Concepts of Digital Labour: Schelling’s Naturphilosophie

Abstract

This paper uses F.W.J. Schelling’s Naturphilsophie as a point of departure for theorizing the concept of digital labour. Beginning with Marx’s distinction between fulfilling and unfulfilling labour, it is argued that the former is labour immanent to, and in line with, Schelling’s notion of Nature as process and ungrounded ground, while unfulfilling labour externalizes Nature and attempts to use it against itself in the service of capital and the establishment of what I call a state-of-power. Schelling’s The Ages of the World is re-interpreted by exchanging Schelling’s notion of immaterial spirituality for digital virtuality, whereby digital labour is viewed as a consequence of previous forms of world historical developments in their entire contingency. While digital virtuality is in fact materialist in terms of both the labour that activates it and the substrate that sustains it, the materiality of the digital is often over-looked in favour of an implicit anti-materialist stance that works to disconnect the digital labourer from their online activity, and precludes the critical self-awareness necessary for an acknowledgement of their “playful” online activity as labour. The paper ends with an analysis of Mark Zuckerberg’s ideational attempt to “re-wire” the world via Facebook’s digital infrastructure, which begins (and/or attempts) to set the conditions of possibility for inter-personal interaction, and explores the possibilities for resistance available within Foucault’s concept of the care of the self.