"Before the Law": immaterial labor, grad students

"Before the Law" is usually read as telling us something about The Law, and for a time it did. Today I am less inclined to engage with the pseudo-mythical object 'Law' and instead see it as a story about immaterial labor. Legal administration is one of the classical forms of immaterial labor (child-rearing/socialization/education being the other major example, pointing to the significance of patriarchy in bringing the one to the fore). What does the gatekeeper do but (what we call) immaterial labor? Without him the gradients of social channels collapse into each other; multiple ontologies violently attempt to reach equilibrium and crush the human in their waves of affect. So at least is the explanation for Law. And this story now extends far beyond the Law. The lost object is nothing particular, simply the rippling alterity that constitutes sociality.

The gatekeepers are essential to maintain these gradients. We should not allegorize their job but see them laboring honestly. What is more interesting is the position of the man from the country. He too has accidentally become an immaterial laborer. In fact, this is what he always wanted to be. He is petitioning the Law to become a gatekeeper (he is a graduate student). However, because he encounters the gatekeeper he is put in suspension as the object of that labor. There he performs the immaterial labor of suspending narrative and preventing the reader, the secondary petitioner, access to the Law. He is the proletariat of immaterial labor (he is a graduate student).