ABSTRACT
This chapter endeavours to set a framework for a renewed (critical) political economy of precarious, quantified work, through interrogating the corporeal and affective turns which have informed the emergence of new materialisms. Renewed debates on materialism have emerged in both feminist poststructuralism and Marxist circles, resulting from a reaction to the glut of cultural studies research that, for too long, focused on narratives and discourses rather than investigations of the ontological and the material. The chapter looks for traces of coherence between investigations in new materialisms, looking to the Marxist social reproduction literature for possible intersections. It sets the theoretical and philosophical groundwork for interrogating a critical political economy of the quantified, precarious self. The chapter theorises what it means for workers to be asked to both endure unprecedented levels of surveillance whilst simultaneously being asked to measure our own productivity, health and wellbeing as well as to permit others to track this information in the context of agility.
