What do autonomy, activism and self-organisation mean in the neoliberal context? A conversation with Antonella Corsani

This is a dialogue with Antonella Corsani on theses contained in her book "Chemins de la liberté: Le travail entre hétéronomie et autonomie"[1] (trans. Paths to freedom: work between heteronomy and autonomy), which was published in October 2020. Through this conversation, we would like her to elaborate on the essence of her arguments concerning cognitive capitalism - a concept that Antonella Corsani helped introduce into the theoretical-political debate - and reflect on the forms of activism that are based on (im)possible practices of self-organisation and autonomy (Böhm, Dinerstein and Spicer, 2010). We believe these concepts and practices are of particular interest today due to the pandemic era and post-pandemic capitalist conditions (Chertkovskaya, Alakavuklar, Husted and Rácz, 2020). Based on Corsani’s years-long engaged research, this interview is well-aligned with the themes of Special Issue, addressing the role of alternative organising that navigates through the tensions between autonomy, self-organising and cooperative/collective forms against the background of neoliberal capitalism in the French context. 

We would like to emphasise her investigative experience of more than fifteen years, first in the movement of “intermittent” workers in the entertainment industry, then in the movement of Business and Employment Cooperatives (BEC).

The so-called “intermittent” performing art workers in France have developed a broad movement of autonomous social mobilization that has anticipated the political demands of precarious and self-employed workers. In France, artists working in the entertainment sector are considered by labour law as employees, although they may work intermittently and with a multiplicity of employers. In other words, although the bond of subordination is weak or poorly characterized and they are not contracted to any company, they are considered employees. Therefore, artists as intermittent workers benefit, like technicians in the entertainment sector, from protection against the risk of unemployment arising from periodic breaks in paid work. Antonella Corsani and Maurizio Lazzarato also published a book (2008) on the movement of intermittents du spectacle, starting from the results of a social enquiry born out of the collaboration between militants of the movement and university researchers around the hybrid figure of temporary cultural work. 

Since the beginning of the 2010s, Antonella Corsani has conducted studies as a co-researcher[2] for action with Coopaname, one of the BEC.

BEC is a very original new form of cooperative, developed in France in the mid-1990s. It is a multi-activity cooperative, and its sales are generated by the “independent activity” of all “salaried entrepreneurs”. Every “project bearer” can ask to be supported by a BEC, and then they can develop their business project under the wing of the BEC. When independent activity begins to generate a turnover, the “project bearer” can benefit from the security of an employment contract. They become a “salaried entrepreneur”. The BEC issues an invoice to the salaried entrepreneur’s customers and pays a salary to the salaried entrepreneur. But also, the BEC pays Social Security contributions and taxes. The wage is indexed to the turnover realised by every salaried entrepreneur, who may choose how to declare working time. Finally, they may be associated and become a “salaried entrepreneur member”, sharing in the ownership and management of the cooperative. They can also choose to leave the cooperative structure to create their own enterprise, but this option is very rare. Through this atypical configuration of the work relationship, the salaried entrepreneur can benefit from social insurance while enjoying full autonomy and freedom in their activity.

BECs developed in the context of neo-liberal transformations and neo-liberal employment policies as a new “mode of government” in a Foucaldian sense, but they also constituted a political laboratory for the experimentation and prefiguration of a new horizon of self-organisation and emancipation beyond wage labour and individual entrepreneurship. As a political laboratory, the activism experimented in BECs detours the neoliberal techniques of individualisation and produces other collective subjectivities that rely on autonomy as a founding characteristic of these works. 

Created in 2004 in Paris, Coopaname transforms BEC into shared enterprises and constitutes a permanent political laboratory around the issues of power relations. 

BECs have thus developed on a narrow ridge, at the intersection of two different perspectives, between the implementation of neoliberal policies and the ability to reverse autonomy from a labour characteristic to a critical one in a cooperative practice. The BEC movement, particularly Coopaname, seems to have shifted the focus of political action to the enterprise as a common good. It is not only a question of resisting neo-liberal policies but also of making bifurcations and hacking the institutions of the wage economy.

Emiliana Armano (EA): Your book reports the results of a study that brings to bear thirty years of critical elaboration and practice of post-operaist thought, reconstructing clearly and punctually the birth of the concept of cognitive capitalism in the 1990s and its subsequent development, with the intellectual courage of taking stock of the fundamental theoretical coordinates of a key conceptual tool, central to the theory of radical movements. Your reflection is prudent to capture the neoliberal turn of the contemporary phase and the specific forms of governance of society and subjectivity to lead to the definition of the post-Fordist transformation in the de-structuring of wage labour. Bearing in mind the recent debate that has developed in France by you and the research network on the grey zones of labour relations (Bureau et al. 2020) and on the end of the dichotomy between salaried and independent work, in which I had the opportunity to meet and participate with Annalisa Murgia. 

I mean that if we look beyond the classic discourse on the dualism of the labour market, precariousness takes the form of a complex social process resulting from the hybridisation of subjective, contractual and organisational conditions (Armano et al., 2017). The theoretical elaboration on liminal dimensions developed by Christian Garmann Johnsen and Bent Meier Sorensen (2015) also fits into this broader perspective. In general, I would say that the interpretative framework of the past does not help us to understand the present, and the old dichotomies (autonomous/independent work; typical/typical; high skilled/low skilled...) do not grasp the dimension of the hybridisation between market and identity and therefore do not grasp the experiences of the subjects who oscillate between economic/contractual questions and symbolic/identity/cultural issues. They do not grasp the role of autonomy in the construction of the subject in the double sense: both in the dimension of its subjection and with regard to the possibility of constructing new forms of organisation and neo-mutualism. Here, I would like to ask what you think about the new social composition. In particular, how the grey zone notion can be mobilised to understand neoliberal subjectivity.

Antonella Corsani (AC): The notion of grey zone becomes a concept with Primo Levi. I think that it is by starting from Primo Levi and his theory of power that we can better understand the complexity of the “manufacture of neoliberal subjectivity” and this tension between subjugation and singularization, as a liberation from the mould in which our subjectivity has been forged. In Levi’s major work, “The Drowned and the Saved: Forty years after Auschwitz”, he develops a theory of power in the Nazi concentration camps. In the second chapter of this book, Levi introduces us to the concept of the grey zone by dealing with what he calls the hybrid class of prisoner-officials, a minority figure in the camps but a majority among the survivors. The grey zone is defined as a non-empty space with ill-defined contours, which both separates and connects the two camps of masters and slaves. In “Remnants of Auschwitz”, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes up the concept of the grey zone, this zone where the oppressed becomes the oppressor and the executioner appears in turn as the victim.

However, for Primo Levi, as for Giorgio Agamben, it is not a question of casting moral judgement on these figures who populate the zone that separates and connects victims and executioners, but rather of understanding the multiple roots of collaboration. Thus, it is a question of understanding the very necessity of this figure within the hierarchical structure of an authoritarian system and, at the same time, the techniques that allow for the fabrication of the subjectivity of the prisoner-official. The concept of the grey zone is, therefore, above all, a political concept, as the historian Anna Bravo points out, denouncing at the same time the trivialisation of the concept through the dissemination of the expression grey zone.

Being careful to avoid the risk of banalisation should not prevent us from daring to transpose the concept of the grey zone into contexts other than those of the Nazi concentration camps. Moreover, Primo Levi himself had envisaged this possibility, which he even considered a necessity. He suggested that if we want to know the human species, we should undertake the analysis of the figures in the grey zones everywhere.
If we move from the concentration camp world to the world of work in a large industrial establishment organised according to the methods of the scientific organisation of work, the figure of the foreman is certainly the one that conceptually approaches that of the prisoner-official. The sociology of work has shown little interest in this figure, the foreman. Yet, as historians have taught us, the study of the figure of the foreman can be of great heuristic interest in understanding how highly hierarchical and authoritarian forms of work organisation can function. The figure of the foreman, an ambivalent figure who emerges from the rubble of the artisanal workshop and is associated with the birth of the Taylorist factory and the reconfiguration of authority, embodies the complexity of labour relations and reflects the uncertainties of the boundaries between social classes. In this sense, the foreman constitutes "a prism through which to look more closely at the nature of 'authority relations' in the world of industrial work, relations marked by both consent and resistance in the context of a relationship - subordination - that is fundamentally asymmetrical" (Ricciardi, 2016: 245). The figure of the foreman, which is disappearing today, introduces us to the problem of the grey zones of labour relations after the crisis of the mass worker (a de-skilled worker subject to the scientific organisation of labour) and Fordist management.

In these grey zones, populated essentially by people in precarious situations, a multitude of heterogeneous figures emerge who have in common the fact of being double figures and, therefore, have a blurred class identity. In these grey zones, there is no foreman; the figure of the foreman is internalised through a set of devices for the fabrication of subjectivity. This does not mean that power relations have disappeared; they have multiplied and diversified, they have moved, for example, to the offices of the institutions responsible for supporting and controlling the unemployed.

To sum up, if the grey zones are consubstantial with the capitalist system, they are now fragmented, scattered and heterogeneous. The figures who inhabit them are not the foremen of yesteryear because there is no longer any need for foremen: the command has been internalised, and control is generalised, most often entrusted to artificial intelligence.

EA: Your elaboration highlights how autonomy is an essential feature of the whole post-Fordist transformation, not only as regards self-employment, not only as instrumental and organisational autonomy of the work process but also as autonomy of ends and autonomy understood as self-organisation for oneself. I think that you profoundly recognise the thought of André Gorz (1988), and on the other hand, I note that you go a step further in interpreting autonomy in heteronomy[3], both as an element of strength and in ambivalence and possible contradiction. As Sergio Bologna pointed out (2018), autonomy and cooperation are not given as “already there” but are the stakes, the space of subjectivation to be achieved within a process of mutual recognition and organisation to be invented, in the field of contention with the other party. Do you share this view, and what organisational implications do you imagine should be placed at the centre of new forms of mutualism that are able to grasp and place autonomy at the centre of heteronomy?

AC: Neoliberalism makes the autonomy of each individual an obligatory model and competition a regulating principle of society. In this perspective, we must grasp the new figures of work that are located in the grey areas and also the figure of the salaried entrepreneur.

So, what is autonomy in the neoliberal context? The question that runs through my book is the question of autonomy, or to use the problematic posed by André Gorz, the question of "autonomy in heteronomy". As Sergio Bologna points out and as André Gorz also emphasized, autonomy is not a given, an “already there”; autonomy is what is at stake. My dialogue with André Gorz revolved around precisely this question. I will try to develop my point of view by starting with two figures that are situated in the grey zone: the salaried entrepreneur and the entrepreneur salaried. The first is the result of the desire of companies to support the development of internal entrepreneurship: intrapreneurship. The salaried entrepreneur is, therefore, an employee who is encouraged and supported in becoming an entrepreneur within the company where he or she is employed. He will then be a co-shareholder of the new entity created (the spinoff). The image of the salaried entrepreneur is a mirror image of the entrepreneur salaried, an atypical figure from the French cooperative movement that emerged in the mid-1990s with the creation of the BEC. The entrepreneur salaried is a really independent worker but formally employed by the BEC, which supports him or her in the development of their entrepreneurial project. Finally, he/she can become an associate member of the BEC.

As employees, the salaried entrepreneur and the entrepreneur salaried are formally subordinated to the employer. But as entrepreneurs, both are supposed to enjoy more or less wide margins of autonomy at work, just like an entrepreneur, a business owner or a self-employed person. In many ways, these two figures are emblematic of the new autonomous work organizations, and they seem to embody the neoliberal subject of labour.

Indeed, the figure of the entrepreneur salaried can be considered, like that of the salaried entrepreneur, as the very embodiment of the neoliberal subject. However, it also contains within itself the seeds of its own subversion. At Coopaname, the largest BEC (approximately 700 members), these seeds are translated into the implementation of an enterprise project that subverts the neoliberal factory of subjectivity. The Coopaname experience combines, in a way, the project of autonomy as it was conceived by Castoriadis and the autonomy of work as it was conceived by Gorz. On the one hand, the autonomous society, as Castoriadis envisages it, is a society in which institutions are the conscious product of the collectivity. Autonomy is then the name of a project of conscious invention of the institutions that govern us. In this theoretical perspective, freedom as autonomy is not the absence of rules or institutions; on the contrary, it is only possible if there are rules and institutions. But these rules, these institutions, must never crystallize to the point of becoming foreign to those they are supposed to serve; they must be able to be changed in a permanent way. It is in this sense that autonomy is not conceived as a state but as a process, a permanent process of self-institution of the society. On the other hand, following Ivan Illich, André Gorz developed a conception of the autonomy and heteronomy of work based on its purposes. The heteronomy of work is not reduced to prescribed and/or subordinated work. Even if one is master of one's own time and of the ways in which work is carried out, work remains heteronomous if its goals depend on the law of the Other.

Coopaname is a cooperative enterprise of "employees without bosses". But "employees without bosses" is an oxymoron. If the condition of the employee is inseparable from the bond of subordination, if hierarchical subordination is consubstantial to the salaried condition, the existence of a boss, of a principal, of the Other to whom one must submit, is consubstantial to that of the employee. The heteronomy - that is to say, being subject to the law of the Other - of work is the characteristic of the salaried condition. However, in Coopaname, as in the other BECs, the entrepreneurs salaried are only formal employees. In reality, they carry out an independent activity; they develop their activity, accompanied by the cooperative, but without the modalities, the places and the times of work, and even the aims of their activity, being determined by the employer: they benefit from full autonomy to determine them. But heteronomy in work is irreducible to the bond of subordination that the employment contract enshrines. The reflections carried out within Coopaname deal precisely with the forms of heteronomy in the absence of a bond of subordination. The Other is then identified in the clients, but above all in "oneself". The work of the collective then becomes this work of self-awareness, a condition of autonomy.

Autonomy is always, inseparably, an individual and collective question. And this is where the perspective carried by Coopaname of making BECs shared enterprises makes a bifurcation and really starts the process of individual and collective autonomization. It is the collective dynamic (periodic meetings, workshops, setting up of ad hoc committees each time a new question arises, spring and autumn universities, promotion of collectives around a trade, brand or project) that goes in the direction of a co-production of the autonomy of each individual and the collective as a whole. But autonomy is a process, and one that is always incomplete.

Thus, despite some apparent similarities, the figures of the salaried entrepreneur and that of the entrepreneurs with a salary in the BEC refer to two very different social imaginations and two subjectivities that are at opposite ends of a spectrum. In one case, it is the imaginary of the game of competition through technological innovation, while in the other, it is the imaginary of cooperation within an innovative institutional form: the enterprise without bosses.

The two experiences refer to very different conceptions of autonomy in general, and of autonomy at work in particular. In the case of intrapreneurship, autonomy, understood as a weakening of the prescription of work and also as a sense of responsibility and capacity for initiative on the part of the employee, is thought of as a means of increasing the competitiveness of the enterprise. For BECs, particularly in the exemplary case of Coopaname, autonomy is more of an objective to be reached through an individual and collective process of empowerment based on cooperative interdependence and mutualisation. This is the current project: to become a “Mutual Work Company”. This project prefigures the possible overcoming of the alternative between freeing work and freeing oneself from work, because it is by freeing work through the BEC that the Mutual Work Company is likely to allow freedom from work.  In other words, if BEC prefigures a horizon of emancipation from labour, in the sense of liberation from labour as it is under capitalism, Mutual Work Company is likely to free up time for the development of free activities. I think it is important to highlight an aspect that often goes unnoticed. The BECs were invented in 1994 and were instituted only twenty years later, thanks to a political action carried out by the BEC movement. The "Mutuelle de travail" does not exist, it has to be invented, from below, and it has to be instituted, that is, the political dimension of the BEC action.

Finally, with Coopaname, the grey zone is overcome in a future beyond labour.

EA: You could describe some experience of self-organisation that goes in this perspective, that shows experimentation with new forms of mutualism. In this regard, in your book, the role of enquiry and co-research is fundamental as a moment of subjectification for the production of the capacity to act. At the end of the last decade, Workers in the performing arts in Italy have also been raising the issue of the production of solidarity in a non-sectorial way, saying that solidarity and income are not just for us, but for everyone, that is to say that workers in the performing arts have become the symbol of all the conditions ignored by a parliament immersed in a "political curfew". What affinities, continuities and divergences are there between your past experiences of enquiry with intermittent workers and your more recent ones with the Coopaname cooperative?

AC: For the Coordination des intermittents et précaires (CIP) as well as for the Coopaname and Oxalis cooperatives, the social enquiry conceived as a self-enquiry constitutes in many ways a tool for action and, at the same time, an instrument of emancipation. In the case of the intermittent workers, enquiry was a means of constituting themselves as a collective subject and asserting themselves as experts, to the extent that they were subjects who had experienced intermittence. The CIP thus succeeded in imposing itself in the public debate and in imposing the expertise of the reform of the unemployment insurance system by those concerned. Therefore, the conflict is twofold: around the unemployment insurance scheme and the neoliberal regime of the expert as a figure of knowledge and power. In the case of the cooperatives, social enquiry is oriented by the search for solutions to the problems linked to the relatively low level of income of its members and the discontinuous nature of that income. More precisely, in the case of the two BECs, Coopaname and Oxalis, the enquiry aims simultaneously to determine the meaning of the actions and to constitute the collective that carries them out. In this sense, enquiry turns out to be a democratic practice of change. In both cases, the social enquiry, beyond the motives that give rise to it, functions as a tool for reflexivity on work practices and life forms. In this sense, it also operates as a factor of de-subjectification. As a researcher, I participated in setting up the enquiry system but did not initiate it. The social enquiry was co-produced by engaging heterogeneous knowledge, that of the people involved and that of the researchers. 
Very specific to the French historical, social and institutional context, while the figures of the intermittent performer and the employee-entrepreneur seem to espouse the neoliberal condition, they simultaneously resist it and make the social investigation, respectively, a weapon of struggle and an instrument for transformative action.
Social enquiry, which involves researchers and non-researchers and is oriented by the search for solutions to problems, has double importance in the context of neoliberal cognitive capitalism. On the one hand, it questions the figure of the researcher who cannot (any more) claim to be "external" and "neutral"; on the other hand, it questions and destabilizes the figure of the expert, a central figure of neoliberal governmentality. Enquiry is not only a tool for the researcher to grasp the experience and the new subjectivities; it is, above all, a tool of de-subjectification and action for the actors.  I think it is essential to highlight the role of social enquiry in the years 2020-2022. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the experience of the survey has spread within the BECs.  The enquiry as a self-inquiry has been a tool to produce the common in a context of distancing from the world. 

The enquiry was one of the tools of cooperation in the pandemic context, in which one might have expected a precariousness of the employee-entrepreneurs. But this was not the case. The collective management of the crisis made it possible to achieve a priority objective for the BECs: access to partial activity allowances to maintain the level of employment. This major result, which could have been considered highly improbable given the specificity of the BECs, was achieved thanks to the close cooperation both between the BECs and between the “Confédération Générale des Scop” and the BECs. It was a question of developing and putting forward to the public authorities an argument justifying the legitimacy of the salaried entrepreneurs of the BECs to access the short-time work schemes. 

In addition, within cooperatives such as Coopaname, the collective frameworks created previously were mobilized to develop solidarity and mutual aid: how to develop the activity in a crisis situation? The salaried entrepreneur was not left alone to face the crisis caused by the pandemic and the measures taken to contain it.

But also, the cooperative played a critical role in occupational health and safety. The salaried entrepreneurs were accompanied individually on a day-to-day basis. Specific sheets for each profession (numerous in a multi-active cooperative) were drawn up by the cooperative, accompanied by occupational health specialists.

Finally, contrary to what one might have feared - given the fragility of the economic model and the activity of many salaried entrepreneurs - the BECs did not collapse; it was through cooperation at different levels that they were able to face the crisis. In a way, we could say that the more the political model is developed, the more it allows us to face crises, despite the fragility of the economic model. 

EA: One last question on the emergence of the most recent debate. I wanted to ask you how you read the transformation of subjectivity and autonomy in light of the ecological and pandemic crisis. Do you think that the pandemic crisis has provided elements to rethink the whole production model of Western society based on competition and performativity, that fear has provided elements for a radical reflection on the futility of life reduced to the production and consumption of commodities? After all, what we have had is a shock, a respectful message on the irreducible priority of the reproduction of life over the capitalist system of reproduction of commodities, which before the pandemic seemed to work so well according to the TINA model.

AC: For more than a year, I have been looking at the world from a window on a screen, just like you, just like all of us. My vision is very partial; I wouldn't want to confuse my dreams for reality. 

Just before the pandemic, I had launched the project of an issue of the journal EcoRev, a critical journal of political ecology created more than twenty years ago and which was sponsored by André Gorz. The title of this issue is Ecosophical Experiments (EcoRev, 2021). Ecosophy is a concept developed by Felix Guattari, one of the French fathers of political ecology. Indeed, for Guattari, as for Gorz, political ecology should not be confined to environmental issues, as it would be not only inefficient but also dangerous. Félix Guattari perceived two possible drifts of a purely environmental ecology: a right-wing and conservative ecology, even reactionary, and ecobusiness. Thus, he had forged the concept of ecosophy to signify an ethico-political articulation of the three ecological registers: that of the environment, that of social relations, and that of human subjectivity. In other words, ecosophy combines the relationship to oneself, the relationship to others and the relationship to the environment.

In order to produce this issue, I had imagined travelling and soliciting collective narratives of experiments that seemed to me to fall under the three registers of ecology. The idea of the narrative as a self-narrative was a bit like a self-enquiry in which we would see what works, what doesn't, and how it could work. In a way, the idea was also to make a book of "recipes" for social and political experiments that could circulate and contaminate desires.

The pandemic slowed down the project but did not weaken the desire of the collectives that had responded positively to the call. And there were very beautiful and sensitive experiences, I think in particular of three collectives of Marseille which discovered in joy the power of collective writing, which was also constitutive of making together. The three collectives intervene in sensitive neighbourhoods; they pursue the objective of allowing children to build their city, a city where we can breathe and co-breathe. There is the experience of a biohackerspace in Lyon, LaMyne, for which the collective writing developed during the pandemic focused on taking care of oneself and others. These are just a few examples. I imagine a pandemic of ecosophical experiments; subjectivity becomes by doing, by looking for solutions to problems, by practising solutions... in other words, by doing enquiry.

Acknowledgement: Antonella Corsani and Emiliana Armano would like to express their sincere thanks to Brian Holmes, who helped them revise the first version of the interview.

[1]     https://editions-croquant.org/sociologie/650-chemins-de-la-liberte-le-travail-entre-autonomie-et-heteronomie.html

[2]      Co-research is a process that overtakes the subject/ object separation principle, which is the foundation of traditional sociology. Co-research was developed in Italy during the sixties (Alquati, 2022). It is probably co-research that addresses, most specifically, the surpassing of separation between “investigator” and “investigated”. Co-research turns the inquiry into a “from below” social knowledge coproduction device based on cooperation between “investigator” and “investigated”. It provides a tool for conceiving egalitarian participation.

[3]     Heteronomy - that is, being subject to the law of the Other - of work is the characteristic of the wage condition.