make up this research, that it is always necessary to pay attention to what is said and what is done, even among fellow workers. This situation persists as phantasmagoria, buoying the relationship of drivers between friendship and cheating policies.
This paradoxical tension of work collective policies sets up a situation through which the worker's activity passes, a problem present in their daily lives and that launches professional controversies to work postures of ethics, always in danger of slipping into a deadlock as a game of complaint and silence. In a work organization, what matters in the drivers' records are any charges that may appear, delation is a terrible weapon that threatens the development of friendly policies among the drivers. Any claim that is made against the driver is registered by the companies, regardless of an analysis of the situation in question, the delation procedure by a colleague set up a blockade on the development of work analysis, which gains ground in the informal talks between workers.
However, if this paranoia with delation is present as a labor policy, drivers continue to insist on casual conversations in the times and places they are able to build. Their collective are configured by diverse dialogues, at work and outside it, during terminal breaks or football matches on the weekends, and even while stuck in traffic, when a driver goes up the front of the bus and meets up with one of his colleague who is behind the wheel - it is worth noting that this latter is officially banned by the companies, which fail to recognize in their organization the importance of dialogue between their professionals.
These are meetings through erratic, random connections and due to working conditions in public transportation, which are part of the plane of production analysis and activity developments of bus drivers. We find here the means of the composition of the drivers collective, along with other urban public transportation workers with whom they establish various intercessions, during these unofficial meetings - which, always at the risk of triggering a closed collectivization mechanism upon himself, allow for the machinic engendering as invention of ways of being together.
We can speak of group processes at work and collective modes of production, seeking to imply the production of these collectives in ways that engenders work realities. Thus, we must distinguish the interpersonality of transpersonality in the trade (Clot, 2008/2010Clot, Y. (2010). Trabalho e poder de agir. Belo Horizonte, MG: Fabrefactum. (Trabalho original publicado em 2008)). If interpersonality refers to the collective work of a group of people gathered for work, the transpersonality is the set of values, norms and experiences that support this collective through a shared history. This transpersonal dimension is what allows, for example, two professionals who do not know each other personally to work together (Clot, 1999/2006aClot, Y. (2006a). A função psicológica do trabalho. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes. (Trabalho original publicado em 1999)). It is through the analysis of the interpersonal and the transpersonal that makes is possible to evaluate the degree of submission and autonomy of a professional group as an institution (Clot & Kostulski, 2011Clot, Y., & Kostulski, K. (2011). Intervening for transforming: The horizon of action in the Clinic of Activity. Theory & Psychology, 21(5), 681-696.).
(Guattari, 1972/2004Guattari, F. (2004). Psicanálise e transversalidade: ensaios de análise institucional. Aparecida, SP: Idéias & Letras. (Trabalho original publicado em 1972)) formulates an approach of the operating modes of the group, to which we can return to for the analysis of the collective body of work. He proposes two poles of group functioning, which are not established ways, but ways of operating that are always oscillating, in tension and construction, for it is not about ideally defining group types. The collective body of the worker, turned into organism by the delation policies that connect him to the work organization, it functions as a subjected group: a group closed on itself, which takes on laws to be followed strictly, seen as something outside and higher than his own existence, with leaders that concentrate strengths and group planning, with scapegoats within or outside the group and, finally, a group that does not seeks its death, its historical contingency, its status passing and its movement condition. This group produces for the organization, taken as a transcendent ideal to the particular production process. We designate this operation of the collective work as a corporation, in reference to groups of workers who organize themselves through the homogeneity of its members and the representational politics they trigger. On the other hand, there is also a subject mode of the group, affirming the work collective as a productive body and working with the possibilities of (dis)assembly of directions and standards, when the group itself looks for ways to take control of its existence, when it produces collective autonomy practices. Collective autonomy that does not mean isolation from other groups within and outside the organization, but a collective responsibility for what is created in conjunction. In the work collective, this corresponds to being able to establish evaluation criteria from a productive experience, with the tension between meaning and efficiency. This operating mode of the work collective is conceptualized here as corporactivity.
The production autonomy of the collective body of work is divided into clashes and alliances, crossing the group and implying a "death instinct of the group" (Guattari, 1972/2004Guattari, F. (2004). Psicanálise e transversalidade: ensaios de análise institucional. Aparecida, SP: Idéias & Letras. (Trabalho original publicado em 1972), p. 66), which, pointing to the aggression and violence involved in the creation of a group, acts towards dissolution. We should clear up that the concept of group death instinct results from a twist and a differentiating use of the psychoanalytic concept, to address institutional issues. Death does not necessarily point to total and global extinctions, the absolute end, but small deaths experienced at work, as drifts of meaning, problematizations of what is being produced, emerging conflictualities in the collective, that can enable changes in the way the group works, taking into consideration the timelessness of work, always completely unpredictable. This is an unproductive dimension, breaking the senses and uses turned habitual, calling for transformations.
The production of the concept of subjected group poses the problem of the exclusion of conflictualities, of clashes and of struggles that, from Guattari's (1972/2004Guattari, F. (2004). Psicanálise e transversalidade: ensaios de análise institucional. Aparecida, SP: Idéias & Letras. (Trabalho original publicado em 1972)) and Clot's (2008Clot, Y. (2008). Entrevista: Yves Clot. Mosaico, 2(1), 65-70. Recuperado de http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/mosaico/index.php/mosaico/article/viewFile/22/18
http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/mosaico/index....
) point of view, are the source of collective formations. Going this way, we leave the perception of conflict as negativity in the development of social relations behind, understood from stability, security and homogenization criteria. These criteria are side effects to groupality, sometimes made to be obstacles to the production process, understood primarily as invention, multiplicity and heterogeneity.
Unproductivity
From the encounter with Deleuze, Guattari abandons the concept of death instinct to build the concept of body with no organs. At first use, this concept is, above all, of an antiproductive dimension of desire in the social field. For the elaboration of the concept, launched in multiple debates in the construction of work Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972-1973/2010Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2010). O anti-édipo: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 1. São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1972-1973), 1980/1996Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1996). Mil platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia (Vol. 3). São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1980)) during the 1970s, the concept of body with no organs will have different uses, exploring new functioning dimensions. Not that the concept would modify to the point of losing its essence, i.e. its consistency strength as a specific instrument, but it certainly did not stay with the same uses, since the issues, ever since The anti-Oedipus till Thousand Plateaus moved according to the changing situations.
Which pathways for work analysis open up when addressing the antiproductive dimension of desire? (Taylor, 1911/1990Taylor, F. W. (1990). Princípios de Administração Científica (8a ed.). São Paulo, SP: Atlas. (Trabalho original publicado em 1911)) stands out as one of the most terrible enemies of the productive development the vagrancy, delayed work. It is to fight this unproductive work dimension that Taylor develops several devices based in the Principles for Scientific Management. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972-1973/2010Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2010). O anti-édipo: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 1. São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1972-1973)) convoke us to break this harmful dichotomy in work organizations between the productive and the unproductive, which aims to affirm the construction and the development by denying the variations and deviations that work suffer in its real route. At work, bus drivers face vagrancy as the random and casual conversations among workers in daily life. What is the relationship between these unproductive conversations at work and the production of urban transportation? Are these talks merely the opposite and the denial of productivity?
After all, what is productivity? What are productivity criteria? What values determine the values of productivity in a working environment? (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972-1973/2010Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2010). O anti-édipo: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 1. São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1972-1973)) induce us to think productivity dismantling the rule of the capital as a source of evaluation and valuation of work. They define capital as a body with no organs, because it constitutes a collective plane, where relationships are built, a common dimension and multiple polyphonic reference. How does this collective plane work? The capital plane is composed around a value that transcends production, and comes to determine and judge what is more productive and less productive through a totalizing comparison (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972-1973/2010Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2010). O anti-édipo: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 1. São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1972-1973); Marx, 1867/1985Marx, K. (1985). O Capital: crítica da economia política (Vol. 1, Tomo 1, 2a ed.). São Paulo, SP: Nova Cultural. (Trabalho original publicado em 1867)).
Capitalism promotes corporation - as opposed to corporactivity - in the work collective, this way subjected to the groups of workers, enabling the capitalization of their forces, integrating them in the organization's power games, which depends on productivity. To form a body of workers into an organism is imperative to connect it to the organization. However, the body of work never becomes completely an organism, because production depends on the live work in its autonomy - which the organization aims to capture, condition and lead. So, the talks of drivers during work, though censored by the organization to avoid loss of control, are not strongly combated, being even relatively tolerated, since work and its unpredictabilities are collectively managed by the workers through them. Therefore, productivity defined by capital depends on the rules built into the body of workers - evaluations inherent to the work processes as a means of regulating and monitoring the variations of the real - so that production does not get stuck.
Capital, as a transcendent criterion, universalizes an evaluation system, disregarding the multiplicities specific to each means of existence and work. Capital serves as a value that flies and judges, like a divine court, all the other values produced. Thus, everything that enters the plane of the capital, can be compared within the system of equivalence. He arrogates universal and produces a collective body that seeks to cover the entire globe, and further still. "It is reality", defend many who state the existence of this functioning. But to act and to think as if what is set is actually the totality of the real, is what the capital reiterates, despite its transformations. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980/1996Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1996). Mil platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia (Vol. 3). São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1980), 1972-1973/2010Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2010). O anti-édipo: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 1. São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1972-1973)) highlight the consideration of the production process coming from the bodies with no organs, relationship multiplicities in a medium that is never quite the same, never general and absolute. Even the capital is a body with no organs, but its functioning and its production methods lead to something terrible, to the nullity of events, since everything tends to become comparable. Seeking to dismantle the alleged unavoidability of the capital, putting itself as the crucial issue to face it, strengthening the pathways of creation and sustentation of other values specific to the located collective.
(Guattari, 1972/2004Guattari, F. (2004). Psicanálise e transversalidade: ensaios de análise institucional. Aparecida, SP: Idéias & Letras. (Trabalho original publicado em 1972)), therefore, attacks the ideal of meaning and the ideal meaning of existence in capitalism that, in Taylor's speech, is presented in terms of productivity and income. "Maximum prosperity can exist only as a result of maximum production" (Taylor, 1911/1990Taylor, F. W. (1990). Princípios de Administração Científica (8a ed.). São Paulo, SP: Atlas. (Trabalho original publicado em 1911), p. 26). This logic, focused on the increase in capital is what prevents the organization from realizing the vagrancy of the talks as a key element of production. Guattari hits the heart of Taylor's proposal, which focuses on a development perspective of the State and the "national efficiency", questioning the concept of the group from the perspective of a unifying goal. Such unifying objective - efficiency, productivity, prosperity, nationalism, category - is contested by Guattari in his claim to be the basis of the collective formations - such as group psychology, hegemonically, still proposes. A group is not formed by the detailed construction of an objective or a subject leader - such configurations correspond to the subjectification processes of the group.
(Clot, 2008Clot, Y. (2008). Entrevista: Yves Clot. Mosaico, 2(1), 65-70. Recuperado de http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/mosaico/index.php/mosaico/article/viewFile/22/18
http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/mosaico/index....
) discusses the problem of the collective composition through human labor, also affirming the disjunction as the power of collectivization. There is "a collective work of work organization that ensures the transfiguration of the official organization to 'keep it' as a tool when faced with the real" (Clot, 2008/2010Clot, Y. (2010). Trabalho e poder de agir. Belo Horizonte, MG: Fabrefactum. (Trabalho original publicado em 2008), p. 167). This collective work, which we refer to at the generic transpersonal dimension of the craft and at the body with no organs as the relational plane for the creation of worlds and subjects, paradoxically, wants to keep and transform the organization at the same time. Workers organize themselves from that which disturbs their work - the organization being the major obstacle - and subvert the blockages through appropriate means to dismantle the organization.
It is necessary to keep enough of the organism so that it recompose itself at every dawn; small provisions of significance and interpretation, it is also necessary to conserve, including to oppose them to their own system, when circumstances require it, when things, people, including situations that force us; and small subjectivity rations, we must conserve enough to respond to the dominant reality (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1996Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1996). Mil platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia (Vol. 3). São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1980), p. 23).
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1980/1996Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1996). Mil platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia (Vol. 3). São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1980)) indicate this way the need for caution in the social experimentation of subverting capitalist modes. The danger is stands out is to destroy, along with the forms of organization, the collective body of work. The prudence would come from the paradox of maintaining the organization, questioning it and turning it each time, into a struggle for the expansion of the power to act of workers to invent themselves and to invent worlds where to live. This way, we seek to resume communism, disengaging it the image of a totalizing project, to affirm it by singularity movements of social struggles machines. The corporactivity built by the informal talks of the workers consists, therefore, a communist power of work in the clashes with the organization. It is thus a way to compose communism as
the release of work as the possibility of collective creation... as a way for the release of individual and collective singularities, in other words, exactly the opposite of regimented thoughts and desires... To constitute a fighting machine, the movement must assume, as completely as possible, the contradictory relationship between singularity and capitalistic society, between ethics and politics... It is in direct conflict, in the same context of the natural ways of singular acting within the bosom where they are formed, that the struggle machines will develop their productive activities and their political action (Guattari & Negri, 1985/1987Guattari, F., & Negri, T. (1987). Os Novos Espaços de Liberdade: seguido de Das Liberdades na Europa por Félix Guattari e da Carta Arqueológica por Toni Negri. Coimbra, PT: Centelha. (Trabalho original publicado em 1985), pp. 5, 60, 62, italics in original).
Disunity and cooperation
The work situation of the urban public bus drivers - discussed by the tensions between friendship policies and control policies for delation, as well as between unproductivity and capital - leads us to conclude that corporactivity is established by a paradoxical relationship between disunity and cooperation in the activity. The disunity can mean contradiction, antagonism of forces and dualistic opposition, i.e. opposing forces that annul each other, reactive to each other; or it can be defined as a paradox, a tense coexistence of struggling meanings. Through this paradoxical way, disunity becomes the condition for the production of a problematic plane of activity, where one can invent a plurality of ways out, as a means of creation at work.
In the disunity as a contradiction, the worker's activity is hindered, enters into an immobilization movement for failing to devise a way out and for the problem of work. There is the annulment of forces, action disempowerment, as occurs when a complaint among professionals of the organization occurs, when conflicts cannot be sustained in the common plane. However, the way out invents itself always uniquely, unexpectedly, by sustaining the conflict as a union paradox. In this tension we are forced to think and develop the activity. (Clot, 2008Clot, Y. (2008). Entrevista: Yves Clot. Mosaico, 2(1), 65-70. Recuperado de http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/mosaico/index.php/mosaico/article/viewFile/22/18
http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/mosaico/index....
) points out that there is a collective production process not to be confused with a finished state, or a closed form, of group or society. The worker's body, the corporactivity, works and produces through disjunctions, expressed in controversial tensions of organized labor in functions that set the standards invented at work as repressive rules to its own activity. The work activity is disjunctive.
A disjunction that remains disjunctive, and which states, however, the disjoint terms, that affirms it throughout its entire distance without limiting one to another or deleting each form the other, perhaps the greatest paradox. "Neither... nor", instead of "or then" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972-1973/2010Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2010). O anti-édipo: capitalismo e esquizofrenia 1. São Paulo, SP: 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1972-1973), p. 106, italics in the original).
The collective is an inclusive disjunctive activity, a production of differences that resist equivalence and are not derived from comparisons between ready terms, affirmation of the differences through the relationship, invention of struggles and battles to build social bodies, open groups and gangs that are unfinished - and, therefore, are producers. The collective is a plane of the forces that make up the various bodies in its meetings. "From our perspective, a group is not a collection of individuals, but an unfinished community" (Clot, 1999/2006aClot, Y. (2006a). A função psicológica do trabalho. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes. (Trabalho original publicado em 1999), p. 38).
The social body is multiple, hybrid, composed. It can never be definitely integrated into a unit as a whole. It is always arranged and disarranged in collective, partial and strong forces that flow aiming life, means of life production. The bus driver body of urban transportation is a composition of partial forces, never completely defined, which participates in the multiplicity of the social body. The organism, however, is the over-determination of the work collective for a structuring mode that injects issues in a unifying order, an order that is (over)naturalized, which is distinct from the productive and historical nature of the work, which is always invention situated and partial. Despite being such unifying ordinations - work organizations - strained by history, sustained and maintained for denying its occasional character of emergency. It is about
a plane we could call organization... Anyway, it has an additional dimension, a surplus dimension, hidden dimension, since it is not itself alone, but should always be complete, inferred and induced from those that organize... It is, therefore, a plane of transcendence, a kind of design, in the minds of men or in the mind of a god, even when we impute a maximum of immanence, burying it deep in the nature, or the Unconscious (Deleuze & Parnet, 1977/1998Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (1998). Diálogos. São Paulo, SP: Escuta. (Trabalho original publicado em 1977), p. 107, italics in the original).
Therefore, issues related to work organization, the organizational overdeterminations, do not constitute the first plane of focus when it comes to considering the work processes, the productive activity, the movements of collective creation. The conversations of the bus drivers deal with the activity from the perspective of the collective work experiences, for it is there on which the organizational structure is based. If they remain attached to the organizational dimension as the starting point of the analysis, they end up leaving the productive dimension of work as background and something to set aside, from which triggers the organization's inquiry.
To the extent that the drivers upkeep the paradoxes of the activity as vertiginous principles of analysis and transformation of the relationships of social production, to develop in interferences and concussions in the work organization, its power to act expands, its body gains consistency to fight beyond merely reacting. The driver's paradox that talks and reports, here discussed, is one of these problematic foci by which the construction of the collective body of work is achieved. The urban collective driver's body itself is passing, a passenger. One can only understand it through the crossroads he faces and the solutions he invents that causes new problems in order to continue his routes. The corporactivity paradox is a problem to be faced body to body, disrupting the weapons of organizational power.
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Funding: Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Espírito Santo (FAPES).
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
May-Aug 2016
History
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Received
21 Feb 2015 -
Reviewed
03 Aug 2015 -
Accepted
28 Dec 2015