Operatoric Research Corpus
Studies in World-Formation
Section V
Work and Emergence Economy
Volume 11
Work as World-Binding – Relational Agency Beyond Function
The present volume brings together three contributions that pursue a shared theoretical question: what is work under conditions in which technical systems are increasingly able to simulate human performance, and what constitutes the specifically human form of work that structurally resists such simulation. The starting point is the observation that modern societies predominantly define work through output, employment status, or market value. This definition, however, enters into crisis once artificial intelligence becomes capable of formally reproducing ever larger portions of this output.
Against this background, the contributions in this volume develop an ontological redefinition of work. Work is not understood primarily as the production of goods or services, but as a form of embodied, self-determined interaction with the world through which social and ecological reality is stabilized. Central to this perspective is the concept of relational agency: work appears as a practice in which action, responsibility, and world-reference are inseparably intertwined, enabling the emergence of new forms of meaning, knowledge, and social order.
From this standpoint, artificial intelligence is not interpreted as a competitor to human labour in the conventional labour-market sense, but as a structural test case. AI makes visible which aspects of human activity are functionally reproducible and which are not. While many forms of output, decision-making, or innovation can be algorithmically simulated, the form of work that arises from situational responsibility, irreversible temporality, and concrete world-binding remains in principle non-delegable. In this context, particular attention is given to the concept of Eigenzeit, which designates the non-externalizable temporal dimension of human action in which decisions, responsibility, and consequences become irreversibly effective.
The volume connects this ontological analysis with an examination of the social conflicts that arise from it. If work is not primarily output production but reality-maintenance and world-binding, those forms of labour that frequently remain invisible within contemporary labour regimes come into focus: artistic practice, care work, activism, critical research, and other forms of self-determined, relational activity. At the same time, these forms of work often encounter institutional resistance, delegitimization, or economic pressure, since they can only partially be integrated into market-based or algorithmically governed models of labour.
The contributions therefore argue that the current transformation of work cannot be understood solely as an economic or technological issue. It concerns the more fundamental question of how societies organize their relationship to reality. If work is defined primarily through simulation, metrics, and interchangeable functions, there is a growing risk that social systems lose their capacity to recognize and correct real problems. In this sense, self-determined relational work appears not as a marginal phenomenon, but as a central condition for societal learning, democratic reflexivity, and the long-term stability of complex systems.
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