Entreprecariat reader synopses and abstracts: Difference between revisions
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Silvio Lorusso narrates the perception of precariousness in relation to entrepreneurship through the different thoughts of writers, philosophers or social movements. “Fake it till you make it” is an expression that represents the existential crisis of the entreprecariat. Nobody assumes that is precariat because this could contradict the entrepreneur spirit. Even so in many countries movements have appeared claiming precarious situations such as San Precario, result of thirty years of policies in favour of companies and against workers. | Silvio Lorusso narrates the perception of precariousness in relation to entrepreneurship through the different thoughts of writers, philosophers or social movements. “Fake it till you make it” is an expression that represents the existential crisis of the entreprecariat. Nobody assumes that is precariat because this could contradict the entrepreneur spirit. Even so in many countries movements have appeared claiming precarious situations such as San Precario, result of thirty years of policies in favour of companies and against workers. | ||
=== | ===From Autonomism to Post-Autonomia: From Class Composition to a New Political Anthropology? ''by Joost de Bloois & Frans Willem Korsten''=== | ||
'''Abstract:''' | '''Abstract:''' | ||
This essay is a summary of the historical and ideological development of Post-Autonomia starting from the operaist and autonomist movements to its international situation. Where the beginning of the '80s signed the closure of the opening of an era of uncertainty and precarization, instead of a new horizon of self-valorization and autonomy, Post-Autonomia tries to resynthesize the old discourse and translate it to face to the new complexity of the relation between capitalism, state, multitude and subjectivity with the intent of delineate the role of the new non-subject in constant transformation. | This essay is a summary of the historical and ideological development of Post-Autonomia starting from the operaist and autonomist movements to its international situation. Where the beginning of the '80s signed the closure of the opening of an era of uncertainty and precarization, instead of a new horizon of self-valorization and autonomy, Post-Autonomia tries to resynthesize the old discourse and translate it to face to the new complexity of the relation between capitalism, state, multitude and subjectivity with the intent of delineate the role of the new non-subject in constant transformation. | ||
===Entrepreneurship of the Multitude | ===Assembly (Chapter 9: Entrepreneurship of the Multitude) ''by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri''=== | ||
'''Abstract:''' | '''Abstract:''' | ||
In chapter 9 of “Assembly”, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri attempt to redefine the meaning of “entrepreneurship”. The “entrepreneurship of the multitude” as proposed by the authors, is capable of forming new social combinations, pointing to autonomous social production and reproduction. | In chapter 9 of “Assembly”, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri attempt to redefine the meaning of “entrepreneurship”. The “entrepreneurship of the multitude” as proposed by the authors, is capable of forming new social combinations, pointing to autonomous social production and reproduction. | ||
===The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (Chapter 1, 2) ''by Richard Sennet''=== | ===The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (Chapter 1, 2) ''by Richard Sennet''=== | ||
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*Publisher and date: 2018 | *Publisher and date: 2018 | ||
===Synopsis=== | ===Synopsis=== | ||
Fake It Till You Make it | Fake It Till You Make it - Genesis of the Entrepreneurial Precariat is an article by Silvio Lorusso, that narrate the perception of precariousness in relation to entrepreneurship through the different view that writers, philosophers or social movements have about it. First of all to describe the current situation, we need to understand Millenials as technology humans main characters of the digital revolution with a constant uncertain horizon. | ||
Based on the words of Michel | Based on the words of Michel Foucault's who introduced the expression "Entrepreneur of the self", Lorusso establish a link between this description of entrepreneur and the current 20-30 years old worker, who has oneself as the centre of gravity of their work instead of their companies. Moreover, we can classify socially the entrepreneur following the social pyramid that Joseph Schumpeter presented. He saw the entrepreneur as the top of the social pyramid because of its precious ability to innovate. This vision was inverted by Peter Drucker who defended that everyone is call to free enterprise if we want to accelerate the innovation. As a result of all these ideas the entreprecariat concept was born. | ||
"Fake it till you make it" is an expression that represents the existential crisis of the entreprecariat. And it can be understood from two different perspectives. On the one hand, as an entrepreneur concept is defined as the existence of a product in order to obtain the financing necessary for its realization but psychologically speaking it is just fake your happiness till you are happy. If you mix this two concepts you can obtain a continuos optimization individuals that assume the failures on themselves. | |||
In relation to the concept | In relation to the concept "class dysphoria" introduced by Raffaele Alberto Ventura we can understand that entreprecatiat need to show themself as a rich individual with opportunities. Nobody assumes that is precariat because this could contradict the entrepreneur spirit. Even so in many countries movements have appeared claiming precarious situations. | ||
Finally, San Precario is described as a collective anonymous creation that emerged after thirty years of policies in favour of companies and against workers and which mission is still to be defined. Alex Foti, indicates three main objectives: urban power, climate justice and Universal Basic Income (UBI) | Finally, San Precario is described as a collective anonymous creation that emerged after thirty years of policies in favour of companies and against workers and which mission is still to be defined. Alex Foti, indicates three main objectives: urban power, climate justice and Universal Basic Income (UBI) | ||
The article conclude explained the possible paths for the future described as: "to replicate the mantra of precarized entrepreneurship or to try to collectively bring about an entrepreneurial precariat". | The article conclude explained the possible paths for the future described as: "to replicate the mantra of precarized entrepreneurship or to try to collectively bring about an entrepreneurial precariat". | ||
===Original text=== | ===Original text=== | ||
At first glance, the main common denominator for the large demographic segment that goes by the name of Millennials is technology. Those born between 1980 and 2000 are the first to have fully experienced the digital revolution, and already nostalgically commemorate its beginnings. Yet there is another aspect that distinguishes this generation from the previous ones. While the baby boomers have been able to count on a stable career and Generation X has complained about the limitations, for Millennials, a path deprived of detours is unrealistic if not outdated. It’s the very idea of a career that falters against a shared horizon characterized by constant uncertainty. | |||
Those who are now twenty or thirty years old are intimately aware that the center of gravity of their professional identity is located within themselves, rather than in the companies with which they temporarily collaborate. They are the company itself or, to use Michel Foucault’s words, they act as “entrepreneurs of the self”. If we think of the abundant use of similar formulas to present themselves on Facebook, the expression used by the French philosopher in ’79 seems trivial today, and therefore prophetic. | |||
But what does it mean to be an entrepreneur without having a real company to manage? In his youth, Joseph Schumpeter, an influential Viennese economist, considered entrepreneurs to be a rare species that stands at the top of the social pyramid because of its precious ability to innovate. Starting from similar premises, management guru Peter Drucker argued that to accelerate innovation, society as a whole would have to become entrepreneurial, getting rid of that disincentive to progress that is the permanent job. Drucker’s vision is today a reality: in the face of widespread economic and employment insecurity, Schumpeter’s pyramid has been reversed. Everyone is called to free enterprise (even employees, as the concept of intrapreneursuggests). This is the general sense of what we can call, with a dose of irony and bitterness, entreprecariat. | |||
When the entrepreneurial spirit gets to the people, entrepreneurship becomes entrepreneurialism. A specific practice is sublimated in common sense and sometimes in a legendary state of nature. Bengali social entrepreneur Muhammad Yunus, a microcredit pioneer, is widely quoted for his claim that stated that “all human beings are entrepreneurs. When we lived in the caves, we were all self-employed”. While TV programs celebrating an entrepreneurial attitude abound (such as The Apprentice, Dragons’ Den or the latest Planet of the Apps) the cult of Silicon Valley and his CEO gains praise, with notorious vlogger Marco Montemagno sharing the myths and legends of industry giants with the Italian populace. However, entrepreneurial rhetoric presents us with a paradox: while framing on Zuckerberg, Musk and Mayer as the main players of their own kind, we tend to bend over backwards to emulate their characters and their habits, taking note of their weekly diet and the hours of sleep they get every night. Entrepreneurial devotion leads to a reckless self-help exercise. | |||
The relapses of this atmospheric pressure are measured psychologically, emotionally and affectively. “Fake it till you make it” is an expression that embodies the existential crisis of the entreprecariat. In a strictly entrepreneurial context, the motto is used when simulating the existence of a product in order to obtain the financing necessary for its realization. Conversely, in terms of pop psychology, the slogan suggests pretending to be happy until one is truly happy. By mixing the two meanings, individuals become an incomplete product in constant optimization that resorts to a conspicuous optimism to present themselves as autonomous to others and to themselves. All this with the risk that, admittedly being the master of their own destiny, the responsibility for their own failures falls only on themselves. | |||
So we meet the fashion designer who pays the rent making home deliveries or the unemployed individual who calls himself a “startupper” at the bottom of the e-mail. However, the individual that we rarely come across is the one that openly adopts the point of view of precarity, given that this label contradicts the obligatory entrepreneurial pose. What distinguishes the current professional (and therefore existential) impasse is a generalized cognitive dissonance. A condition similar to what Raffaele Alberto Ventura calls “class dysphoria” in his Teoria della Classe Disagiata. If for Ventura the middle class feels rich even if it’s destined to poverty, the members of the entreprecariat need to showthemselves as individuals rich of potential in the light of a growing poverty of opportunities to express their abilities. | |||
In addition to the existential dimension of the entreprecariat, the mutual influence between entrepreneurship and precariousness in economic, contractual and social relations can be more concretely noticed. In the United Kingdom, the couriers of the independent IWGB union, in the pocket of the gig economy, claim their rights by stating that, “We are not entrepreneurs”. In the United States, what Paolo Mossetti calls entrepreneurship of despair is now spreading: an increasing number of families are forced to bet on crowdfunding to finance their medical expenses, inventing campaigns that require managerial skills and familiarity with the internet. In Japan, those employees without a fixed-term contract that have several low-profile jobs and whose relationship with freedom sounds like a farce are called “freeters” (neologism that combines the English word ‘free’ to the German word ‘arbeiter’). In Italy, we are witnessing the sorrows of the “popolo delle partite IVA” (literally “the VAT people”), whose members are often independent only on paper, while there’s an increase in the number of state programs to convert NEET’s, young people who don’t have a job and have stopped looking for it, in passionate startuppers. Finally, there are admittedly militant positions on the field of the entreprecariat. In her recent Non è lavoro, è sfruttamento, Marta Fana offers a bleak portrait in which precariousness itself emerges as the result of thirty years of policies in favor of companies and to the detriment of workers. | |||
If so far we have interpreted entrepreneurship from the rhetorical perspective, it’s perhaps possible to recognize a genuine entrepreneurial energy intrinsic to precarity. This is what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri propose in Assembly, a programmatic essay that extends the famous trilogy of the Empire. An “entrepreneurship of the multitude” rejects the image of the demiurge entrepreneur who extracts innovation by orchestrating cooperation from above and, on the contrary, favors the autonomous and horizontal administration of society, evident to the authors’ eyes in the dynamics of the new insurrectional movements. On the other hand, the San Precario brand, a collective and anonymous creation emerged during the first tumults born explicitly under the banner of the precariat, betrays at the very least a “bottom-up” entrepreneurial inclination. | |||
However, after over ten years from the first appearance of the saint, there’s still no agreement on what the fundamental mission of precariousness is. In his recent General Theory of the Precariat, Alex Foti, an activist who contributed to the canonization of San Precario, indicates three main objectives: urban power, climate justice and Universal Basic Income (UBI). Ironically, this last goal is thrilling for some of those entrepreneurs active in the United States who are currently the object of worship. Hence the risk that if a modest sum of money were to be offered unconditionally and distributed to all citizens, this could bury once and for all that remains of the social welfare. Thus, while we await with anxiety or trepidation the advent of the UBI, the possible paths seem to be two: to replicate the mantra of precarized entrepreneurship or to try to collectively bring about an entrepreneurial precariat. | |||
== | ==From Autonomism to Post-Autonomia: From Class Composition to a New Political Anthropology?== | ||
*Author: Joost de Bloois & Frans Willem Korsten | *Author: Joost de Bloois & Frans Willem Korsten | ||
*Publisher and date: | *Publisher and date: 'Rethinking Marxism', Volume 26, Issue 2, April 2014 | ||
===Synopsis=== | ===Synopsis=== | ||
In 1970 Autonomism exposed the new role of the state and the intimate working of biopolitics and surveillance in the Italian crisis context called 'years of lead', with the aim to put into practice self-evaluation and autonomy in the very moment of its historical disappearance from the core of the social factory' (Tronti), later neo-liberalism. At the end of the '70s and with the repression of autonomism in the early '80, the end of every possibility to implement the emancipatory ideal and the birth of a new series of suffering subjects was decreed. Here the debate from premonition of an anthropological mutation (Autonomism) moves on the research for a possible antidote through the direct confrontation with the complexity of the real (Post-Autonomism). | |||
The analysis of the social condition in the new 'state of exception' (Agamben), is seen as the need to create a new social sphere outside of power (Berardi), in a reality in which a radical disjunction has occurred. Sometimes perceived as rupture (Morfino) or an ontological metamorphosis, that manifests itself in a general 'absence of memory and future' (Negri) that needs a search for continuity (Shukaitis). In this context the formation of a new subject is emerging. Assuming that the solution of the state to the crisis consists in reconstructing the system by reintegrating the antagonistic components (Negri), and that this process generates an ambiguity of values and an inability to develop a radical imagination (Shukaitis), arise the needs for awareness of such mechanisms, of how self-valorization is absorbed and twisted by the perversion of the state and capital (Berardi), and the need to avoid capitalist narratives of reappropriation. The focus then shifts to the role of 'cognitariat'. Where the bipolar logic, hyperactivity of work and consequent depression, characterizes the contemporary subject drained by the crisis and transformed into a non-subject opposed to its juridical person, the only solution is the autonomy of mental labour, capable of recombining the social elements in their perennial mutation according to a non-accumulative / non-competitive / non-aggressive principle (Berardi). | |||
The analysis of the new subject is also articulated in its relationship with the multitude. Where the politicization of the processes of subjectification has generated branded and distorted subjects (Tiqqun), the work of the multitude is described as an animal body, embodying the 'animal spirit', feeding the parasitic economy of advanced capitalism. Here the redefinitions of the commons enable us to face this 'evil' nature of the multitude, and means recovering the productive animal force before its turned into the dark matter of capitalism.(Pasquinelli). This ambivalence of the multitude is also seen as the force of negation of language that radicalize aggression, and the reconfiguration of the political animal as a linguistic animal.The uncertainty introduced by the multitude, derives from the impossibility open to the world of leaving the natural state, and the self-government, against this ambivalence of language, is configured in the use of the ritual as a process of acknowledgment of the uncertainty, primal setting of the original hominid and not as something that should be removed(Virno). | |||
In conclusion the discourse is addressed into an anthropological investigation, social and individual, as the main feature of Post-Autonomism, capable of criticize the different incarnations of the anthropological subject, to not be stuck in a 'common' as voluntary servitude and self-dictatorship. The reappropriation of the 'common' must first of all produce a drastic auto-critique and this lead to the necessity to rethink the character of academic knowledge production and the intellectual. Starting from the observation that universities are not anymore the avantguard of knowledge-production, is proposed the 'machinic intellectual', one-man, interface and resistor of the circuit in contraposition to the intellectual as representative of a large social cause(Bratich), and the critical use of academic disciplines to expose underground realities as cartography (Casa-Cortès, Cobarrubias). | |||
===Original text=== | |||
1. Absent memories, absent futures? | |||
As early as 1981, that is to say in the midst of government repression of the autonomist movement and its remains, Toni Negri writes the following: The class composition of the contemporary metropolitan subject has no memory because it has no work, because it does not want commanded labour, dialectical labour. It has no memory because only labour can construct for the proletariat a relation with past history. […] The existing memory of 1968 and of the decade that followed is now only that of the gravedigger… [….] Communist transition is absence of memory. 1 The quote addresses some of the key issues that we want to deal with in this introduction: the relation between labor and history, the ontological status of labor, the social formation and status of contemporary subjectivity in connection to the history of autonomist and post-autonomist thinking. The quote also testifies, with hindsight, of a certain historical irony. At the very moment when the Italian state seeks to actively repress the actuality of the autonomist movement, Negri declares that neither this repression nor the combative persistence of some of his former comrades makes sense, since “communist transition is the absence of memory”... Yet autonomist and operaist thought did have an afterlife. Especially over the past ten tot fifteen years the memory and resurgence of autonomist ideas and strategies in both activism and critical theory have been vital. In fact, the “class composition of the contemporary metropolitan subject” owes quite a bit to the relation with the recent past and the ways in which this past has been reworked and thought through by theorists like Negri himself, in their transition from the operaism/autonomism toward post-autonomist thinking. One only has to look at the syllabi in political and aesthetic theory to see how persistent autonomism’s memory in fact is. Toni Negri, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi, and Paolo Virno have become household names for students and activists alike - although it is instructive to see who does not figure on this list, for instance the autonomist feminist Silvia Federici. ‘Postautonomism’, or at least the conceptual nebula that it refers to, has offered new readings of ‘bio-politics’, ‘precarity’, cognitive, affective and ‘immaterial labour’, the ‘social factory’, the ‘social subject’ and so on. Often it is packaged as ‘Italian thought’. However, as Stevphen Shukaitis writes: Over the recent years, there has been a veritable explosion of interest in the political current of Italian workerism, operaismo, more commonly referred to as autonomism. […] Despite this, attention paid to this development has almost inverted the workings of the radical imagination of autonomist politics. While the theoretical vocabulary and language of autonomist politics has proliferated like so many Brooklyn hipsters, fittingly enough, it has done so in a superficial manner. Paradoxically, the radical intent underlying autonomism has seemingly vanished. Rather than understanding capitalist development as having been determined by the movement of working class resistance, autonomist concepts have been used in ways that make capitalist development seem like a hermetically closed, self-directing process. (Shukaitis 2009, 32) The aim of this issue of Rethinking Marxism is to propose a different reading. That is to say, not to package post-autonomism as a supposedly uniform ‘Italian thought’ – or its twin ‘the Italian difference’ – since precisely the life and afterlife of autonomist thought demonstrates constant bifurcations and altercations, rupture upon rupture, palimpsest upon palimpsest. As the work of Steven Wright, Sergio Bianci, Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, Gigi Roggero and others shows, the history of (post- )autonomism has in fact many different temporalities. There is the shorter version, as written by Sergio Bianci and Lanfranco Caminiti, Marcello Tari and others. It spans the years 1973-1979 and shows the cultural, political and affective density of the autonomia movement, which included operaism/workerism, feminism, counter culture and so on. There is the long version, as written for instance by Steven Wright (Wright 2002), from operaismo in the narrow sense and its key concepts, to the ultimate diffusion into autonomia’s – the post-operaismi’s – reworking of operaist ideas, as sketched by Guido Borio and the authors of Futoro anteriore (Borio et al 2002). It is perhaps the clampdown on the autonomist movement towards the end of the 1970’s that is its most instructive moment, when it exposes the new role of the state and the intimate workings of biopolitics and surveillance. It is partly because of the similarities between that context and ours that the memory of autonomism is so much more than just that of ‘the gravedigger’, as Negri had it (and, obviously, Negri’s own international standing testifies to this). Instead of the ‘Italian difference’, we might speak in the contemporary context of the generalization of the Italian state of exception of the late 1970’s. The international dissemination of autonomist ideas and strategies is evidently closely related to this. To a very large extent, the appeal of autonomist thought today proceeds from autonomism’s traumatic end game, in its attempt to think and put into practice self-valorization and autonomy at the very moment of its, perhaps ultimate, disappearance in, first, the social factory and then neo-liberal subsumption. As in accordance with this, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi describes the Autonomia-moment in terms of “passage” and “premonition”. For him, in 1977, the time is out of joint, for we witness the closure and dissolution of “the modern horizon” (Berardi, 2009, 14). This is to say that we witness the end of the modern emancipatory ideal and concurrent modes of struggle and the emergence of a new transformative subject. 1977 thus becomes the year of a “passage beyond modernity” (27), of the “premonition of an anthropological mutation” and its “possible antidotes” (16), and all this in the context of the installation of the state of exception, the history of which we have traversed over the past three decades, be it intensified and modulated. Berardi’s argument about the relation between autonomism and history becomes even more pronounced when he states that the very name autonomia testifies to what he calls an implosion of the future. The future, as the horizon of political, social or sexual emancipatory thought, dissolves. According to Berardi, autonomia represents the first and most poignant attempt to endorse this dissolution. This is also, however, where according to Bifo a future beyond the future lies for autonomist thought: “We need to resume the thread of analysis of social composition and decomposition if we want to distinguish possible lines of a process of recomposition to come” (31). Autonomia should help to realize the “exodus from the kingdom of exploitation and the creation of a new social sphere, which has nothing to do with power, labour or the market” (25). This issue of an absent or viable future – and we recall the title of a pamphlet issued during the University Occupations in California in 2009: Communiqué from an Absent Future – is also central in what Negri’s calls, in Time for Revolution, “the teleology of the common” and the ontological transformation that “frees us from sovereignty” (Negri 2003, 226-227). In fact, the term that Negri uses to label this teleology of the common is dystopia: “While utopia appropriates a future fully determined, the common language of dystopia invests a tocome that remains empty. But dystopia is vigorous because it projects the power of innovation into the void” (236). In Negri, it is precisely the absence of a future that defines the temporality of the constituent power of the multitude. If the passage from modernity to post-modernity is the passage from utopia to dystopia, this passage becomes the precondition for “a power that extends the common into the to-come, that constructs bodies in common on the edge of time” (250). This constitutive power extends itself from its biopolitical base, “across all horizons of being, and so to every instant of temporality” (233), thus realizing what Negri, as in the quote with which we began, called “the absence of memory”. It concerns not so much a defeatist dystopia, then, that acknowledges the vanity of past struggles. On the contrary, it is a dystopia that remains entirely constructive, and that takes leave of the “Power of the State and every transcendental illusion in order to produce new common co-operative temporalities” (259). There is no before or after the multitude, then. There is but the to-come-ness of bio-political generation, since generation is something that “proceeds from the multitude” (232). Negri’s movement, however, from a modern political statist temporality (geared towards a future horizon) to a post-modern dystopian temporality (rooted in bio-political generation) is criticized - rightly, in our analysis - by Vittorio Morfino.2 The latter shows how the so-called absence of memory in Negri is in fact operated by enforcing a rupture in ontological terms, specifically two ontologically distinct forms of time: a time of power and a time of potential, or the empty time of state repression and the full time of living labour (Morfino 2010, 269). In Morfino’s reading, Negri radically disarticulates ontology and history. It is out fear for recuperation within a dialectically shaped history, intimately associated with the workings of power, that Negri defines the multitude not so much in terms of a to-comeness but of “the eternal present of ontology” (269). Or to put this differently, a paradoxical to-comeness without memory nor future condemns the multitude to the eternal present that is characterized by metamorphosis, that he defines as “an inner and collective modification/transformation, both singular and ethical, led in the multitudes and by them” (Negri in Chieza and Toscano 2009, 19). Yet, going back to Negri’s sources Spinoza and Althusser, Morfino argues that for these thinkers the multitude is no less than the articulation of, or Spinozian connexio between, multiple temporalities that are irreducible to an essential contemporaneity. In Morfino’s reading, Spinoza and Althusser demonstrate that the concept of ‘multitude’ shows the “primacy of the encounter” over form – as Negri would no doubt agree on. However, this signifies the dissolution of both horizon and contemporaneity in favor of the infinite multiplication of temporalities for which, as Morfino writes, “power, violence and ideology are not the other, the empty shell that imprisons it, but the form itself of its intertwined necessity” (269). For Morfino, consequently: The point is not to operate the imaginary dissolution of power […] to make way for the Dionysian triumph in an ontological beyond […] but to think the non-contemporaneity of the multitude in its radicality, the articulation of its multiple times, through an archeology of the present from which may result the formulation of a complex strategy that is up to the task and the complexity of the planes and the strata of the real. (Morfino 2010, 269). | |||
This non-contemporaneity of the multitude is caught in a complex connexio of a multiplicity of encounters and the effects they produce, for instance between the still active residues of Fordism and Taylorism in the post-Fordist condition, of modernity and antemodernity, of a variety of libidinal investments, and so on. Differentiating between constituted and constituent power therefore might not be a matter of operating an ontological fracture, but rather, as Stevphen Shukaitis argues, of being able to tell the difference “between a living social struggle and one that has become undead” (Shukaitis 2009, 46). Post-autonomism here might mean to remember that class composition is, precisely, a continuous process – and that we are facing an antagonism that continually shifts. For Shukaitis, we need “to keep open an antagonism without closure that is continually composed and recomposed, to develop the necessary tools to resist the pervasive subdivision and suburbanization of the radical imagination” (10). This is a strategy that, in fact, works on rather than against the “energies unleashed around us” and might take us “far from where we might like to go” (44) – not in the least by refusing “to fetishize particular dramatic, visible moments of transformation”. (15) Although the criticism with regard to Negri is not explicit, here, it is of relevance. The absence of a foreseeable future, rather than being transformed into an ontological dystopia, sanctions the more brutal lessons of the experience of historical autonomism. The future might give you exactly what you were asking for, but with wholly different intent and consequences. One evident example would be the afterlife of the precario bello (the ‘beautiful precarity’) of the late 1970’s… | |||
2. Subjects in Formation: From ‘Social Worker’ to ‘Cognitariat’ | |||
For Shukaitis the actuality of autonomist thought lies precisely in it never having shunned the complexity of the strata of the real but in having forced us to confront these head on. Against the absence of memory, autonomism has, as Shukaitis calls it, “played the Marxist LP backwards” to reveal how “the social technologies and processes through which social insurgency and revolt are turned back against themselves and incorporated into founding and modifying regimes of accumulation and dispossession.” (2009, 39) If today we can indeed speak of a “crisis in the radical imagination” it is to the extent that it reflects “the inability or refusal to see the ways in which many of the horrors we rage against today are precisely the dreams of yesterday’s revolutionaries turned upside down.” (47) This in fact echoes the operaist Negri, who writes in 1977 in Domination and Sabotage: For capital there is no problem: […] the solution of the crisis consists in a restructuring of the system that will combat and reintegrate the antagonistic components of the proletariat within the project of political stabilization […] The continuing work of reinforcing the state-form – that is, of the imposition of the law of value (albeit in continuously modified form) - as a measure and a synthesis of stabilization and restructuring – has never faltered. (2005, 232- 233) If the power of the contemporary Crisis-State, as Negri calls it (238), lies in the fact that its content is nothing more than a continual restructuring to re-impose the law of value, that is as empty as it is efficacious and violent (because of this vacuity…), the practical and theoretical starting point remains not the abandonment but “the intensification of both the concept and the experiences of proletarian selfvalorization” (235). Or, as Berardi writes: “the process of the becoming autonomous of workers away from their disciplinary role has provoked a social earthquake which triggered capitalist deregulation” (2009, 76). The various experiments of operaist and autonomist workers’ self-valorization – and to a larger extent: of the advent throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s of a multiplicity of newfangled socio-political subjects – were not left unanswered. They were, in fact, met with the ever-increasing flexibilization and the fractalization of labour. One meaning of ‘post-autonomous’ for contemporary critical thought might include the awareness of the ambiguity and complexity of self-valorization, such as its appropriation, torsion and ultimate perversion by state and capital. With Berardi, we might say that “there is a close relationship between [the autonomist notion of] ‘refusal of work’, informatization of the factories, downsizing, outsourcing of jobs and the flexibilization of labour” (76). However, as Berardi also stresses (and omits to develop in his own writings), we should be cautious not to reduce this relationship to a simplistic narrative of cause and effect. Post-autonomous thought should avoid both the narrative of capitalist reappropriation of a supposed pure desire for self-valorization and the narrative of the fundamentally speculative character of such a desire as merely reflecting tendencies inherent to capitalism. What is not yet theorized enough is what happens between these two narratives: which institutions and apparatuses (re)produce, capture and thwart any such desire? Moreover, is ‘desire’ the most satisfactory category? Here, the ontological rift operated in Negri’s recent texts and Berardi’s techno-pathological mantra that “the self-organization of cognitive work is the only way to go beyond the psycho-pathic present” (82) are equally unsatisfactory. In part, we might argue that post-autonomous thought has resulted from the frictions that were inherent to the complex relationship between workerism/operaism proper and Autonomia as a movement that reunited a variety of socio-political claims and appeals for the recognition and formation of new forms of subjectivity – political, professional, sexual and otherwise. On the one hand – and this is what undoubtedly constitutes their ongoing actuality – workerists like Mario Tronti analyzed adequately that “at the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation becomes a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society becomes an articulation of production” (Tronti in Wright 2002, 37). On the other hand, the Autonomia movement showed that operaismo failed to fully grasp the theoretical and activist consequences of its analysis of new class compositions and social subject formations. When Tronti writes that “the whole of society exists as a function of the factory”, for instance, the emphasis is still too much on the factory and its correlated forms of subjectivity. For the autonomists of the 1970’s, such as Christian Marazzi, the operaists “failed to realize that the state, through its strategy of bypassing the factory as privileged instrument of command […] had begun the formation of a new subject outside of the relations of production” (Marazzi in Wright 2002, 209). Today, most exemplary, this formation continues to use the instruments of debt and rent, and the marketing of personality and sexuality in a consumerism apparently unharmed by a half-decade of crisis. Conversely, for Steven Wright, the demise of Autonomia lies in the fact that, having abandoned the factory as a matrix for the analysis of new social and subjective formations, it in fact got lost in the intricacies of the new modes of subjectivation and, we might add, lost sight of the dialectic that tied these to reconfigured forms of capitalism and the state, even if the latter appeared in its emptied-out form as CrisisState. So far, post-autonomous thought has negotiated this tension by the recognition of new modes of subjectivation as an intrinsic part of capitalist and state restructuring. But we may ask if key concepts such as ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘cognitive capitalism’ are actually capable of drawing the line between an emancipatory potential and mere power effects, and to what extent this affects strategic notions such as ‘exodus’ (see below, paragraph four). In for example Paolo Virno and Matteo Pasquinelli’s work, as we will see, the ambivalence of the autonomous conceptual vocabulary becomes pivotal, but also results in a Russian doll effect when the recognition of ambivalence generates the search for new conceptual safeguards. Here, we touch upon a, if not the core problematic of operaism that has remained equally fundamental to Autonomia: the refusal of any form of mediation between proletarian emancipation and the (history of) capitalism. The ‘refusal of work’ constituted the refutation of capitalism’s most basic category, labour, both practically and theoretically. The core principles of operaism/autonomism are grounded in an ingenuous but far-reaching logic: no self-valorization can pass through the categories laid out by the adversary. It is a matter of all or nothing. This idea stands its ground in post-autonomism when the multitude’s emancipation takes place in capital’s beyond – that is to say, not so much a historical beyond, but rather in the construction of a world parallel to it. Hence post-autonomism’s idiom of ‘exodus’, ‘desertion’ or ‘ontological leaps’. Even if post-autononism draws heavily upon the techno-scientific dimension of contemporary capitalism – veering at times, in Berardi in particular, towards techno-determinism – it does not see in this an instrument for negotiation or mediation. Loyal to Tronti’s axiom that “if the working class does not emancipate itself from capital, capital will most certainly emancipate itself from the working class” post-autonomism only assumes the ever-increasing rift between capital and workers. In post-autononism the operaist all-or-nothing logic firmly remains at work, often leading to a rhetoric of the oddly anachronistic historical/dialectical notion of a ‘last chance to free ourselves from capitalism’... We may see the recent work of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi as emblematic of this dual or, better still, bipolar logic. The back-and-forth between hyperactivity and depression that, according to Berardi, characterizes the contemporary subject also seems to rhythm his own writings. On the one hand, Berardi describes how a reversal of “the intense and prolonged investment of mental and libidinal energies in the labour process has created the conditions for a psychic collapse” (2009, 38). In Berardi’s work we end up with a non-subject thoroughly drained by the apparatuses of the Crisis-State. As he writes: “The juridical person is free to express itself, to choose it representatives, to be entrepreneurial at the level of politics and the economy. […] Only the person has disappeared. What is left is like an inert object, irrelevant and useless.” (33) On the other hand, it is to that very same subject that Berardi assigns the role of insurrectionary catalyst. Hence, Berardi’s notion of insurrection appears foremost a therapeutic, cathartic notion. Depression, panic and anger need to be traversed, the very worst needs to be confronted head-on in order to be left behind once and for all. Berardi’s ‘Exhaustion and Senile Utopia of the Coming European Insurrection’ (2010) paints a bleak picture indeed by suggesting that any opposition to what he calls “the catastrophic aggression against social life” and its vital psychosomatic components through precarious labor and the decomposition of social solidarity, now swings between massive yet fruitless demonstrations and the melancholic withdrawal from “the game of work and consumption” by large social groups, that might just succeed to “create new, enhanced forms of co-habitation, a village economy within the metropolis” (2010). Once again, Berardi emphasizes the vital role of the ‘cognitariat’, with mantra-like statements such as: Only the autonomy of mental labour from economic rule can deactivate the suicidal mechanism of war and the obsession with growth that devastates the planet. Cognitive, networked, precarious labour is the transversal function capable of recombining the social elements in perennial mutation according to a non-accumulative, non-competitive and non-aggressive principle (2009, 9). One wonders how to read these mantras: as so many attempts to identify compositional lines of flight (even if these turn out to be interrupted once and again) or as a despairing clasp on a conceptual safeguard (mirroring Negri’s Spinozian ontological safeguard) that assures us that “only a movement of researchers, a high tech labour movement of the cognitariat that is autonomously organized” can save us from ruin? (59, 61). However in Berardi’s most recent texts, at the very moment we are tempted to allow ourselves a discrete sigh of relief, even this safeguard falters, as he writes that “the subjectivity of the general intellect is dismantled as a precondition to a much broader subjugation of the processes of knowledge, to the techno-linguistic enslavement of cognitive behavior in the sphere of production and consumption.” (2010, 24). Berardi’s writing thus seems to emulate the workings of the contemporary biopolitical apparatus that regulates by being the instrument of mental and physical destitution and therefore leaves no margin unoccupied. The apparatus works both ways: it structures subjectivity, just as much as it allows for, and incites, the outpouring of affects. As a consequence, the contemporary subject is prone to hysteria, panic attacks, hypes. It alternates between depressive and manic states of self-loss and emotional expenditure. Its mood swings simply define it. We might say that today, as Berardi’s writings show, we are not even given the comfort of catastrophe. Instead crisis – whether financial, ecological, or subjective – is precisely what is being put to work. As is the case for Virno (see below, paragraph four), for Berardi there can be no reassuring ‘third term’ that serves as an escape route for the multitude. Yet as indicated, in Berardi this absence of a third term becomes an extremely unsettling biopolarity. The overmediated subject is immediately exposed to power – this, precisely, is a vital meaning of ‘precarity’. With respect to this, we may ask ourselves, however, to what extent withdrawal, exodus or poverty truly by-pass the dispositive and the law of value it upholds by means of what we might call psychic and physical primitive accumulation. Raising the question does not necessarily mean falling prey to what Matteo Pasquinelli calls a hyperfoucauldian paranoia, nor does it necessarily means having recourse to an updated dialectical materialism or neo-Jacobin kitsch celebrating the ‘will of the people’. Raising the question shows the complexity of what perhaps has permanently been at the heart of the autonomist project: a political anthropology that today is intimately related to the anatomy of the dispositive (see below, paragraph four, for an extended discussion of such a political anthropology). | |||
As | 3. Multitude and the Subject, Once More | ||
For the French collective Tiqqun autonomism’s legacy consists of having thought the possibility of the revolt of a non-subject within the frame of a “negative anthropology” that was aimed at politicizing processes of subjectivation (2010, 12). One way of reading these processes – that we may also call processes of ‘generation’ - is to show that they include residues of branded identity and distorted power effects; that they are an interweaving of histories, encounters, desires and biological constants. As just one example of the many ties between French and Italian thinking, Tiqqun’s ideas tie in with recent work by Paolo Virno on the profoundly ambivalent nature of constituent power. For Virno, what founds the constituent power of the multitude is a certain force of negation, which has its roots in “the risky instability of the human animal” that, being labeled “evil”, has traditionally served as the State’s most prominent excuse for the formation and maintenance of its sovereignty, allowing it, for example to distinguish between the reassuring stability of ‘the people’ versus the multitude (Virno 2008, 16). Considering and accepting the problematic, undefined and possibly dangerous temperament of the human animal that is “characterized by negation” (18), Virno writes about the multitude’s subject: “sometimes aggressive, sometimes united, prone to intelligent cooperation, but also to the war between fractions, being both the poison and the antidote, such is the multitude” (40). In radicalizing Aristotle’s thought on the issue, Virno contends that the political human animal is foremost a linguistic animal. Negation and the modality of the possible are the work of language, or the effects of our mode of existence as speaking bodies. More generally, as a non-substantial institution and “deprived of any limit whatsoever in its processes” (50), language is the institution that renders all other institutions possible. However, and pace Habermas (whom Virno defines as a “happy-go-lucky philosopher”…) language dangerous potential resides in the fact that the value of any linguistic element “consists in its not being x”. By means of this characteristic, language is able to radicalize aggression “beyond measure” (18) if only for its ability “to enunciate something like ‘this is not a man’” (20). The latter possibility is what Virno defines as “truly radical evil” that nevertheless shares “the same root as the good life” (21) since negation can also be infinitely redirected against itself. It mayalso concern the negation of murderous statements such as ‘this is not a man’ and therefore the opening toward collaborative life-forms. It is this political opening up toward a good life that gives us a radically different idea of potential than the one presented by Negri. For Virno, the multitude is a historico-natural category and as the ‘many’ it introduces “uncertainty into the public sphere, and also the undifferentiated potential of the [human] animal that, being deprived of an environmental niche, is open to the world.” (37) If the advent of the multitude marks the crisis of the modern, central state, this is because “the crisis derives from the impossibility of leaving the natural state.” (37) Consequently, according to Virno, the main question faced by the multitude is its self-government in the face of the disturbing ambivalence that characterizes the linguistic aspect of the human species (51 ). Since language also defines thought, Virno has recourse to ritual in order to outline a modus operandi for new means of self-government. The political here becomes therapeutic: Ritual fulfills a therapeutic function not because it erects a barrier against the crisis of presence, but because on the contrary, it goes back over each stage ofthe crisis and tries to overturn the traces of each of those stages. Ritual praxis upholds extreme danger, widens uncertainty and chaos, and returns to the primal setting of the original hominid. (Virno 2008, 52) Central to Virno’s ritualized, symbolically repetitive forms of anthropogenesis is the notion of katechon, that he finds in Schmitt’s reading of Paul: Just as presence itself is nothing more than a constant redemption from the crisis of presence, so too, the nature of anthropos is equal to the regression and repetition of anthropogenesis. Katechon not only oscillates between the negative and the positive, without ever expunging the negative, it also safeguards the state of oscillation and its persistence as such. (Virno 2008, 60) The ritualistic-linguistic katechon restrains but does not remove uncertainty; it lives off the very instability it wards off since it functions by means of semantic excess; and it is able to adapt itself to the state of exception, when it is not, pace Schmitt, the defining marker of the sovereign state, but “indicates rather the action and discourse of the multitude.” (62) In the work of Matteo Pasquinelli we find a similar effort to re-conceptualize the labour of the multitude in terms of ‘evil’ (Georges Bataille is a constant reference in Pasquinelli), but whereas Virno’s ‘animal’ is the common (and one could argue wrong) translation of the Greek zoon, with Pasquinelli animality gets an intrinsic or conceptual meaning. What he calls ‘animal spirits’ haunt immaterial labour and the biopolitical generation of the multitude. As Pasquinelli argues: In a general sense, the animal body is another name for living labour; the social body feeding the parasitic economy of advanced capitalism, the sexualized unconscious of mass media and cultural production, but also the dark side of the neo-conservative multitude. While intellectual discourse remains blind to the beast, capitalism siphons money right out of it and the Empire converts the animal energy into the force of its imperial guard. (Pasquinelli 2008, 27). When Pasquinelli calls for a redefinition of the commons, this very definition would have to enable us to face the profoundly parasitic and therefore profoundlybiomorphic character, or should we say ‘nature’, of contemporary capitalism, which also underpins the commons that emerge from or against it. Instead of withdrawing into what he calls the “sub-religion of separatism”, Pasquinelli states that we should acknowledge and take as our point of departure the extent to which contemporary forms of the commons are “haunted and infested by three conceptual beasts: corporate parasites, […] hydra of gentrification; the bicephalous eagle of power and desire” (14). And note that whereas Pasquinelli seems to be speaking metaphorically, here, he defines the three conceptually instead, as not just beast-like, but indeed beastly. Against this biomorphic backdrop, the familiar poststructuralist vocabulary, with its fixation of codes and symbols, will not take us very far. As for his stance towards this option, Pasquinelli is clear: “The immediate psychopolitical consequence of this position is a code claustrophobia that disallows any potential engagement” (19). It concerns a form of claustrophobia that becomes paradigmatic in Slavoj Žižek’s recurrent impetus to “read, read, read” so that we might magically re-emerge as true Leninist master strategists from our cabinets de lecture. It is also a claustrophobia that we encounter in the now prevalent notion of “life as code” (the work of Eugene Thacker is emblematic here)3 and that firmly remains within the mimetic paradigm according to Pasquinelli (57). With respect to this, Pasquinelli underlines that: The central difference between a post-operaist and a postmodern approach lies precisely in the conception of language: for Virno, language has become a means of production; for Zizek, language repeats the symbolic order of the dominant ideology. That is, once again, the ancient struggle between demons of production and angels of representation. (Pasquinelli 2008, 25) However, it appears that post-autonomous thought is not entirely beyond this classical, celestial or heavenly battle between demons and angels, production and representation, or material and immaterial labour, for that matter. Virno’s considering language only as a form of production appears to be a counterbalance for Negri’s phobia of mediation. What is of interest, nevertheless, is Pasquinelli’s attempt to go through this bipolar balance and to analyze and plug into “the biomorphic unconscious of immaterial and cultural production” that consist in: The physiology of surplus and excess energies flowing under any technological environment, the instinctual and irrational forces also running behind the new cognitive and libidinal modes of capitalist accumulation. […] The animal body is the productive engine of the multitudes finally described in all its variants: cognitive, affective, libidinal and physical. It is a way to combine surplus production, social conflicts, libidinal excess and political passions along a single terrain. (Pasquinelli 2008, 27) On the face of it, Pasquinelli comes close, here, to Berardi’s assertion that the immaterial or cognitive commons remain firmly inserted into “the fleshy circuits of human subjectivity”. In the end, however, his analysis is not bipolar at all, but material through and through: when he states that: “Residual forces from a prior biological stage resurface for not being deeply civilized by the digital evolution” (29). Consequently, today, radical critique and oppositional practices should tap into these animal spirits against an “abstract and frictionless notion of the commons [that] is taken as a general paradigm for any sort of political agency. Reclaiming the obscure reality of the commons means recovering the productive animal force before its turns into the dark matter of capitalism.” (29) The question here, however, is what exactly this ‘before’ of the productive animal force, the biochemical surplus, might mean. Pasquinelli runs the risk of dreaming up an attractive, yet merely wishful surplus-asexteriority. Moreover, living in times of bio-political economies might mean, as Melinda Cooper has analyzed in Life as Surplus, that that there are no true animals left, or that, in effect, all animals are turned, in one way or another, into parasites. | |||
4. Of Democratic Animals and Machinic Intellectuals: Post-Autonomism as Knowledge-Production. | |||
Virno and Pasquinelli’s emphasis on bio- and anthropopolitics (with their references to ritual and anthropogenesis) echoes Mario Tronti’s recent call that “There will be no genuine and effective critique of democracy without a profound anthropologicalinvestigation, a social anthropology but also and individual anthropology, taking ‘individual’ here too in the sense of the thought-practice of difference” (Tronti in Chieza and Toscano 102). For Tronti, today we witness the “epochal encounter between homo oeconomicous and homo democraticus” whose cross-breeding gives birth to this peculiar third political species: the ‘animal democraticum’ – the true “subject of the spirits of capitalism”, according to Tronti. In post-autonomous discourse this democratic animal gets different names, such as, most vociferously, ‘the Bloom’ in Tiqqun (see, for example, Tiqqun 2010). As we argued above, in particular in relation to Virno, it is the potential of a thoroughly novel political anthropology that underpins post-autonomist thought that may prove to be its most vital feature. Certainly, any alternative to what Tronti calls the “mass biopolitics” that goes under the name of democracy has to proceed from a far-reaching critique of the different incarnations of the anthropological subject. If not, we may say with Tronti, we remain hopelessly stuck in a system In which singularity is permitted for the private but denied to the public. The ‘common’ which is spoken of today is really that in-common which is already wholly taken over by this kind of self-dictatorship, this kind of tyranny over oneself which is the contemporary form of that brilliant idea: voluntary servitude. (Tronti in Chieza and Toscano 103) For Tronti it is only in escaping the web of ‘really existing democracy’ that we can imagine escaping ‘the very web of neo-liberal power’. If the anthropologicalconditions of democracy – that is to say: its implied definition and active configuration of what it means to be human, of the anthropos – are not put into crisis “the subject itself cannot manage any effective political maneuver in this situation, through an alternative network, for the sake of another historical break” (106). In this sense, the ‘post’ in post-autonomism refers to its ventures away from more narrowly defined issues of socio-economic relations (a move already prefigured in the passage from operaism to Autonomia) to the anthropological field of social relations per se. Thus conceived, post-autonomist thought raises the question of what kind of knowledge production this implies. Again, here, post-autonomism does not signify a break with 1970’s autonomism any more than Autonomia signified a break with operaism, but rather it rearticulates some of its key questions. In this case, that of knowledge production: to what extend does the ‘object’ of study – the workers’ condition - affect the means by which it is addressed? Or better still: how to reverse the hierarchy between object and subject, worker and researcher? Operaism privileged ‘militant research’, such as the workers’ inquiry that proceeds from the collective knowledge of the workers themselves as it was collected by researchers (such as Raniero Panzieri). How would such a militant – or holistic – research take shape today? As Toni Negri and Judith Revel write: “To re-appropriate the common, we must first of all produce a drastic critique of it.” (Negri and Revel in The Edu-Factory Collective, 175). In our particular context of knowledge production and cultural production this also implies a drastic institutional and emotional auto-critique. Not in the least, insofar the inflicted reality-checks of the past decade haven’t already done so, this means abandoning phantasies of the ‘cutting edge character’ of academic knowledge production. As Stevphen Shukaitis argues in Imaginal Machines, today, the university is anything but a vanguard. There is no point in celebrating the university as a pinnacle of immaterial labour, because it has in fact lost its monopoly on knowledge production. It is in this context that Jack Bratich coins the notion of the ‘machinic intellectual’ (as a Deleuzian counter-weight to Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectual’) (Bratich in Graeber et al. 2007, 137). Today’s scholars are embedded in a host of institutions, policies and organizations (that is to say in a never-ending race for funding, social relevance, media exposure and corporate partnerships that force them to star in a one-man/woman variety show…). According to Bratich, it is precisely this embeddedness that could constitute a future for the intellectual, who would no longer be representative of a larger social cause, but who, as machinic intellectual, functions as “an interface, embedded as a specific intellectual in its professional and disciplinarian skirmishes which themselves are now embedded in a larger circuit” (150). The machinic intellectual is embedded, yet equally active and productive, a translator and exchanger, a modulator, transversal resistor and circuit breaker. The future of critical studies thus lies in “machinic intellectuals who are collaborating with nonacademic machinic intellectuals. Together, they are producing new circuits of exit.” (150) With Skukaitis, we might also say that today anycompositional analysis refuses to represent or communicate struggles (in view of future realizations or demands), but rather explores “the forms of composition found within the situation, or in the various processes of interaction, collective valorization and productive compatibilities found between different projects” (2009, 19). One such attempt at a new compositional analysis is made by activist/academic initiatives such as the Counter Cartographies Collective. As Maribel Casas-Cortés and Sebastian Cobarrubias show: Our spatial understanding of the university as a discrete and untouched entity [is] totally inadequate […] and obscures the multiple roles of universities in employment and flexible labour markets, the knowledge economy and corporate research, defense contracts and recruiting finance capitalism through loans, university endowments and investments and gentrification. (CasasCortés and Cobarrubias in Graeber et al. 113) If the contemporary university, “erases the bodies and the materiality involved in knowledge production” (122), a critical use of academic disciplines such as cartography can precisely expose “underground realities otherwise off the radar for regular discourse” (117) and, crucially, as an “interlocking system with multiple power and counterpower networks flowing through it.” (123) Cartography here becomes a tool against the imaginary of the ivory tower that, both ironically and tragically, is all too often used by activists to brush off a supposed lack of true engagement and as an excuse for the university’s slow financial euthanasia by government policies and managerial board. To reappropriate knowledge, or, for that matter, cultural production, is a daunting task. As Brian Holmes writes in Escape the Overcode, with regard to the highly ambiguous role of subjectivity within the knowledge and cultural industries, it is crucial to think through: …the tremendous effectiveness of the new motivational paradigm and the particular power of conviction it seems to hold for those involved in culturalized production. The reason for this is that even within hyperflexible markets giving all the advantages to the state or corporate buyer, everything connected to the arts still offers a chance for self-expression and a veritable economy of self-development – which is no small attraction. (Holmes 2010, 37). When Holmes is talking about culturalized production, here, the knowledge production in the university and especially in the humanities and social sciences is intrinsic to it. Analogously, everything that is connected to the arts, here, offering a chance for self-expression, also concerns very much those working in the academy. With respect to this, perhaps the most urgent significance of the idea of postautonomy, and the most urgent aspect of the autonomist legacy, is to be finally finished with the attraction of this economy of ‘self-development’ that governs a host of social, political and cultural circuits. | |||
== | ==Assembly (Chapter 9: Entrepreneurship of the Multitude)== | ||
*Author: Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri | |||
*Publisher and date: Oxford University Press, 2017 | |||
===Synopsis=== | |||
In the “Entrepreneurship of the Multitude”, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri perceive language and communication as significant political tools. They argue that neoliberal politicians often distort political “terms and concepts” and separate them from their original historical context, in order to support their arguments. With a focus on political antagonism, Hardt and Negri suggest that we should claim back words that have been diverted and give them our own interpretations, hence forming new alternatives. In chapter 9 of "Assembly", there is an attempt to redefine the meaning of “entrepreneurship”. | |||
The chapter begins with Joseph Schumpeter’s description of the “entrepreneur”, as a person whose special ability is to create “new combinations” among already “existing workers, ideas, technologies, resources and machines”. The construction of these new “machinic assemblages” is a vital aspect of productivity growth. The heroic figure of the capitalist entrepreneur, portrays a “man of action”, who “gets things done” and becomes a role-model for the masses. | |||
However, this perception hides an important part of the entrepreneurial process, which is the labor itself. Under the praised work of the capitalist entrepreneur, lies the constant expropriation of the cooperative power of the multitude. The entrepreneurial function does not belong a manager or a guru. On the contrary, it is accomplished through cooperation. As the main actors of production process, the workers collaborate, while limiting their individuality and thus create social wealth. Under this condition, the maximum human powers can be unveiled. | |||
At this point, Hardt and Negri introduce the novel term of “entrepreneurship of the multitude”. In postmodern global economy, the production process is progressively based in new networks of collaboration and communication, in coordination with contemporary technologies. On these terms, the labor gradually acquires a degree of autonomy in production. Provided that today workers manage their social relationships and make decisions together, in the future they could set goals on their own, and eventually accomplish self-direction. | |||
In regard to the term itself, "entrepreneurship of the multitude" can be tricky and lead to misinterpretation. Hardt and Negri clarify that their approach stands apart from “social entrepreneurship”. They argue that after the collapse of the welfare state, this practice, despite its rhetoric, failed to provide sustainable aid to the weakest parts of society. Instead, it proved harmful to existing solidarity networks of local communities in developing countries, by forcing them to follow the logic of the market. | |||
The “entrepreneurship of the multitude” as proposed by the authors, is capable of forming new social combinations, pointing to autonomous social production and reproduction. Admittedly, people are not naturally oriented to collective self-rule. Nevertheless, Hardt and Negri believe in the power of people’s assembly. Social movements need to connect with labor organizing, and form what is referred as “social unionism”. | |||
In conclusion, the “multitude” has the potential not only to reject the current social system as we know it, but use its entrepreneurial spirit to build novel forms of cooperation. Ultimately, the triumph of private property will be abandoned. In its place, the “autonomous organization of social cooperation” can build the ground where “social wealth is shared in common”. | |||
===Original text=== | ===Original text=== | ||
ENTREPRENEURSHIP | |||
OF THE MULTITUDE | |||
We live, we are told, in an entrepreneurial society in which everyone is called on to be an entrepreneur. The important thing is to incarnate the energy, responsibility, and virtue of the entrepreneurial spirit. You can go into business, launch your own start-up, or organize a project for the homeless.“Even fields commonly thought to exist outside of the sphere of business and labor,” writes Imre Szeman, “such as artistic and cultural production, have been colonized by discourses of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship exists in the twenty-first century as a commonsense way of navigating the inevitable, irreproachable, and apparently unchangeable reality of global capitalism.”1 We will return in chapter 12 to analyze the entrepreneurial ideology of neoliberalism, but here we want to insist that first and foremost entrepreneurship belongs to the multitude, and names the multitude’s capacities for cooperative social production and reproduction. Like many other terms in our political vocabulary, entrepreneurship has been diverted and distorted. We need to take it back and claim it as our own. We will try to uncover the entrepreneurship of the multitude through an indirect route and a direct one, that is, through a symptomatic reading and an ontological reading. For the former we will engage Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of the entrepreneur against the grain to unmask, underneath the ideology of the capitalist entrepreneur, the continuous expropriation of the cooperative power of the multitude. The capitalist entrepreneur, from this perspective, is unjustly given credit for an entrepreneurial function accomplished elsewhere, but rather than such a moral claim we are much more interested in how capitalist entrepreneurship reveals the potential of the multitude. The latter route instead investigates directly the productive social power of the multitude, exploring how much its leadership can be developed and questioning what leadership means in this context. | |||
How to become an entrepreneur | |||
Joseph Schumpeter’s classic theory goes against today’s standard image of the entrepreneur in many respects. Entrepreneurial activity in his view, for instance, is not defined by risk taking. Neither does it involve scientific discoveries or inventing new technologies. Whereas “the inventor produces ideas,” Schumpeter asserts, “the entrepreneur ‘gets things done,’ which may but need not embody anything that is scientifically new.”2 Entrepreneurs, he continues, are not managers and most often not owners of the means of production, only ones who have them at their disposal. The essence of entrepreneurship, instead, according to Schumpeter, is to create new combinations among already existing workers, ideas, technologies, resources, and machines. Entrepreneurs, in other words, create new machinic assemblages. Moreover, these assemblages must be dynamic over time. Whereas most capitalists merely pursue “adaptive responses to change,” adjusting their existing arrangements, entrepreneurs carry out “creative responses” that grasp and set in motion what is new in their world.3 | |||
In order to enact these combinations, of course, the entrepreneur must not only bring together workers with resources and machines but must also impose on them a mode of cooperation and discipline by which they are to work together. The essence of combination is cooperation. It requires, in other words, the establishment and repetition of new social and productive relationships. Schumpeter is very close to Marx in his recognition that the key to increased productivity (and hence greater profits) is the cooperation of workers in coordination with systems of machines. Marx explains, in fact, that cooperation, while increasing productivity, also has a transformative effect on labor, creating a new social productive force: “the special productive power of the combined working day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power arises from co-operation itself. When the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.”4 The powers of humanity are realized in cooperation or, really, a new social being is forged in this process, a new machinic assemblage, a new composition of humans, machines, ideas, resources, and other beings. | |||
Schumpeter is well aware, moreover, that in addition to the paid cooperation of the workers they employ, entrepreneurs also need the unpaid cooperatioof a vast social field: “Just as a sovereign cannot place a policeman behind every citizen, the entrepreneur cannot pay everyone in social and political life whose cooperation he requires.”5 The analogy with the sovereign and its police emphasizes the threat of force or violence required by the entrepreneur. Marx similarly compares the capitalist overseeing cooperation as a general on the battlefield, dictating strategy for the troops under his command.6 Cooperation in capitalist society is always accomplished under the threat of force. Schumpeter’s analogy goes further, however, by recognizing that the cooperation imposed or required by entrepreneurs takes effect not only in their factories but across society, over populations paid and unpaid. Social labor, in addition to being unpaid, must also be functionally subordinated and ordered toward a specific productive goal. This is precisely the hypothesis that, during the years of the crisis of the Fordist industrial model, led to practices of externalization, along with the diffuse factories and construction of complex industrial zones that supported a new social organization of production. From Silicon Valley to software technology parks in India, from the innovative production centers in northern Italy and Bavaria to the free trade zones and export processing zones in Mexico and China, these entrepreneurial “combinations,” administering the productive power of a vast social field, a wide variety of paid and unpaid social actors, have had great success. | |||
Who, then, are these entrepreneurs? Schumpeter, in the original 1911 edition of Theory of Economic Development, in passages eliminated from later editions, provides an illuminating social vision—with weak echoes of Nietzsche or, really, foreshadowing Ayn Rand—that divides society into three groups on the basis of new combinations and entrepreneurship. The masses, he begins, who go about their lives in a habitual way and are in this sense “hedonistic,” do not see the potential of new combinations. A minority of people, he continues, “with a sharper intelligence and a more agile imagination,” can see the potential of new combinations but do not have the power or character to put them into action. “Then, there is an even smaller minority—and this one acts. . . . It is this type that scorns the hedonistic equilibrium and faces risk without timidity. . . . What matters is the disposition to act. It is the ability to subjugate others and to utilize them for his purposes, to order and to prevail that leads to ‘successful deeds’—even without particularly brilliant intelligence.”7 It is interesting, but not really important, that he seems to contradict here his insistences elsewhere that entrepreneurship does not require risk. | |||
More important is his conception of the “Man of Action,” the weight of whose personality demands obedience. If there is to be economic development, he maintains, there have to be such leaders.8 And, correspondingly, Schumpeter presents “the masses” of workers, peasants, artisans, and others as hedonistic, passive, and resistant to the new. Schumpeter’s anthropology of the “Man of Action” is certainly crude, but it clearly resonates in the contemporary media-driven cult of the entrepreneur, especially in the digital world of dotcoms and start-ups. The bright white faces of men of action, distinguished by their energy and daring, confidently stare at us from the magazine racks of newsstands. | |||
When he revises the Theory of Economic Development for the 1934 edition, however, Schumpeter abandons the heroic figure of the entrepreneur. He recognizes now that the entrepreneur creates new combinations “not by convincing people of the desirability of carrying out his plan or by creating confidence in his leading in the manner of a political leader—the only man he has to convince or impress is the banker who is to finance him—but by buying them or their services, and then using them as he sees fit.”9 The increasingly powerful rule of finance, Schumpeter realizes, reduces the entrepreneur from a leader whose force of personality or ideas gains the consent of the masses to a supplicant of the banker. The power of money, finance, and property, and the economic coercion they deploy, which we will study in more detail in part III, replaces the traditional modes of authority and consent required for leadership. | |||
Finally, a decade later, in the 1940s, Schumpeter becomes convinced that even property and ownership, organized now in huge corporations, are no longer able to gain the consent of all those engaged in social production. This returns us to the passage we cited earlier. “The capitalist process,” he laments, “takes the life out of the idea of property. . . . Dematerialized, defunctionalized and absentee ownership does not impress and call forth moral allegiance as the vital form of property did. Eventually there will be nobody left who really cares to stand for it—nobody within and nobody without the precincts of the big concerns.”10 Schumpeter reluctantly admits, at this point, that the only path forward for capitalist production is centralized planning. | |||
Schumpeter, however, is blind to the other side of the equation. Whereas he rightly cuts down to size the figure of the entrepreneur and recognizes the social limits posed by the power of money and property, he maintains a view of the “masses” as fundamentally passive. Instead, in the course of capitalist development, as productive cooperation extends ever more widely across the social field in diffuse, polycentric circuits, new combinations are increasingly organized and maintained by the producers themselves. With the potential to reappropriate fixed capital, as we indicated earlier, the multitude becomes increasingly autonomous in the generation and implementation of productive cooperation. No longer are generals needed to deploy them on the battlefield of social production; the troops, so to speak, can organize themselves and chart their own direction. | |||
Faced with potentially autonomous cooperating forces of social production and reproduction, capitalist owners would seem to have two options. Either they can imprison them, reducing them to the dimensions of industrial discipline and forcing them to obey the supposedly scientific organization of labor, diminishing people’s intelligence, creativity, and social capacities, for example, with “clickwork” and regimes of digital Taylorism. For this option capital must intervene at the level of subjectivity and produce workers who are happy (or at least willing) to put their lives in the service of the company. But then capital ends up reducing productive powers and thwarting its own thirst for profit. The other option (really capital’s only feasible path) is to embrace the autonomous and cooperative potential of workers, recognizing that this is the key to valorization and increased productivity, and at the same time try to contain it. Capital does not pose the problem of disciplining labor and controlling it from the inside but instead seeks to rule it from the outside, from above. In line with this option, capital retreats from the traditional modes of imposing productive cooperation and instead tends, from outside the productive process and its circuits of cooperation, to extract value socially produced in relative autonomy. | |||
Fifth call: Entrepreneurship of the multitude | |||
We can begin to recognize emerging within the circuits of cooperation of social production and reproduction an altogether different notion of entrepreneurship, which was perhaps latent in Schumpeter’s notion from the beginning: the entrepreneurship of the multitude, that is, the autonomous organization of social cooperation. | |||
The emerging entrepreneurship of the multitude is closely related with the establishment of a new mode of production, a phase of capitalist development in which social cooperation, affective and cognitive labor, and digital and communicative technologies have become dominant. When we say a new mode of production we are not conceiving a historical passage through homogeneous stages, a conception that has had pernicious effects both in the workers’ movement and in colonialist ideology. Conceiving the slave organization of labor, for example, as a distinct mode of production separate from capitalism led to both conceptual confusion and insidious political effects. We conceive the new mode of production instead as a heterogeneous formation in which labor processes remaining from the past mix with new ones, all of which nonetheless are (not so much ordered by but) cast in a new light by a dominant set of elements.11 (We will return to this discussion in more detail in chapter 10 in relation to concepts of the real and formal subsumption.) Mode of production in this sense, then, is another way of saying form of life or rather the production of forms of life, and this is increasingly so since in social production, more than commodities, society and social relations are the direct objects of productive processes. Producing, in other words, means organizing social cooperation and reproducing forms of life. The mode of production of social labor, then, of general intellect and the common, is a field in which the entrepreneurship of the multitude appears. | |||
Before we can see the entrepreneurship of the multitude growing, however, we have to clear away some of the weeds that block our view. After all, doesn’t neoliberal ideology exhort us each to become entrepreneurs of ourselves, to wean ourselves of state assistance and construct an entrepreneurial society? Being entrepreneurs in this way means that each of us individually must be responsible for our own lives, our own welfare, our own reproduction, and so forth. What is missing and mystified by this neoliberal entrepreneurship, however, are the mechanisms and relations of cooperation that animate social production and reproduction. In fact, as we will argue in chapter 12, neoliberal practices and governance, including the neoliberal notion of entrepreneurship, attempt to interpret, contain, and respond to the movement toward autonomy that the multitude has already set in course. The neoliberal mandate to become the individual entrepreneur of your own life, in other words, is an attempt to recuperate and domesticate a threatening form of multitudinous entrepreneurship that is already emerging from below. | |||
Another mystification to clear away is the notion of “social entrepreneurship” sometimes espoused by social democrats and center-left politicians. The rise of social entrepreneurship, in fact, coincides with the neoliberal destruction of the welfare state, as its flip side, its compensatory mechanism, its caring face, forming together a “social neoliberalism.”12 Charles Leadbeater, a former advisor to Tony Blair, who is credited as originator of the term, argues for social entrepreneurship to fill the gap left when state benefits and assistance disappear. (As we claimed earlier, the destruction of welfare policies, although initiated under Reagan and Thatcher, were predominantly carried out by their center-left successors, Clinton and Blair.) Social entrepreneurship, Leadbeater explains, involves a combination of volunteerism, charity, and philanthropy, which create nonstate, community-based systems of services “in which users and clients are encouraged to take more responsibility for their own lives.”13 Leadbeater points to examples such as a brave and tenacious woman who, instead of allowing a public hospital to close, transforms it into a Christian community hospital, and a dedicated black Briton who solicits corporate sponsors and celebrity athletes to create a sports center for poor youth. Social entrepreneurship, despite its rhetoric of empowerment, is really the translation into the field of charity of the traditional ideology of the heroic business entrepreneur, adopting something like the anthropology of Schumpeter’s early writings (with its rare men of action and hedonistic masses). Furthermore, social entrepreneurship, true to its social democratic roots, does not question the rule of property and the sources of social inequality but instead seeks to alleviate the worst suffering and make capitalist society more humane. This is certainly a noble task in itself, but it makes social entrepreneurs blind to the potentially autonomous circuits of cooperation that emerge in the relationships of social production and reproduction. | |||
The illusory claims of social entrepreneurship are even more damaging, as many scholars have shown, in the circuits of international aid, philanthropy, and NGO activity in the most subordinated countries. In the name of empowerment, recipients of aid are often required to orient social life toward commodity production and internalize neoliberal development culture and its market rationalities, thus abandoning local and indigenous community structures and values or mobilizing them as entrepreneurial assets. For example, although systems of microcredit—that is, the extension of very small loans to those, especially women, who lack the collateral to access standard lending structures—have been celebrated for opening access to the means of entrepreneurship for the world’s poorest populations, results show that such loans have done little to alleviate poverty and have instead saddled populations with lasting debt burdens. Women who receive microloans generally have to “entrepreneurialize” existing networks of social solidarity and cooperation in the service of a neoliberalism from below.14 In similar ways, a variety of projects of social entrepreneurship through international aid that pronounce goals to eliminate the worst poverty and eradicate disease—from the widely promoted “Millennial Villages” in Kenya to irrigation aid for indigenous communities in Ecuador—require the adoption of neoliberal rationalities. The nexus of social neoliberalism and social entrepreneurship destroy community networks and autonomous modes of cooperation that support social life.15 | |||
Once these neoliberal notions of entrepreneurship are cleared away, we can begin to glimpse some characteristics of a potential (or even already existing) entrepreneurial multitude, that is, a multitude that is author of “new combinations” that foster autonomous social production and reproduction. First, this entrepreneurship follows directly from the forms of cooperation that emerge from inside and outside capitalist production. Whereas previously the capitalist was required to generate productive cooperation through disciplinary routines, today increasingly cooperation is generated socially, that is, autonomously from capitalist command. Second, the multitude can become entrepreneurial when it has access to the means of production, when it is able to take back fixed capital and create its own machinic assemblages. The machines, knowledges, resources, and labor combined by the multitude, third, must be pulled out of the realm of private property and made common. Only when social wealth is shared and managed together can the productivity of social cooperation realize its potential. | |||
In our first call in chapter 2 we proposed that strategy and tactics should be inverted such that leadership becomes merely tactical and strategy is entrusted to the multitude. At that point in our argument, however, that proposal could only appear as a wish because we were not in the position to confirm the capacities of the multitude to accomplish the tasks of strategy, that is, to understand the contours of the social field, to organize complex social projects, to orchestrate and sustain long-term plans. The results of this chapter allow us in part to fill in that gap and recognize that potential. The networks of productive cooperation, the social nature of production and reproduction, and, moreover, the capacities of entrepreneurship of the multitude are the solid foundations of strategic powers. Ultimately, this entrepreneurship points toward the self-organization and self-governance of the multitude, and in order to realize this potential there must be struggles. | |||
Social production→social union→social strike | |||
Production is today, as we have argued throughout part II, increasingly social in two senses. On the one side, the productive processes are social; that is, rather than individuals producing in isolation, production is accomplished in networks of cooperation. Furthermore, those rules and habits of how to cooperate, how to relate to each other productively, tend no longer to be imposed from above but generated from below, in the social relations among producers. On the other side, the results of production also tend to be social. Rather than conceiving material or immaterial commodities as the endpoint of production, we need to understand it as the production (often via commodities) of social relations and, ultimately, of human life itself. This is the sense in which one can call contemporary production anthropogenetic or biopolitical. | |||
The social nature of production in both these senses points directly to the common. Private property appears increasingly as a fetter to social productivity both in the sense that it blocks the relationships of cooperation that generate production and that it undermines the social relations that are its result. The path from social production to the common, however, is not immediate or inevitable. The affirmation and defense of the right to the common, as we said earlier, needs activist projects to be sustained. The potentials created by social production, specifically, require a combination of social movements and labor struggles to be realized. This is a key form of the entrepreneurship of the multitude. | |||
On one side, social movements that affirm the right to the common, such as struggles over resources like water or the numerous urban encampments and occupations that have been born since 2011 (and continue to spring up) in the attempt on small scales to open urban space to the common, generate new combinations and new forms of social cooperation.16 Moreover, various struggles over housing, welfare services, education, transportation, and other institutions of our common social life, which often involve self-management or mutualistic experiments, such as the antieviction and housing campaign in Spain (PAH, or “platform of those affected by mortgages”) and the solidary health clinics in Greece, constitute forms of entrepreneurship from below. On the other side, as the center of gravity of capitalist production shifts outside the factory, labor organizing has to follow it on the terrain of social production and reproduction, where the entrepreneurship of the multitude arises. On this terrain trade unions and social movements must create alliances or hybrid structures in the form of social unions. “Aware of the extreme ambiguity of this definition,” write Alberto De Nicola and Biagio Quattrocchi, “we use the term ‘social unionism’ [sindacalismo sociale] to group together various experiences of struggle that, within and outside trade union organizations, counteract the ways that traditional trade unions, due to weakness or by choice, serve to obstruct or pacify social conflict.”17 Social unionism, which constitutes the intersection or interweaving of labor struggles and social movements, offers the promise of, on the one hand, renewing the power of labor organizing and overcoming the conservative practices of some existing unions and, on the other, of bolstering the longevity and effectiveness of social movements. | |||
Social unionism overturns the traditional relation between economic struggles and political struggles, which is another version of the relation between strategy and tactics. The standard view regards economic and trade union struggles (especially those over wages) as partial and tactical, and thus in need of an alliance with and guidance from the political struggles led by the party, which is thought to have a comprehensive and strategic scope. The alliance between economic and political struggles proposed by social unionism scrambles the assignments of tactics and strategy since economic movements link not with a constituted power but a constituent power, not a political party but a social movement. Such an alliance should benefit social movements by allowing them to stand on the stable, developed organizational structure of the union, giving the struggles of the poor, the precarious, and the unemployed a social reach and a continuity they would otherwise lack. In return, the alliance should not only enlarge the social sphere of trade unions, extending union struggles beyond wages and the workplace to address all aspects of the life of the working class, focusing the attention of union organizing on the form of life of the class, but also should renew the methods of unions, allowing the antagonistic dynamics of social movement activism to break the sclerotic structures of union hierarchies and their worn-out modes of struggle.18 | |||
In | The locus classicus of social unionism in the anglophone world is the antiapartheid alliance formed in South Africa: in 1990 the Congress of South African Trade Unions entered into a “tripartite alliance” with the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party. The alliance served as an umbrella for a wide variety of antiapartheid social movements, and served as inspiration outside South Africa for how a trade union organization could foster the developments and actions of social movements.19 The South African experiences resonate with sporadic developments throughout the world in recent decades. The 1997 alliance between the carnevalesque social movement Reclaim the Streets and the sacked Liverpool dockers and the brief cooperation between Teamsters and Turtles (that is, environmental groups) at the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle are two significant examples. Some of the most dynamic trade unions in Italy, such as the Federation of Metal Workers (FIOM) and the grassroots unions in education, health, and other sectors (COBAS), along with the Service Employees International Union in the United States, have repeatedly experimented with social movement alliances with varying degrees of success.20 | ||
The tradition of social unionism must today, however, undergo a significant shift. Rather than posing an external relation of alliance between trade unions and social movements, groups must now around social production and the common construct an internal relation that regards labor organizing and social movements as not only intimately tied but also mutually constitutive in the modes and objects of struggle, recognizing how the terrain of labor is increasingly too that of forms of life. In order to realize the potentials of this new conception of social unionism we must understand social production and reproduction in a wide frame, well beyond the factory and the workplace. The metropolis itself is an enormous factory of social production and reproduction, or more precisely, it is a space produced in common (looking backward) that serves (looking forward) as the means of production and reproduction for future instances of the common. In capitalist society today, the common names both the means of production and the forms of life. | |||
In this frame, then, the current international cycles of struggles that affirm the right to the common, which we cited earlier, open new possibilities for social unionism. The centrality of the common in contemporary production and reproduction does not negate the distinction between economic and political struggles, but it does demonstrate that they are inextricably interwoven. The struggles pose equal and open access plus collective self-management of the common as a precondition for any possible construction of a new form of democracy—and necessary too for constructing postcapitalist economic relations. One can trace a clear line, for example, between Spain’s 2013 “marea blanca” protests against health care budget cuts, which brought health workers and health system users into the streets, and the 2015 municipal election victories in large cities, including Barcelona and Madrid, of coalitions dedicated to making health care and other social services common. | |||
The primary weapon of social unionism (and the expression of the power of social production) is the social strike. The labor union since its inception has based its power on the threat of the organized refusal of work: when labor is withheld, capitalist production grinds to a halt. Historic and heroic battles have been fought on this terrain. In this traditional frame, however, unemployed workers, unwaged domestic labor, the precarious, and the poor appear to be powerless: since withholding their labor does not directly threaten capitalist production and profit, the standard logic goes, they have no leverage. Social movements, however, long ago discovered that the strategy of refusal can be an effective weapon for a wide variety if not all social groups: “some of the poor,” Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward explain, “are sometimes so isolated from significant institutional participation that the only ‘contribution’ they can withhold is that of quiescence in civil life: they can riot.”21 Everyone, even the poor, wields in the final instance the threat to withdraw their voluntary servitude and disrupt the social order. | |||
In the contemporary age of biopolitical production, when the common becomes the basis of social production and reproduction, as it does increasingly today, and when the circuits of productive cooperation extend throughout the social fabric, well beyond the walls of the factory, then the power of refusal spreads across the social terrain. Disruption of the social order and suspension of capitalist production become indistinguishably linked. This is precisely the potential that social unionism opens: the two traditions—the labor movement’s interruption of industrial production and the social movements’ disruption of the social order, both now based in the common—come together and, like chemical reagents, create an explosive mixture. In this context, in fact, the traditional conceptions of a general strike in which workers in all sectors of production will stop simultaneously gains a new and even more powerful meaning. | |||
The social strike, however, must be not only a refusal but also an affirmation. It must, in other words, also be an act of entrepreneurship that creates or, better, reveals the circuits of cooperation and the potentially autonomous relationships of social production that exist inside and outside waged labor, making use of social wealth shared in common. | |||
== | ==The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (Chapter 1, 2)== | ||
*Author: Richard Sennet | |||
*Publisher and date: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000 | |||
===Synopsis=== | |||
The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (chapter 1 and 2) addresses the problems and challenges that have arisen in an economy that has changed tremendously in the last 30 years. The author Richard Sennet talks about "flexible capitalism" as an economic and political system where everything feels fast-paced and unstable. Values of loyalty and devotedness were substituted by detachment to accommodate more superficial relations. | |||
'' | The first chapters, Routine and Drift, are centered in a working man called Rico. Rico is economically successful but suffers from the uncertainty of his work-life. The traditional idea of building a lifelong career in one place has changed and for the new worker this means shifting lives often. This constant change of jobs, cities, and friends makes the fractured pieces of Rico's life difficult to understand. It's hard to build a story for himself. | ||
Although Rico understands the characteristics of the new worker and adapts quickly to his new situation, he lacks the lasting values and guiding principles he feels are necessary to educate his children. The old debate between the philosophers Denis Diderot and Adam Smith resurfaces, discussing if routine is necessary to compose a life or if we should search for more flexible experiences. | |||
The author provides a historical contextualization to these issues, writing about how time and routine has influenced the management and workforce of factories since the transition from manual labor to more sophisticated industrial systems. A pin factory and the Ford Motor Company are examples of how time control can lead to better productivity or to depression. There is no clear answer on how the human being will react to the continuous lack of routine in today's dynamic economy but Rico embodies some of the conflicts that are already surfacing in his personal life. | |||
===Original text=== | |||
Today the phrase “flexible capitalism” describes a system which is more than a permutation on an old theme. The emphasis is on flexibility. Rigid forms of bureaucracy are under attack, as are the evils of blind routine. Workers are asked to behave nimbly, to be open to change on short notice, to take risks continually, to become ever less dependent on regulations and formal procedures. | |||
This emphasis on flexibility is changing the very meaning of work, and so the words we use for it. “Career,” for instance, in its English origins meant a road for carriages, and as eventually applied to labor meant a lifelong channel for one’s economic pursuits. Flexible capitalism has blocked the straight roadway of career, diverting employees suddenly from one kind of work into another. The word “job” in English of the fourteenth century meant a lump or piece of something which could be carted around. Flexibility today brings back this arcane sense of the job, as people do lumps of labor, pieces of work, over the course of a lifetime. | |||
It is quite natural that flexibility should arouse anxiety: people do not know what risks will pay off, what paths to pursue. To take the curse off the phrase “capitalist system” there developed in the past many circumlocutions, such as the “free enterprise” or “private enterprise” system. Flexibility is used today as another way to lift the curse of oppression from capitalism. In attacking rigid bureaucracy and emphasizing risk, it is claimed, flexibility gives people more freedom to shape their lives. In fact, the new order substitutes new controls rather than simply abolishing the rules of the past—but these new controls are also hard to understand. The new capitalism is an often illegible regime of power. | |||
Perhaps the most confusing aspect of flexibility is its impact on personal character. The old English speakers, and indeed writers going back to antiquity, were in no doubt about the meaning of “character”: it is the ethical value we place on our own desires and on our relations to others. Horace writes that the character of a man depends on his connections to the world. In this sense, “character” is a more encompassing term than its more modern offspring “personality,” which concerns desires and sentiments which may fester within, witnessed by no one else. | |||
Character particularly focuses upon the long-term aspect of our emotional experience. Character is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment, or through the pursuit of long-term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratification for the sake of a future end. Out of the confusion of sentiments in which we all dwell at any particular moment, we seek to save and sustain some; these sustainable sentiments will serve our characters. Character concerns the personal traits which we value in ourselves and for which we seek to be valued by others. | |||
How do we decide what is of lasting value in ourselves in a society which is impatient, which focuses on the immediate moment? How can long-term goals be pursued in an economy devoted to the short term? How can mutual loyalties and | |||
commitments be sustained in institutions which are constantly breaking apart or continually being redesigned? These are the questions about character posed by the new, flexible capitalism. | |||
A QUARTER CENTURY AGO, Jonathan Cobb and I wrote a book about working-class Americans, The Hidden Injuries of Class. In The Corrosion of Character, I’ve taken up some of the same issues about work and character in an economy which has changed radically. The Corrosion of Character is intended to be a long essay rather than a short book; that is, I’ve tried to write out a single | |||
argument, whose sections are divided into very short chapters. In The Hidden Injuries of Class, Jonathan Cobb and I relied exclusively on formal interviews. Here, as befits an essay-argument, I’ve used more mixed and informal sources, including economic data, historical accounts, and social theories; I’ve also explored the | |||
daily life around me, much as an anthropologist might. | |||
At the outset, I should point out two things about this text. The reader will often find philosophical ideas applied to or tested by the concrete experience of individuals. For this I make no apology; an idea has to bear the weight of concrete experience or else it becomes a mere abstraction. Second, I’ve disguised individual identities rather more heavily than one would when reporting formal interviews; this has meant changing places and times and occasionally compounding several voices into one or splitting one voice into many. These disguises put demands on the reader’s trust, | |||
but not the trust a novelist would seek to earn through a well-made narrative, for that coherence is now lacking in real lives. My hope is that I have accurately reflected the sense of what I’ve heard, if not precisely its circumstances. | |||
All the notes for essay text appear at the end of the text. I’ve also placed at the end some statistical tables, prepared by Arturo Sanchez and myself, which help illustrate some recent economic trends. | |||
I LEARNED A GREAT DEAL about work from Jonathan Cobb a quarter century ago. I returned to this subject at the urging of Garrick Utley, and was helped in pursuing it by Bennett Harrison, Christopher Jencks, and Saskia Sassen; The Corrosion of Character tries to fathom some personal implications of the discoveries they all have | |||
made about the modern economy. To my graduate assistant Michael Laskawy, I owe a debt of intellectual companionship and also of forbearance in dealing with the various practical issues which attend research and writing. | |||
This essay began as a Darwin Lecture, given at Cambridge University in 1996. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences afforded me the time to write this book. | |||
Finally, I would like to thank Donald Lamm and Alane Mason, of W. W. Norton & Company, and Arnulf Conradi and Elizabeth Ruge of Berlin Verlag, who helped me shape the manuscript. | |||
ONE | |||
Drift | |||
Recently I met someone in an airport whom I hadn’t seen for fifteen years. I had interviewed the father of Rico (as I shall call him) a quarter century ago when I wrote a book about blue-collar workers in America, The Hidden Injuries of Class. Enrico, his father, then worked as a janitor, and had high hopes for this boy, who was just entering adolescence, a bright kid good at sports. | |||
When I lost touch with his father a decade later, Rico had just finished college. In the airline lounge, Rico looked as if he had fulfilled his father’s dreams. He carried a computer in a smart leather case, dressed in a suit I couldn’t afford, and sported a signet ring with a crest. | |||
Enrico had spent twenty years by the time we first met cleaning toilets and mopping floors in a downtown office building. He did so without complaining, but also without any hype about living out the American Dream. His work had one single and durable purpose, the service of his family. It had taken him fifteen years to save the money for a house, which he purchased in a suburb near Boston, cutting ties with his old Italian neighborhood because a house in the suburbs was better for the kids. Then his wife, Flavia, had gone to work, as a presser in a dry-cleaning plant; by the time I met Enrico in 1970, both parents were saving for the college education of their | |||
two sons. | |||
The | What had most struck me about Enrico and his generation was how linear time was in their lives: year after year of working in jobs which seldom varied from day to day. And along that line of time, achievement was cumulative: Enrico and Flavia checked the increase in their savings every week, measured their domesticity by the various improvements and additions they had made to their ranch house. Finally, the time they lived was predictable. The upheavals of the Great Depression and World War II had faded, unions protected their jobs; though he was only forty when I first met him, Enrico knew precisely when he would retire and how much money he would have. | ||
Time is the only resource freely available to those at the bottom of society. To make time accumulate, Enrico needed what the sociologist Max Weber called an “iron cage,” a bureaucratic structure which rationalized the use of time; in Enrico’s case, the seniority rules of his union about pay and the regulations organizing his government pension provided this scaffolding. When he added to these resources his own self-discipline, the result was more than economic. | |||
He carved out a clear story for himself in which his experience accumulated materially and psychically; his life thus made sense to him as a linear narrative. Though a snob might dismiss Enrico as boring, he experienced the years as a dramatic story moving forward repair by repair, interest payment by interest payment. The janitor felt he became the author of his life, and though he was a man low on the social scale, this narrative provided him a sense of self-respect. | |||
Though clear, Enrico’s life story was not simple. I was particularly struck by how Enrico straddled the worlds of his old immigrant community and his new suburban-neutral life. Among his suburban neighbors he lived as a quiet, self-effacing citizen; when he returned to the old neighborhood, however, he received much more attention as a man who had made good on the outside, a worthy elder who returned each Sunday for Mass followed by lunch followed by gossipy coffees. He got recognition as a distinctive human being from those who knew him long enough to understand his story; he got a more anonymous kind of respect from his new neighbors by doing what everyone else did, keeping his home and garden neat, living without incident. The thick texture of Enrico’s particular experience lay in the fact that he was acknowledged in both ways, depending in which community he moved: two identities from the same disciplined use of his time. | |||
If the world were a happy and just place, those who enjoy respect would give back in equal measure the regard which has been accorded them. This was Fichte’s idea in “The Foundations of National Law” he spoke of the “reciprocal effect” of recognition. | |||
But real life does not proceed so generously. Enrico disliked blacks, although he had labored peaceably for many years with other janitors who were black; he disliked non-Italian foreigners like the Irish, although his own father could barely speak English. He could not acknowledge kindred struggles; he had no class allies. Most of all, however, Enrico disliked middle-class people. We treated him as though he were invisible, “as a zero,” he said; the janitor’s resentment was complicated by his fear that because of his lack of education and his menial status, we had a sneaking right to do so. To his powers of endurance in time he contrasted the whining self-pity of blacks, the unfair intrusion of foreigners, and the unearned privileges of the bourgeoisie. | |||
Though Enrico felt he had achieved a measure of social honor, he hardly wanted his son Rico to repeat his own life. The American dream of upward mobility for the children powerfully drove my friend. “I don’t understand a word he says,” Enrico boasted to me several times when Rico had come home from school and was at work on math. I heard many other parents of sons and daughters like Rico say something like “I don’t understand him” in harder tones, as though the kids had abandoned them. We all violate in some way the place assigned us in the family myth, but upward mobility gives that passage a peculiar twist. Rico and other youngsters headed up the social ladder sometimes betrayed shame about their parents’ working-class accents and rough manners, but more often felt suffocated by the endless strategizing over pennies and the reckoning of time in tiny steps. These favored children wanted to embark on a less constrained journey. | |||
Now, many years later, thanks to the encounter at the airport, I had the chance to see how it had turned out for Enrico’s son. In the airport lounge, I must confess, I didn’t much like what I saw. Rico’s expensive suit could have been just business plumage, but the crested signet ring—a mark of elite family background—seemed both a lie and a betrayal of the father. However, circumstances threw Rico and me together on a long flight. He and I did not have one of those American journeys in which a stranger spills out his or her emotional guts to you, gathers more tangible baggage when the plane lands, and disappears forever. I took the seat next to Rico without being asked, and for the first hour of a long flight from New York to Vienna had to pry information out of him. | |||
RICO, I LEARNED, has fulfilled his father’s desire for upward mobility, but has indeed rejected the way of his father. Rico scorns “time-servers” and others wrapped in the armor of bureaucracy; instead he believes in being open to change and in taking risks. And he has prospered; whereas Enrico had an income in the bottom quarter of the wage scale, Rico’s has shot up to the top 5 percent. | |||
Yet this is not an entirely happy story for Rico. | |||
After graduating from a local university in electrical engineering, Rico went to a business school in New York. There he married a fellow student, a young Protestant woman from a better family. School prepared the young couple to move and change jobs frequently, and they’ve done so. Since graduation, in fourteen years | |||
at work Rico has moved four times. | |||
Rico began as a technology adviser to a venture capital firm on the West Coast, in the early, heady days of the developing computer industry in Silicon Valley; he then moved to Chicago, where he also did well. But the next move was for the sake of his wife’s career. If Rico were an ambition-driven character out of the pages of Balzac, | |||
he would never have done it, for he gained no larger salary, and he left hotbeds of high-tech activity for a more retired, if leafy, office park in Missouri. Enrico felt somewhat ashamed when Flavia went to work; Rico sees Jeannette, his wife, as an equal working partner, and has adapted to her. It was at this point, when Jeannette’s career took off, that their children began arriving. | |||
In the Missouri office park, the uncertainties of the new economy caught up with the young man. While Jeannette was promoted, Rico was downsized—his firm was absorbed by another, larger firm that had its own analysts. So the couple made a fourth move, back East to a suburb outside New York. Jeannette now manages a big team of accountants, and he has started a small consulting firm. | |||
Prosperous as they are, the very acme of an adaptable, mutually supportive couple, both husband and wife often fear they are on the edge of losing control over their lives. This fear is built into their work histories. | |||
In Rico’s case, the fear of lacking control is straightforward: it concerns managing time. When Rico told his peers he was going to start his own consulting firm, most approved; consulting seems the road to independence. But in getting started he found himself plunged into many menial tasks, like doing his own photocopying, | |||
which before he’d taken for granted. He found himself plunged into the sheer flux of networking; every call had to be answered, the slightest acquaintance pursued. To find work, he has fallen subservient to the schedules of people who are in no way obliged to respond to him. Like other consultants, he wants to work in accordance with contracts setting out just what the consultant will do. But these contracts, he says, are largely fictions. A consultant usually has to tack one way and another in response to the changing whims or thoughts of those who pay; Rico has no fixed role that allows him to say to others, “This is what I do, this is what I am responsible for.” | |||
Jeannette’s lack of control is more subtle. The small group of accountants she now manages is divided among people who work at home, people usually in the office, and a phalanx of low-level backoffice clerks a thousand miles away connected to her by computer cable. In her present corporation, strict rules and surveillance of | |||
phones and e-mail disciplines the conduct of the accountants who work from home; to organize the work of the back-office clerks a thousand miles away, she can’t make hands-on, face-to-face judgments, but instead must work by formal written guidelines. She hasn’t experienced less bureaucracy in this seemingly flexible work arrangement; indeed, her own decisions count for less than in the days when she supervised workers who were grouped together, all the time, in the same office. | |||
As I say, at first I was not prepared to shed many tears for this American Dream couple. Yet as dinner was served to Rico and me on our flight, and he began to talk more personally, my sympathies increased. His fear of losing control, it developed, went much deeper than worry about losing power in his job. He feared that the actions he needs to take and the way he has to live in order to survive in the modern economy have set his emotional, inner life adrift. | |||
Rico told me that he and Jeannette have made friends mostly with the people they see at work, and have lost many of these friendships during the moves of the last twelve years, “though we stay ‘netted.’” Rico looks to electronic communications for the sense of community which Enrico most enjoyed when he attended meetings of the janitors’ union, but the son finds communications on-line short and hurried. “It’s like with your kids—when you’re not there, all you get is news later.” | |||
In each of his four moves, Rico’s new neighbors have treated his advent as an arrival which closes past chapters of his life; they ask him about Silicon Valley or the Missouri office park, but, Rico says, “they don’t see other places” their imaginations are not engaged. This is a very American fear. The classic American suburb was a bedroom community; in the last generation a different kind of suburb has arisen, more economically independent of the urban core, but not really town or village either; a place springs into life with the wave of a developer’s wand, flourishes, and begins to decay all within a generation. Such communities are not empty of sociability or neighborliness, but no one in them becomes a longterm witness to another person’s life. | |||
The fugitive quality of friendship and local community form the background to the most important of Rico’s inner worries, his family. Like Enrico, Rico views work as his service to the family; unlike Enrico, Rico finds that the demands of the job interfere with achieving the end. At first I thought he was talking about the all too familiar conflict between work time and time for family. “We get home at seven, do dinner, try to find an hour for the kids’ homework, and then deal with our own paperwork.” When things get tough for months at a time in his consulting firm, “it’s like I don’t know who my kids are.” He worries about the frequent anarchy into which his family plunges, and about neglecting his children, whose needs can’t be programmed to fit into the demands of his job. | |||
Hearing this, I tried to reassure him; my wife, stepson, and I had endured and survived well a similarly high-pressure life. “You aren’t being fair to yourself,” I said. “The fact you care so much means you are doing the best for your family you can.” Though he warmed to this, I had misunderstood. | |||
As a boy, I already knew, Rico had chafed under Enrico’s authority; he had told me then he felt smothered by the smallminded rules which governed the janitor’s life. Now that he is a father himself, the fear of a lack of ethical discipline haunts him, particularly the fear that his children will become “mall rats,” hanging out aimlessly in the parking lots of shopping centers in the afternoons while the parents remain out of touch at their offices. He therefore wants to set for his son and daughters an example of resolution and purpose, “but you can’t just tell kids to be like that” he has to set an example. The objective example he could set, his upward mobility, is something they take for granted, a history that belongs to a past not their own, a story which is over. But his deepest worry is that he cannot offer the substance of his work life as an example to his children of how they should conduct themselves ethically. The qualities of good work are not the qualities of good character. | |||
In | AS I CAME LATER TO UNDERSTAND, the gravity of this fear comes from a gap separating Enrico and Rico’s generations. Business leaders and journalists emphasize the global marketplace and the use of new technologies as the hallmarks of the capitalism of our time. This is true enough, but misses another dimension of change: new ways of organizing time, particularly working time. The most tangible sign of that change might be the motto “No long term.” In work, the traditional career progressing step by step through the corridors of one or two institutions is withering; so is the deployment of a single set of skills through the course of a working life. Today, a young American with at least two years of college can expect to change jobs at least eleven times in the course of working, and change his or her skill base at least three times during those forty years of labor. | ||
An executive for ATT points out that the motto “No long term” is altering the very meaning of work: | |||
In ATT we have to promote the whole concept of the work force being contingent, though most of the contingent workers are inside our walls. “Jobs” are being replaced by “projects” and “fields of work.”1 | |||
Corporations have also farmed out many of the tasks they once did permanently in-house to small firms and to individuals employed on short-term contracts. The fastest-growing sector of the American labor force, for instance, is people who work for temporary job agencies.2 | |||
“People are hungry for [change],” the management guru James Champy argues, because “the market may be ‘consumer-driven’ as never before in history.”3 The market, in this view, is too dynamic to permit doing things the same way year after year, or doing the same thing. The economist Bennett Harrison believes the source of this hunger for change is “impatient capital,” the desire for rapid return; for instance, the average length of time stocks have been held on British and American exchanges has dropped 60 percent in the last fifteen years. The market believes rapid market return is best generated by rapid institutional change. | |||
The “long-term” order at which the new regime takes aim, it should be said, was itself short-lived—the decades spanning the mid-twentieth century. Nineteenth-century capitalism lurched from disaster to disaster in the stock markets and in irrational corporate investment; the wild swings of the business cycle provided people little security. In Enrico’s generation after World War II, this disorder was brought somewhat under control in most advanced economies; strong unions, guarantees of the welfare state, and largescale corporations combined to produce an era of relative stability. This span of thirty or so years defines the “stable past” now challenged by a new regime. | |||
A change in modern institutional structure has accompanied short-term, contract, or episodic labor. Corporations have sought to remove layers of bureaucracy, to become flatter and more flexible organizations. In place of organizations as pyramids, management wants now to think of organizations as networks. “Networklike arrangements are lighter on their feet” than pyramidal hierarchies, the sociologist Walter Powell declares; “they are more readily decomposable or redefinable than the fixed assets of hierarchies.”4 This means that promotions and dismissals tend not to be based on clear, fixed rules, nor are work tasks crisply defined; the network is constantly redefining its structure. | |||
An IBM executive once told Powell that the flexible corporation “must become an archipelago of related activities.”5 The archipelago is an apt image for communications in a network, communication occurring like travel between islands—but at the speed of light, thanks to modern technologies. The computer has been the key to replacing the slow and clogged communications which occur in traditional chains of command. The fastest-growing sector of the labor force deals in computer and data-processing services, the area in which Jeanette and Rico work; the computer is now used in virtually all jobs, in many ways, by people of all ranks. (Please see Tables 1 and 7 in the Appendix for a statistical portrait.) For all these reasons, Enrico’s experience of long-term, narrative time in fixed channels has become dysfunctional. What Rico sought to explain to me—and perhaps to himself—is that the material changes embodied in the motto “No long term” have become dysfunctional for him too, but as guides to personal character, particularly in relation to his family life. | |||
Take the matter of commitment and loyalty. “No long term” is a principle which corrodes trust, loyalty, and mutual commitment. Trust can, of course, be a purely formal matter, as when people agree to a business deal or rely on another to observe the rules in a game. But usually deeper experiences of trust are more informal, as when people learn on whom they can rely when given a difficult or impossible task. Such social bonds take time to develop, slowly rooting into the cracks and crevices of institutions. | |||
The short time frame of modern institutions limits the ripening of informal trust. A particularly egregious violation of mutual commitment often occurs when new enterprises are first sold. In firms starting up, long hours and intense effort are demanded of everyone; when the firms go public—that is, initially offer publicly traded shares—the founders are apt to sell out and cash in, leaving lower-level employees behind. If an organization whether new or old operates as a flexible, loose network structure rather than by rigid command from the top, the network can also weaken social bonds. The sociologist Mark Granovetter says that modern institutional networks are marked by “the strength of weak ties,” by which he partly means that fleeting forms of association are more useful to people than long-term connections, and partly that strong social ties like loyalty have ceased to be compelling.6 These weak ties are embodied in teamwork, in which the team moves from task to task and the personnel of the team changes in the process. Strong ties depend, by contrast, on long association. And more personally they depend on a willingness to make commitments to others. Given the typically short, weak ties in institutions today, John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor, counsels the young to work “on the outside rather than on the inside” of organizations. He advocates consulting rather than becoming “entangled” in long-term employment; institutional loyalty is a trap in an economy where “business concepts, product designs, competitor intelligence, capital equipment, and all kinds of knowledge have shorter credible life spans.”7 A consultant who managed a recent IBM job shrinkage declares that once employees “understand [they can’t depend on the corporation] they’re marketable.”8 Detachment and superficial cooperativeness are better armor for dealing with current realities than behavior based on values of loyalty and service. | |||
It is the time dimension of the new capitalism, rather than hightech data transmission, global stock markets, or free trade, which most directly affects people’s emotional lives outside the workplace. Transposed to the family realm, “No long term” means keep moving, don’t commit yourself, and don’t sacrifice. Rico suddenly erupted on the plane, “You can’t imagine how stupid I feel when I talk to my kids about commitment. It’s an abstract virtue to them; they don’t see it anywhere.” Over dinner I simply didn’t understand the outburst, which seemed apropos of nothing. But his meaning is now clearer to me as a reflection upon himself. He means the children don’t see commitment practiced in the lives of their parents or their parents’ generation. | |||
Similarly, Rico hates the emphasis on teamwork and open discussion which marks an enlightened, flexible workplace once those values are transposed to the intimate realm. Practiced at home, teamwork is destructive, marking an absence of authority and of firm guidance in raising children. He and Jeannette, he says, have seen too many parents who have talked every family issue to death for fear of saying “No!,” parents who listen too well, who understand beautifully rather than lay down the law; they have seen as a result too many disoriented kids. | |||
“Things have to hold together,” Rico declared to me. Again, I didn’t at first quite get this, and he explained what he meant in terms of watching television. Perhaps unusually, Rico and Jeannette make it a practice to discuss with their two sons the relation between movies or sitcoms the boys watch on the tube and events in the newspapers. “Otherwise it’s just a jumble of images.” But mostly the connections concern the violence and sexuality the children see on television. Enrico constantly spoke in little parables to drive home questions of character; these parables he derived from his work as a janitor—such as “You can ignore dirt but it won’t go away.” When I first knew Rico as an adolescent, he reacted with a certain shame to these homely snippets of wisdom. So now I asked Rico if he too made parables or even just drew ethical rules from his experience at work. He first ducked answering directly—“There’s not much on TV about that sort of thing”—then replied, “And well, no, I don’t talk that way.” | |||
Behavior which earns success or even just survival at work thus gives Rico little to offer in the way of a parental role model. In fact, for this modern couple, the problem is just the reverse: how can they protect family relations from succumbing to the short-term behavior, the meeting mind-set, and above all the weakness of loyalty and commitment which mark the modern workplace? In place of the chameleon values of the new economy, the family—as Rico sees it—should emphasize instead formal obligation, trustworthiness, commitment, and purpose. These are all long-term virtues. | |||
This conflict between family and work poses some questions about adult experience itself. How can long-term purposes be pursued in a short-term society? How can durable social relations be sustained? How can a human being develop a narrative of identity and life history in a society composed of episodes and fragments? The conditions of the new economy feed instead on experience which drifts in time, from place to place, from job to job. If I could state Rico’s dilemma more largely, short-term capitalism threatens to corrode his character, particularly those qualities of character which bind human beings to one another and furnishes each with a sense of sustainable self. | |||
BY THE END OF DINNER, both of us were wrapped in our own thoughts. I had imagined a quarter century ago that late capitalism had achieved something like a final consummation; whether there was more market freedom, less government control, still the “system” entered into people’s everyday experience as it always had, through success and failure, domination and submission, alienation and consumption. Questions of culture and character fell for me into these familiar categories. But no young person’s experience today could be captured by these old habits of thought. Rico’s talk about his family had also set him, evidently, to thinking about his ethical values. When we retired to the back of the cabin to smoke, he remarked to me that he used to be a liberal, in the generous American sense of caring about the poor and behaving well to minorities like blacks and homosexuals. Enrico’s intolerance of blacks and foreigners shamed his son. Since going to work, though, Rico says he has become a “cultural conservative.” Like most of his peers, he loathes social parasites, embodied for him in the figure of the welfare mother who spends her government checks on booze and drugs. He has also become a believer in fixed, Draconian standards of communal behavior, as opposed to those values of “liberal parenting” which parallel the open-ended meeting at work. As an example of this communal ideal Rico told me that he approves the proposal current in some conservative circles to take away the children of bad parents and put them in orphanages. My hackles rose and we debated furiously, smoke rising above us in a cloud. We were talking past each other. (And as I look over my notes, I see Rico also a bit enjoyed provoking me.) He knows his cultural conservatism is just that—an idealized symbolic community. He has no real expectation of shutting children up in orphanages. He has certainly had little adult experience of the conservatism which preserves the past; for instance, other Americans have treated him each time he has moved as though life is just beginning, the past consigned to oblivion. The cultural conservatism to which he subscribes forms a testament to the coherence he feels missing in his life. | |||
And as concerns the family, his values are no simple matter of nostalgia. Rico in fact disliked the actual experience of rigid parental rule such as he suffered at Enrico’s hands. He would not return to the linear time which ordered Enrico and Flavia’s existence even if he could; he looked at me with a certain disgust when I told him that as a college professor, I have job tenure for life. He treats uncertainty and risk-taking as challenges at work; as a consultant he has learned to be an adept team player. But these forms of flexible behavior have not served Rico in his roles as a father or as a member of a community; he wants to sustain social relations and to offer durable guidance. It is against the severed ties at work, willful amnesia of his neighbors, and the specter of his children as mall rats that he asserts the idea of lasting values. And so Rico has become caught in a trap. | |||
All the specific values he cited are fixed rules: a parent says no; a community demands work; dependence is an evil. The vagaries of circumstance are excluded from these ethical rules—random vagaries are what, after all, Rico wants to defend against. But it’s difficult to put such timeless rules into practice. | |||
That difficulty appears in the language Rico uses to describe his moves the last fourteen years around the country. Though many of these moves have not been of his own desiring, he seldom used the passive voice in recounting the events. For instance, he dislikes the locution “I was downsized” instead, when this event broke up his life in the Missouri office park, he declared, “I faced a crisis and I had a decision to make.” About this crisis he said, “I make my own choices; I take full responsibility for moving around so much.” This sounded like his father. “Taking responsibility for yourself” was the most important phrase in Enrico’s lexicon. But Rico didn’t see how to act on it. | |||
I asked Rico, “When you were downsized in Missouri, why didn’t you protest, why didn’t you fight back?” | |||
“Sure, I felt angry, but that doesn’t do any good. There was nothing unfair about the corporation’s making its operation tighter. | |||
Whatever happened, I had to deal with the consequences. Would I ask Jeannette to move, one more time, for me? It was bad for the kids as well as her. Should I ask her? Who should I write a letter to about that?” | |||
There was no action he could take. Even so, he feels responsible for this event beyond his control; he literally takes it into himself, as his own burden. But what does “taking responsibility” mean? His children accept mobility as just the way of the world; his wife is in fact grateful that he has been willing to move for her sake. Yet the statement “I take responsibility for moving around so much” issues from Rico as a defiant challenge. By this point in our journey, I understood that the last thing I should reply to this challenge was “How could you hold yourself accountable?” It would have been a reasonable question and an insult—you don’t really matter. | |||
Enrico had a somewhat fatalistic, old-world sense of people being born into a particular class or condition of life and making the very best of what is possible within those constraints. Events beyond his control, like layoffs, happened to him; then he coped. As this bit of sparring I’ve just quoted may make clear, Rico’s sense of responsibility is more absolute. What he draws attention to is his unbending willingness to be held accountable, to that quality of character, rather than to a particular course of action. Flexibility has pushed him to assert the sheer strength of will as the essence of his own ethical character. | |||
Assuming responsibility for events beyond one’s control may seem a familiar friend—guilt—but this would wrongly characterize Rico, at least as he appeared to me. He is not self-indulgently selfaccusing. Nor has he lost his nerve, faced with a society which seems to him all in fragments. The rules he frames for what a person of good character should do may seem simplistic or childish, but again this would be to judge him wrongly. He is in a way a realist; it would indeed have been meaningless for him to write a letter to his employers about the havoc they had introduced into his family. So Rico focuses on his own sheer determination to resist: he will not drift. He wants to resist particularly the acid erosion of those qualities of character, like loyalty, commitment, purpose, and resolution, which are long-term in nature. He affirms timeless values which characterize who he is—for good, permanently, essentially. His will has become static; he is trapped in the sheer assertion of values. | |||
What is missing between the polar opposites of drifting experience and static assertion is a narrative which could organize his conduct. Narratives are more than simple chronicles of events; they give shape to the forward movement of time, suggesting reasons why things happen, showing their consequences. Enrico had a narrative for his life, linear and cumulative, a narrative which made sense in a highly bureaucratic world. Rico lives in a world marked instead by short-term flexibility and flux; this world does not offer much, either economically or socially, in the way of narrative. Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connections. Creative destruction, Schumpeter said, thinking about entrepreneurs, requires people at ease about not reckoning the consequences of change, or not knowing what comes next. Most people, though, are not at ease with change in this nonchalant, negligent way. | |||
Certainly Rico doesn’t want to live as a Schumpeterian man, though in the brute struggle for survival he has done well. “Change” means just drift; Rico worries that his children will drift ethically and emotionally—but as with his employers, there is nothing like a letter he can write to his children which will guide them through time. The lessons he wants to teach them are as timeless as is his own sense of determination—which means his ethical precepts apply to any and all cases. Change’s confusions and anxieties have bred in him this swing to the opposite extreme; perhaps this is why he cannot hold up his own life as an illustrative tale to his children, perhaps why, in listening to him, one has no sense of his character unfolding, or his ideals evolving. | |||
I’VE DESCRIBED THIS ENCOUNTER BECAUSE Rico’s experiences with time, place, and work are not unique; neither is his emotional response. The conditions of time in the new capitalism have created a conflict between character and experience, the experience of disjointed time threatening the ability of people to form their characters into sustained narratives. | |||
At the end of the fifteenth century, the poet Thomas Hoccleve declared in The Regiment of Princes, “Allas, wher ys this worldes stabylnesse?”—a lament that appears equally in Homer or in Jeremiah in the Old Testament.9 Through most of human history, people have accepted the fact that their lives will shift suddenly due to wars, famines, or other disasters, and that they will have to improvise in order to survive. Our parents and grandparents were filled with anxiety in 1940, having endured the wreckage of the Great Depression and facing the looming prospect of a world war. What’s peculiar about uncertainty today is that it exists without any looming historical disaster; instead it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism. Instability is meant to be normal, Schumpeter’s entrepreneur served up as an ideal Everyman. Perhaps the corroding of character is an inevitable consequence. “No long term” disorients action over the long term, loosens bonds of trust and commitment, and divorces will from behavior. | |||
I think Rico knows he is both a successful and a confused man. The flexible behavior which has brought him success is weakening his own character in ways for which there exists no practical remedy. If he is an Everyman for our times, his universality may lie in that dilemma. | |||
TWO | |||
Routine | |||
There are good reasons Rico struggles to make sense of the time he lives. Modern society is in revolt against the routine, bureaucratic time which can paralyze work or government or other institutions. Rico’s problem is what to do with himself when this revolt against routine succeeds. | |||
At the dawn of industrial capitalism, though, it was not selfevident that routine was an evil. In the middle of the eighteenth century, it seemed that repetitive labor could lead in two quite different directions, one positive and fruitful, the other destructive. The positive side of routine was depicted in Diderot’s great Encyclopedia, published from 1751 to 1772; the negative side of regular labor-time was portrayed most dramatically in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Diderot believed routine in work could be like any other form of rote learning, a necessary teacher; Smith believed routine deadened the mind. Today, society sides with Smith. Diderot suggests what we might lose by taking his opponent’s side. | |||
THE MOST STRIKING ARTICLES in the Encyclopedia to Diderot’s wellbred audience were those on everyday life: articles by several authors on industry, the various crafts, and farming. These accompanied a series of engravings which illustrated how to make a chair or chisel stone. Mid-eighteenth-century drawing is marked by an elegance of line, but most artists deployed that elegance to depict scenes of aristocratic leisure or landscape; the illustrators of the Encyclopedia put that elegance in the service of drawing hammers, paper presses, and pile drivers. The point of both images and text was to justify the inherent dignity of labor.10 | |||
The particular dignity of routine appears in Volume 5 of the Encyclopedia, in a series of plates showing an actual paper factory, l’Anglée, which lay about sixty miles south of Paris near the town of Montargis. The paper mill is laid out like a chateau, with a main block connecting at two right angles to smaller wings; on the exterior we see parterres and allées around the mill, just as they might have looked on the grounds of a country aristocrat’s home. The setting of this model factory—so pretty to our eyes—in fact dramatizes a great transformation of labor beginning in Diderot’s time: here home was separated from workplace. Up to the mideighteenth century, the household served as the physical center of the economy. In the countryside, families made most of the things they consumed; in cities like Paris or London, trades also were practiced in the family dwelling. In a baker’s house, for instance, journeymen, apprentices, and the baker’s biological family all “took their meals together, and food was provided for all, together, since all were expected to sleep and live in the house,” as the historian Herbert Applebaum points out; “the cost of making bread… included the housing, feeding, and clothing of all the people who worked for the master. Money wages was a fraction of the cost.”11 The anthropologist Daniel Defert calls this an economy of the domus; instead of wage slavery, there reigned an inseparable combination of shelter and subordination to the will of a master. | |||
Diderot depicts at L’Anglée a new order of work, cut free from the domus. The factory provided no workers’ housing on the grounds; indeed, this factory was one of the first in France to recruit workers from far enough away that they had to ride to work, rather than walk on foot. It was also one of the first to pay adolescent workers wages directly, rather than paying their parents. The attractive, even elegant, appearance of the paper mill suggests that the engraver viewed this separation in a positive light. | |||
What we are shown inside is also positive: order reigns. Paper pulping was in fact during the eighteenth century a messy and stinking operation; the rags used for paper were often stripped from corpses, then rotted in vats for two months to break down their fibers. At L’Anglée, though, the floors are spotless and no workers appear on the verge of vomiting. In the room where the fibers are beaten to a pulp by a stamping mill—the messiest of all activities— there are no human beings at all. In the room where the trickiest human division of labor occurred, the pulp scooped, then pressed into thin sheets, three craftsmen work with balletic coordination. The secret of this industrial order lay in its precise routines. | |||
L’Anglée is a factory in which everything has its appointed place and everyone knows what to do. But for Diderot, routines of this sort did not imply the simple, endless mechanical repetition of a task. The schoolmaster who insists a pupil memorize fifty lines of a poem wants the poetry stored in the pupil’s brain, recoverable at command and usable in judging other poems. In his Paradox of Acting, Diderot sought to explain how the actor or actress gradually plumbs the depths of a part by repeating the lines again and again. And these same virtues of repetition he expected to find in industrial labor. | |||
Paper-making is not mindless; Diderot believed—again by analogy to the arts—that its routines were in constant evolution, as workers learned how to manipulate and alter each stage of the labor process. More largely, the “rhythm” of work means that by repeating a particular operation, we find how to speed up and slow down, make variations, play with materials, develop new practices —just as a musician learns how to manage time in performing a piece of music. Thanks to repetition and rhythm, the worker can achieve, Diderot said, “the unity of mind and hand” in labor.12 Of course, this is an ideal. Diderot offers evidence of a visual and subtle kind to make it convincing. At the paper mill the young boys cutting up rancid rags are shown working alone in a room, without an adult overseer. In the sizing, drying, and finishing rooms, young boys, young women, and burly men work side by side; here the Encyclopedia’s audience literally saw equality and fraternity. What makes that imagery specially compelling visually is the faces of the workers. No matter how demanding the tasks engaging them, the workers’ faces are serene, reflecting Diderot’s conviction that through labor human beings come to be at peace with themselves. “Let’s work without theorizing,” Martin says in Voltaire’s Candide. “It’s the only way to make life bearable.” Though Diderot was more inclined to theorize, like Voltaire he believed that through mastering routine and its rhythms, people both take control and calm down. TO ADAM SMITH, these images of orderly evolution, fraternity, and serenity represent an impossible dream. Routine deadens the spirit. Routine, at least as organized in the emerging capitalism which he observed, seemed to deny any connection between ordinary labor and the positive role of repetition in making art. When Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, he was read—as he has continued to be read—as an apostle of that new capitalism. This was because of the declaration he made at the outset of his book in favor of free markets. But Smith is more than an apostle of economic liberty; he was fully aware of the dark side of the market. That awareness came to him particularly in considering the routine organization of time in this new economic order. | |||
The Wealth of Nations is based on a single great insight: Smith believed the free circulation of money, goods, and labor would require people to do ever more specialized tasks. The growth of free markets is coupled to the division of labor in society. We easily understand Smith’s idea of the division of labor in observing a beehive; as the hive grows in size, each of its cells becomes the site for a particular labor. Put formally, the numeric dimensions of exchange—be they size of the money supply or the quantity of goods in the market—are inseparably linked to specialization of productive function. | |||
Smith’s own graphic example is of a pin factory. (Not modern sewing pins; eighteenth-century pins were the equivalent of our tacks and small nails, used in carpentry.) Smith calculated a pinmaker doing everything for himself could make at most a few hundred pins a day; in a pin factory operating according to the new divisions of labor, where pin-making was broken down into all its component parts and each worker did only one of them, a pin-maker could process more than 16,000 pins a day.13 The trade the pin factory engages in on the free market will only stimulate demand for pins, leading to larger enterprises, with ever more elaborate divisions of labor. | |||
Like Diderot’s paper mill, Smith’s pin factory is a place to work but not to live in. The separation of home and labor is, Smith said, the most important of all the modern divisions of labor. And like Diderot’s paper mill, Smith’s pin factory operates in an orderly fashion thanks to routine, each worker performing only one function. The pin factory differs from the paper mill in Smith’s vision of how disastrous, humanly, it is to organize work time this way. The world Smith lived in had, of course, been long familiar with routines and schedules of time. Church bells from the sixth century on had marked out time into religious units of the day; the Benedictines took an important step in the early Middle Ages by ringing bells to mark off the times for work and the times for eating as well as the times for prayer. Nearer to Smith’s own day, mechanical clocks had replaced the bells of churches, and by the mid-eighteenth century pocket watches were in widespread use. Now mathematically precise time could be told wherever a person was, whether in earshot or eyesight of a church or not: time had thus ceased to be dependent on space. Why should extending this scheduling of time further prove a human disaster? | |||
The Wealth of Nations is a very long book, and the proponents of the new economy in Smith’s own time tended only to refer to its dramatic and hopeful beginning. As the text progresses, however, it darkens; the pin factory becomes a more sinister place. Smith recognizes that breaking the tasks involved in making pins down into their component parts would condemn individual pin-makers to a numbingly boring day, hour after hour spent doing one small job. At a certain point, routine becomes self-destructive, because human beings lose control over their own efforts; lack of control over work time means people go dead mentally. | |||
The capitalism of his own time Smith believed was crossing this great divide; when Smith declares that “those who labor most get least” in the new order, he was thinking in these human terms, rather than about wages.14 In one of the grimmest passages of The Wealth of Nations he writes: | |||
In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour…comes to be confined to a few very simple operations; frequently to one or two…. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations…generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.15 The industrial worker thus knows nothing of the self-possession and mobile expressiveness of the actor who has memorized a thousand lines; Diderot’s comparison of actor and worker is false, because the worker does not control his or her work. The pin-maker becomes a “stupid and ignorant” creature in the course of the division of labor; the repetitive nature of his work has pacified him. For these reasons, industrial routine threatens to diminish human character in its very depths. | |||
If this seems a strangely pessimistic Adam Smith, it is perhaps only because he was a more complex thinker than capitalist ideology makes him out to be. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments he had earlier argued for the virtues of mutual sympathy and the capacity to identify with the needs of others. Sympathy, he argued, is a spontaneous moral sentiment; it bursts forth suddenly when a man or woman suddenly understands the sufferings or stresses of another. The division of labor dulls, however, spontaneous outburst; routine represses the pouring forth of sympathy. To be sure, Smith equated the growth of markets and the division of labor with the material progress of society, but not with its moral progress. And the virtues of sympathy reveal something perhaps more subtle about individual character. | |||
Rico’s moral center, as we have seen, lay in the resolute assertion of his will; for Smith, the spontaneous eruption of sympathy overcomes the will, sweeps a man or woman up in emotions beyond his or her control, like sudden identification with society’s failures, compassion for habitual liars or for cowards. Eruptions of sympathy—this realm of spontaneous time—pushes us outside our normal moral boundaries. There is nothing predictable or routine about sympathy. | |||
In emphasizing the ethical importance of such bursts of emotion, Smith spoke distinctively among his contemporaries. Many of them viewed human character, in its ethical aspect, as having little to do with spontaneous feeling, or indeed with human will; Jefferson declared in the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (1779), that “the opinions and beliefs of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their own minds.”16 Character turns on doing one’s duty; as James Madison said in 1785, following the dictates of conscience “is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator.”17 Nature and Nature’s God proposes; man obeys. Adam Smith speaks a language of character which is perhaps closer to our own. Character appears to him shaped by history and its unpredictable twists. Once established, a routine doesn’t permit much in the way of personal history; to develop one’s character, one has to break out of routine. This general proposition Smith made specific; he celebrated the character of traders, believing they acted responsively and sympathetically to the changing demands of the moment, just as he pitied the state of character of industrial workers yoked to routine. The trader was, in his view, the more fully engaged human being. | |||
It should not surprise us that Marx was a close reader of Adam Smith, though hardly a celebrant of trade or traders. As a young man, Marx admired at least the general theory of spontaneity in The Theory of Moral Sentiments; as a more adult and sober analyst, he zeroed in upon Smith’s depiction of the ills of routine, the division of labor without the worker’s control of work—these are the essential ingredients of Marx’s analysis of commodified time. Marx added to Smith’s depiction of routine in the pin factory the contrast to such older practices as the German system of Tagwerk, in which a laborer was paid by the day; in that practice, the worker could adapt to the conditions of his or her environment, working differently on days when it rained than on clear days, or organizing tasks to take account of the delivery of supplies; there was rhythm to such work, because the worker was in control.18 By contrast, as the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson would later write, in modern capitalism those employed “experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own’ time.”19 | |||
The fears Adam Smith and Marx harbored of routine time passed into our own century as the phenomenon called Fordism. It’s in Fordism that we can most fully document the apprehension Smith had about the industrial capitalism just emerging at the end of the eighteenth century, particularly in the place for which Fordism was named. | |||
In | THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY’S Highland Park factory was generally considered, during the years 1910–14, to be an illustrious example of technologically based division of labor. Henry Ford was in some ways a humane employer; he gave workers good wages through a five-dollar-day pay scheme (the equivalent of $120 a day in 1997 dollars), and included workers in a profit-sharing plan. The operations on the factory floor were another matter. Henry Ford believed worry about the quality of work life “mere moonshine” five dollars a day was a handsome enough reward for boredom. Before Ford created model factories like Highland Park, the automobile industry was craft-based, with highly skilled workers doing many complex jobs on a motor or an auto body during the course of a working day. These workers enjoyed a great deal of autonomy, and the auto industry was in fact a cluster of decentralized shops. “Many skilled workers,” Stephan Meyer notes, “often hired and fired their own helpers and paid the latter some fixed proportion of their earnings.”20 Around 1910, the pin-maker’s regime took hold in the auto industry. | ||
As Ford Motor industrialized its production process, it favored the employment of so-called specialist workers over skilled craftsmen; the jobs of the specialist workers were those sorts of miniature operations requiring little thought or judgment. In the Ford plant at Highland Park, most of these specialist workers were recent immigrants, while the skilled craftsmen consisted of Germans and other more established Americans; the new immigrants were thought both by management and the “native” Americans to lack the intelligence to do more than routine work. By 1917, 55 percent of the work force were specialist employees; another 15 percent were unskilled cleaners and janitors hovering on the sidelines of the assembly line, and the crafts and technical workers had fallen to 15 percent. | |||
“Cheap men need expensive jigs,” said Sterling Bunnell, an early proponent of these changes, while “highly skilled men need little outside of their tool chests.”21 That insight about using complicated machinery to simplify human labor laid the foundation for the consummation of Smith’s fears. For instance, the industrial psychologist Frederick W. Taylor believed that machinery and industrial design could be immensely complicated in a great enterprise, but there was no need for the workers to understand that complexity; indeed, he asserted, the less they were “distracted” by understanding the design of the whole, the more efficiently they would stick to doing their own jobs.22 Taylor’s infamous timemotion studies were conducted with a stopwatch, measuring to the fraction of a second how long installing a head-lamp or a fender should take. Time-motion management carried Smith’s image of the pin factory to a sadistic extreme, but Taylor had little doubt his human guinea pigs would passively accept measurement and manipulation. | |||
In fact, passive acceptance of this routine time-slavery did not follow as a consequence; David Noble observes that “workers displayed a wide repertoire of techniques for sabotaging timemotion studies and, as a matter of course, ignored methods and process specifications whenever they got in the way or conflicted with their own interests.”23 Moreover, Smith’s “stupid and ignorant” creature became depressed at work, and this diminished his or her productivity. Experiments like those at General Electric’s Hawthorn plant showed that nearly any attention paid to workers as sentient human beings improved their productiveness; industrial psychologists like Elton Mayo thus urged managers to show more concern for their employees and adapted psychiatric practices of counseling to the workplace. Still, industrial psychologists like Mayo were clear-eyed. They knew they could temper the pains of boredom, but not erase them in this iron cage of time. | |||
The pains of routine culminated in Enrico’s generation. In a classic study of the 1950s, “Work and Its Discontents,” Daniel Bell sought to analyze this apotheosis in another automobile site, the General Motors Willow Run plant in Michigan. Smith’s honeycomb had now become truly gigantic; Willow Run was a structure twothirds of a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide. Here all the materials needed to make cars, from raw steel to glass blocks to leather tanneries, were assembled under a single roof, the work coordinated by a highly disciplined bureaucracy of analysts and managers. So complex an organization could function only via precise rules, which Bell called an “engineering rationality.” This immense, well-engineered cage operated on three principles: “the logic of size, the logic of ‘metric time,’ and the logic of hierarchy.”24 | |||
The logic of size was simple: bigger is more efficient. Concentrating all elements of production in one place like Willow Run conserved energy, saved on the transport of materials, and meshed the factory with the company’s white-collar sales and executive offices. | |||
The logic of hierarchy was not quite so simple. Max Weber had asserted in defining the human iron cage that “no special proof is necessary to show that military discipline is the ideal model for the modern capitalism factory.”25 In companies like General Motors in the 1950s, however, Bell noted a somewhat different model of control. The “superstructure which organizes and directs production…draws all possible brainwork away from the shop; everything is centered in the planning and schedule and design departments.” Architecturally, this meant removing the technicians and managers as far from the throbbing machinery of the plants as possible. The generals of work thus lost physical contact with their troops. The result, however, only reinforced the numbing evils of routine for “the worker at the bottom, attending only to details, [who] is divorced from any decision or modification about the product he is working on.”26 | |||
These ills at Willow Run continued to be founded on the Taylorite logic of “metric time.” Time was minutely calculated everywhere in the vast plant so that top managers knew precisely what everyone was supposed to be doing at a given moment. Bell was struck, for instance, by how General Motors “divides the hour into ten six-minute periods…the worker is paid by the numbers of tenths of an hour he works.”27 This minute engineering of work time was connected to very long measures of time in the corporation as well. Seniority pay was finely tuned to the total number of hours a man or woman had worked for General Motors; a laborer could minutely calculate benefits of vacation time and sick leave. The micrometrics of time governed the lower echelons of white-collar offices as well as manual labor on the assembly line, in terms of promotion and benefits. | |||
By Enrico’s generation, however, metrics of time had become something other than an act of repression and domination practiced by management for the sake of the giant industrial organization’s growth. Intense negotiations over these schedules preoccupied both the United Auto Workers union and the management of General Motors; the rank and file in the union paid close and at times passionate attention to the numbers involved in these negotiations. Routinized time had become an arena in which workers could assert their own demands, an arena of empowerment. | |||
This was a political outcome Adam Smith did not anticipate. The entrepreneurial storms which Schumpeter summoned in the image of “creative destruction” meant that Smith’s kind of pin factory went bankrupt throughout the nineteenth century, its rational honeycomb a design on paper which survived in metal and stone often only for a few years. Correspondingly, to preserve themselves against these upheavals, workers sought to routinize time, through savings in mutual aide societies, or through mortgages on homes gained through building societies. We are hardly disposed now to think of routinized time as a personal achievement, but given the stresses, booms, and depressions of industrial capitalism, it often became so. This complicated the meaning of the engineering of routine time which appeared at Ford’s Highland Park and found a consummation of sorts in General Motors’ Willow Run. We have seen how, out of this obsessive attention to the routine schedules of time, Enrico crafted a positive narrative for his life. Routine can demean, but it can also protect; routine can decompose labor, but it can also compose a life. | |||
Still, the substance of Smith’s fear remained vivid to Daniel Bell, who was then still trying to make sense of why workers did not revolt against capitalism. Bell was, as it were, halfway out of the door of socialist faith. He had learned that the discontents of work, even those as profound as the hollowing out of the content of work, do not lead men and women to revolt: resistance to routine does not beget revolution. But still Bell remained a good son in the socialist house. He believed that at the sprawling Willow Run factory he had visited the scene of a tragedy. | |||
A thread connected Bell’s Willow Run back in time to Ford’s Highland Park and then again to Adam Smith’s pin factory. Routine has appeared in all these scenes of labor as personally degrading, a source of mental ignorance—and ignorance of a particular kind. The immediate present may be clear enough, as a laborer presses the same lever or crank hour after hour. What the routine worker lacks is any larger vision of a different future, or knowledge about how to make change. To rephrase this criticism of routine, mechanical activity does not beget any sense of a larger historical narrative: the micronarratives in the lives of workers like Enrico would have appeared to Marx negligible on the larger scale of History, or mere accommodations to existing circumstances. | |||
This is why the old debate between Denis Diderot and Adam Smith remains vividly alive. Diderot did not believe routine work is degrading; on the contrary, he thought routines beget narratives, as the rules and rhythms of work gradually evolve. It’s ironic that this boulevardier and philosophe, a creature of the sleazier salons of mid-eighteenth-century Paris, appears today more a champion of the inherent dignity of ordinary labor than do many of those who have spoken in the name of the People. Diderot’s greatest modern heir, the sociologist Anthony Giddens, has tried to keep Diderot’s insight alive by pointing to the primary value of habit in both social practices and self-understanding; we test out alternatives only in relation to habits which we have already mastered. To imagine a life of momentary impulses, of short-term action, devoid of sustainable routines, a life without habits, is to imagine indeed a mindless existence.28 | |||
Today we stand at a historical divide on the issue of routine. The new language of flexibility implies that routine is dying in the dynamic sectors of the economy. However, most labor remains inscribed within the circle of Fordism. Simple statistics are hard to come by, but a good estimate of the modern jobs described in Table 1 is that at least two-thirds are repetitive in ways which Adam Smith would recognize as akin to those in his pin factory. The computer use at work portrayed in Table 7 similarly involves, for the most part, quite routine tasks like data entry. If we believe, with Diderot and Giddens, that such labor need not be inherently demeaning, then we would focus on the working conditions in which it gets done; we would hope to make factories and offices look more like the cooperative, supportive scenes of labor depicted in the engravings of L’Anglée. | |||
If, however, we are disposed to view routine as inherently demeaning, then we will attack the very nature of the work process itself. We will abhor both routine and its father, the dead hand of bureaucracy. We may be largely driven by the practical desire for greater market responsiveness, productivity, and profit. But we need not be just greedy capitalists; we may believe, as heirs of Adam Smith, that people are stimulated by more flexible experience, both at work and in other institutions. We may believe in the virtues of spontaneity. The question then becomes: will flexibility with all the risks and uncertainties it entails in fact remedy the human evil it sets out to attack? Even supposing routine has a pacifying effect on character, just how is flexibility to make a more engaged human being? | |||
==Towards an Incoherent Refusal of Efficiency== | |||
*Author: Lidia Pereira | |||
*Publisher and date: Pervasive Labour Union Zine Issue #11: The Entreprecariat (ed. Silvio Lorusso), 2018 | |||
===Synopsis=== | |||
Lidia Pereira's essay begins with an etymological and historical tracing of the modern sense of efficiency as an ideal condition of labour. Arising in conjunction with the nascent Industrial Revolution, this notion of efficiency was spurred on by proponents such as Frederick Winslow Taylor, a driving force in the Efficiency Movement, and a Soviet pioneer of scientific management of labour, Alexei Gastev, who both held that workers should operate in machine-like ways in order to optimise efficiency. | |||
With an escalated demand for production due to the outbreak of World War I, the limitations of the human body and psyche were revealed, resulting in the establishment of the field of industrial psychology in the United Kingdom and the development of employee management techniques in the United States. These aimed to rethink efficiency by mediating the relationship between company and employer, aiming to instil in workers a sense of personal investment in the company’s success. | With an escalated demand for production due to the outbreak of World War I, the limitations of the human body and psyche were revealed, resulting in the establishment of the field of industrial psychology in the United Kingdom and the development of employee management techniques in the United States. These aimed to rethink efficiency by mediating the relationship between company and employer, aiming to instil in workers a sense of personal investment in the company’s success. | ||
This enmeshment of worker’s subjectivity within the life of the company led to a shift in responsibility for addressing discontent with systematic inequality from employer to worker by "centering problems on the self and its immediate conditions". Pereira makes a connection between this individualisation with an obscured infra- and superstructure, leading to the collective exploitation of workers. Isabelle Lorey's research on the governmentality of workers, drawn from Foucault’s biopolitics and | This enmeshment of worker’s subjectivity within the life of the company led to a shift in responsibility for addressing discontent with systematic inequality from employer to worker by "centering problems on the self and its immediate conditions". Pereira makes a connection between this individualisation with an obscured infra- and superstructure, leading to the collective exploitation of workers. Isabelle Lorey's research on the governmentality of workers, drawn from Foucault’s biopolitics and History of Sexuality draws the concept of self-development, or an individual's need to govern and adapt themselves as an extension of state power. This leads to a question; why might individuals opt for self-precarization in Western capitalist societies? These individuals are often celebrated within neoliberal discourse as entrepreneurial role models that are coherent with the hegemonic norm; white, male, nationalised and with highly developed social and creative skills. Pereira suggest it is a state-imposed narrative that imbues these individuals with authenticity while obscuring decisive factors that hinder access to equal opportunity for those outside of the norm, shifting responsibility for failure and its consequences (for both those who are forced into precarity and those who choose self-precarization) from the state to the governed subject. | ||
The pressure on those outside the norm to adapt in order to gain acceptance leads to their diversity being conflated with their ability to be productive, but only if these differences are coherent with their official portrait and to the extent that they may be exploited by capital. Social pressures to self-improve and preoccupation with individuals “becoming themselves” through self-promotion and networking is paradoxically at the cost of building important social bonds. | The pressure on those outside the norm to adapt in order to gain acceptance leads to their diversity being conflated with their ability to be productive, but only if these differences are coherent with their official portrait and to the extent that they may be exploited by capital. Social pressures to self-improve and preoccupation with individuals “becoming themselves” through self-promotion and networking is paradoxically at the cost of building important social bonds. | ||
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In conclusion Pereira offers coherence as a concept to be explored further, proposing that by taking an incoherent, inconsistent and idiosyncratic position, individuals who deviate from the norm could be protected from exploitation by refusing to adapt. | In conclusion Pereira offers coherence as a concept to be explored further, proposing that by taking an incoherent, inconsistent and idiosyncratic position, individuals who deviate from the norm could be protected from exploitation by refusing to adapt. | ||
===Original text=== | |||
“efficient (adj.) <br> | |||
1. (of a system or machine) achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.<br> | |||
2. (of a person) working in a well-organized and competent way.” (Oxford Dictionaries) <br> | |||
“Efficiency is a measurable concept that can be determined by determining the ratio of useful output to total input. It minimizes the waste of resources such as physical materials, energy and time, while successfully achieving the desired output.” (Investopedia)<br> | |||
From the latin verb efficiō –meaning to execute, to accomplish– the modern sense of the word ‘efficient’, according to the same Oxford Dictionaries from where I extracted the opening quote of this text, only came into existence in the late 18th century, roughly around the same time as the Industrial Revolution | |||
was entering upon.<br> | |||
Taylorism, a theory of labour developed from the 1880s onwards by Frederick Winslow Taylor –himself one of the main influences within the ‘Efficiency Movement’– was committed to the quest of achieving the perfect ratio of “useful output to total input” to such an extent that some of its proponents went to the point of collapsing the person with the machine as a desired outcome. One such example is Alexei Gastev, founder of the Central Institute of Labour in the Soviet Union, advocate of the “principle of mechanization” and the “biological automatization” of workers (The Charnel House, 2011).<br> | |||
Also known as the scientific management of labor, Taylor’s brainchild consisted of an array of techniques for disciplining workers’ bodies into becoming efficient productive machines. Motion studies, calculation and metrics would produce the knowledge necessary to inform the training of workers and the rational | |||
allocation of human resources. Nikolas Rose understands this process as the first of many attempts to provide management with rational legitimacy. Fabricating compliance was thus essential for preventing conflicts between worker and employer. The perfect Taylorist worker would thus be a docile body, as compliant and sturdy as the steam engine (Gregory, Hendry, Watts, Young, 2017).<br> | |||
But this reductive vision of the worker would not last forever. In “Governing the Soul – The Shaping of the Private Self”, specifically within the chapter “The Productive Subject”, Nikolas Roses maps the developments which allowed for these theories, if not to subside, to evolve. When World War I struck and demands grew heavier on workers’ bodies, it became clear that the worker-machine had limitations and was bound to fatigue and other health-related issues. According to Rose, this allowed for a series of interventions that would gradually shift the conception of the worker as mere physiological apparatus. In 1921 C.S. Myers established the National Institute of Industrial Psychology in the United Kingdom, marking a new era where the psychology of the worker became a crucial way of reconceptualizing industrial efficiency and peaceful continuation.<br> | |||
In the United States, too, the ways of conceiving the working body shifted similarly. However, whereas in the United Kingdom the focus was on individual differences, in the United States the problem was conceptualized in terms of human relations within the group. Overall, workers’ subjectivity “had emerged as a new domain for management” (Rose 1989), which set itself as a neutral, independent authority that would act as a middle man between worker and employer, smoothing out the frictions that might arise between them. Moreover, the enmeshment of the worker’s subjectivity in the life of the company was to create a sense of belonging and common, shared goals, stimulating a renewed personal investment in | |||
the advancement of the company’s interests.<br> | |||
Pinning rightful work discontent caused by systemic inequality down to maladjustment and pathology, this managerial approach to workers’ subjectivity obscures workers’ exploitation in layers of scientific authority, centering the problem on the self and its immediate conditions. In turn, this promotes an internalization and individualization of the problem, thus obfuscating the larger infrastructure/superstructure complex engendering workers’ collective exploitation. These thoughts seem to be echoed by many critics who claim that these interventions did nothing to solve basic inequalities. While Rose sees much truth in these analyses, and indeed links these managerial efforts with a hope to weaken trade unionism, he warns against regarding these discourses as purely ideological as to do so would imply that the knowledge involved in the management of the workers’ psyche is false.<br> | |||
According to Michel Foucault, the preoccupation with the wellbeing of the general population for the purposes of a strong and healthy state dates back to the 18th century Western societies. Such an endeavor requires not only large amounts of data, but also that every individual participates in their own governance. Governmentality thus refers to structural entanglement of self-government with the government of a state (Lorey 2006). In her reading of Foucault’s biopolitics within the context of selfprecarization, Isabell Lorey explores how ideas of freedom and autonomy are constituted in Western capitalist societies. What does it mean to ‘choose’ precarity within the context of neoliberal | |||
governmentality?<br> | |||
From Foucault’s ''History of Sexuality'', Lorey extracts the fundamental notion that the modern Western subject must gradually learn a relationship with themselves. Here, the self emerges as something to be shaped and developed. This development is modeled on the concept of “normal” (e.g. white, male, bourgeois, national, etc), which Lorey identifies with the hegemonic; this concept is infused with the sense of authenticity, thus obscuring the effect of power on the construction of the self. Whilst traditionally those who did not fit the norm were made precarious, Lorey posits that, in neoliberalism, precarization is transformed from an exception into a hegemonic, normalized function. Self-precarization, thus, serves the needs of economical and governmental power whilst at the same time beclouding its role.<br> | |||
Both for forced and self-chosen precarization the narrative is one of creating one’s own opportunities and devising one’s own means of economical success – in short, becoming an entrepreneur. This state imposed narrative is characterized by a shift of responsibility, letting the governed subject shoulder the consequences, as well as the blame, for their failures, obscuring decisive factors which might hinder equal access to opportunities such as class, gender, race, neurological differences, etc.<br> | |||
“In a neoliberal context they [the self-precarious] are exploitable to such an extreme that the state presents them as role models.” (Lorey 2006)<br> | |||
This role model, the normalized identity which corresponds to the hegemonic, is that of a tireless individual who is alert and always ready, a force of nature with a strong presence that is mostly white, often male, charming, creative and gregarious. The normal subject is someone with the ability to, first and foremost, sell themselves, whose social skills are well tuned and whose energy comes from connecting with others. A force to be reckoned with, this well of virtues is resilient, organized, flexible, efficient... the list goes on and on. Within the neoliberal environment, where precarious bodies need to constantly prove themselves economically viable, being visible can also be decisive –every event is an opportunity to trade in social capital, every party might decide whether economical survival will be possible for the next couple of months. Where everyone is an entrepreneur, everyone can become your | |||
next investor. Being seen as productive often becomes more important than production itself.<br> | |||
Lorey identifies self-precarization with feelings of fear, loss of control, insecurity, as well with a redefinition of the boundaries between work and leisure. Always having to be “on” and prove yourself constantly to others is a taxing project on everyone forced to exist under such conditions – even for those who fit the ‘job’ description almost to a tee. We can imagine it is even more so for the precarious within the precarized population –the neurodiverse, people of colour, female, transexual, introverted, anxious, etc. For them, fitting in always involves some degree of self-mutilation and adaptation. As an example, a simple internet search for “introvert” returns several links to articles about the hidden power of the introvert, the wonderful mythical creature with a rich inner world that can become a great leader if his/her powers are respected and correctly harnessed. Likewise, several articles praise the value of having a person on the Autism Spectrum on your work team. This stereotyped and mystified narrative, besides being unhelpful and assuming some degree of advantage, immediately places an inordinate amount of pressure on these people to make up for their deviance to the norm with the “unique” attributes they are famed to have. Acceptance comes at the price of constant performance of an attributed set of traits, qualities and strengths. Much of the mainstream discourse in this arena condescendingly engulfs all diversity into a productive body: individual differences are taken into account as long as they are coherent with their official portrait and in so far as they can be made exploitable by capital.<br> | |||
Coherence might just be a key concept to retain and explore further. Lorey underlines its importance as a fundamental of modern sovereignty – self-governing depends on an imagined coherence and wholeness that shapes itself on the mold of “normality”. Likewise, in order to be made productive, “abnormality” must be absorbed into a perfectly defined identity that is thus easier to govern. If constructing one’s identity boils down to attaining some sort of perceived coherence, when this requirement fails the individual becomes susceptible to what some psychologists call ‘ontological insecurity’. Ontological insecurity, which R.D. Laing defines as the lack of an overarching “sense of personal consistency and cohesiveness”, is a postmodern condition as Rob Horning maintains in his “Sick of Myself”.<br> | |||
Where everyone is concerned with becoming themselves, with selfrealization, self-improvement, and other self-alienating techniques, attention shifts away from community building, organization and strengthening of solidarity bonds between individuals. For all of its promotion of networking and social interaction, normalized precarious identity, where everyone is an entrepreneur of the self, is paradoxically isolating. In this scenario, human relations are not conceived as bonds of solidarity and shared struggles, but established as a means to achieve an end –they’re the promise of future financial gratification. Evoking the image of the social graph (the graphical representation of relationships between everybody and everything on the internet), Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin underline that the visualization of social networks as nodes and links “reinforces the philosophical assumption that social relations always exist in a reified manner as ‘links’ between one atomic unit and another” (Hui and Halpin, 2013). Presiding not only over our online, but also over our offline lives, these atomized representations challenge the possibilities for collectivized counterbehaviour which, Lorey states, is currently missing.<br> | |||
Could a radical refusal of coherence be the basis to start constructing such collectivized counterbehaviour? Could idiosyncrasy be part of the answer to Lorey’s question as to what, within neoliberalism, functions as deviant and cannot be exploited in this way? An inconsistent, incoherent and idiosyncratic mass that refuses their deviance to the hegemonic norm be made compliant with the requirements of the economical system. Organization on the basis of acceptance as opposed to adaptation, where society cares for the individual even if it can’t commodify its “unique” traits. If we are too difficult to predict we become, in the best possible scenario, dangerous. In the worst possible scenario, of little or no use to the market. Unity, accountability, predictability – these are the most prized traits in a governable subject. Can we ever refuse them?<br> | |||
==Duty: Free Art== | |||
*Author: Hito Steyerl | |||
*Publisher and date: Verso 2017 | |||
===Synopsis=== | |||
Hito Steyerl's narration rides between fact and fiction. She is clever, adapting a story telling tone that makes the narrative readable and relevant to the more of us. In the opening chapter, she istuates the plot in a unnamed battle field, where contemporary warfare has taken place. The identity of location is only disclosed few chapters later. The war is targeted at physical bodies, maneuvered behind the screens. | Hito Steyerl's narration rides between fact and fiction. She is clever, adapting a story telling tone that makes the narrative readable and relevant to the more of us. In the opening chapter, she istuates the plot in a unnamed battle field, where contemporary warfare has taken place. The identity of location is only disclosed few chapters later. The war is targeted at physical bodies, maneuvered behind the screens. | ||
Today's war is unlike the wars restrained by physical bodies. In the day, the battlefield is executed by information; in the night, white plastic sheets covers combat zones. Onwards, the warscape falls to the scope of real estate prospection, which entails 3D render videos of reconstruction plans featuring happy playgrounds and walkways. It is a plot where creative destruction has taken place. Capitalism | Today's war is unlike the wars restrained by physical bodies. In the day, the battlefield is executed by information; in the night, white plastic sheets covers combat zones. Onwards, the warscape falls to the scope of real estate prospection, which entails 3D render videos of reconstruction plans featuring happy playgrounds and walkways. It is a plot where creative destruction has taken place. Capitalism dissovles all sorts of seemingly solid structures and force them to constantly upgrade and renew, both from within and without. | ||
As she lays the theoretical grounds from contemporary warfare to economy, the transition of content from | As she lays the theoretical grounds from contemporary warfare to economy, the transition of content from battle field to art economy becomes ilucidated to the reader. Steyerl changes to duty free storages located in freeports of Switzerland, where art trades from one freeport to another, invisible under the the governmental setup of duty free storage zone. The invisibility facilitates tacit strategies of money laundering and tax evasion. At the end, Steyerl raises a pounding question, how will art be accessible to public, if stored in unvisible freeports? | ||
As Ranciere puts it, the division of visibility and invisibility is determined by what is visible in public arenas. | As Ranciere puts it, the division of visibility and invisibility is determined by what is visible in public arenas. | ||
Aside from | Aside from aboved synopsized predicaments, Steyerl also narrates algorithmic data manipulation from authority, which reflects back to the very first plot - data as a contemporary weapon. | ||
=== Original text === | |||
=== | |||
I saw the future. It was empty. A clean slate, flat, designed through and through. | I saw the future. It was empty. A clean slate, flat, designed through and through. | ||
| Line 1,145: | Line 676: | ||
Subject: Fw: Flight itenary OMA staff | Subject: Fw: Flight itenary OMA staff | ||
AMENDMENT | |||
Dear Mr. Azzam, | Dear Mr. Azzam, | ||
| Line 1,179: | Line 710: | ||
With these thoughts in mind, I fell asleep and started dreaming and my dream was pretty strange. I dreamt about some diagrams in one of Peter Osborne's recent texts. | With these thoughts in mind, I fell asleep and started dreaming and my dream was pretty strange. I dreamt about some diagrams in one of Peter Osborne's recent texts. | ||
They describe a genealogy of contemporary art; I wasn't focusing on their content, but instead on their form. The first thing I noticed was that the succession of concentric circles seemed to indicate a dent, or a dimple, in any case, a 3D cavity. But why would time and space start sagging, so to speak? Could there be an issue with gravity? Maybe a micro black hole could cause these circles to curve? But then again, it is much more likely that something else caused this dimple. | They describe a genealogy of contemporary art; I wasn't focusing on their content, but instead on their form. The first thing I noticed was that the succession of concentric circles seemed to indicate a dent, or a dimple, in any case, a 3D cavity. But why would time and space start sagging, so to speak? Could there be an issue with gravity? Maybe a micro black hole could cause these circles to curve? But then again, it is much more likely that something else caused this dimple. | ||
| Line 1,199: | Line 729: | ||
You don't know what's going on behind the doors of the freeport storage rooms either, do you? Let me tell you what's happening in there: time and space are smashed and rearranged into little pieces like in a freak particle accelerator, and the result is the cage without borders called contemporary art today. | You don't know what's going on behind the doors of the freeport storage rooms either, do you? Let me tell you what's happening in there: time and space are smashed and rearranged into little pieces like in a freak particle accelerator, and the result is the cage without borders called contemporary art today. | ||
"AND THIS IS WHERE THE FICTIONAL PART ABRUPTLY ENDS" | |||
I woke in shock and found myself reading this PDF document aloud. | I woke in shock and found myself reading this PDF document aloud. | ||
| Line 1,321: | Line 851: | ||
During the same period, looted archeological artifacts from Palmyra, Syria were recovered at Geneva freeport. | During the same period, looted archeological artifacts from Palmyra, Syria were recovered at Geneva freeport. | ||
== | ==Digital labour the internet as playground and factory (Chapter: Free Labor)== | ||
*Author: Tiziana Terranova | |||
*Publisher and date: Taylor & Francis, 2013 | |||
*Author: | |||
===Synopsis=== | |||
A critical concept of the essential role played by free labor and how the digital labor is implemented in its complicated relation to the capitalist society. | |||
===Original text=== | |||
The real not-capital is labor. | |||
— Karl Marx, Grundrisse | |||
Working in the digital media industry was never as much fun as it is made out to be. Certainly, for the workers of the best- known and most highly valued companies, work might have been a brief experience of something that did not feel like work at all.1 On the other hand, even during the dot-com boom, the “netslaves” of the homonymous webzine had always been vociferous about the shamelessly exploitative nature of the job, its punishing work rhythms, and its ruthless casualization.2 They talked about “24-7 electronic sweatshops” and complained about the 90-hour week and the “moronic management of new media companies.”3 Antagonism in the new media industry also affected the legions of volunteers running well-known sites for the Internet giants. In early 1999, 7 of the 15,000 “volunteers” of America Online rocked the info–love boat by asking the Department of Labor to investigate whether AOL owed them back wages for their years of playing chat hosts for free. They used to work long hours and love it; but they also felt the pain of being burned by digital media. These events point to an inevitable backlash against the glamorization of digital labor, which highlighted its continuities with the modern sweatshop and the increasing degradation of knowledge work. Yet the question of labor in a digital economy as an innovative development of the familiar logic of capitalist exploitation is not so easily dismissed. The netslaves are not simply a typical form of labor on the Internet; they also embody a complex relation to labor that is widespread in late capitalist societies. | |||
In this chapter, I call this excessive activity that makes the Internet a thriving and hyperactive medium “free labor”—a feature of the cultural economy at large and an important, yet unacknowledged, source of value in advanced capitalist societies. By looking at the Internet as a specific instance of the fundamental role played by free labor, this chapter also highlights the connections between the digital economy and what the Italian autonomists have called the “social factory” (or “society-factory”).4 The society-factory describes a process whereby “work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine.”5 Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the net includes the activity of building websites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces. Far from being an unreal, empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large. Support for this argument, however, is immediately complicated by the recent history of Anglo-American cultural theory. How should we speak of labor, especially cultural and technical labor, after the demolition job carried out by 30 years of postmodernism? The postmodern socialist feminism of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” spelled out some of the reasons behind the antipathy of 1980s critical theory for Marxist analyses of labor. Haraway explicitly rejected the humanistic tendencies of theorists who see the latter as the “pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing the world.”6 Paul Gilroy similarly expressed his discontent at the inadequacy of Marxist analysis of labor to the descendants of slaves, who value artistic expression as “the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation.”7 If labor is “the humanizing activity that makes [white] man,” then, surely, this humanizing labor does not really belong in the age of networked, posthuman intelligence. However, the “informatics of domination” that Haraway describes in the manifesto is certainly preoccupied with the relation between cybernetics, labor, and capital. In the 20 years since its publication, this triangulation has become even more evident. The expansion of the Internet has given ideological and material support to contemporary trends toward increased flexibility of the workforce, continuous reskilling, freelance work, and the diffusion of practices such as “supplementing” (bringing supplementary work home from the conventional office).8 Advertising campaigns and business manuals suggest that the Internet is not only a site of disintermediation (embodying the famous death of the middle man, from bookshops to travel agencies to computer stores), but also the means through which a flexible, collective intelligence has come into being. | |||
This chapter does not seek to offer a judgment on the effects of the Internet on society. What I will rather do is map the way in which the Internet connects to the autonomist social factory. I will look at how the “outernet”—the network of social, cultural, and economic relationships that crisscrosses and exceeds the Internet—surrounds and connects the latter to larger flows of labor, culture, and power. It is fundamental to move beyond the notion that cyberspace is about escaping reality in order to understand how the reality of the Internet is deeply connected to the development of late postindustrial societies as a whole. It is related to phenomena that have been defined as “external economies” within theoretical perspectives (such as the theory of transaction costs), suggesting that “the production of value is increasingly involving the capture of productive elements and social wealth that are outside the direct productive process.”9 Cultural and technical work is central to the Internet but is also a widespread activity throughout advanced capitalist societies. Such labor is not exclusive to so-called knowledge workers but is a pervasive feature of the postindustrial economy. The pervasiveness of such production questions the legitimacy of a fixed distinction between production and consumption, labor and culture. It also undermines Gilroy’s distinction between work as “servitude, misery and subordination” and artistic expression as the means to self-fashioning and communal liberation. The increasingly blurred territory between production and consumption, work and cultural expression, however, does not signal the recomposition of the alienated Marxist worker. The Internet does not automatically turn every user into an active producer and every worker into a creative subject. The process whereby production and consumption are reconfigured within the category of free labor signals the unfolding of another logic of value whose operations need careful analysis. | |||
[[Category: Start up, Burn out: Life Hacks]] | [[Category: Start up, Burn out: Life Hacks]] | ||
Latest revision as of 16:55, 15 October 2018
THE ENTREPRECARIAT READER
Index
Subjectivity in the "Gig Economy": From the entreprecariat to base union militancy by Jamie Woodcock
Abstract: This article addresses the issue of the rise of the “gig-economy“ where temporary positions are endorsed instead of long-term work contracted jobs and also the relationship between this phenomenon and the digital mediated entrepreneurialism. It establishes the relationships among the development of the “gig-economy“, the digital context that this one lies in and the effect that both have on the rise of the Entreprecariat. Self-employed/independent workers are attracted for a job where they find a precarious sense of flexibility and are stuck to a platform that is in need of real demands made online. The deprivation of rights imposed to self-employed riders was used as a tool in the food-delivery sector. Workers that found themselves in this contractless situation claimed their right to organize strikes without the need to follow trade union rules.
Fake It Till You Make it – Genesis of the Entrepreneurial Precariat by Silvio Lorusso
Abstract: Silvio Lorusso narrates the perception of precariousness in relation to entrepreneurship through the different thoughts of writers, philosophers or social movements. “Fake it till you make it” is an expression that represents the existential crisis of the entreprecariat. Nobody assumes that is precariat because this could contradict the entrepreneur spirit. Even so in many countries movements have appeared claiming precarious situations such as San Precario, result of thirty years of policies in favour of companies and against workers.
From Autonomism to Post-Autonomia: From Class Composition to a New Political Anthropology? by Joost de Bloois & Frans Willem Korsten
Abstract: This essay is a summary of the historical and ideological development of Post-Autonomia starting from the operaist and autonomist movements to its international situation. Where the beginning of the '80s signed the closure of the opening of an era of uncertainty and precarization, instead of a new horizon of self-valorization and autonomy, Post-Autonomia tries to resynthesize the old discourse and translate it to face to the new complexity of the relation between capitalism, state, multitude and subjectivity with the intent of delineate the role of the new non-subject in constant transformation.
Assembly (Chapter 9: Entrepreneurship of the Multitude) by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri
Abstract: In chapter 9 of “Assembly”, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri attempt to redefine the meaning of “entrepreneurship”. The “entrepreneurship of the multitude” as proposed by the authors, is capable of forming new social combinations, pointing to autonomous social production and reproduction.
The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (Chapter 1, 2) by Richard Sennet
Abstract: The relation between work, time and the more personal aspect of life is a focal point in Sennet’s book. The state of today’s economy, described as “flexible capitalism”, has forced a constant rotation of jobs, cities, and friends which can be stimulating but can also contribute to an unstructured and meaningless life. The author addresses these problems by analyzing his encounter with Rico, a successful man suffering from the uncertainty of life and the lack of longstanding values in society.
Towards an Incoherent Refusal of Efficiency by Lidia Pereira
Abstract: A historical account of the scientific management of labour and the concept of efficiency leads to the central question of this essay; what functions as deviant and cannot be exploited by capital, within neoliberalism? Lidia Pereira proposes incoherence as a counterbehaviour to promote acceptance, rather than adaption to the norm.
Duty: Free Art by Hito Steyerl
Abstract: How to define terminology of art in age of planetary civil war, the war behind the screens?
Digital labour the internet as playground and factory (Chapter: Free Labor) by Tiziana Terranova
Abstract: A critical concept of the essential role played by free labor and how the digital labor is implemented in its complicated relation to the capitalist society.
Subjectivity in the "Gig Economy": From the entreprecariat to base union militancy
- Author: Jamie Woodcock
- Publisher and date: Pervasive Labour Union Zine #11 - The Entreprecariat, September 10th, 2017
Synopsis
Subjectivity in the “Gig Economy: From the entreprecariat to base union militancy” is an article by Jamie Woodcock published in the Issue #11 of the Pervasive Labour Union Zine from September 2017. The article addresses the issue of the rise of the “gig-economy“ where temporary positions are endorsed instead of long-term work contracted jobs and also the relationship between this phenomenon and the digital mediated entrepreneurialism. The author starts the article establishing the relationships among the development of the “gig-economy“, the digital context that this one lies in and the effect that both have on the rise of the Entreprecariat. In this precarious economy what is portrayed is that in the foundation of this contractless job positions there are employment places that provide a lot of freedom to those who are applying.
Companies created some sort of propaganda about this free space for someone with limited availability, but with the fast rise of what the author calls the “platform capitalism“ where companies outsource their work through online systems, the reality is that people are in reality in a precarious flexibility. Self-employed/independent workers are stuck to a platform that is in need of real demands made online, no minimum wages or sick pays are assured and you have to invest in your working equipment. It is interesting how this deprivation of rights was used by employers has a tool in the food-delivery sector. Workers that find themselves in this contractless situation and that are used as a company outsource claimed their right to organize strikes without the need to follow trade union rules. This strategy was only possible because, in theory, they are their self-employed. Workers who had no prior knowledge of organizing in mainstream trade unions are now taking action in their own self-union organizations.
Jamie Woodcock finishes his article raising awareness to the increase of this kind of business models and the fact that they are being used across different sectors but also bring up the fact that these self-employed people are reorganizing themselves collectively as a counter-power to work in the so-called “gig-economy“.
Original text
Contemporary work has been transformed. This can be seen most sharply with the rise of the so-called 'gig economy', which involves workers tying together of different forms of short term and unreliable work in order to make ends meet. Instead of long-term (or even reasonably short-term) work contracts, contemporary employment is becoming more precarious and increasingly mediated in a digital context. These kinds of arrangements are facilitating the rise of the Entreprecariat, which "refers to the reciprocal influence of an entrepreneurialist regime and pervasive precarity." [1] The entrepreneurialist regime is an ideological construction that promises freedom – often pitched as flexibility – achieved through sheer willpower and hard work. It builds upon the idea of 'Homo Economicus' – that people are rational and self-interested agents who will seek to maximise their own utility and profit. It is an attempt to convince workers that their own conditions are not due to the structure of society, but solely down to their own agency. Take, for example, a recent advert from Fiverr – the 'Freelance Services Marketplace for The Lean Entrepreneur' [2] – featured a portrait of a gaunt and tired-looking worker with the following text:
You eat a coffee for lunch.
You follow through on
your follow through. Sleep
deprivation is your drug of
choice. You might be a doer.
You – as the idealised "gig worker" – do not need the support of minimum wage legislation or holiday pay (let alone sick pay!) as you are a 'doer', drawing on your entrepreneurial skills to get ahead, unlike the supposed don’t-er, who are unwilling to take initiative.
The idea of the Entreprecariat has been popularised following the 2008 financial crisis. In the context of what Paul Mason has described as a 'jobless recovery' [3], there has been a rapid rise of 'platform capitalism' [4], in which companies have tried to[…] ment used for the work. The purported flexibility of this kind of work involves the transferral of risk from capital to labour, with very little in return. There is no opportunity for entrepreneurialism, with the work dictated by the demand for food delivery. While the labour process is controlled via immaterial smartphone apps, the work itself is definitely material. The food has to be sourced from ingredients and cooked into meals, and these then have to be transported across the physical environment of the city. This movement is powered through the burning of calories on a bicycle or the burning of petrol on mopeds. It requires long shifts, regardless of the weather and traffic, and risks injury and accidents.
The power of the Entreprecariat subjectivity has not lasted long in the "gig economy". Despite the marketing gimmicks about flexibility and the promise of liberation that would come from being a self-employed independent contractor, the grim realities of this kind of precarious work are increasingly coming to the surface. Instead, a new subjectivity is being formed in the offline spaces of these online platforms. In the case of Deliveroo, workers are assigned meeting points to ensure the fastest delivery[…] rank and file organisations have very different structures to mainstream trade unions, starting from workers’ self-organisation and action.
The success of the new business models in the "gig economy" means that the experiences of this kind of work are becoming increasingly common across different sectors. The model is an attempt to force workers to take on more risk and less pay, often with digital surveillance and control. But there is now an alternative to the Entreprecariat subjectivity of trying harder, working longer, and drinking much more coffee. Rather than individuals competing to get ahead, a new collective subjectivity of the 'doer' is being formed. This is the worker who refuses, who talks to other workers at the meetup point, who starts a WhatsApp group, who writes a leaflet, and who takes the first step to organising that refusal into an antagonism with management [7]. This new subjectivity is being forged through the collective struggle for counter-power at work.
Fake It Till You Make it – Genesis of the Entrepreneurial Precariat
- Author: Silvio Lorusso
- Publisher and date: 2018
Synopsis
Fake It Till You Make it - Genesis of the Entrepreneurial Precariat is an article by Silvio Lorusso, that narrate the perception of precariousness in relation to entrepreneurship through the different view that writers, philosophers or social movements have about it. First of all to describe the current situation, we need to understand Millenials as technology humans main characters of the digital revolution with a constant uncertain horizon.
Based on the words of Michel Foucault's who introduced the expression "Entrepreneur of the self", Lorusso establish a link between this description of entrepreneur and the current 20-30 years old worker, who has oneself as the centre of gravity of their work instead of their companies. Moreover, we can classify socially the entrepreneur following the social pyramid that Joseph Schumpeter presented. He saw the entrepreneur as the top of the social pyramid because of its precious ability to innovate. This vision was inverted by Peter Drucker who defended that everyone is call to free enterprise if we want to accelerate the innovation. As a result of all these ideas the entreprecariat concept was born.
"Fake it till you make it" is an expression that represents the existential crisis of the entreprecariat. And it can be understood from two different perspectives. On the one hand, as an entrepreneur concept is defined as the existence of a product in order to obtain the financing necessary for its realization but psychologically speaking it is just fake your happiness till you are happy. If you mix this two concepts you can obtain a continuos optimization individuals that assume the failures on themselves.
In relation to the concept "class dysphoria" introduced by Raffaele Alberto Ventura we can understand that entreprecatiat need to show themself as a rich individual with opportunities. Nobody assumes that is precariat because this could contradict the entrepreneur spirit. Even so in many countries movements have appeared claiming precarious situations.
Finally, San Precario is described as a collective anonymous creation that emerged after thirty years of policies in favour of companies and against workers and which mission is still to be defined. Alex Foti, indicates three main objectives: urban power, climate justice and Universal Basic Income (UBI)
The article conclude explained the possible paths for the future described as: "to replicate the mantra of precarized entrepreneurship or to try to collectively bring about an entrepreneurial precariat".
Original text
At first glance, the main common denominator for the large demographic segment that goes by the name of Millennials is technology. Those born between 1980 and 2000 are the first to have fully experienced the digital revolution, and already nostalgically commemorate its beginnings. Yet there is another aspect that distinguishes this generation from the previous ones. While the baby boomers have been able to count on a stable career and Generation X has complained about the limitations, for Millennials, a path deprived of detours is unrealistic if not outdated. It’s the very idea of a career that falters against a shared horizon characterized by constant uncertainty. Those who are now twenty or thirty years old are intimately aware that the center of gravity of their professional identity is located within themselves, rather than in the companies with which they temporarily collaborate. They are the company itself or, to use Michel Foucault’s words, they act as “entrepreneurs of the self”. If we think of the abundant use of similar formulas to present themselves on Facebook, the expression used by the French philosopher in ’79 seems trivial today, and therefore prophetic. But what does it mean to be an entrepreneur without having a real company to manage? In his youth, Joseph Schumpeter, an influential Viennese economist, considered entrepreneurs to be a rare species that stands at the top of the social pyramid because of its precious ability to innovate. Starting from similar premises, management guru Peter Drucker argued that to accelerate innovation, society as a whole would have to become entrepreneurial, getting rid of that disincentive to progress that is the permanent job. Drucker’s vision is today a reality: in the face of widespread economic and employment insecurity, Schumpeter’s pyramid has been reversed. Everyone is called to free enterprise (even employees, as the concept of intrapreneursuggests). This is the general sense of what we can call, with a dose of irony and bitterness, entreprecariat. When the entrepreneurial spirit gets to the people, entrepreneurship becomes entrepreneurialism. A specific practice is sublimated in common sense and sometimes in a legendary state of nature. Bengali social entrepreneur Muhammad Yunus, a microcredit pioneer, is widely quoted for his claim that stated that “all human beings are entrepreneurs. When we lived in the caves, we were all self-employed”. While TV programs celebrating an entrepreneurial attitude abound (such as The Apprentice, Dragons’ Den or the latest Planet of the Apps) the cult of Silicon Valley and his CEO gains praise, with notorious vlogger Marco Montemagno sharing the myths and legends of industry giants with the Italian populace. However, entrepreneurial rhetoric presents us with a paradox: while framing on Zuckerberg, Musk and Mayer as the main players of their own kind, we tend to bend over backwards to emulate their characters and their habits, taking note of their weekly diet and the hours of sleep they get every night. Entrepreneurial devotion leads to a reckless self-help exercise. The relapses of this atmospheric pressure are measured psychologically, emotionally and affectively. “Fake it till you make it” is an expression that embodies the existential crisis of the entreprecariat. In a strictly entrepreneurial context, the motto is used when simulating the existence of a product in order to obtain the financing necessary for its realization. Conversely, in terms of pop psychology, the slogan suggests pretending to be happy until one is truly happy. By mixing the two meanings, individuals become an incomplete product in constant optimization that resorts to a conspicuous optimism to present themselves as autonomous to others and to themselves. All this with the risk that, admittedly being the master of their own destiny, the responsibility for their own failures falls only on themselves. So we meet the fashion designer who pays the rent making home deliveries or the unemployed individual who calls himself a “startupper” at the bottom of the e-mail. However, the individual that we rarely come across is the one that openly adopts the point of view of precarity, given that this label contradicts the obligatory entrepreneurial pose. What distinguishes the current professional (and therefore existential) impasse is a generalized cognitive dissonance. A condition similar to what Raffaele Alberto Ventura calls “class dysphoria” in his Teoria della Classe Disagiata. If for Ventura the middle class feels rich even if it’s destined to poverty, the members of the entreprecariat need to showthemselves as individuals rich of potential in the light of a growing poverty of opportunities to express their abilities. In addition to the existential dimension of the entreprecariat, the mutual influence between entrepreneurship and precariousness in economic, contractual and social relations can be more concretely noticed. In the United Kingdom, the couriers of the independent IWGB union, in the pocket of the gig economy, claim their rights by stating that, “We are not entrepreneurs”. In the United States, what Paolo Mossetti calls entrepreneurship of despair is now spreading: an increasing number of families are forced to bet on crowdfunding to finance their medical expenses, inventing campaigns that require managerial skills and familiarity with the internet. In Japan, those employees without a fixed-term contract that have several low-profile jobs and whose relationship with freedom sounds like a farce are called “freeters” (neologism that combines the English word ‘free’ to the German word ‘arbeiter’). In Italy, we are witnessing the sorrows of the “popolo delle partite IVA” (literally “the VAT people”), whose members are often independent only on paper, while there’s an increase in the number of state programs to convert NEET’s, young people who don’t have a job and have stopped looking for it, in passionate startuppers. Finally, there are admittedly militant positions on the field of the entreprecariat. In her recent Non è lavoro, è sfruttamento, Marta Fana offers a bleak portrait in which precariousness itself emerges as the result of thirty years of policies in favor of companies and to the detriment of workers. If so far we have interpreted entrepreneurship from the rhetorical perspective, it’s perhaps possible to recognize a genuine entrepreneurial energy intrinsic to precarity. This is what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri propose in Assembly, a programmatic essay that extends the famous trilogy of the Empire. An “entrepreneurship of the multitude” rejects the image of the demiurge entrepreneur who extracts innovation by orchestrating cooperation from above and, on the contrary, favors the autonomous and horizontal administration of society, evident to the authors’ eyes in the dynamics of the new insurrectional movements. On the other hand, the San Precario brand, a collective and anonymous creation emerged during the first tumults born explicitly under the banner of the precariat, betrays at the very least a “bottom-up” entrepreneurial inclination. However, after over ten years from the first appearance of the saint, there’s still no agreement on what the fundamental mission of precariousness is. In his recent General Theory of the Precariat, Alex Foti, an activist who contributed to the canonization of San Precario, indicates three main objectives: urban power, climate justice and Universal Basic Income (UBI). Ironically, this last goal is thrilling for some of those entrepreneurs active in the United States who are currently the object of worship. Hence the risk that if a modest sum of money were to be offered unconditionally and distributed to all citizens, this could bury once and for all that remains of the social welfare. Thus, while we await with anxiety or trepidation the advent of the UBI, the possible paths seem to be two: to replicate the mantra of precarized entrepreneurship or to try to collectively bring about an entrepreneurial precariat.
From Autonomism to Post-Autonomia: From Class Composition to a New Political Anthropology?
- Author: Joost de Bloois & Frans Willem Korsten
- Publisher and date: 'Rethinking Marxism', Volume 26, Issue 2, April 2014
Synopsis
In 1970 Autonomism exposed the new role of the state and the intimate working of biopolitics and surveillance in the Italian crisis context called 'years of lead', with the aim to put into practice self-evaluation and autonomy in the very moment of its historical disappearance from the core of the social factory' (Tronti), later neo-liberalism. At the end of the '70s and with the repression of autonomism in the early '80, the end of every possibility to implement the emancipatory ideal and the birth of a new series of suffering subjects was decreed. Here the debate from premonition of an anthropological mutation (Autonomism) moves on the research for a possible antidote through the direct confrontation with the complexity of the real (Post-Autonomism).
The analysis of the social condition in the new 'state of exception' (Agamben), is seen as the need to create a new social sphere outside of power (Berardi), in a reality in which a radical disjunction has occurred. Sometimes perceived as rupture (Morfino) or an ontological metamorphosis, that manifests itself in a general 'absence of memory and future' (Negri) that needs a search for continuity (Shukaitis). In this context the formation of a new subject is emerging. Assuming that the solution of the state to the crisis consists in reconstructing the system by reintegrating the antagonistic components (Negri), and that this process generates an ambiguity of values and an inability to develop a radical imagination (Shukaitis), arise the needs for awareness of such mechanisms, of how self-valorization is absorbed and twisted by the perversion of the state and capital (Berardi), and the need to avoid capitalist narratives of reappropriation. The focus then shifts to the role of 'cognitariat'. Where the bipolar logic, hyperactivity of work and consequent depression, characterizes the contemporary subject drained by the crisis and transformed into a non-subject opposed to its juridical person, the only solution is the autonomy of mental labour, capable of recombining the social elements in their perennial mutation according to a non-accumulative / non-competitive / non-aggressive principle (Berardi).
The analysis of the new subject is also articulated in its relationship with the multitude. Where the politicization of the processes of subjectification has generated branded and distorted subjects (Tiqqun), the work of the multitude is described as an animal body, embodying the 'animal spirit', feeding the parasitic economy of advanced capitalism. Here the redefinitions of the commons enable us to face this 'evil' nature of the multitude, and means recovering the productive animal force before its turned into the dark matter of capitalism.(Pasquinelli). This ambivalence of the multitude is also seen as the force of negation of language that radicalize aggression, and the reconfiguration of the political animal as a linguistic animal.The uncertainty introduced by the multitude, derives from the impossibility open to the world of leaving the natural state, and the self-government, against this ambivalence of language, is configured in the use of the ritual as a process of acknowledgment of the uncertainty, primal setting of the original hominid and not as something that should be removed(Virno).
In conclusion the discourse is addressed into an anthropological investigation, social and individual, as the main feature of Post-Autonomism, capable of criticize the different incarnations of the anthropological subject, to not be stuck in a 'common' as voluntary servitude and self-dictatorship. The reappropriation of the 'common' must first of all produce a drastic auto-critique and this lead to the necessity to rethink the character of academic knowledge production and the intellectual. Starting from the observation that universities are not anymore the avantguard of knowledge-production, is proposed the 'machinic intellectual', one-man, interface and resistor of the circuit in contraposition to the intellectual as representative of a large social cause(Bratich), and the critical use of academic disciplines to expose underground realities as cartography (Casa-Cortès, Cobarrubias).
Original text
1. Absent memories, absent futures? As early as 1981, that is to say in the midst of government repression of the autonomist movement and its remains, Toni Negri writes the following: The class composition of the contemporary metropolitan subject has no memory because it has no work, because it does not want commanded labour, dialectical labour. It has no memory because only labour can construct for the proletariat a relation with past history. […] The existing memory of 1968 and of the decade that followed is now only that of the gravedigger… [….] Communist transition is absence of memory. 1 The quote addresses some of the key issues that we want to deal with in this introduction: the relation between labor and history, the ontological status of labor, the social formation and status of contemporary subjectivity in connection to the history of autonomist and post-autonomist thinking. The quote also testifies, with hindsight, of a certain historical irony. At the very moment when the Italian state seeks to actively repress the actuality of the autonomist movement, Negri declares that neither this repression nor the combative persistence of some of his former comrades makes sense, since “communist transition is the absence of memory”... Yet autonomist and operaist thought did have an afterlife. Especially over the past ten tot fifteen years the memory and resurgence of autonomist ideas and strategies in both activism and critical theory have been vital. In fact, the “class composition of the contemporary metropolitan subject” owes quite a bit to the relation with the recent past and the ways in which this past has been reworked and thought through by theorists like Negri himself, in their transition from the operaism/autonomism toward post-autonomist thinking. One only has to look at the syllabi in political and aesthetic theory to see how persistent autonomism’s memory in fact is. Toni Negri, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi, and Paolo Virno have become household names for students and activists alike - although it is instructive to see who does not figure on this list, for instance the autonomist feminist Silvia Federici. ‘Postautonomism’, or at least the conceptual nebula that it refers to, has offered new readings of ‘bio-politics’, ‘precarity’, cognitive, affective and ‘immaterial labour’, the ‘social factory’, the ‘social subject’ and so on. Often it is packaged as ‘Italian thought’. However, as Stevphen Shukaitis writes: Over the recent years, there has been a veritable explosion of interest in the political current of Italian workerism, operaismo, more commonly referred to as autonomism. […] Despite this, attention paid to this development has almost inverted the workings of the radical imagination of autonomist politics. While the theoretical vocabulary and language of autonomist politics has proliferated like so many Brooklyn hipsters, fittingly enough, it has done so in a superficial manner. Paradoxically, the radical intent underlying autonomism has seemingly vanished. Rather than understanding capitalist development as having been determined by the movement of working class resistance, autonomist concepts have been used in ways that make capitalist development seem like a hermetically closed, self-directing process. (Shukaitis 2009, 32) The aim of this issue of Rethinking Marxism is to propose a different reading. That is to say, not to package post-autonomism as a supposedly uniform ‘Italian thought’ – or its twin ‘the Italian difference’ – since precisely the life and afterlife of autonomist thought demonstrates constant bifurcations and altercations, rupture upon rupture, palimpsest upon palimpsest. As the work of Steven Wright, Sergio Bianci, Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, Gigi Roggero and others shows, the history of (post- )autonomism has in fact many different temporalities. There is the shorter version, as written by Sergio Bianci and Lanfranco Caminiti, Marcello Tari and others. It spans the years 1973-1979 and shows the cultural, political and affective density of the autonomia movement, which included operaism/workerism, feminism, counter culture and so on. There is the long version, as written for instance by Steven Wright (Wright 2002), from operaismo in the narrow sense and its key concepts, to the ultimate diffusion into autonomia’s – the post-operaismi’s – reworking of operaist ideas, as sketched by Guido Borio and the authors of Futoro anteriore (Borio et al 2002). It is perhaps the clampdown on the autonomist movement towards the end of the 1970’s that is its most instructive moment, when it exposes the new role of the state and the intimate workings of biopolitics and surveillance. It is partly because of the similarities between that context and ours that the memory of autonomism is so much more than just that of ‘the gravedigger’, as Negri had it (and, obviously, Negri’s own international standing testifies to this). Instead of the ‘Italian difference’, we might speak in the contemporary context of the generalization of the Italian state of exception of the late 1970’s. The international dissemination of autonomist ideas and strategies is evidently closely related to this. To a very large extent, the appeal of autonomist thought today proceeds from autonomism’s traumatic end game, in its attempt to think and put into practice self-valorization and autonomy at the very moment of its, perhaps ultimate, disappearance in, first, the social factory and then neo-liberal subsumption. As in accordance with this, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi describes the Autonomia-moment in terms of “passage” and “premonition”. For him, in 1977, the time is out of joint, for we witness the closure and dissolution of “the modern horizon” (Berardi, 2009, 14). This is to say that we witness the end of the modern emancipatory ideal and concurrent modes of struggle and the emergence of a new transformative subject. 1977 thus becomes the year of a “passage beyond modernity” (27), of the “premonition of an anthropological mutation” and its “possible antidotes” (16), and all this in the context of the installation of the state of exception, the history of which we have traversed over the past three decades, be it intensified and modulated. Berardi’s argument about the relation between autonomism and history becomes even more pronounced when he states that the very name autonomia testifies to what he calls an implosion of the future. The future, as the horizon of political, social or sexual emancipatory thought, dissolves. According to Berardi, autonomia represents the first and most poignant attempt to endorse this dissolution. This is also, however, where according to Bifo a future beyond the future lies for autonomist thought: “We need to resume the thread of analysis of social composition and decomposition if we want to distinguish possible lines of a process of recomposition to come” (31). Autonomia should help to realize the “exodus from the kingdom of exploitation and the creation of a new social sphere, which has nothing to do with power, labour or the market” (25). This issue of an absent or viable future – and we recall the title of a pamphlet issued during the University Occupations in California in 2009: Communiqué from an Absent Future – is also central in what Negri’s calls, in Time for Revolution, “the teleology of the common” and the ontological transformation that “frees us from sovereignty” (Negri 2003, 226-227). In fact, the term that Negri uses to label this teleology of the common is dystopia: “While utopia appropriates a future fully determined, the common language of dystopia invests a tocome that remains empty. But dystopia is vigorous because it projects the power of innovation into the void” (236). In Negri, it is precisely the absence of a future that defines the temporality of the constituent power of the multitude. If the passage from modernity to post-modernity is the passage from utopia to dystopia, this passage becomes the precondition for “a power that extends the common into the to-come, that constructs bodies in common on the edge of time” (250). This constitutive power extends itself from its biopolitical base, “across all horizons of being, and so to every instant of temporality” (233), thus realizing what Negri, as in the quote with which we began, called “the absence of memory”. It concerns not so much a defeatist dystopia, then, that acknowledges the vanity of past struggles. On the contrary, it is a dystopia that remains entirely constructive, and that takes leave of the “Power of the State and every transcendental illusion in order to produce new common co-operative temporalities” (259). There is no before or after the multitude, then. There is but the to-come-ness of bio-political generation, since generation is something that “proceeds from the multitude” (232). Negri’s movement, however, from a modern political statist temporality (geared towards a future horizon) to a post-modern dystopian temporality (rooted in bio-political generation) is criticized - rightly, in our analysis - by Vittorio Morfino.2 The latter shows how the so-called absence of memory in Negri is in fact operated by enforcing a rupture in ontological terms, specifically two ontologically distinct forms of time: a time of power and a time of potential, or the empty time of state repression and the full time of living labour (Morfino 2010, 269). In Morfino’s reading, Negri radically disarticulates ontology and history. It is out fear for recuperation within a dialectically shaped history, intimately associated with the workings of power, that Negri defines the multitude not so much in terms of a to-comeness but of “the eternal present of ontology” (269). Or to put this differently, a paradoxical to-comeness without memory nor future condemns the multitude to the eternal present that is characterized by metamorphosis, that he defines as “an inner and collective modification/transformation, both singular and ethical, led in the multitudes and by them” (Negri in Chieza and Toscano 2009, 19). Yet, going back to Negri’s sources Spinoza and Althusser, Morfino argues that for these thinkers the multitude is no less than the articulation of, or Spinozian connexio between, multiple temporalities that are irreducible to an essential contemporaneity. In Morfino’s reading, Spinoza and Althusser demonstrate that the concept of ‘multitude’ shows the “primacy of the encounter” over form – as Negri would no doubt agree on. However, this signifies the dissolution of both horizon and contemporaneity in favor of the infinite multiplication of temporalities for which, as Morfino writes, “power, violence and ideology are not the other, the empty shell that imprisons it, but the form itself of its intertwined necessity” (269). For Morfino, consequently: The point is not to operate the imaginary dissolution of power […] to make way for the Dionysian triumph in an ontological beyond […] but to think the non-contemporaneity of the multitude in its radicality, the articulation of its multiple times, through an archeology of the present from which may result the formulation of a complex strategy that is up to the task and the complexity of the planes and the strata of the real. (Morfino 2010, 269). This non-contemporaneity of the multitude is caught in a complex connexio of a multiplicity of encounters and the effects they produce, for instance between the still active residues of Fordism and Taylorism in the post-Fordist condition, of modernity and antemodernity, of a variety of libidinal investments, and so on. Differentiating between constituted and constituent power therefore might not be a matter of operating an ontological fracture, but rather, as Stevphen Shukaitis argues, of being able to tell the difference “between a living social struggle and one that has become undead” (Shukaitis 2009, 46). Post-autonomism here might mean to remember that class composition is, precisely, a continuous process – and that we are facing an antagonism that continually shifts. For Shukaitis, we need “to keep open an antagonism without closure that is continually composed and recomposed, to develop the necessary tools to resist the pervasive subdivision and suburbanization of the radical imagination” (10). This is a strategy that, in fact, works on rather than against the “energies unleashed around us” and might take us “far from where we might like to go” (44) – not in the least by refusing “to fetishize particular dramatic, visible moments of transformation”. (15) Although the criticism with regard to Negri is not explicit, here, it is of relevance. The absence of a foreseeable future, rather than being transformed into an ontological dystopia, sanctions the more brutal lessons of the experience of historical autonomism. The future might give you exactly what you were asking for, but with wholly different intent and consequences. One evident example would be the afterlife of the precario bello (the ‘beautiful precarity’) of the late 1970’s…
2. Subjects in Formation: From ‘Social Worker’ to ‘Cognitariat’ For Shukaitis the actuality of autonomist thought lies precisely in it never having shunned the complexity of the strata of the real but in having forced us to confront these head on. Against the absence of memory, autonomism has, as Shukaitis calls it, “played the Marxist LP backwards” to reveal how “the social technologies and processes through which social insurgency and revolt are turned back against themselves and incorporated into founding and modifying regimes of accumulation and dispossession.” (2009, 39) If today we can indeed speak of a “crisis in the radical imagination” it is to the extent that it reflects “the inability or refusal to see the ways in which many of the horrors we rage against today are precisely the dreams of yesterday’s revolutionaries turned upside down.” (47) This in fact echoes the operaist Negri, who writes in 1977 in Domination and Sabotage: For capital there is no problem: […] the solution of the crisis consists in a restructuring of the system that will combat and reintegrate the antagonistic components of the proletariat within the project of political stabilization […] The continuing work of reinforcing the state-form – that is, of the imposition of the law of value (albeit in continuously modified form) - as a measure and a synthesis of stabilization and restructuring – has never faltered. (2005, 232- 233) If the power of the contemporary Crisis-State, as Negri calls it (238), lies in the fact that its content is nothing more than a continual restructuring to re-impose the law of value, that is as empty as it is efficacious and violent (because of this vacuity…), the practical and theoretical starting point remains not the abandonment but “the intensification of both the concept and the experiences of proletarian selfvalorization” (235). Or, as Berardi writes: “the process of the becoming autonomous of workers away from their disciplinary role has provoked a social earthquake which triggered capitalist deregulation” (2009, 76). The various experiments of operaist and autonomist workers’ self-valorization – and to a larger extent: of the advent throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s of a multiplicity of newfangled socio-political subjects – were not left unanswered. They were, in fact, met with the ever-increasing flexibilization and the fractalization of labour. One meaning of ‘post-autonomous’ for contemporary critical thought might include the awareness of the ambiguity and complexity of self-valorization, such as its appropriation, torsion and ultimate perversion by state and capital. With Berardi, we might say that “there is a close relationship between [the autonomist notion of] ‘refusal of work’, informatization of the factories, downsizing, outsourcing of jobs and the flexibilization of labour” (76). However, as Berardi also stresses (and omits to develop in his own writings), we should be cautious not to reduce this relationship to a simplistic narrative of cause and effect. Post-autonomous thought should avoid both the narrative of capitalist reappropriation of a supposed pure desire for self-valorization and the narrative of the fundamentally speculative character of such a desire as merely reflecting tendencies inherent to capitalism. What is not yet theorized enough is what happens between these two narratives: which institutions and apparatuses (re)produce, capture and thwart any such desire? Moreover, is ‘desire’ the most satisfactory category? Here, the ontological rift operated in Negri’s recent texts and Berardi’s techno-pathological mantra that “the self-organization of cognitive work is the only way to go beyond the psycho-pathic present” (82) are equally unsatisfactory. In part, we might argue that post-autonomous thought has resulted from the frictions that were inherent to the complex relationship between workerism/operaism proper and Autonomia as a movement that reunited a variety of socio-political claims and appeals for the recognition and formation of new forms of subjectivity – political, professional, sexual and otherwise. On the one hand – and this is what undoubtedly constitutes their ongoing actuality – workerists like Mario Tronti analyzed adequately that “at the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation becomes a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society becomes an articulation of production” (Tronti in Wright 2002, 37). On the other hand, the Autonomia movement showed that operaismo failed to fully grasp the theoretical and activist consequences of its analysis of new class compositions and social subject formations. When Tronti writes that “the whole of society exists as a function of the factory”, for instance, the emphasis is still too much on the factory and its correlated forms of subjectivity. For the autonomists of the 1970’s, such as Christian Marazzi, the operaists “failed to realize that the state, through its strategy of bypassing the factory as privileged instrument of command […] had begun the formation of a new subject outside of the relations of production” (Marazzi in Wright 2002, 209). Today, most exemplary, this formation continues to use the instruments of debt and rent, and the marketing of personality and sexuality in a consumerism apparently unharmed by a half-decade of crisis. Conversely, for Steven Wright, the demise of Autonomia lies in the fact that, having abandoned the factory as a matrix for the analysis of new social and subjective formations, it in fact got lost in the intricacies of the new modes of subjectivation and, we might add, lost sight of the dialectic that tied these to reconfigured forms of capitalism and the state, even if the latter appeared in its emptied-out form as CrisisState. So far, post-autonomous thought has negotiated this tension by the recognition of new modes of subjectivation as an intrinsic part of capitalist and state restructuring. But we may ask if key concepts such as ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘cognitive capitalism’ are actually capable of drawing the line between an emancipatory potential and mere power effects, and to what extent this affects strategic notions such as ‘exodus’ (see below, paragraph four). In for example Paolo Virno and Matteo Pasquinelli’s work, as we will see, the ambivalence of the autonomous conceptual vocabulary becomes pivotal, but also results in a Russian doll effect when the recognition of ambivalence generates the search for new conceptual safeguards. Here, we touch upon a, if not the core problematic of operaism that has remained equally fundamental to Autonomia: the refusal of any form of mediation between proletarian emancipation and the (history of) capitalism. The ‘refusal of work’ constituted the refutation of capitalism’s most basic category, labour, both practically and theoretically. The core principles of operaism/autonomism are grounded in an ingenuous but far-reaching logic: no self-valorization can pass through the categories laid out by the adversary. It is a matter of all or nothing. This idea stands its ground in post-autonomism when the multitude’s emancipation takes place in capital’s beyond – that is to say, not so much a historical beyond, but rather in the construction of a world parallel to it. Hence post-autonomism’s idiom of ‘exodus’, ‘desertion’ or ‘ontological leaps’. Even if post-autononism draws heavily upon the techno-scientific dimension of contemporary capitalism – veering at times, in Berardi in particular, towards techno-determinism – it does not see in this an instrument for negotiation or mediation. Loyal to Tronti’s axiom that “if the working class does not emancipate itself from capital, capital will most certainly emancipate itself from the working class” post-autonomism only assumes the ever-increasing rift between capital and workers. In post-autononism the operaist all-or-nothing logic firmly remains at work, often leading to a rhetoric of the oddly anachronistic historical/dialectical notion of a ‘last chance to free ourselves from capitalism’... We may see the recent work of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi as emblematic of this dual or, better still, bipolar logic. The back-and-forth between hyperactivity and depression that, according to Berardi, characterizes the contemporary subject also seems to rhythm his own writings. On the one hand, Berardi describes how a reversal of “the intense and prolonged investment of mental and libidinal energies in the labour process has created the conditions for a psychic collapse” (2009, 38). In Berardi’s work we end up with a non-subject thoroughly drained by the apparatuses of the Crisis-State. As he writes: “The juridical person is free to express itself, to choose it representatives, to be entrepreneurial at the level of politics and the economy. […] Only the person has disappeared. What is left is like an inert object, irrelevant and useless.” (33) On the other hand, it is to that very same subject that Berardi assigns the role of insurrectionary catalyst. Hence, Berardi’s notion of insurrection appears foremost a therapeutic, cathartic notion. Depression, panic and anger need to be traversed, the very worst needs to be confronted head-on in order to be left behind once and for all. Berardi’s ‘Exhaustion and Senile Utopia of the Coming European Insurrection’ (2010) paints a bleak picture indeed by suggesting that any opposition to what he calls “the catastrophic aggression against social life” and its vital psychosomatic components through precarious labor and the decomposition of social solidarity, now swings between massive yet fruitless demonstrations and the melancholic withdrawal from “the game of work and consumption” by large social groups, that might just succeed to “create new, enhanced forms of co-habitation, a village economy within the metropolis” (2010). Once again, Berardi emphasizes the vital role of the ‘cognitariat’, with mantra-like statements such as: Only the autonomy of mental labour from economic rule can deactivate the suicidal mechanism of war and the obsession with growth that devastates the planet. Cognitive, networked, precarious labour is the transversal function capable of recombining the social elements in perennial mutation according to a non-accumulative, non-competitive and non-aggressive principle (2009, 9). One wonders how to read these mantras: as so many attempts to identify compositional lines of flight (even if these turn out to be interrupted once and again) or as a despairing clasp on a conceptual safeguard (mirroring Negri’s Spinozian ontological safeguard) that assures us that “only a movement of researchers, a high tech labour movement of the cognitariat that is autonomously organized” can save us from ruin? (59, 61). However in Berardi’s most recent texts, at the very moment we are tempted to allow ourselves a discrete sigh of relief, even this safeguard falters, as he writes that “the subjectivity of the general intellect is dismantled as a precondition to a much broader subjugation of the processes of knowledge, to the techno-linguistic enslavement of cognitive behavior in the sphere of production and consumption.” (2010, 24). Berardi’s writing thus seems to emulate the workings of the contemporary biopolitical apparatus that regulates by being the instrument of mental and physical destitution and therefore leaves no margin unoccupied. The apparatus works both ways: it structures subjectivity, just as much as it allows for, and incites, the outpouring of affects. As a consequence, the contemporary subject is prone to hysteria, panic attacks, hypes. It alternates between depressive and manic states of self-loss and emotional expenditure. Its mood swings simply define it. We might say that today, as Berardi’s writings show, we are not even given the comfort of catastrophe. Instead crisis – whether financial, ecological, or subjective – is precisely what is being put to work. As is the case for Virno (see below, paragraph four), for Berardi there can be no reassuring ‘third term’ that serves as an escape route for the multitude. Yet as indicated, in Berardi this absence of a third term becomes an extremely unsettling biopolarity. The overmediated subject is immediately exposed to power – this, precisely, is a vital meaning of ‘precarity’. With respect to this, we may ask ourselves, however, to what extent withdrawal, exodus or poverty truly by-pass the dispositive and the law of value it upholds by means of what we might call psychic and physical primitive accumulation. Raising the question does not necessarily mean falling prey to what Matteo Pasquinelli calls a hyperfoucauldian paranoia, nor does it necessarily means having recourse to an updated dialectical materialism or neo-Jacobin kitsch celebrating the ‘will of the people’. Raising the question shows the complexity of what perhaps has permanently been at the heart of the autonomist project: a political anthropology that today is intimately related to the anatomy of the dispositive (see below, paragraph four, for an extended discussion of such a political anthropology).
3. Multitude and the Subject, Once More For the French collective Tiqqun autonomism’s legacy consists of having thought the possibility of the revolt of a non-subject within the frame of a “negative anthropology” that was aimed at politicizing processes of subjectivation (2010, 12). One way of reading these processes – that we may also call processes of ‘generation’ - is to show that they include residues of branded identity and distorted power effects; that they are an interweaving of histories, encounters, desires and biological constants. As just one example of the many ties between French and Italian thinking, Tiqqun’s ideas tie in with recent work by Paolo Virno on the profoundly ambivalent nature of constituent power. For Virno, what founds the constituent power of the multitude is a certain force of negation, which has its roots in “the risky instability of the human animal” that, being labeled “evil”, has traditionally served as the State’s most prominent excuse for the formation and maintenance of its sovereignty, allowing it, for example to distinguish between the reassuring stability of ‘the people’ versus the multitude (Virno 2008, 16). Considering and accepting the problematic, undefined and possibly dangerous temperament of the human animal that is “characterized by negation” (18), Virno writes about the multitude’s subject: “sometimes aggressive, sometimes united, prone to intelligent cooperation, but also to the war between fractions, being both the poison and the antidote, such is the multitude” (40). In radicalizing Aristotle’s thought on the issue, Virno contends that the political human animal is foremost a linguistic animal. Negation and the modality of the possible are the work of language, or the effects of our mode of existence as speaking bodies. More generally, as a non-substantial institution and “deprived of any limit whatsoever in its processes” (50), language is the institution that renders all other institutions possible. However, and pace Habermas (whom Virno defines as a “happy-go-lucky philosopher”…) language dangerous potential resides in the fact that the value of any linguistic element “consists in its not being x”. By means of this characteristic, language is able to radicalize aggression “beyond measure” (18) if only for its ability “to enunciate something like ‘this is not a man’” (20). The latter possibility is what Virno defines as “truly radical evil” that nevertheless shares “the same root as the good life” (21) since negation can also be infinitely redirected against itself. It mayalso concern the negation of murderous statements such as ‘this is not a man’ and therefore the opening toward collaborative life-forms. It is this political opening up toward a good life that gives us a radically different idea of potential than the one presented by Negri. For Virno, the multitude is a historico-natural category and as the ‘many’ it introduces “uncertainty into the public sphere, and also the undifferentiated potential of the [human] animal that, being deprived of an environmental niche, is open to the world.” (37) If the advent of the multitude marks the crisis of the modern, central state, this is because “the crisis derives from the impossibility of leaving the natural state.” (37) Consequently, according to Virno, the main question faced by the multitude is its self-government in the face of the disturbing ambivalence that characterizes the linguistic aspect of the human species (51 ). Since language also defines thought, Virno has recourse to ritual in order to outline a modus operandi for new means of self-government. The political here becomes therapeutic: Ritual fulfills a therapeutic function not because it erects a barrier against the crisis of presence, but because on the contrary, it goes back over each stage ofthe crisis and tries to overturn the traces of each of those stages. Ritual praxis upholds extreme danger, widens uncertainty and chaos, and returns to the primal setting of the original hominid. (Virno 2008, 52) Central to Virno’s ritualized, symbolically repetitive forms of anthropogenesis is the notion of katechon, that he finds in Schmitt’s reading of Paul: Just as presence itself is nothing more than a constant redemption from the crisis of presence, so too, the nature of anthropos is equal to the regression and repetition of anthropogenesis. Katechon not only oscillates between the negative and the positive, without ever expunging the negative, it also safeguards the state of oscillation and its persistence as such. (Virno 2008, 60) The ritualistic-linguistic katechon restrains but does not remove uncertainty; it lives off the very instability it wards off since it functions by means of semantic excess; and it is able to adapt itself to the state of exception, when it is not, pace Schmitt, the defining marker of the sovereign state, but “indicates rather the action and discourse of the multitude.” (62) In the work of Matteo Pasquinelli we find a similar effort to re-conceptualize the labour of the multitude in terms of ‘evil’ (Georges Bataille is a constant reference in Pasquinelli), but whereas Virno’s ‘animal’ is the common (and one could argue wrong) translation of the Greek zoon, with Pasquinelli animality gets an intrinsic or conceptual meaning. What he calls ‘animal spirits’ haunt immaterial labour and the biopolitical generation of the multitude. As Pasquinelli argues: In a general sense, the animal body is another name for living labour; the social body feeding the parasitic economy of advanced capitalism, the sexualized unconscious of mass media and cultural production, but also the dark side of the neo-conservative multitude. While intellectual discourse remains blind to the beast, capitalism siphons money right out of it and the Empire converts the animal energy into the force of its imperial guard. (Pasquinelli 2008, 27). When Pasquinelli calls for a redefinition of the commons, this very definition would have to enable us to face the profoundly parasitic and therefore profoundlybiomorphic character, or should we say ‘nature’, of contemporary capitalism, which also underpins the commons that emerge from or against it. Instead of withdrawing into what he calls the “sub-religion of separatism”, Pasquinelli states that we should acknowledge and take as our point of departure the extent to which contemporary forms of the commons are “haunted and infested by three conceptual beasts: corporate parasites, […] hydra of gentrification; the bicephalous eagle of power and desire” (14). And note that whereas Pasquinelli seems to be speaking metaphorically, here, he defines the three conceptually instead, as not just beast-like, but indeed beastly. Against this biomorphic backdrop, the familiar poststructuralist vocabulary, with its fixation of codes and symbols, will not take us very far. As for his stance towards this option, Pasquinelli is clear: “The immediate psychopolitical consequence of this position is a code claustrophobia that disallows any potential engagement” (19). It concerns a form of claustrophobia that becomes paradigmatic in Slavoj Žižek’s recurrent impetus to “read, read, read” so that we might magically re-emerge as true Leninist master strategists from our cabinets de lecture. It is also a claustrophobia that we encounter in the now prevalent notion of “life as code” (the work of Eugene Thacker is emblematic here)3 and that firmly remains within the mimetic paradigm according to Pasquinelli (57). With respect to this, Pasquinelli underlines that: The central difference between a post-operaist and a postmodern approach lies precisely in the conception of language: for Virno, language has become a means of production; for Zizek, language repeats the symbolic order of the dominant ideology. That is, once again, the ancient struggle between demons of production and angels of representation. (Pasquinelli 2008, 25) However, it appears that post-autonomous thought is not entirely beyond this classical, celestial or heavenly battle between demons and angels, production and representation, or material and immaterial labour, for that matter. Virno’s considering language only as a form of production appears to be a counterbalance for Negri’s phobia of mediation. What is of interest, nevertheless, is Pasquinelli’s attempt to go through this bipolar balance and to analyze and plug into “the biomorphic unconscious of immaterial and cultural production” that consist in: The physiology of surplus and excess energies flowing under any technological environment, the instinctual and irrational forces also running behind the new cognitive and libidinal modes of capitalist accumulation. […] The animal body is the productive engine of the multitudes finally described in all its variants: cognitive, affective, libidinal and physical. It is a way to combine surplus production, social conflicts, libidinal excess and political passions along a single terrain. (Pasquinelli 2008, 27) On the face of it, Pasquinelli comes close, here, to Berardi’s assertion that the immaterial or cognitive commons remain firmly inserted into “the fleshy circuits of human subjectivity”. In the end, however, his analysis is not bipolar at all, but material through and through: when he states that: “Residual forces from a prior biological stage resurface for not being deeply civilized by the digital evolution” (29). Consequently, today, radical critique and oppositional practices should tap into these animal spirits against an “abstract and frictionless notion of the commons [that] is taken as a general paradigm for any sort of political agency. Reclaiming the obscure reality of the commons means recovering the productive animal force before its turns into the dark matter of capitalism.” (29) The question here, however, is what exactly this ‘before’ of the productive animal force, the biochemical surplus, might mean. Pasquinelli runs the risk of dreaming up an attractive, yet merely wishful surplus-asexteriority. Moreover, living in times of bio-political economies might mean, as Melinda Cooper has analyzed in Life as Surplus, that that there are no true animals left, or that, in effect, all animals are turned, in one way or another, into parasites.
4. Of Democratic Animals and Machinic Intellectuals: Post-Autonomism as Knowledge-Production. Virno and Pasquinelli’s emphasis on bio- and anthropopolitics (with their references to ritual and anthropogenesis) echoes Mario Tronti’s recent call that “There will be no genuine and effective critique of democracy without a profound anthropologicalinvestigation, a social anthropology but also and individual anthropology, taking ‘individual’ here too in the sense of the thought-practice of difference” (Tronti in Chieza and Toscano 102). For Tronti, today we witness the “epochal encounter between homo oeconomicous and homo democraticus” whose cross-breeding gives birth to this peculiar third political species: the ‘animal democraticum’ – the true “subject of the spirits of capitalism”, according to Tronti. In post-autonomous discourse this democratic animal gets different names, such as, most vociferously, ‘the Bloom’ in Tiqqun (see, for example, Tiqqun 2010). As we argued above, in particular in relation to Virno, it is the potential of a thoroughly novel political anthropology that underpins post-autonomist thought that may prove to be its most vital feature. Certainly, any alternative to what Tronti calls the “mass biopolitics” that goes under the name of democracy has to proceed from a far-reaching critique of the different incarnations of the anthropological subject. If not, we may say with Tronti, we remain hopelessly stuck in a system In which singularity is permitted for the private but denied to the public. The ‘common’ which is spoken of today is really that in-common which is already wholly taken over by this kind of self-dictatorship, this kind of tyranny over oneself which is the contemporary form of that brilliant idea: voluntary servitude. (Tronti in Chieza and Toscano 103) For Tronti it is only in escaping the web of ‘really existing democracy’ that we can imagine escaping ‘the very web of neo-liberal power’. If the anthropologicalconditions of democracy – that is to say: its implied definition and active configuration of what it means to be human, of the anthropos – are not put into crisis “the subject itself cannot manage any effective political maneuver in this situation, through an alternative network, for the sake of another historical break” (106). In this sense, the ‘post’ in post-autonomism refers to its ventures away from more narrowly defined issues of socio-economic relations (a move already prefigured in the passage from operaism to Autonomia) to the anthropological field of social relations per se. Thus conceived, post-autonomist thought raises the question of what kind of knowledge production this implies. Again, here, post-autonomism does not signify a break with 1970’s autonomism any more than Autonomia signified a break with operaism, but rather it rearticulates some of its key questions. In this case, that of knowledge production: to what extend does the ‘object’ of study – the workers’ condition - affect the means by which it is addressed? Or better still: how to reverse the hierarchy between object and subject, worker and researcher? Operaism privileged ‘militant research’, such as the workers’ inquiry that proceeds from the collective knowledge of the workers themselves as it was collected by researchers (such as Raniero Panzieri). How would such a militant – or holistic – research take shape today? As Toni Negri and Judith Revel write: “To re-appropriate the common, we must first of all produce a drastic critique of it.” (Negri and Revel in The Edu-Factory Collective, 175). In our particular context of knowledge production and cultural production this also implies a drastic institutional and emotional auto-critique. Not in the least, insofar the inflicted reality-checks of the past decade haven’t already done so, this means abandoning phantasies of the ‘cutting edge character’ of academic knowledge production. As Stevphen Shukaitis argues in Imaginal Machines, today, the university is anything but a vanguard. There is no point in celebrating the university as a pinnacle of immaterial labour, because it has in fact lost its monopoly on knowledge production. It is in this context that Jack Bratich coins the notion of the ‘machinic intellectual’ (as a Deleuzian counter-weight to Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectual’) (Bratich in Graeber et al. 2007, 137). Today’s scholars are embedded in a host of institutions, policies and organizations (that is to say in a never-ending race for funding, social relevance, media exposure and corporate partnerships that force them to star in a one-man/woman variety show…). According to Bratich, it is precisely this embeddedness that could constitute a future for the intellectual, who would no longer be representative of a larger social cause, but who, as machinic intellectual, functions as “an interface, embedded as a specific intellectual in its professional and disciplinarian skirmishes which themselves are now embedded in a larger circuit” (150). The machinic intellectual is embedded, yet equally active and productive, a translator and exchanger, a modulator, transversal resistor and circuit breaker. The future of critical studies thus lies in “machinic intellectuals who are collaborating with nonacademic machinic intellectuals. Together, they are producing new circuits of exit.” (150) With Skukaitis, we might also say that today anycompositional analysis refuses to represent or communicate struggles (in view of future realizations or demands), but rather explores “the forms of composition found within the situation, or in the various processes of interaction, collective valorization and productive compatibilities found between different projects” (2009, 19). One such attempt at a new compositional analysis is made by activist/academic initiatives such as the Counter Cartographies Collective. As Maribel Casas-Cortés and Sebastian Cobarrubias show: Our spatial understanding of the university as a discrete and untouched entity [is] totally inadequate […] and obscures the multiple roles of universities in employment and flexible labour markets, the knowledge economy and corporate research, defense contracts and recruiting finance capitalism through loans, university endowments and investments and gentrification. (CasasCortés and Cobarrubias in Graeber et al. 113) If the contemporary university, “erases the bodies and the materiality involved in knowledge production” (122), a critical use of academic disciplines such as cartography can precisely expose “underground realities otherwise off the radar for regular discourse” (117) and, crucially, as an “interlocking system with multiple power and counterpower networks flowing through it.” (123) Cartography here becomes a tool against the imaginary of the ivory tower that, both ironically and tragically, is all too often used by activists to brush off a supposed lack of true engagement and as an excuse for the university’s slow financial euthanasia by government policies and managerial board. To reappropriate knowledge, or, for that matter, cultural production, is a daunting task. As Brian Holmes writes in Escape the Overcode, with regard to the highly ambiguous role of subjectivity within the knowledge and cultural industries, it is crucial to think through: …the tremendous effectiveness of the new motivational paradigm and the particular power of conviction it seems to hold for those involved in culturalized production. The reason for this is that even within hyperflexible markets giving all the advantages to the state or corporate buyer, everything connected to the arts still offers a chance for self-expression and a veritable economy of self-development – which is no small attraction. (Holmes 2010, 37). When Holmes is talking about culturalized production, here, the knowledge production in the university and especially in the humanities and social sciences is intrinsic to it. Analogously, everything that is connected to the arts, here, offering a chance for self-expression, also concerns very much those working in the academy. With respect to this, perhaps the most urgent significance of the idea of postautonomy, and the most urgent aspect of the autonomist legacy, is to be finally finished with the attraction of this economy of ‘self-development’ that governs a host of social, political and cultural circuits.
Assembly (Chapter 9: Entrepreneurship of the Multitude)
- Author: Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri
- Publisher and date: Oxford University Press, 2017
Synopsis
In the “Entrepreneurship of the Multitude”, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri perceive language and communication as significant political tools. They argue that neoliberal politicians often distort political “terms and concepts” and separate them from their original historical context, in order to support their arguments. With a focus on political antagonism, Hardt and Negri suggest that we should claim back words that have been diverted and give them our own interpretations, hence forming new alternatives. In chapter 9 of "Assembly", there is an attempt to redefine the meaning of “entrepreneurship”.
The chapter begins with Joseph Schumpeter’s description of the “entrepreneur”, as a person whose special ability is to create “new combinations” among already “existing workers, ideas, technologies, resources and machines”. The construction of these new “machinic assemblages” is a vital aspect of productivity growth. The heroic figure of the capitalist entrepreneur, portrays a “man of action”, who “gets things done” and becomes a role-model for the masses.
However, this perception hides an important part of the entrepreneurial process, which is the labor itself. Under the praised work of the capitalist entrepreneur, lies the constant expropriation of the cooperative power of the multitude. The entrepreneurial function does not belong a manager or a guru. On the contrary, it is accomplished through cooperation. As the main actors of production process, the workers collaborate, while limiting their individuality and thus create social wealth. Under this condition, the maximum human powers can be unveiled.
At this point, Hardt and Negri introduce the novel term of “entrepreneurship of the multitude”. In postmodern global economy, the production process is progressively based in new networks of collaboration and communication, in coordination with contemporary technologies. On these terms, the labor gradually acquires a degree of autonomy in production. Provided that today workers manage their social relationships and make decisions together, in the future they could set goals on their own, and eventually accomplish self-direction.
In regard to the term itself, "entrepreneurship of the multitude" can be tricky and lead to misinterpretation. Hardt and Negri clarify that their approach stands apart from “social entrepreneurship”. They argue that after the collapse of the welfare state, this practice, despite its rhetoric, failed to provide sustainable aid to the weakest parts of society. Instead, it proved harmful to existing solidarity networks of local communities in developing countries, by forcing them to follow the logic of the market.
The “entrepreneurship of the multitude” as proposed by the authors, is capable of forming new social combinations, pointing to autonomous social production and reproduction. Admittedly, people are not naturally oriented to collective self-rule. Nevertheless, Hardt and Negri believe in the power of people’s assembly. Social movements need to connect with labor organizing, and form what is referred as “social unionism”.
In conclusion, the “multitude” has the potential not only to reject the current social system as we know it, but use its entrepreneurial spirit to build novel forms of cooperation. Ultimately, the triumph of private property will be abandoned. In its place, the “autonomous organization of social cooperation” can build the ground where “social wealth is shared in common”.
Original text
ENTREPRENEURSHIP OF THE MULTITUDE
We live, we are told, in an entrepreneurial society in which everyone is called on to be an entrepreneur. The important thing is to incarnate the energy, responsibility, and virtue of the entrepreneurial spirit. You can go into business, launch your own start-up, or organize a project for the homeless.“Even fields commonly thought to exist outside of the sphere of business and labor,” writes Imre Szeman, “such as artistic and cultural production, have been colonized by discourses of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship exists in the twenty-first century as a commonsense way of navigating the inevitable, irreproachable, and apparently unchangeable reality of global capitalism.”1 We will return in chapter 12 to analyze the entrepreneurial ideology of neoliberalism, but here we want to insist that first and foremost entrepreneurship belongs to the multitude, and names the multitude’s capacities for cooperative social production and reproduction. Like many other terms in our political vocabulary, entrepreneurship has been diverted and distorted. We need to take it back and claim it as our own. We will try to uncover the entrepreneurship of the multitude through an indirect route and a direct one, that is, through a symptomatic reading and an ontological reading. For the former we will engage Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of the entrepreneur against the grain to unmask, underneath the ideology of the capitalist entrepreneur, the continuous expropriation of the cooperative power of the multitude. The capitalist entrepreneur, from this perspective, is unjustly given credit for an entrepreneurial function accomplished elsewhere, but rather than such a moral claim we are much more interested in how capitalist entrepreneurship reveals the potential of the multitude. The latter route instead investigates directly the productive social power of the multitude, exploring how much its leadership can be developed and questioning what leadership means in this context.
How to become an entrepreneur
Joseph Schumpeter’s classic theory goes against today’s standard image of the entrepreneur in many respects. Entrepreneurial activity in his view, for instance, is not defined by risk taking. Neither does it involve scientific discoveries or inventing new technologies. Whereas “the inventor produces ideas,” Schumpeter asserts, “the entrepreneur ‘gets things done,’ which may but need not embody anything that is scientifically new.”2 Entrepreneurs, he continues, are not managers and most often not owners of the means of production, only ones who have them at their disposal. The essence of entrepreneurship, instead, according to Schumpeter, is to create new combinations among already existing workers, ideas, technologies, resources, and machines. Entrepreneurs, in other words, create new machinic assemblages. Moreover, these assemblages must be dynamic over time. Whereas most capitalists merely pursue “adaptive responses to change,” adjusting their existing arrangements, entrepreneurs carry out “creative responses” that grasp and set in motion what is new in their world.3 In order to enact these combinations, of course, the entrepreneur must not only bring together workers with resources and machines but must also impose on them a mode of cooperation and discipline by which they are to work together. The essence of combination is cooperation. It requires, in other words, the establishment and repetition of new social and productive relationships. Schumpeter is very close to Marx in his recognition that the key to increased productivity (and hence greater profits) is the cooperation of workers in coordination with systems of machines. Marx explains, in fact, that cooperation, while increasing productivity, also has a transformative effect on labor, creating a new social productive force: “the special productive power of the combined working day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power arises from co-operation itself. When the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.”4 The powers of humanity are realized in cooperation or, really, a new social being is forged in this process, a new machinic assemblage, a new composition of humans, machines, ideas, resources, and other beings. Schumpeter is well aware, moreover, that in addition to the paid cooperation of the workers they employ, entrepreneurs also need the unpaid cooperatioof a vast social field: “Just as a sovereign cannot place a policeman behind every citizen, the entrepreneur cannot pay everyone in social and political life whose cooperation he requires.”5 The analogy with the sovereign and its police emphasizes the threat of force or violence required by the entrepreneur. Marx similarly compares the capitalist overseeing cooperation as a general on the battlefield, dictating strategy for the troops under his command.6 Cooperation in capitalist society is always accomplished under the threat of force. Schumpeter’s analogy goes further, however, by recognizing that the cooperation imposed or required by entrepreneurs takes effect not only in their factories but across society, over populations paid and unpaid. Social labor, in addition to being unpaid, must also be functionally subordinated and ordered toward a specific productive goal. This is precisely the hypothesis that, during the years of the crisis of the Fordist industrial model, led to practices of externalization, along with the diffuse factories and construction of complex industrial zones that supported a new social organization of production. From Silicon Valley to software technology parks in India, from the innovative production centers in northern Italy and Bavaria to the free trade zones and export processing zones in Mexico and China, these entrepreneurial “combinations,” administering the productive power of a vast social field, a wide variety of paid and unpaid social actors, have had great success. Who, then, are these entrepreneurs? Schumpeter, in the original 1911 edition of Theory of Economic Development, in passages eliminated from later editions, provides an illuminating social vision—with weak echoes of Nietzsche or, really, foreshadowing Ayn Rand—that divides society into three groups on the basis of new combinations and entrepreneurship. The masses, he begins, who go about their lives in a habitual way and are in this sense “hedonistic,” do not see the potential of new combinations. A minority of people, he continues, “with a sharper intelligence and a more agile imagination,” can see the potential of new combinations but do not have the power or character to put them into action. “Then, there is an even smaller minority—and this one acts. . . . It is this type that scorns the hedonistic equilibrium and faces risk without timidity. . . . What matters is the disposition to act. It is the ability to subjugate others and to utilize them for his purposes, to order and to prevail that leads to ‘successful deeds’—even without particularly brilliant intelligence.”7 It is interesting, but not really important, that he seems to contradict here his insistences elsewhere that entrepreneurship does not require risk. More important is his conception of the “Man of Action,” the weight of whose personality demands obedience. If there is to be economic development, he maintains, there have to be such leaders.8 And, correspondingly, Schumpeter presents “the masses” of workers, peasants, artisans, and others as hedonistic, passive, and resistant to the new. Schumpeter’s anthropology of the “Man of Action” is certainly crude, but it clearly resonates in the contemporary media-driven cult of the entrepreneur, especially in the digital world of dotcoms and start-ups. The bright white faces of men of action, distinguished by their energy and daring, confidently stare at us from the magazine racks of newsstands. When he revises the Theory of Economic Development for the 1934 edition, however, Schumpeter abandons the heroic figure of the entrepreneur. He recognizes now that the entrepreneur creates new combinations “not by convincing people of the desirability of carrying out his plan or by creating confidence in his leading in the manner of a political leader—the only man he has to convince or impress is the banker who is to finance him—but by buying them or their services, and then using them as he sees fit.”9 The increasingly powerful rule of finance, Schumpeter realizes, reduces the entrepreneur from a leader whose force of personality or ideas gains the consent of the masses to a supplicant of the banker. The power of money, finance, and property, and the economic coercion they deploy, which we will study in more detail in part III, replaces the traditional modes of authority and consent required for leadership. Finally, a decade later, in the 1940s, Schumpeter becomes convinced that even property and ownership, organized now in huge corporations, are no longer able to gain the consent of all those engaged in social production. This returns us to the passage we cited earlier. “The capitalist process,” he laments, “takes the life out of the idea of property. . . . Dematerialized, defunctionalized and absentee ownership does not impress and call forth moral allegiance as the vital form of property did. Eventually there will be nobody left who really cares to stand for it—nobody within and nobody without the precincts of the big concerns.”10 Schumpeter reluctantly admits, at this point, that the only path forward for capitalist production is centralized planning. Schumpeter, however, is blind to the other side of the equation. Whereas he rightly cuts down to size the figure of the entrepreneur and recognizes the social limits posed by the power of money and property, he maintains a view of the “masses” as fundamentally passive. Instead, in the course of capitalist development, as productive cooperation extends ever more widely across the social field in diffuse, polycentric circuits, new combinations are increasingly organized and maintained by the producers themselves. With the potential to reappropriate fixed capital, as we indicated earlier, the multitude becomes increasingly autonomous in the generation and implementation of productive cooperation. No longer are generals needed to deploy them on the battlefield of social production; the troops, so to speak, can organize themselves and chart their own direction. Faced with potentially autonomous cooperating forces of social production and reproduction, capitalist owners would seem to have two options. Either they can imprison them, reducing them to the dimensions of industrial discipline and forcing them to obey the supposedly scientific organization of labor, diminishing people’s intelligence, creativity, and social capacities, for example, with “clickwork” and regimes of digital Taylorism. For this option capital must intervene at the level of subjectivity and produce workers who are happy (or at least willing) to put their lives in the service of the company. But then capital ends up reducing productive powers and thwarting its own thirst for profit. The other option (really capital’s only feasible path) is to embrace the autonomous and cooperative potential of workers, recognizing that this is the key to valorization and increased productivity, and at the same time try to contain it. Capital does not pose the problem of disciplining labor and controlling it from the inside but instead seeks to rule it from the outside, from above. In line with this option, capital retreats from the traditional modes of imposing productive cooperation and instead tends, from outside the productive process and its circuits of cooperation, to extract value socially produced in relative autonomy.
Fifth call: Entrepreneurship of the multitude
We can begin to recognize emerging within the circuits of cooperation of social production and reproduction an altogether different notion of entrepreneurship, which was perhaps latent in Schumpeter’s notion from the beginning: the entrepreneurship of the multitude, that is, the autonomous organization of social cooperation. The emerging entrepreneurship of the multitude is closely related with the establishment of a new mode of production, a phase of capitalist development in which social cooperation, affective and cognitive labor, and digital and communicative technologies have become dominant. When we say a new mode of production we are not conceiving a historical passage through homogeneous stages, a conception that has had pernicious effects both in the workers’ movement and in colonialist ideology. Conceiving the slave organization of labor, for example, as a distinct mode of production separate from capitalism led to both conceptual confusion and insidious political effects. We conceive the new mode of production instead as a heterogeneous formation in which labor processes remaining from the past mix with new ones, all of which nonetheless are (not so much ordered by but) cast in a new light by a dominant set of elements.11 (We will return to this discussion in more detail in chapter 10 in relation to concepts of the real and formal subsumption.) Mode of production in this sense, then, is another way of saying form of life or rather the production of forms of life, and this is increasingly so since in social production, more than commodities, society and social relations are the direct objects of productive processes. Producing, in other words, means organizing social cooperation and reproducing forms of life. The mode of production of social labor, then, of general intellect and the common, is a field in which the entrepreneurship of the multitude appears. Before we can see the entrepreneurship of the multitude growing, however, we have to clear away some of the weeds that block our view. After all, doesn’t neoliberal ideology exhort us each to become entrepreneurs of ourselves, to wean ourselves of state assistance and construct an entrepreneurial society? Being entrepreneurs in this way means that each of us individually must be responsible for our own lives, our own welfare, our own reproduction, and so forth. What is missing and mystified by this neoliberal entrepreneurship, however, are the mechanisms and relations of cooperation that animate social production and reproduction. In fact, as we will argue in chapter 12, neoliberal practices and governance, including the neoliberal notion of entrepreneurship, attempt to interpret, contain, and respond to the movement toward autonomy that the multitude has already set in course. The neoliberal mandate to become the individual entrepreneur of your own life, in other words, is an attempt to recuperate and domesticate a threatening form of multitudinous entrepreneurship that is already emerging from below. Another mystification to clear away is the notion of “social entrepreneurship” sometimes espoused by social democrats and center-left politicians. The rise of social entrepreneurship, in fact, coincides with the neoliberal destruction of the welfare state, as its flip side, its compensatory mechanism, its caring face, forming together a “social neoliberalism.”12 Charles Leadbeater, a former advisor to Tony Blair, who is credited as originator of the term, argues for social entrepreneurship to fill the gap left when state benefits and assistance disappear. (As we claimed earlier, the destruction of welfare policies, although initiated under Reagan and Thatcher, were predominantly carried out by their center-left successors, Clinton and Blair.) Social entrepreneurship, Leadbeater explains, involves a combination of volunteerism, charity, and philanthropy, which create nonstate, community-based systems of services “in which users and clients are encouraged to take more responsibility for their own lives.”13 Leadbeater points to examples such as a brave and tenacious woman who, instead of allowing a public hospital to close, transforms it into a Christian community hospital, and a dedicated black Briton who solicits corporate sponsors and celebrity athletes to create a sports center for poor youth. Social entrepreneurship, despite its rhetoric of empowerment, is really the translation into the field of charity of the traditional ideology of the heroic business entrepreneur, adopting something like the anthropology of Schumpeter’s early writings (with its rare men of action and hedonistic masses). Furthermore, social entrepreneurship, true to its social democratic roots, does not question the rule of property and the sources of social inequality but instead seeks to alleviate the worst suffering and make capitalist society more humane. This is certainly a noble task in itself, but it makes social entrepreneurs blind to the potentially autonomous circuits of cooperation that emerge in the relationships of social production and reproduction. The illusory claims of social entrepreneurship are even more damaging, as many scholars have shown, in the circuits of international aid, philanthropy, and NGO activity in the most subordinated countries. In the name of empowerment, recipients of aid are often required to orient social life toward commodity production and internalize neoliberal development culture and its market rationalities, thus abandoning local and indigenous community structures and values or mobilizing them as entrepreneurial assets. For example, although systems of microcredit—that is, the extension of very small loans to those, especially women, who lack the collateral to access standard lending structures—have been celebrated for opening access to the means of entrepreneurship for the world’s poorest populations, results show that such loans have done little to alleviate poverty and have instead saddled populations with lasting debt burdens. Women who receive microloans generally have to “entrepreneurialize” existing networks of social solidarity and cooperation in the service of a neoliberalism from below.14 In similar ways, a variety of projects of social entrepreneurship through international aid that pronounce goals to eliminate the worst poverty and eradicate disease—from the widely promoted “Millennial Villages” in Kenya to irrigation aid for indigenous communities in Ecuador—require the adoption of neoliberal rationalities. The nexus of social neoliberalism and social entrepreneurship destroy community networks and autonomous modes of cooperation that support social life.15 Once these neoliberal notions of entrepreneurship are cleared away, we can begin to glimpse some characteristics of a potential (or even already existing) entrepreneurial multitude, that is, a multitude that is author of “new combinations” that foster autonomous social production and reproduction. First, this entrepreneurship follows directly from the forms of cooperation that emerge from inside and outside capitalist production. Whereas previously the capitalist was required to generate productive cooperation through disciplinary routines, today increasingly cooperation is generated socially, that is, autonomously from capitalist command. Second, the multitude can become entrepreneurial when it has access to the means of production, when it is able to take back fixed capital and create its own machinic assemblages. The machines, knowledges, resources, and labor combined by the multitude, third, must be pulled out of the realm of private property and made common. Only when social wealth is shared and managed together can the productivity of social cooperation realize its potential. In our first call in chapter 2 we proposed that strategy and tactics should be inverted such that leadership becomes merely tactical and strategy is entrusted to the multitude. At that point in our argument, however, that proposal could only appear as a wish because we were not in the position to confirm the capacities of the multitude to accomplish the tasks of strategy, that is, to understand the contours of the social field, to organize complex social projects, to orchestrate and sustain long-term plans. The results of this chapter allow us in part to fill in that gap and recognize that potential. The networks of productive cooperation, the social nature of production and reproduction, and, moreover, the capacities of entrepreneurship of the multitude are the solid foundations of strategic powers. Ultimately, this entrepreneurship points toward the self-organization and self-governance of the multitude, and in order to realize this potential there must be struggles.
Social production→social union→social strike
Production is today, as we have argued throughout part II, increasingly social in two senses. On the one side, the productive processes are social; that is, rather than individuals producing in isolation, production is accomplished in networks of cooperation. Furthermore, those rules and habits of how to cooperate, how to relate to each other productively, tend no longer to be imposed from above but generated from below, in the social relations among producers. On the other side, the results of production also tend to be social. Rather than conceiving material or immaterial commodities as the endpoint of production, we need to understand it as the production (often via commodities) of social relations and, ultimately, of human life itself. This is the sense in which one can call contemporary production anthropogenetic or biopolitical. The social nature of production in both these senses points directly to the common. Private property appears increasingly as a fetter to social productivity both in the sense that it blocks the relationships of cooperation that generate production and that it undermines the social relations that are its result. The path from social production to the common, however, is not immediate or inevitable. The affirmation and defense of the right to the common, as we said earlier, needs activist projects to be sustained. The potentials created by social production, specifically, require a combination of social movements and labor struggles to be realized. This is a key form of the entrepreneurship of the multitude. On one side, social movements that affirm the right to the common, such as struggles over resources like water or the numerous urban encampments and occupations that have been born since 2011 (and continue to spring up) in the attempt on small scales to open urban space to the common, generate new combinations and new forms of social cooperation.16 Moreover, various struggles over housing, welfare services, education, transportation, and other institutions of our common social life, which often involve self-management or mutualistic experiments, such as the antieviction and housing campaign in Spain (PAH, or “platform of those affected by mortgages”) and the solidary health clinics in Greece, constitute forms of entrepreneurship from below. On the other side, as the center of gravity of capitalist production shifts outside the factory, labor organizing has to follow it on the terrain of social production and reproduction, where the entrepreneurship of the multitude arises. On this terrain trade unions and social movements must create alliances or hybrid structures in the form of social unions. “Aware of the extreme ambiguity of this definition,” write Alberto De Nicola and Biagio Quattrocchi, “we use the term ‘social unionism’ [sindacalismo sociale] to group together various experiences of struggle that, within and outside trade union organizations, counteract the ways that traditional trade unions, due to weakness or by choice, serve to obstruct or pacify social conflict.”17 Social unionism, which constitutes the intersection or interweaving of labor struggles and social movements, offers the promise of, on the one hand, renewing the power of labor organizing and overcoming the conservative practices of some existing unions and, on the other, of bolstering the longevity and effectiveness of social movements. Social unionism overturns the traditional relation between economic struggles and political struggles, which is another version of the relation between strategy and tactics. The standard view regards economic and trade union struggles (especially those over wages) as partial and tactical, and thus in need of an alliance with and guidance from the political struggles led by the party, which is thought to have a comprehensive and strategic scope. The alliance between economic and political struggles proposed by social unionism scrambles the assignments of tactics and strategy since economic movements link not with a constituted power but a constituent power, not a political party but a social movement. Such an alliance should benefit social movements by allowing them to stand on the stable, developed organizational structure of the union, giving the struggles of the poor, the precarious, and the unemployed a social reach and a continuity they would otherwise lack. In return, the alliance should not only enlarge the social sphere of trade unions, extending union struggles beyond wages and the workplace to address all aspects of the life of the working class, focusing the attention of union organizing on the form of life of the class, but also should renew the methods of unions, allowing the antagonistic dynamics of social movement activism to break the sclerotic structures of union hierarchies and their worn-out modes of struggle.18 The locus classicus of social unionism in the anglophone world is the antiapartheid alliance formed in South Africa: in 1990 the Congress of South African Trade Unions entered into a “tripartite alliance” with the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party. The alliance served as an umbrella for a wide variety of antiapartheid social movements, and served as inspiration outside South Africa for how a trade union organization could foster the developments and actions of social movements.19 The South African experiences resonate with sporadic developments throughout the world in recent decades. The 1997 alliance between the carnevalesque social movement Reclaim the Streets and the sacked Liverpool dockers and the brief cooperation between Teamsters and Turtles (that is, environmental groups) at the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle are two significant examples. Some of the most dynamic trade unions in Italy, such as the Federation of Metal Workers (FIOM) and the grassroots unions in education, health, and other sectors (COBAS), along with the Service Employees International Union in the United States, have repeatedly experimented with social movement alliances with varying degrees of success.20 The tradition of social unionism must today, however, undergo a significant shift. Rather than posing an external relation of alliance between trade unions and social movements, groups must now around social production and the common construct an internal relation that regards labor organizing and social movements as not only intimately tied but also mutually constitutive in the modes and objects of struggle, recognizing how the terrain of labor is increasingly too that of forms of life. In order to realize the potentials of this new conception of social unionism we must understand social production and reproduction in a wide frame, well beyond the factory and the workplace. The metropolis itself is an enormous factory of social production and reproduction, or more precisely, it is a space produced in common (looking backward) that serves (looking forward) as the means of production and reproduction for future instances of the common. In capitalist society today, the common names both the means of production and the forms of life. In this frame, then, the current international cycles of struggles that affirm the right to the common, which we cited earlier, open new possibilities for social unionism. The centrality of the common in contemporary production and reproduction does not negate the distinction between economic and political struggles, but it does demonstrate that they are inextricably interwoven. The struggles pose equal and open access plus collective self-management of the common as a precondition for any possible construction of a new form of democracy—and necessary too for constructing postcapitalist economic relations. One can trace a clear line, for example, between Spain’s 2013 “marea blanca” protests against health care budget cuts, which brought health workers and health system users into the streets, and the 2015 municipal election victories in large cities, including Barcelona and Madrid, of coalitions dedicated to making health care and other social services common. The primary weapon of social unionism (and the expression of the power of social production) is the social strike. The labor union since its inception has based its power on the threat of the organized refusal of work: when labor is withheld, capitalist production grinds to a halt. Historic and heroic battles have been fought on this terrain. In this traditional frame, however, unemployed workers, unwaged domestic labor, the precarious, and the poor appear to be powerless: since withholding their labor does not directly threaten capitalist production and profit, the standard logic goes, they have no leverage. Social movements, however, long ago discovered that the strategy of refusal can be an effective weapon for a wide variety if not all social groups: “some of the poor,” Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward explain, “are sometimes so isolated from significant institutional participation that the only ‘contribution’ they can withhold is that of quiescence in civil life: they can riot.”21 Everyone, even the poor, wields in the final instance the threat to withdraw their voluntary servitude and disrupt the social order. In the contemporary age of biopolitical production, when the common becomes the basis of social production and reproduction, as it does increasingly today, and when the circuits of productive cooperation extend throughout the social fabric, well beyond the walls of the factory, then the power of refusal spreads across the social terrain. Disruption of the social order and suspension of capitalist production become indistinguishably linked. This is precisely the potential that social unionism opens: the two traditions—the labor movement’s interruption of industrial production and the social movements’ disruption of the social order, both now based in the common—come together and, like chemical reagents, create an explosive mixture. In this context, in fact, the traditional conceptions of a general strike in which workers in all sectors of production will stop simultaneously gains a new and even more powerful meaning. The social strike, however, must be not only a refusal but also an affirmation. It must, in other words, also be an act of entrepreneurship that creates or, better, reveals the circuits of cooperation and the potentially autonomous relationships of social production that exist inside and outside waged labor, making use of social wealth shared in common.
The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (Chapter 1, 2)
- Author: Richard Sennet
- Publisher and date: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000
Synopsis
The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (chapter 1 and 2) addresses the problems and challenges that have arisen in an economy that has changed tremendously in the last 30 years. The author Richard Sennet talks about "flexible capitalism" as an economic and political system where everything feels fast-paced and unstable. Values of loyalty and devotedness were substituted by detachment to accommodate more superficial relations.
The first chapters, Routine and Drift, are centered in a working man called Rico. Rico is economically successful but suffers from the uncertainty of his work-life. The traditional idea of building a lifelong career in one place has changed and for the new worker this means shifting lives often. This constant change of jobs, cities, and friends makes the fractured pieces of Rico's life difficult to understand. It's hard to build a story for himself.
Although Rico understands the characteristics of the new worker and adapts quickly to his new situation, he lacks the lasting values and guiding principles he feels are necessary to educate his children. The old debate between the philosophers Denis Diderot and Adam Smith resurfaces, discussing if routine is necessary to compose a life or if we should search for more flexible experiences.
The author provides a historical contextualization to these issues, writing about how time and routine has influenced the management and workforce of factories since the transition from manual labor to more sophisticated industrial systems. A pin factory and the Ford Motor Company are examples of how time control can lead to better productivity or to depression. There is no clear answer on how the human being will react to the continuous lack of routine in today's dynamic economy but Rico embodies some of the conflicts that are already surfacing in his personal life.
Original text
Today the phrase “flexible capitalism” describes a system which is more than a permutation on an old theme. The emphasis is on flexibility. Rigid forms of bureaucracy are under attack, as are the evils of blind routine. Workers are asked to behave nimbly, to be open to change on short notice, to take risks continually, to become ever less dependent on regulations and formal procedures. This emphasis on flexibility is changing the very meaning of work, and so the words we use for it. “Career,” for instance, in its English origins meant a road for carriages, and as eventually applied to labor meant a lifelong channel for one’s economic pursuits. Flexible capitalism has blocked the straight roadway of career, diverting employees suddenly from one kind of work into another. The word “job” in English of the fourteenth century meant a lump or piece of something which could be carted around. Flexibility today brings back this arcane sense of the job, as people do lumps of labor, pieces of work, over the course of a lifetime. It is quite natural that flexibility should arouse anxiety: people do not know what risks will pay off, what paths to pursue. To take the curse off the phrase “capitalist system” there developed in the past many circumlocutions, such as the “free enterprise” or “private enterprise” system. Flexibility is used today as another way to lift the curse of oppression from capitalism. In attacking rigid bureaucracy and emphasizing risk, it is claimed, flexibility gives people more freedom to shape their lives. In fact, the new order substitutes new controls rather than simply abolishing the rules of the past—but these new controls are also hard to understand. The new capitalism is an often illegible regime of power. Perhaps the most confusing aspect of flexibility is its impact on personal character. The old English speakers, and indeed writers going back to antiquity, were in no doubt about the meaning of “character”: it is the ethical value we place on our own desires and on our relations to others. Horace writes that the character of a man depends on his connections to the world. In this sense, “character” is a more encompassing term than its more modern offspring “personality,” which concerns desires and sentiments which may fester within, witnessed by no one else. Character particularly focuses upon the long-term aspect of our emotional experience. Character is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment, or through the pursuit of long-term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratification for the sake of a future end. Out of the confusion of sentiments in which we all dwell at any particular moment, we seek to save and sustain some; these sustainable sentiments will serve our characters. Character concerns the personal traits which we value in ourselves and for which we seek to be valued by others. How do we decide what is of lasting value in ourselves in a society which is impatient, which focuses on the immediate moment? How can long-term goals be pursued in an economy devoted to the short term? How can mutual loyalties and commitments be sustained in institutions which are constantly breaking apart or continually being redesigned? These are the questions about character posed by the new, flexible capitalism.
A QUARTER CENTURY AGO, Jonathan Cobb and I wrote a book about working-class Americans, The Hidden Injuries of Class. In The Corrosion of Character, I’ve taken up some of the same issues about work and character in an economy which has changed radically. The Corrosion of Character is intended to be a long essay rather than a short book; that is, I’ve tried to write out a single argument, whose sections are divided into very short chapters. In The Hidden Injuries of Class, Jonathan Cobb and I relied exclusively on formal interviews. Here, as befits an essay-argument, I’ve used more mixed and informal sources, including economic data, historical accounts, and social theories; I’ve also explored the daily life around me, much as an anthropologist might. At the outset, I should point out two things about this text. The reader will often find philosophical ideas applied to or tested by the concrete experience of individuals. For this I make no apology; an idea has to bear the weight of concrete experience or else it becomes a mere abstraction. Second, I’ve disguised individual identities rather more heavily than one would when reporting formal interviews; this has meant changing places and times and occasionally compounding several voices into one or splitting one voice into many. These disguises put demands on the reader’s trust, but not the trust a novelist would seek to earn through a well-made narrative, for that coherence is now lacking in real lives. My hope is that I have accurately reflected the sense of what I’ve heard, if not precisely its circumstances. All the notes for essay text appear at the end of the text. I’ve also placed at the end some statistical tables, prepared by Arturo Sanchez and myself, which help illustrate some recent economic trends.
I LEARNED A GREAT DEAL about work from Jonathan Cobb a quarter century ago. I returned to this subject at the urging of Garrick Utley, and was helped in pursuing it by Bennett Harrison, Christopher Jencks, and Saskia Sassen; The Corrosion of Character tries to fathom some personal implications of the discoveries they all have made about the modern economy. To my graduate assistant Michael Laskawy, I owe a debt of intellectual companionship and also of forbearance in dealing with the various practical issues which attend research and writing. This essay began as a Darwin Lecture, given at Cambridge University in 1996. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences afforded me the time to write this book. Finally, I would like to thank Donald Lamm and Alane Mason, of W. W. Norton & Company, and Arnulf Conradi and Elizabeth Ruge of Berlin Verlag, who helped me shape the manuscript.
ONE
Drift
Recently I met someone in an airport whom I hadn’t seen for fifteen years. I had interviewed the father of Rico (as I shall call him) a quarter century ago when I wrote a book about blue-collar workers in America, The Hidden Injuries of Class. Enrico, his father, then worked as a janitor, and had high hopes for this boy, who was just entering adolescence, a bright kid good at sports. When I lost touch with his father a decade later, Rico had just finished college. In the airline lounge, Rico looked as if he had fulfilled his father’s dreams. He carried a computer in a smart leather case, dressed in a suit I couldn’t afford, and sported a signet ring with a crest. Enrico had spent twenty years by the time we first met cleaning toilets and mopping floors in a downtown office building. He did so without complaining, but also without any hype about living out the American Dream. His work had one single and durable purpose, the service of his family. It had taken him fifteen years to save the money for a house, which he purchased in a suburb near Boston, cutting ties with his old Italian neighborhood because a house in the suburbs was better for the kids. Then his wife, Flavia, had gone to work, as a presser in a dry-cleaning plant; by the time I met Enrico in 1970, both parents were saving for the college education of their two sons. What had most struck me about Enrico and his generation was how linear time was in their lives: year after year of working in jobs which seldom varied from day to day. And along that line of time, achievement was cumulative: Enrico and Flavia checked the increase in their savings every week, measured their domesticity by the various improvements and additions they had made to their ranch house. Finally, the time they lived was predictable. The upheavals of the Great Depression and World War II had faded, unions protected their jobs; though he was only forty when I first met him, Enrico knew precisely when he would retire and how much money he would have. Time is the only resource freely available to those at the bottom of society. To make time accumulate, Enrico needed what the sociologist Max Weber called an “iron cage,” a bureaucratic structure which rationalized the use of time; in Enrico’s case, the seniority rules of his union about pay and the regulations organizing his government pension provided this scaffolding. When he added to these resources his own self-discipline, the result was more than economic. He carved out a clear story for himself in which his experience accumulated materially and psychically; his life thus made sense to him as a linear narrative. Though a snob might dismiss Enrico as boring, he experienced the years as a dramatic story moving forward repair by repair, interest payment by interest payment. The janitor felt he became the author of his life, and though he was a man low on the social scale, this narrative provided him a sense of self-respect. Though clear, Enrico’s life story was not simple. I was particularly struck by how Enrico straddled the worlds of his old immigrant community and his new suburban-neutral life. Among his suburban neighbors he lived as a quiet, self-effacing citizen; when he returned to the old neighborhood, however, he received much more attention as a man who had made good on the outside, a worthy elder who returned each Sunday for Mass followed by lunch followed by gossipy coffees. He got recognition as a distinctive human being from those who knew him long enough to understand his story; he got a more anonymous kind of respect from his new neighbors by doing what everyone else did, keeping his home and garden neat, living without incident. The thick texture of Enrico’s particular experience lay in the fact that he was acknowledged in both ways, depending in which community he moved: two identities from the same disciplined use of his time. If the world were a happy and just place, those who enjoy respect would give back in equal measure the regard which has been accorded them. This was Fichte’s idea in “The Foundations of National Law” he spoke of the “reciprocal effect” of recognition. But real life does not proceed so generously. Enrico disliked blacks, although he had labored peaceably for many years with other janitors who were black; he disliked non-Italian foreigners like the Irish, although his own father could barely speak English. He could not acknowledge kindred struggles; he had no class allies. Most of all, however, Enrico disliked middle-class people. We treated him as though he were invisible, “as a zero,” he said; the janitor’s resentment was complicated by his fear that because of his lack of education and his menial status, we had a sneaking right to do so. To his powers of endurance in time he contrasted the whining self-pity of blacks, the unfair intrusion of foreigners, and the unearned privileges of the bourgeoisie. Though Enrico felt he had achieved a measure of social honor, he hardly wanted his son Rico to repeat his own life. The American dream of upward mobility for the children powerfully drove my friend. “I don’t understand a word he says,” Enrico boasted to me several times when Rico had come home from school and was at work on math. I heard many other parents of sons and daughters like Rico say something like “I don’t understand him” in harder tones, as though the kids had abandoned them. We all violate in some way the place assigned us in the family myth, but upward mobility gives that passage a peculiar twist. Rico and other youngsters headed up the social ladder sometimes betrayed shame about their parents’ working-class accents and rough manners, but more often felt suffocated by the endless strategizing over pennies and the reckoning of time in tiny steps. These favored children wanted to embark on a less constrained journey. Now, many years later, thanks to the encounter at the airport, I had the chance to see how it had turned out for Enrico’s son. In the airport lounge, I must confess, I didn’t much like what I saw. Rico’s expensive suit could have been just business plumage, but the crested signet ring—a mark of elite family background—seemed both a lie and a betrayal of the father. However, circumstances threw Rico and me together on a long flight. He and I did not have one of those American journeys in which a stranger spills out his or her emotional guts to you, gathers more tangible baggage when the plane lands, and disappears forever. I took the seat next to Rico without being asked, and for the first hour of a long flight from New York to Vienna had to pry information out of him.
RICO, I LEARNED, has fulfilled his father’s desire for upward mobility, but has indeed rejected the way of his father. Rico scorns “time-servers” and others wrapped in the armor of bureaucracy; instead he believes in being open to change and in taking risks. And he has prospered; whereas Enrico had an income in the bottom quarter of the wage scale, Rico’s has shot up to the top 5 percent. Yet this is not an entirely happy story for Rico. After graduating from a local university in electrical engineering, Rico went to a business school in New York. There he married a fellow student, a young Protestant woman from a better family. School prepared the young couple to move and change jobs frequently, and they’ve done so. Since graduation, in fourteen years at work Rico has moved four times. Rico began as a technology adviser to a venture capital firm on the West Coast, in the early, heady days of the developing computer industry in Silicon Valley; he then moved to Chicago, where he also did well. But the next move was for the sake of his wife’s career. If Rico were an ambition-driven character out of the pages of Balzac, he would never have done it, for he gained no larger salary, and he left hotbeds of high-tech activity for a more retired, if leafy, office park in Missouri. Enrico felt somewhat ashamed when Flavia went to work; Rico sees Jeannette, his wife, as an equal working partner, and has adapted to her. It was at this point, when Jeannette’s career took off, that their children began arriving. In the Missouri office park, the uncertainties of the new economy caught up with the young man. While Jeannette was promoted, Rico was downsized—his firm was absorbed by another, larger firm that had its own analysts. So the couple made a fourth move, back East to a suburb outside New York. Jeannette now manages a big team of accountants, and he has started a small consulting firm. Prosperous as they are, the very acme of an adaptable, mutually supportive couple, both husband and wife often fear they are on the edge of losing control over their lives. This fear is built into their work histories. In Rico’s case, the fear of lacking control is straightforward: it concerns managing time. When Rico told his peers he was going to start his own consulting firm, most approved; consulting seems the road to independence. But in getting started he found himself plunged into many menial tasks, like doing his own photocopying, which before he’d taken for granted. He found himself plunged into the sheer flux of networking; every call had to be answered, the slightest acquaintance pursued. To find work, he has fallen subservient to the schedules of people who are in no way obliged to respond to him. Like other consultants, he wants to work in accordance with contracts setting out just what the consultant will do. But these contracts, he says, are largely fictions. A consultant usually has to tack one way and another in response to the changing whims or thoughts of those who pay; Rico has no fixed role that allows him to say to others, “This is what I do, this is what I am responsible for.” Jeannette’s lack of control is more subtle. The small group of accountants she now manages is divided among people who work at home, people usually in the office, and a phalanx of low-level backoffice clerks a thousand miles away connected to her by computer cable. In her present corporation, strict rules and surveillance of phones and e-mail disciplines the conduct of the accountants who work from home; to organize the work of the back-office clerks a thousand miles away, she can’t make hands-on, face-to-face judgments, but instead must work by formal written guidelines. She hasn’t experienced less bureaucracy in this seemingly flexible work arrangement; indeed, her own decisions count for less than in the days when she supervised workers who were grouped together, all the time, in the same office. As I say, at first I was not prepared to shed many tears for this American Dream couple. Yet as dinner was served to Rico and me on our flight, and he began to talk more personally, my sympathies increased. His fear of losing control, it developed, went much deeper than worry about losing power in his job. He feared that the actions he needs to take and the way he has to live in order to survive in the modern economy have set his emotional, inner life adrift. Rico told me that he and Jeannette have made friends mostly with the people they see at work, and have lost many of these friendships during the moves of the last twelve years, “though we stay ‘netted.’” Rico looks to electronic communications for the sense of community which Enrico most enjoyed when he attended meetings of the janitors’ union, but the son finds communications on-line short and hurried. “It’s like with your kids—when you’re not there, all you get is news later.” In each of his four moves, Rico’s new neighbors have treated his advent as an arrival which closes past chapters of his life; they ask him about Silicon Valley or the Missouri office park, but, Rico says, “they don’t see other places” their imaginations are not engaged. This is a very American fear. The classic American suburb was a bedroom community; in the last generation a different kind of suburb has arisen, more economically independent of the urban core, but not really town or village either; a place springs into life with the wave of a developer’s wand, flourishes, and begins to decay all within a generation. Such communities are not empty of sociability or neighborliness, but no one in them becomes a longterm witness to another person’s life. The fugitive quality of friendship and local community form the background to the most important of Rico’s inner worries, his family. Like Enrico, Rico views work as his service to the family; unlike Enrico, Rico finds that the demands of the job interfere with achieving the end. At first I thought he was talking about the all too familiar conflict between work time and time for family. “We get home at seven, do dinner, try to find an hour for the kids’ homework, and then deal with our own paperwork.” When things get tough for months at a time in his consulting firm, “it’s like I don’t know who my kids are.” He worries about the frequent anarchy into which his family plunges, and about neglecting his children, whose needs can’t be programmed to fit into the demands of his job. Hearing this, I tried to reassure him; my wife, stepson, and I had endured and survived well a similarly high-pressure life. “You aren’t being fair to yourself,” I said. “The fact you care so much means you are doing the best for your family you can.” Though he warmed to this, I had misunderstood. As a boy, I already knew, Rico had chafed under Enrico’s authority; he had told me then he felt smothered by the smallminded rules which governed the janitor’s life. Now that he is a father himself, the fear of a lack of ethical discipline haunts him, particularly the fear that his children will become “mall rats,” hanging out aimlessly in the parking lots of shopping centers in the afternoons while the parents remain out of touch at their offices. He therefore wants to set for his son and daughters an example of resolution and purpose, “but you can’t just tell kids to be like that” he has to set an example. The objective example he could set, his upward mobility, is something they take for granted, a history that belongs to a past not their own, a story which is over. But his deepest worry is that he cannot offer the substance of his work life as an example to his children of how they should conduct themselves ethically. The qualities of good work are not the qualities of good character.
AS I CAME LATER TO UNDERSTAND, the gravity of this fear comes from a gap separating Enrico and Rico’s generations. Business leaders and journalists emphasize the global marketplace and the use of new technologies as the hallmarks of the capitalism of our time. This is true enough, but misses another dimension of change: new ways of organizing time, particularly working time. The most tangible sign of that change might be the motto “No long term.” In work, the traditional career progressing step by step through the corridors of one or two institutions is withering; so is the deployment of a single set of skills through the course of a working life. Today, a young American with at least two years of college can expect to change jobs at least eleven times in the course of working, and change his or her skill base at least three times during those forty years of labor. An executive for ATT points out that the motto “No long term” is altering the very meaning of work: In ATT we have to promote the whole concept of the work force being contingent, though most of the contingent workers are inside our walls. “Jobs” are being replaced by “projects” and “fields of work.”1 Corporations have also farmed out many of the tasks they once did permanently in-house to small firms and to individuals employed on short-term contracts. The fastest-growing sector of the American labor force, for instance, is people who work for temporary job agencies.2 “People are hungry for [change],” the management guru James Champy argues, because “the market may be ‘consumer-driven’ as never before in history.”3 The market, in this view, is too dynamic to permit doing things the same way year after year, or doing the same thing. The economist Bennett Harrison believes the source of this hunger for change is “impatient capital,” the desire for rapid return; for instance, the average length of time stocks have been held on British and American exchanges has dropped 60 percent in the last fifteen years. The market believes rapid market return is best generated by rapid institutional change. The “long-term” order at which the new regime takes aim, it should be said, was itself short-lived—the decades spanning the mid-twentieth century. Nineteenth-century capitalism lurched from disaster to disaster in the stock markets and in irrational corporate investment; the wild swings of the business cycle provided people little security. In Enrico’s generation after World War II, this disorder was brought somewhat under control in most advanced economies; strong unions, guarantees of the welfare state, and largescale corporations combined to produce an era of relative stability. This span of thirty or so years defines the “stable past” now challenged by a new regime. A change in modern institutional structure has accompanied short-term, contract, or episodic labor. Corporations have sought to remove layers of bureaucracy, to become flatter and more flexible organizations. In place of organizations as pyramids, management wants now to think of organizations as networks. “Networklike arrangements are lighter on their feet” than pyramidal hierarchies, the sociologist Walter Powell declares; “they are more readily decomposable or redefinable than the fixed assets of hierarchies.”4 This means that promotions and dismissals tend not to be based on clear, fixed rules, nor are work tasks crisply defined; the network is constantly redefining its structure.
An IBM executive once told Powell that the flexible corporation “must become an archipelago of related activities.”5 The archipelago is an apt image for communications in a network, communication occurring like travel between islands—but at the speed of light, thanks to modern technologies. The computer has been the key to replacing the slow and clogged communications which occur in traditional chains of command. The fastest-growing sector of the labor force deals in computer and data-processing services, the area in which Jeanette and Rico work; the computer is now used in virtually all jobs, in many ways, by people of all ranks. (Please see Tables 1 and 7 in the Appendix for a statistical portrait.) For all these reasons, Enrico’s experience of long-term, narrative time in fixed channels has become dysfunctional. What Rico sought to explain to me—and perhaps to himself—is that the material changes embodied in the motto “No long term” have become dysfunctional for him too, but as guides to personal character, particularly in relation to his family life.
Take the matter of commitment and loyalty. “No long term” is a principle which corrodes trust, loyalty, and mutual commitment. Trust can, of course, be a purely formal matter, as when people agree to a business deal or rely on another to observe the rules in a game. But usually deeper experiences of trust are more informal, as when people learn on whom they can rely when given a difficult or impossible task. Such social bonds take time to develop, slowly rooting into the cracks and crevices of institutions.
The short time frame of modern institutions limits the ripening of informal trust. A particularly egregious violation of mutual commitment often occurs when new enterprises are first sold. In firms starting up, long hours and intense effort are demanded of everyone; when the firms go public—that is, initially offer publicly traded shares—the founders are apt to sell out and cash in, leaving lower-level employees behind. If an organization whether new or old operates as a flexible, loose network structure rather than by rigid command from the top, the network can also weaken social bonds. The sociologist Mark Granovetter says that modern institutional networks are marked by “the strength of weak ties,” by which he partly means that fleeting forms of association are more useful to people than long-term connections, and partly that strong social ties like loyalty have ceased to be compelling.6 These weak ties are embodied in teamwork, in which the team moves from task to task and the personnel of the team changes in the process. Strong ties depend, by contrast, on long association. And more personally they depend on a willingness to make commitments to others. Given the typically short, weak ties in institutions today, John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor, counsels the young to work “on the outside rather than on the inside” of organizations. He advocates consulting rather than becoming “entangled” in long-term employment; institutional loyalty is a trap in an economy where “business concepts, product designs, competitor intelligence, capital equipment, and all kinds of knowledge have shorter credible life spans.”7 A consultant who managed a recent IBM job shrinkage declares that once employees “understand [they can’t depend on the corporation] they’re marketable.”8 Detachment and superficial cooperativeness are better armor for dealing with current realities than behavior based on values of loyalty and service.
It is the time dimension of the new capitalism, rather than hightech data transmission, global stock markets, or free trade, which most directly affects people’s emotional lives outside the workplace. Transposed to the family realm, “No long term” means keep moving, don’t commit yourself, and don’t sacrifice. Rico suddenly erupted on the plane, “You can’t imagine how stupid I feel when I talk to my kids about commitment. It’s an abstract virtue to them; they don’t see it anywhere.” Over dinner I simply didn’t understand the outburst, which seemed apropos of nothing. But his meaning is now clearer to me as a reflection upon himself. He means the children don’t see commitment practiced in the lives of their parents or their parents’ generation.
Similarly, Rico hates the emphasis on teamwork and open discussion which marks an enlightened, flexible workplace once those values are transposed to the intimate realm. Practiced at home, teamwork is destructive, marking an absence of authority and of firm guidance in raising children. He and Jeannette, he says, have seen too many parents who have talked every family issue to death for fear of saying “No!,” parents who listen too well, who understand beautifully rather than lay down the law; they have seen as a result too many disoriented kids.
“Things have to hold together,” Rico declared to me. Again, I didn’t at first quite get this, and he explained what he meant in terms of watching television. Perhaps unusually, Rico and Jeannette make it a practice to discuss with their two sons the relation between movies or sitcoms the boys watch on the tube and events in the newspapers. “Otherwise it’s just a jumble of images.” But mostly the connections concern the violence and sexuality the children see on television. Enrico constantly spoke in little parables to drive home questions of character; these parables he derived from his work as a janitor—such as “You can ignore dirt but it won’t go away.” When I first knew Rico as an adolescent, he reacted with a certain shame to these homely snippets of wisdom. So now I asked Rico if he too made parables or even just drew ethical rules from his experience at work. He first ducked answering directly—“There’s not much on TV about that sort of thing”—then replied, “And well, no, I don’t talk that way.”
Behavior which earns success or even just survival at work thus gives Rico little to offer in the way of a parental role model. In fact, for this modern couple, the problem is just the reverse: how can they protect family relations from succumbing to the short-term behavior, the meeting mind-set, and above all the weakness of loyalty and commitment which mark the modern workplace? In place of the chameleon values of the new economy, the family—as Rico sees it—should emphasize instead formal obligation, trustworthiness, commitment, and purpose. These are all long-term virtues.
This conflict between family and work poses some questions about adult experience itself. How can long-term purposes be pursued in a short-term society? How can durable social relations be sustained? How can a human being develop a narrative of identity and life history in a society composed of episodes and fragments? The conditions of the new economy feed instead on experience which drifts in time, from place to place, from job to job. If I could state Rico’s dilemma more largely, short-term capitalism threatens to corrode his character, particularly those qualities of character which bind human beings to one another and furnishes each with a sense of sustainable self.
BY THE END OF DINNER, both of us were wrapped in our own thoughts. I had imagined a quarter century ago that late capitalism had achieved something like a final consummation; whether there was more market freedom, less government control, still the “system” entered into people’s everyday experience as it always had, through success and failure, domination and submission, alienation and consumption. Questions of culture and character fell for me into these familiar categories. But no young person’s experience today could be captured by these old habits of thought. Rico’s talk about his family had also set him, evidently, to thinking about his ethical values. When we retired to the back of the cabin to smoke, he remarked to me that he used to be a liberal, in the generous American sense of caring about the poor and behaving well to minorities like blacks and homosexuals. Enrico’s intolerance of blacks and foreigners shamed his son. Since going to work, though, Rico says he has become a “cultural conservative.” Like most of his peers, he loathes social parasites, embodied for him in the figure of the welfare mother who spends her government checks on booze and drugs. He has also become a believer in fixed, Draconian standards of communal behavior, as opposed to those values of “liberal parenting” which parallel the open-ended meeting at work. As an example of this communal ideal Rico told me that he approves the proposal current in some conservative circles to take away the children of bad parents and put them in orphanages. My hackles rose and we debated furiously, smoke rising above us in a cloud. We were talking past each other. (And as I look over my notes, I see Rico also a bit enjoyed provoking me.) He knows his cultural conservatism is just that—an idealized symbolic community. He has no real expectation of shutting children up in orphanages. He has certainly had little adult experience of the conservatism which preserves the past; for instance, other Americans have treated him each time he has moved as though life is just beginning, the past consigned to oblivion. The cultural conservatism to which he subscribes forms a testament to the coherence he feels missing in his life. And as concerns the family, his values are no simple matter of nostalgia. Rico in fact disliked the actual experience of rigid parental rule such as he suffered at Enrico’s hands. He would not return to the linear time which ordered Enrico and Flavia’s existence even if he could; he looked at me with a certain disgust when I told him that as a college professor, I have job tenure for life. He treats uncertainty and risk-taking as challenges at work; as a consultant he has learned to be an adept team player. But these forms of flexible behavior have not served Rico in his roles as a father or as a member of a community; he wants to sustain social relations and to offer durable guidance. It is against the severed ties at work, willful amnesia of his neighbors, and the specter of his children as mall rats that he asserts the idea of lasting values. And so Rico has become caught in a trap. All the specific values he cited are fixed rules: a parent says no; a community demands work; dependence is an evil. The vagaries of circumstance are excluded from these ethical rules—random vagaries are what, after all, Rico wants to defend against. But it’s difficult to put such timeless rules into practice. That difficulty appears in the language Rico uses to describe his moves the last fourteen years around the country. Though many of these moves have not been of his own desiring, he seldom used the passive voice in recounting the events. For instance, he dislikes the locution “I was downsized” instead, when this event broke up his life in the Missouri office park, he declared, “I faced a crisis and I had a decision to make.” About this crisis he said, “I make my own choices; I take full responsibility for moving around so much.” This sounded like his father. “Taking responsibility for yourself” was the most important phrase in Enrico’s lexicon. But Rico didn’t see how to act on it. I asked Rico, “When you were downsized in Missouri, why didn’t you protest, why didn’t you fight back?” “Sure, I felt angry, but that doesn’t do any good. There was nothing unfair about the corporation’s making its operation tighter. Whatever happened, I had to deal with the consequences. Would I ask Jeannette to move, one more time, for me? It was bad for the kids as well as her. Should I ask her? Who should I write a letter to about that?” There was no action he could take. Even so, he feels responsible for this event beyond his control; he literally takes it into himself, as his own burden. But what does “taking responsibility” mean? His children accept mobility as just the way of the world; his wife is in fact grateful that he has been willing to move for her sake. Yet the statement “I take responsibility for moving around so much” issues from Rico as a defiant challenge. By this point in our journey, I understood that the last thing I should reply to this challenge was “How could you hold yourself accountable?” It would have been a reasonable question and an insult—you don’t really matter.
Enrico had a somewhat fatalistic, old-world sense of people being born into a particular class or condition of life and making the very best of what is possible within those constraints. Events beyond his control, like layoffs, happened to him; then he coped. As this bit of sparring I’ve just quoted may make clear, Rico’s sense of responsibility is more absolute. What he draws attention to is his unbending willingness to be held accountable, to that quality of character, rather than to a particular course of action. Flexibility has pushed him to assert the sheer strength of will as the essence of his own ethical character.
Assuming responsibility for events beyond one’s control may seem a familiar friend—guilt—but this would wrongly characterize Rico, at least as he appeared to me. He is not self-indulgently selfaccusing. Nor has he lost his nerve, faced with a society which seems to him all in fragments. The rules he frames for what a person of good character should do may seem simplistic or childish, but again this would be to judge him wrongly. He is in a way a realist; it would indeed have been meaningless for him to write a letter to his employers about the havoc they had introduced into his family. So Rico focuses on his own sheer determination to resist: he will not drift. He wants to resist particularly the acid erosion of those qualities of character, like loyalty, commitment, purpose, and resolution, which are long-term in nature. He affirms timeless values which characterize who he is—for good, permanently, essentially. His will has become static; he is trapped in the sheer assertion of values. What is missing between the polar opposites of drifting experience and static assertion is a narrative which could organize his conduct. Narratives are more than simple chronicles of events; they give shape to the forward movement of time, suggesting reasons why things happen, showing their consequences. Enrico had a narrative for his life, linear and cumulative, a narrative which made sense in a highly bureaucratic world. Rico lives in a world marked instead by short-term flexibility and flux; this world does not offer much, either economically or socially, in the way of narrative. Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connections. Creative destruction, Schumpeter said, thinking about entrepreneurs, requires people at ease about not reckoning the consequences of change, or not knowing what comes next. Most people, though, are not at ease with change in this nonchalant, negligent way. Certainly Rico doesn’t want to live as a Schumpeterian man, though in the brute struggle for survival he has done well. “Change” means just drift; Rico worries that his children will drift ethically and emotionally—but as with his employers, there is nothing like a letter he can write to his children which will guide them through time. The lessons he wants to teach them are as timeless as is his own sense of determination—which means his ethical precepts apply to any and all cases. Change’s confusions and anxieties have bred in him this swing to the opposite extreme; perhaps this is why he cannot hold up his own life as an illustrative tale to his children, perhaps why, in listening to him, one has no sense of his character unfolding, or his ideals evolving.
I’VE DESCRIBED THIS ENCOUNTER BECAUSE Rico’s experiences with time, place, and work are not unique; neither is his emotional response. The conditions of time in the new capitalism have created a conflict between character and experience, the experience of disjointed time threatening the ability of people to form their characters into sustained narratives. At the end of the fifteenth century, the poet Thomas Hoccleve declared in The Regiment of Princes, “Allas, wher ys this worldes stabylnesse?”—a lament that appears equally in Homer or in Jeremiah in the Old Testament.9 Through most of human history, people have accepted the fact that their lives will shift suddenly due to wars, famines, or other disasters, and that they will have to improvise in order to survive. Our parents and grandparents were filled with anxiety in 1940, having endured the wreckage of the Great Depression and facing the looming prospect of a world war. What’s peculiar about uncertainty today is that it exists without any looming historical disaster; instead it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism. Instability is meant to be normal, Schumpeter’s entrepreneur served up as an ideal Everyman. Perhaps the corroding of character is an inevitable consequence. “No long term” disorients action over the long term, loosens bonds of trust and commitment, and divorces will from behavior. I think Rico knows he is both a successful and a confused man. The flexible behavior which has brought him success is weakening his own character in ways for which there exists no practical remedy. If he is an Everyman for our times, his universality may lie in that dilemma.
TWO Routine
There are good reasons Rico struggles to make sense of the time he lives. Modern society is in revolt against the routine, bureaucratic time which can paralyze work or government or other institutions. Rico’s problem is what to do with himself when this revolt against routine succeeds. At the dawn of industrial capitalism, though, it was not selfevident that routine was an evil. In the middle of the eighteenth century, it seemed that repetitive labor could lead in two quite different directions, one positive and fruitful, the other destructive. The positive side of routine was depicted in Diderot’s great Encyclopedia, published from 1751 to 1772; the negative side of regular labor-time was portrayed most dramatically in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Diderot believed routine in work could be like any other form of rote learning, a necessary teacher; Smith believed routine deadened the mind. Today, society sides with Smith. Diderot suggests what we might lose by taking his opponent’s side.
THE MOST STRIKING ARTICLES in the Encyclopedia to Diderot’s wellbred audience were those on everyday life: articles by several authors on industry, the various crafts, and farming. These accompanied a series of engravings which illustrated how to make a chair or chisel stone. Mid-eighteenth-century drawing is marked by an elegance of line, but most artists deployed that elegance to depict scenes of aristocratic leisure or landscape; the illustrators of the Encyclopedia put that elegance in the service of drawing hammers, paper presses, and pile drivers. The point of both images and text was to justify the inherent dignity of labor.10 The particular dignity of routine appears in Volume 5 of the Encyclopedia, in a series of plates showing an actual paper factory, l’Anglée, which lay about sixty miles south of Paris near the town of Montargis. The paper mill is laid out like a chateau, with a main block connecting at two right angles to smaller wings; on the exterior we see parterres and allées around the mill, just as they might have looked on the grounds of a country aristocrat’s home. The setting of this model factory—so pretty to our eyes—in fact dramatizes a great transformation of labor beginning in Diderot’s time: here home was separated from workplace. Up to the mideighteenth century, the household served as the physical center of the economy. In the countryside, families made most of the things they consumed; in cities like Paris or London, trades also were practiced in the family dwelling. In a baker’s house, for instance, journeymen, apprentices, and the baker’s biological family all “took their meals together, and food was provided for all, together, since all were expected to sleep and live in the house,” as the historian Herbert Applebaum points out; “the cost of making bread… included the housing, feeding, and clothing of all the people who worked for the master. Money wages was a fraction of the cost.”11 The anthropologist Daniel Defert calls this an economy of the domus; instead of wage slavery, there reigned an inseparable combination of shelter and subordination to the will of a master. Diderot depicts at L’Anglée a new order of work, cut free from the domus. The factory provided no workers’ housing on the grounds; indeed, this factory was one of the first in France to recruit workers from far enough away that they had to ride to work, rather than walk on foot. It was also one of the first to pay adolescent workers wages directly, rather than paying their parents. The attractive, even elegant, appearance of the paper mill suggests that the engraver viewed this separation in a positive light. What we are shown inside is also positive: order reigns. Paper pulping was in fact during the eighteenth century a messy and stinking operation; the rags used for paper were often stripped from corpses, then rotted in vats for two months to break down their fibers. At L’Anglée, though, the floors are spotless and no workers appear on the verge of vomiting. In the room where the fibers are beaten to a pulp by a stamping mill—the messiest of all activities— there are no human beings at all. In the room where the trickiest human division of labor occurred, the pulp scooped, then pressed into thin sheets, three craftsmen work with balletic coordination. The secret of this industrial order lay in its precise routines. L’Anglée is a factory in which everything has its appointed place and everyone knows what to do. But for Diderot, routines of this sort did not imply the simple, endless mechanical repetition of a task. The schoolmaster who insists a pupil memorize fifty lines of a poem wants the poetry stored in the pupil’s brain, recoverable at command and usable in judging other poems. In his Paradox of Acting, Diderot sought to explain how the actor or actress gradually plumbs the depths of a part by repeating the lines again and again. And these same virtues of repetition he expected to find in industrial labor. Paper-making is not mindless; Diderot believed—again by analogy to the arts—that its routines were in constant evolution, as workers learned how to manipulate and alter each stage of the labor process. More largely, the “rhythm” of work means that by repeating a particular operation, we find how to speed up and slow down, make variations, play with materials, develop new practices —just as a musician learns how to manage time in performing a piece of music. Thanks to repetition and rhythm, the worker can achieve, Diderot said, “the unity of mind and hand” in labor.12 Of course, this is an ideal. Diderot offers evidence of a visual and subtle kind to make it convincing. At the paper mill the young boys cutting up rancid rags are shown working alone in a room, without an adult overseer. In the sizing, drying, and finishing rooms, young boys, young women, and burly men work side by side; here the Encyclopedia’s audience literally saw equality and fraternity. What makes that imagery specially compelling visually is the faces of the workers. No matter how demanding the tasks engaging them, the workers’ faces are serene, reflecting Diderot’s conviction that through labor human beings come to be at peace with themselves. “Let’s work without theorizing,” Martin says in Voltaire’s Candide. “It’s the only way to make life bearable.” Though Diderot was more inclined to theorize, like Voltaire he believed that through mastering routine and its rhythms, people both take control and calm down. TO ADAM SMITH, these images of orderly evolution, fraternity, and serenity represent an impossible dream. Routine deadens the spirit. Routine, at least as organized in the emerging capitalism which he observed, seemed to deny any connection between ordinary labor and the positive role of repetition in making art. When Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, he was read—as he has continued to be read—as an apostle of that new capitalism. This was because of the declaration he made at the outset of his book in favor of free markets. But Smith is more than an apostle of economic liberty; he was fully aware of the dark side of the market. That awareness came to him particularly in considering the routine organization of time in this new economic order. The Wealth of Nations is based on a single great insight: Smith believed the free circulation of money, goods, and labor would require people to do ever more specialized tasks. The growth of free markets is coupled to the division of labor in society. We easily understand Smith’s idea of the division of labor in observing a beehive; as the hive grows in size, each of its cells becomes the site for a particular labor. Put formally, the numeric dimensions of exchange—be they size of the money supply or the quantity of goods in the market—are inseparably linked to specialization of productive function. Smith’s own graphic example is of a pin factory. (Not modern sewing pins; eighteenth-century pins were the equivalent of our tacks and small nails, used in carpentry.) Smith calculated a pinmaker doing everything for himself could make at most a few hundred pins a day; in a pin factory operating according to the new divisions of labor, where pin-making was broken down into all its component parts and each worker did only one of them, a pin-maker could process more than 16,000 pins a day.13 The trade the pin factory engages in on the free market will only stimulate demand for pins, leading to larger enterprises, with ever more elaborate divisions of labor. Like Diderot’s paper mill, Smith’s pin factory is a place to work but not to live in. The separation of home and labor is, Smith said, the most important of all the modern divisions of labor. And like Diderot’s paper mill, Smith’s pin factory operates in an orderly fashion thanks to routine, each worker performing only one function. The pin factory differs from the paper mill in Smith’s vision of how disastrous, humanly, it is to organize work time this way. The world Smith lived in had, of course, been long familiar with routines and schedules of time. Church bells from the sixth century on had marked out time into religious units of the day; the Benedictines took an important step in the early Middle Ages by ringing bells to mark off the times for work and the times for eating as well as the times for prayer. Nearer to Smith’s own day, mechanical clocks had replaced the bells of churches, and by the mid-eighteenth century pocket watches were in widespread use. Now mathematically precise time could be told wherever a person was, whether in earshot or eyesight of a church or not: time had thus ceased to be dependent on space. Why should extending this scheduling of time further prove a human disaster? The Wealth of Nations is a very long book, and the proponents of the new economy in Smith’s own time tended only to refer to its dramatic and hopeful beginning. As the text progresses, however, it darkens; the pin factory becomes a more sinister place. Smith recognizes that breaking the tasks involved in making pins down into their component parts would condemn individual pin-makers to a numbingly boring day, hour after hour spent doing one small job. At a certain point, routine becomes self-destructive, because human beings lose control over their own efforts; lack of control over work time means people go dead mentally. The capitalism of his own time Smith believed was crossing this great divide; when Smith declares that “those who labor most get least” in the new order, he was thinking in these human terms, rather than about wages.14 In one of the grimmest passages of The Wealth of Nations he writes: In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour…comes to be confined to a few very simple operations; frequently to one or two…. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations…generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.15 The industrial worker thus knows nothing of the self-possession and mobile expressiveness of the actor who has memorized a thousand lines; Diderot’s comparison of actor and worker is false, because the worker does not control his or her work. The pin-maker becomes a “stupid and ignorant” creature in the course of the division of labor; the repetitive nature of his work has pacified him. For these reasons, industrial routine threatens to diminish human character in its very depths. If this seems a strangely pessimistic Adam Smith, it is perhaps only because he was a more complex thinker than capitalist ideology makes him out to be. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments he had earlier argued for the virtues of mutual sympathy and the capacity to identify with the needs of others. Sympathy, he argued, is a spontaneous moral sentiment; it bursts forth suddenly when a man or woman suddenly understands the sufferings or stresses of another. The division of labor dulls, however, spontaneous outburst; routine represses the pouring forth of sympathy. To be sure, Smith equated the growth of markets and the division of labor with the material progress of society, but not with its moral progress. And the virtues of sympathy reveal something perhaps more subtle about individual character. Rico’s moral center, as we have seen, lay in the resolute assertion of his will; for Smith, the spontaneous eruption of sympathy overcomes the will, sweeps a man or woman up in emotions beyond his or her control, like sudden identification with society’s failures, compassion for habitual liars or for cowards. Eruptions of sympathy—this realm of spontaneous time—pushes us outside our normal moral boundaries. There is nothing predictable or routine about sympathy. In emphasizing the ethical importance of such bursts of emotion, Smith spoke distinctively among his contemporaries. Many of them viewed human character, in its ethical aspect, as having little to do with spontaneous feeling, or indeed with human will; Jefferson declared in the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (1779), that “the opinions and beliefs of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their own minds.”16 Character turns on doing one’s duty; as James Madison said in 1785, following the dictates of conscience “is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator.”17 Nature and Nature’s God proposes; man obeys. Adam Smith speaks a language of character which is perhaps closer to our own. Character appears to him shaped by history and its unpredictable twists. Once established, a routine doesn’t permit much in the way of personal history; to develop one’s character, one has to break out of routine. This general proposition Smith made specific; he celebrated the character of traders, believing they acted responsively and sympathetically to the changing demands of the moment, just as he pitied the state of character of industrial workers yoked to routine. The trader was, in his view, the more fully engaged human being. It should not surprise us that Marx was a close reader of Adam Smith, though hardly a celebrant of trade or traders. As a young man, Marx admired at least the general theory of spontaneity in The Theory of Moral Sentiments; as a more adult and sober analyst, he zeroed in upon Smith’s depiction of the ills of routine, the division of labor without the worker’s control of work—these are the essential ingredients of Marx’s analysis of commodified time. Marx added to Smith’s depiction of routine in the pin factory the contrast to such older practices as the German system of Tagwerk, in which a laborer was paid by the day; in that practice, the worker could adapt to the conditions of his or her environment, working differently on days when it rained than on clear days, or organizing tasks to take account of the delivery of supplies; there was rhythm to such work, because the worker was in control.18 By contrast, as the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson would later write, in modern capitalism those employed “experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own’ time.”19 The fears Adam Smith and Marx harbored of routine time passed into our own century as the phenomenon called Fordism. It’s in Fordism that we can most fully document the apprehension Smith had about the industrial capitalism just emerging at the end of the eighteenth century, particularly in the place for which Fordism was named.
THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY’S Highland Park factory was generally considered, during the years 1910–14, to be an illustrious example of technologically based division of labor. Henry Ford was in some ways a humane employer; he gave workers good wages through a five-dollar-day pay scheme (the equivalent of $120 a day in 1997 dollars), and included workers in a profit-sharing plan. The operations on the factory floor were another matter. Henry Ford believed worry about the quality of work life “mere moonshine” five dollars a day was a handsome enough reward for boredom. Before Ford created model factories like Highland Park, the automobile industry was craft-based, with highly skilled workers doing many complex jobs on a motor or an auto body during the course of a working day. These workers enjoyed a great deal of autonomy, and the auto industry was in fact a cluster of decentralized shops. “Many skilled workers,” Stephan Meyer notes, “often hired and fired their own helpers and paid the latter some fixed proportion of their earnings.”20 Around 1910, the pin-maker’s regime took hold in the auto industry. As Ford Motor industrialized its production process, it favored the employment of so-called specialist workers over skilled craftsmen; the jobs of the specialist workers were those sorts of miniature operations requiring little thought or judgment. In the Ford plant at Highland Park, most of these specialist workers were recent immigrants, while the skilled craftsmen consisted of Germans and other more established Americans; the new immigrants were thought both by management and the “native” Americans to lack the intelligence to do more than routine work. By 1917, 55 percent of the work force were specialist employees; another 15 percent were unskilled cleaners and janitors hovering on the sidelines of the assembly line, and the crafts and technical workers had fallen to 15 percent. “Cheap men need expensive jigs,” said Sterling Bunnell, an early proponent of these changes, while “highly skilled men need little outside of their tool chests.”21 That insight about using complicated machinery to simplify human labor laid the foundation for the consummation of Smith’s fears. For instance, the industrial psychologist Frederick W. Taylor believed that machinery and industrial design could be immensely complicated in a great enterprise, but there was no need for the workers to understand that complexity; indeed, he asserted, the less they were “distracted” by understanding the design of the whole, the more efficiently they would stick to doing their own jobs.22 Taylor’s infamous timemotion studies were conducted with a stopwatch, measuring to the fraction of a second how long installing a head-lamp or a fender should take. Time-motion management carried Smith’s image of the pin factory to a sadistic extreme, but Taylor had little doubt his human guinea pigs would passively accept measurement and manipulation. In fact, passive acceptance of this routine time-slavery did not follow as a consequence; David Noble observes that “workers displayed a wide repertoire of techniques for sabotaging timemotion studies and, as a matter of course, ignored methods and process specifications whenever they got in the way or conflicted with their own interests.”23 Moreover, Smith’s “stupid and ignorant” creature became depressed at work, and this diminished his or her productivity. Experiments like those at General Electric’s Hawthorn plant showed that nearly any attention paid to workers as sentient human beings improved their productiveness; industrial psychologists like Elton Mayo thus urged managers to show more concern for their employees and adapted psychiatric practices of counseling to the workplace. Still, industrial psychologists like Mayo were clear-eyed. They knew they could temper the pains of boredom, but not erase them in this iron cage of time.
The pains of routine culminated in Enrico’s generation. In a classic study of the 1950s, “Work and Its Discontents,” Daniel Bell sought to analyze this apotheosis in another automobile site, the General Motors Willow Run plant in Michigan. Smith’s honeycomb had now become truly gigantic; Willow Run was a structure twothirds of a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide. Here all the materials needed to make cars, from raw steel to glass blocks to leather tanneries, were assembled under a single roof, the work coordinated by a highly disciplined bureaucracy of analysts and managers. So complex an organization could function only via precise rules, which Bell called an “engineering rationality.” This immense, well-engineered cage operated on three principles: “the logic of size, the logic of ‘metric time,’ and the logic of hierarchy.”24 The logic of size was simple: bigger is more efficient. Concentrating all elements of production in one place like Willow Run conserved energy, saved on the transport of materials, and meshed the factory with the company’s white-collar sales and executive offices. The logic of hierarchy was not quite so simple. Max Weber had asserted in defining the human iron cage that “no special proof is necessary to show that military discipline is the ideal model for the modern capitalism factory.”25 In companies like General Motors in the 1950s, however, Bell noted a somewhat different model of control. The “superstructure which organizes and directs production…draws all possible brainwork away from the shop; everything is centered in the planning and schedule and design departments.” Architecturally, this meant removing the technicians and managers as far from the throbbing machinery of the plants as possible. The generals of work thus lost physical contact with their troops. The result, however, only reinforced the numbing evils of routine for “the worker at the bottom, attending only to details, [who] is divorced from any decision or modification about the product he is working on.”26 These ills at Willow Run continued to be founded on the Taylorite logic of “metric time.” Time was minutely calculated everywhere in the vast plant so that top managers knew precisely what everyone was supposed to be doing at a given moment. Bell was struck, for instance, by how General Motors “divides the hour into ten six-minute periods…the worker is paid by the numbers of tenths of an hour he works.”27 This minute engineering of work time was connected to very long measures of time in the corporation as well. Seniority pay was finely tuned to the total number of hours a man or woman had worked for General Motors; a laborer could minutely calculate benefits of vacation time and sick leave. The micrometrics of time governed the lower echelons of white-collar offices as well as manual labor on the assembly line, in terms of promotion and benefits. By Enrico’s generation, however, metrics of time had become something other than an act of repression and domination practiced by management for the sake of the giant industrial organization’s growth. Intense negotiations over these schedules preoccupied both the United Auto Workers union and the management of General Motors; the rank and file in the union paid close and at times passionate attention to the numbers involved in these negotiations. Routinized time had become an arena in which workers could assert their own demands, an arena of empowerment. This was a political outcome Adam Smith did not anticipate. The entrepreneurial storms which Schumpeter summoned in the image of “creative destruction” meant that Smith’s kind of pin factory went bankrupt throughout the nineteenth century, its rational honeycomb a design on paper which survived in metal and stone often only for a few years. Correspondingly, to preserve themselves against these upheavals, workers sought to routinize time, through savings in mutual aide societies, or through mortgages on homes gained through building societies. We are hardly disposed now to think of routinized time as a personal achievement, but given the stresses, booms, and depressions of industrial capitalism, it often became so. This complicated the meaning of the engineering of routine time which appeared at Ford’s Highland Park and found a consummation of sorts in General Motors’ Willow Run. We have seen how, out of this obsessive attention to the routine schedules of time, Enrico crafted a positive narrative for his life. Routine can demean, but it can also protect; routine can decompose labor, but it can also compose a life. Still, the substance of Smith’s fear remained vivid to Daniel Bell, who was then still trying to make sense of why workers did not revolt against capitalism. Bell was, as it were, halfway out of the door of socialist faith. He had learned that the discontents of work, even those as profound as the hollowing out of the content of work, do not lead men and women to revolt: resistance to routine does not beget revolution. But still Bell remained a good son in the socialist house. He believed that at the sprawling Willow Run factory he had visited the scene of a tragedy. A thread connected Bell’s Willow Run back in time to Ford’s Highland Park and then again to Adam Smith’s pin factory. Routine has appeared in all these scenes of labor as personally degrading, a source of mental ignorance—and ignorance of a particular kind. The immediate present may be clear enough, as a laborer presses the same lever or crank hour after hour. What the routine worker lacks is any larger vision of a different future, or knowledge about how to make change. To rephrase this criticism of routine, mechanical activity does not beget any sense of a larger historical narrative: the micronarratives in the lives of workers like Enrico would have appeared to Marx negligible on the larger scale of History, or mere accommodations to existing circumstances. This is why the old debate between Denis Diderot and Adam Smith remains vividly alive. Diderot did not believe routine work is degrading; on the contrary, he thought routines beget narratives, as the rules and rhythms of work gradually evolve. It’s ironic that this boulevardier and philosophe, a creature of the sleazier salons of mid-eighteenth-century Paris, appears today more a champion of the inherent dignity of ordinary labor than do many of those who have spoken in the name of the People. Diderot’s greatest modern heir, the sociologist Anthony Giddens, has tried to keep Diderot’s insight alive by pointing to the primary value of habit in both social practices and self-understanding; we test out alternatives only in relation to habits which we have already mastered. To imagine a life of momentary impulses, of short-term action, devoid of sustainable routines, a life without habits, is to imagine indeed a mindless existence.28 Today we stand at a historical divide on the issue of routine. The new language of flexibility implies that routine is dying in the dynamic sectors of the economy. However, most labor remains inscribed within the circle of Fordism. Simple statistics are hard to come by, but a good estimate of the modern jobs described in Table 1 is that at least two-thirds are repetitive in ways which Adam Smith would recognize as akin to those in his pin factory. The computer use at work portrayed in Table 7 similarly involves, for the most part, quite routine tasks like data entry. If we believe, with Diderot and Giddens, that such labor need not be inherently demeaning, then we would focus on the working conditions in which it gets done; we would hope to make factories and offices look more like the cooperative, supportive scenes of labor depicted in the engravings of L’Anglée. If, however, we are disposed to view routine as inherently demeaning, then we will attack the very nature of the work process itself. We will abhor both routine and its father, the dead hand of bureaucracy. We may be largely driven by the practical desire for greater market responsiveness, productivity, and profit. But we need not be just greedy capitalists; we may believe, as heirs of Adam Smith, that people are stimulated by more flexible experience, both at work and in other institutions. We may believe in the virtues of spontaneity. The question then becomes: will flexibility with all the risks and uncertainties it entails in fact remedy the human evil it sets out to attack? Even supposing routine has a pacifying effect on character, just how is flexibility to make a more engaged human being?
Towards an Incoherent Refusal of Efficiency
- Author: Lidia Pereira
- Publisher and date: Pervasive Labour Union Zine Issue #11: The Entreprecariat (ed. Silvio Lorusso), 2018
Synopsis
Lidia Pereira's essay begins with an etymological and historical tracing of the modern sense of efficiency as an ideal condition of labour. Arising in conjunction with the nascent Industrial Revolution, this notion of efficiency was spurred on by proponents such as Frederick Winslow Taylor, a driving force in the Efficiency Movement, and a Soviet pioneer of scientific management of labour, Alexei Gastev, who both held that workers should operate in machine-like ways in order to optimise efficiency.
With an escalated demand for production due to the outbreak of World War I, the limitations of the human body and psyche were revealed, resulting in the establishment of the field of industrial psychology in the United Kingdom and the development of employee management techniques in the United States. These aimed to rethink efficiency by mediating the relationship between company and employer, aiming to instil in workers a sense of personal investment in the company’s success.
This enmeshment of worker’s subjectivity within the life of the company led to a shift in responsibility for addressing discontent with systematic inequality from employer to worker by "centering problems on the self and its immediate conditions". Pereira makes a connection between this individualisation with an obscured infra- and superstructure, leading to the collective exploitation of workers. Isabelle Lorey's research on the governmentality of workers, drawn from Foucault’s biopolitics and History of Sexuality draws the concept of self-development, or an individual's need to govern and adapt themselves as an extension of state power. This leads to a question; why might individuals opt for self-precarization in Western capitalist societies? These individuals are often celebrated within neoliberal discourse as entrepreneurial role models that are coherent with the hegemonic norm; white, male, nationalised and with highly developed social and creative skills. Pereira suggest it is a state-imposed narrative that imbues these individuals with authenticity while obscuring decisive factors that hinder access to equal opportunity for those outside of the norm, shifting responsibility for failure and its consequences (for both those who are forced into precarity and those who choose self-precarization) from the state to the governed subject.
The pressure on those outside the norm to adapt in order to gain acceptance leads to their diversity being conflated with their ability to be productive, but only if these differences are coherent with their official portrait and to the extent that they may be exploited by capital. Social pressures to self-improve and preoccupation with individuals “becoming themselves” through self-promotion and networking is paradoxically at the cost of building important social bonds.
In conclusion Pereira offers coherence as a concept to be explored further, proposing that by taking an incoherent, inconsistent and idiosyncratic position, individuals who deviate from the norm could be protected from exploitation by refusing to adapt.
Original text
“efficient (adj.)
1. (of a system or machine) achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.
2. (of a person) working in a well-organized and competent way.” (Oxford Dictionaries)
“Efficiency is a measurable concept that can be determined by determining the ratio of useful output to total input. It minimizes the waste of resources such as physical materials, energy and time, while successfully achieving the desired output.” (Investopedia)
From the latin verb efficiō –meaning to execute, to accomplish– the modern sense of the word ‘efficient’, according to the same Oxford Dictionaries from where I extracted the opening quote of this text, only came into existence in the late 18th century, roughly around the same time as the Industrial Revolution
was entering upon.
Taylorism, a theory of labour developed from the 1880s onwards by Frederick Winslow Taylor –himself one of the main influences within the ‘Efficiency Movement’– was committed to the quest of achieving the perfect ratio of “useful output to total input” to such an extent that some of its proponents went to the point of collapsing the person with the machine as a desired outcome. One such example is Alexei Gastev, founder of the Central Institute of Labour in the Soviet Union, advocate of the “principle of mechanization” and the “biological automatization” of workers (The Charnel House, 2011).
Also known as the scientific management of labor, Taylor’s brainchild consisted of an array of techniques for disciplining workers’ bodies into becoming efficient productive machines. Motion studies, calculation and metrics would produce the knowledge necessary to inform the training of workers and the rational
allocation of human resources. Nikolas Rose understands this process as the first of many attempts to provide management with rational legitimacy. Fabricating compliance was thus essential for preventing conflicts between worker and employer. The perfect Taylorist worker would thus be a docile body, as compliant and sturdy as the steam engine (Gregory, Hendry, Watts, Young, 2017).
But this reductive vision of the worker would not last forever. In “Governing the Soul – The Shaping of the Private Self”, specifically within the chapter “The Productive Subject”, Nikolas Roses maps the developments which allowed for these theories, if not to subside, to evolve. When World War I struck and demands grew heavier on workers’ bodies, it became clear that the worker-machine had limitations and was bound to fatigue and other health-related issues. According to Rose, this allowed for a series of interventions that would gradually shift the conception of the worker as mere physiological apparatus. In 1921 C.S. Myers established the National Institute of Industrial Psychology in the United Kingdom, marking a new era where the psychology of the worker became a crucial way of reconceptualizing industrial efficiency and peaceful continuation.
In the United States, too, the ways of conceiving the working body shifted similarly. However, whereas in the United Kingdom the focus was on individual differences, in the United States the problem was conceptualized in terms of human relations within the group. Overall, workers’ subjectivity “had emerged as a new domain for management” (Rose 1989), which set itself as a neutral, independent authority that would act as a middle man between worker and employer, smoothing out the frictions that might arise between them. Moreover, the enmeshment of the worker’s subjectivity in the life of the company was to create a sense of belonging and common, shared goals, stimulating a renewed personal investment in
the advancement of the company’s interests.
Pinning rightful work discontent caused by systemic inequality down to maladjustment and pathology, this managerial approach to workers’ subjectivity obscures workers’ exploitation in layers of scientific authority, centering the problem on the self and its immediate conditions. In turn, this promotes an internalization and individualization of the problem, thus obfuscating the larger infrastructure/superstructure complex engendering workers’ collective exploitation. These thoughts seem to be echoed by many critics who claim that these interventions did nothing to solve basic inequalities. While Rose sees much truth in these analyses, and indeed links these managerial efforts with a hope to weaken trade unionism, he warns against regarding these discourses as purely ideological as to do so would imply that the knowledge involved in the management of the workers’ psyche is false.
According to Michel Foucault, the preoccupation with the wellbeing of the general population for the purposes of a strong and healthy state dates back to the 18th century Western societies. Such an endeavor requires not only large amounts of data, but also that every individual participates in their own governance. Governmentality thus refers to structural entanglement of self-government with the government of a state (Lorey 2006). In her reading of Foucault’s biopolitics within the context of selfprecarization, Isabell Lorey explores how ideas of freedom and autonomy are constituted in Western capitalist societies. What does it mean to ‘choose’ precarity within the context of neoliberal
governmentality?
From Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Lorey extracts the fundamental notion that the modern Western subject must gradually learn a relationship with themselves. Here, the self emerges as something to be shaped and developed. This development is modeled on the concept of “normal” (e.g. white, male, bourgeois, national, etc), which Lorey identifies with the hegemonic; this concept is infused with the sense of authenticity, thus obscuring the effect of power on the construction of the self. Whilst traditionally those who did not fit the norm were made precarious, Lorey posits that, in neoliberalism, precarization is transformed from an exception into a hegemonic, normalized function. Self-precarization, thus, serves the needs of economical and governmental power whilst at the same time beclouding its role.
Both for forced and self-chosen precarization the narrative is one of creating one’s own opportunities and devising one’s own means of economical success – in short, becoming an entrepreneur. This state imposed narrative is characterized by a shift of responsibility, letting the governed subject shoulder the consequences, as well as the blame, for their failures, obscuring decisive factors which might hinder equal access to opportunities such as class, gender, race, neurological differences, etc.
“In a neoliberal context they [the self-precarious] are exploitable to such an extreme that the state presents them as role models.” (Lorey 2006)
This role model, the normalized identity which corresponds to the hegemonic, is that of a tireless individual who is alert and always ready, a force of nature with a strong presence that is mostly white, often male, charming, creative and gregarious. The normal subject is someone with the ability to, first and foremost, sell themselves, whose social skills are well tuned and whose energy comes from connecting with others. A force to be reckoned with, this well of virtues is resilient, organized, flexible, efficient... the list goes on and on. Within the neoliberal environment, where precarious bodies need to constantly prove themselves economically viable, being visible can also be decisive –every event is an opportunity to trade in social capital, every party might decide whether economical survival will be possible for the next couple of months. Where everyone is an entrepreneur, everyone can become your
next investor. Being seen as productive often becomes more important than production itself.
Lorey identifies self-precarization with feelings of fear, loss of control, insecurity, as well with a redefinition of the boundaries between work and leisure. Always having to be “on” and prove yourself constantly to others is a taxing project on everyone forced to exist under such conditions – even for those who fit the ‘job’ description almost to a tee. We can imagine it is even more so for the precarious within the precarized population –the neurodiverse, people of colour, female, transexual, introverted, anxious, etc. For them, fitting in always involves some degree of self-mutilation and adaptation. As an example, a simple internet search for “introvert” returns several links to articles about the hidden power of the introvert, the wonderful mythical creature with a rich inner world that can become a great leader if his/her powers are respected and correctly harnessed. Likewise, several articles praise the value of having a person on the Autism Spectrum on your work team. This stereotyped and mystified narrative, besides being unhelpful and assuming some degree of advantage, immediately places an inordinate amount of pressure on these people to make up for their deviance to the norm with the “unique” attributes they are famed to have. Acceptance comes at the price of constant performance of an attributed set of traits, qualities and strengths. Much of the mainstream discourse in this arena condescendingly engulfs all diversity into a productive body: individual differences are taken into account as long as they are coherent with their official portrait and in so far as they can be made exploitable by capital.
Coherence might just be a key concept to retain and explore further. Lorey underlines its importance as a fundamental of modern sovereignty – self-governing depends on an imagined coherence and wholeness that shapes itself on the mold of “normality”. Likewise, in order to be made productive, “abnormality” must be absorbed into a perfectly defined identity that is thus easier to govern. If constructing one’s identity boils down to attaining some sort of perceived coherence, when this requirement fails the individual becomes susceptible to what some psychologists call ‘ontological insecurity’. Ontological insecurity, which R.D. Laing defines as the lack of an overarching “sense of personal consistency and cohesiveness”, is a postmodern condition as Rob Horning maintains in his “Sick of Myself”.
Where everyone is concerned with becoming themselves, with selfrealization, self-improvement, and other self-alienating techniques, attention shifts away from community building, organization and strengthening of solidarity bonds between individuals. For all of its promotion of networking and social interaction, normalized precarious identity, where everyone is an entrepreneur of the self, is paradoxically isolating. In this scenario, human relations are not conceived as bonds of solidarity and shared struggles, but established as a means to achieve an end –they’re the promise of future financial gratification. Evoking the image of the social graph (the graphical representation of relationships between everybody and everything on the internet), Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin underline that the visualization of social networks as nodes and links “reinforces the philosophical assumption that social relations always exist in a reified manner as ‘links’ between one atomic unit and another” (Hui and Halpin, 2013). Presiding not only over our online, but also over our offline lives, these atomized representations challenge the possibilities for collectivized counterbehaviour which, Lorey states, is currently missing.
Could a radical refusal of coherence be the basis to start constructing such collectivized counterbehaviour? Could idiosyncrasy be part of the answer to Lorey’s question as to what, within neoliberalism, functions as deviant and cannot be exploited in this way? An inconsistent, incoherent and idiosyncratic mass that refuses their deviance to the hegemonic norm be made compliant with the requirements of the economical system. Organization on the basis of acceptance as opposed to adaptation, where society cares for the individual even if it can’t commodify its “unique” traits. If we are too difficult to predict we become, in the best possible scenario, dangerous. In the worst possible scenario, of little or no use to the market. Unity, accountability, predictability – these are the most prized traits in a governable subject. Can we ever refuse them?
Duty: Free Art
- Author: Hito Steyerl
- Publisher and date: Verso 2017
Synopsis
Hito Steyerl's narration rides between fact and fiction. She is clever, adapting a story telling tone that makes the narrative readable and relevant to the more of us. In the opening chapter, she istuates the plot in a unnamed battle field, where contemporary warfare has taken place. The identity of location is only disclosed few chapters later. The war is targeted at physical bodies, maneuvered behind the screens.
Today's war is unlike the wars restrained by physical bodies. In the day, the battlefield is executed by information; in the night, white plastic sheets covers combat zones. Onwards, the warscape falls to the scope of real estate prospection, which entails 3D render videos of reconstruction plans featuring happy playgrounds and walkways. It is a plot where creative destruction has taken place. Capitalism dissovles all sorts of seemingly solid structures and force them to constantly upgrade and renew, both from within and without.
As she lays the theoretical grounds from contemporary warfare to economy, the transition of content from battle field to art economy becomes ilucidated to the reader. Steyerl changes to duty free storages located in freeports of Switzerland, where art trades from one freeport to another, invisible under the the governmental setup of duty free storage zone. The invisibility facilitates tacit strategies of money laundering and tax evasion. At the end, Steyerl raises a pounding question, how will art be accessible to public, if stored in unvisible freeports?
As Ranciere puts it, the division of visibility and invisibility is determined by what is visible in public arenas.
Aside from aboved synopsized predicaments, Steyerl also narrates algorithmic data manipulation from authority, which reflects back to the very first plot - data as a contemporary weapon.
Original text
I saw the future. It was empty. A clean slate, flat, designed through and through.
In his 1963 film How to Kill People designer George Nelson argues that killing is a matter of design, next to fashion and homemaking. Nelson states that design is crucial in improving both the form and function of weapons. It deploys aesthetics to improve lethal technology.
An accelerated version of the design of killing recently went on trial in this city. Its old town was destroyed, expropriated, in parts eradicated. Young locals claiming autonomy started an insurgency. Massive state violence squashed it, claimed buildings, destroyed neighborhoods, strangled movement, hopes for devolution, secularism, and equality. Other cities fared worse. Many are dead. Elsewhere, operations were still ongoing. No, this city is not in Syria. Not in Iraq either. Let's call it the old town for now. Artifacts found in the area date back to the Stone Age.
The future design of killing is already in action here.
It is accelerationist, articulating soft- and hardwares, combining emergency missives, programs, forms and templates. Tanks are coordinated with databases, chemicals meet excavators, social media come across tear gas, languages, special forces and managed visibility.
In the streets children were playing with a dilapidated computer keyboard thrown out onto a pile of stuff and debris. It said Fun City in big red letters. In the twelfth century one of the important predecessors of computer technology and cybernetics had lived in the old town. Scholar Al-Jazari devised many automata and pieces of cutting-edge engineering.1 One of his most astonishing designs is a band of musical robots floating on a boat in a lake, serving drinks to guests. Another one of his devices is seen as anticipating the design of programmable machines.2 He wrote the so-called Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, featuring dozens of inventions in the areas of hydropower, medicine, engineering, timekeeping, music, and entertainment. Now, the area where these designs were made is being destroyed.
Warfare, construction and destruction literally take place behind screensunder coverrequiring planning and installation. Blueprints were designed. Laws bent and sculpted. Minds both numbed and incited by the media glare of permanent emergency. The design of killing orchestrates military, housing, and religiously underpinned population policies. It shifts gears across emergency measures, land registers, pimped passions, and curated acts of daily harassment and violence. It deploys trolls, fiduciaries, breaking news, and calls to prayer. People are rotated in and out of territories, ranked by affinity to the current hegemony. The design of killing is smooth, participatory, progressing and aggressive, supported by irregulars and occasional machete killings. It is strong, brash, striving for purity and danger. It quickly reshuffles both its allies and its enemies. It quashes the dissimilar and dissenting. It is asymmetrical, multidimensional, overwhelming, ruling from a position of aerial supremacy.
After the fighting had ended, the curfew continued. Big white plastic sheets were covering all entrances to the area to block any view of the former combat zones. An army of bulldozers was brought in. Construction became the continuation of warfare with other means. The rubble of the torn down buildings was removed by workers brought in from afar, partly rumored to be dumped into the river, partly stored in highly guarded landfills far from the city center. Parents were said to dig for their missing children's bodies in secret. They had joined the uprising and were unaccounted for. Some remnants of barricades still remained in the streets, soaked with the smell of dead bodies.
Special forces roamed about arresting anyone who seemed to be taking pictures. You can't erase them, said one. Once you take them they are directly uploaded to the cloud.
A 3D render video of reconstruction plans was released while the area was still under curfew. Render ghosts patrol a sort of tidied gamescape built in traditional-looking styles, omitting signs of the different cultures and religions that had populated the city since antiquity. Images of destruction are replaced with digital renders of happy playgrounds and Haussmannized walkways by way of misaligned wipes.
The video uses wipes to transition from one state to another, from present to future, from elected municipality to emergency rule,3 from working-class neighborhood to prime real estate. Wipes as a filmic means are a powerful political symbol. They show displacement by erasure, or more precisely, replacement. They clear one image by shoving in another and pushing the old one out of sight. They visually wipe out the initial population, the buildings, elected representatives, and property rights in order to clear the space and fill it with a more convenient population, a more culturally homogeneous cityscape, a more aligned administration and homeowners. According to the simulation, the void in the old town would be intensified by expensive newly built developments rehashing bygone templates, rendering the city as a site for consumption, possession, and conquest. The objects of this type of design are ultimately the people and, as Brecht said, their deposition (or disposal, if deemed necessary). The wipe is the filmic equivalent of this. The design of killing is a permanent coup against the non-compliant part of people, against resistant human systems and economies.
So, where is this old town? It is in Turkey: Diyarbakir, the unofficial capital of the Kurdish-populated regions. Worse cases exist all over the region. The interesting thing is not that these events happen. They happen all the time, continuously. The interesting thing is that most people think that they are perfectly normal. Disaffection is part of the overall design structure, as well as the feeling that all of this is too difficult to comprehend and too specific to unravel. Yet this place seems to be designed as a unique case that just follows its own rules, if any. It is not included in the horizon of a shared humanity; it is designed as a singular case, a small-scale singularity.4
So let's take a few steps back to draw more general conclusions. What does this specific instance of the design of killing mean for the idea of design as a whole?
One could think of Martin Heidegger's notion of being-toward-death (Dasein zum Tode), the embeddedness of death within life. Similarly, we could talk in this case about "Design zum Tode," or a type of design in which death is the all-encompassing horizon, founding a structure of meaning that is strictly hierarchical and violent.5
But something else is blatantly apparent as well, and it becomes tangible through the lens of filmic recording. Imagine a bulldozer doing its work recorded on video. It destroys buildings and tears them to the ground. Now imagine the same recording being played backwards. It will show something very peculiar, namely a bulldozer that actually constructs a building. You will see that dust and debris will violently contract into building materials. The structure will materialize as if sucked from thin air with some kind of Brutalist vacuum cleaner. In fact, the process you see in this imaginary video is very similar to what I described; it is a pristine visualization of a special variety of creative destruction.
Shortly before World War I, the sociologist Werner Sombart coined the term "creative destruction" in his book War and Capitalism.6 During World War II, the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter labeled creative destruction "the essential fact about capitalism."7 Schumpeter drew on Karl Marx's description of capitalism's ability to dissolve all sorts of seemingly solid structures and force them to constantly upgrade and renew, both from within and without. Marx emphasized that "creative destruction" was still primarily a process of destruction.8 However, the term became popular within neoliberal ideologies as a sort of necessary internal cleansing process to keep up productivity and efficiency. Its destructivism echoes in both futurism and contemporary accelerationism, both of which celebrate some kind of mandatory catastrophe.
Today, the term "creative disruption" seems to have taken the place of creative destruction.9 Automation of blue- and white-collar labor, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cybernetic control systems or "autonomous" appliances are examples of current so-called disruptive technologies, violently shaking up existing societies, markets, and technologies. This is where we circle back to Al-Jazari's mechanical robots, predecessors of disruptive technologies. Which types of design are associated with these technologies, if any? What are social technologies of disruption? How are Twitter bots, trolls, leaks, and blanket internet shutdowns deployed to accelerate autocratic rule? How do contemporary robots cause unemployment, and what about networked commodities and semi-autonomous weapons systems? How about widespread artificial stupidity, dysfunctional systems, and endless hotlines from hell? How about the oversized Hyundai and Komatsu cranes and bulldozers, ploughing through destroyed cities, performing an absurd ballet mécanique, punching through ruins, clawing through social fabric, erasing lived presents and eagerly building blazing emptiness?
Disruptive innovation is causing social polarization through the decimation of jobs, mass surveillance, and algorithmic confusion. It facilitates the fragmentation of societies by creating antisocial tech monopolies that spread bubbled resentment, change cities, magnify shade, and maximize poorly paid freelance work. The effects of these social and technological disruptions include nationalist, sometimes nativist, fascist, or ultra-religious mass movements.10 Creative disruption, fueled by automation and cybernetic control, runs in parallel with an age of political fragmentation. The forces of extreme capital, turbocharged with tribal and fundamentalist hatred, reorganize within financials and filter bubbles.
In modernist science fiction, the worst kinds of governments used to be imagined as a single artificial intelligence remote-controlling society. Today's real existing proto- and para-fascisms, however, rely on decentralized artificial stupidity. Bot armies, like farms and meme magick, form the gut brains of political sentiment, manufacturing shitstorms that pose as popular passion. The idea of technocratic fascist rule "supposedly detached, omniscient, and sophisticated "is realized as a barrage of dumbed-down tweets. Democracy's demos is replaced by a mob on mobiles11 capturing people's activities, motion, and vital energies. But in contrast to the modernist dystopias, current autocracies do not rely on the perfection of such systems. They rather thrive on their permanent breakdown, dysfunctions, and so-called "predictive" capacities creating havoc.
Time seems especially affected by disruption. Think back to the reversed bulldozer video: the impression of creative destruction only comes about because time was reversed and is running backwards. After 1989, Jacques Derrida dramatically declared that time was "out of joint" and basically running amok. Writers like Francis Fukuyama thought history had somehow petered out. Jean-Fransois Lyotard described the present as a succession of explosion-like shocks, after which nothing in particular happened.12 Simultaneously, logistics reorganized global production chains, trying to montage disparate shreds of time to maximize efficiency and profit. Echoing cut-and-paste aesthetics, the resulting fragmented time created large-scale havoc for people who had to organize their own lives around increasingly impossible, fractured, and often unpaid work hours and schedules.
Added to this is a dimension of time that is no longer accessible to humans, but only to networked so-called control systems that produce flash crashes and high frequency trading scams. Financialization introduces a host of further complications: the economic viability of the present is sustained by debt, that is, by future income claimed, consumed, or spent in the present. Thus on the one hand futures are depleted, and on the other, presents are destabilized. In short, the present feels as if it is constituted by emptying out the future to sustain a looping version of a past that never existed. Which means that for at least parts of this trajectory, time indeed runs backwards, from an emptied-out future to nurturing a stagnant imaginary past, sustained by disruptive design.
Disruption shows in the jitter in the ill-aligned wipes of the old town's 3D render. The transition between present and future is abrupt and literally uneven: frames look as if jolted by earthquakes. In replacing a present urban reality characterized by strong social bonds with a sanitized digital projection that renders population replacement, disruptive design shows grief and dispossession thinly plastered over with an opportunist layer of pixels.
Warfare in the old town is far from being irrelevant, marginal or peripheral, since it shows a singular form of disruptive design, a specific design of killing, a special form of wrecked cutting-edge temporality. Futures are hastened, not by spending future incomes, but by making future deaths happen in the present; a sort of application of the mechanism of debt to that of military control, occupation, and expropriation.
While dreaming of the one technological singularity that will once and for all render humanity superfluous, disruption as a social, aesthetic, and militarized process creates countless little singularities, entities trapped within the horizons of what autocrats declare as their own history, identity, culture, ideology, race, or religion; each with their own incompatible rules, or more precisely, their own incompatible lack of rules.13 "Creative disruption" is not just realized by the wrecking of buildings and urban areas. It refers to the wrecking of a horizon of common understanding, replacing it by narrow, parallel, top-down, trimmed and bleached artificial histories.
This is exactly how processes of disruption might affect you, if you live somewhere else that is. Not in the sense that you will necessarily be expropriated, displaced or worse. This might happen or not, depending on where (and who) you are. But you too might get trapped in your own singular hell of a future repeating invented pasts, with one part of the population hell-bent on getting rid of another. People will peer in from afar, conclude they can't understand what's going on, and keep watching cat videos.
What to do about this? What is the opposite design, a type of creation that assists pluriform, horizontal forms of life, and that can be comprehended as part of a shared humanity? What is the contrary to a procedure that inflates, accelerates, purges, disrupts, and homogenizes; a process that designs humanity as a uniform, cleansed, and allegedly superior product, a super-humanity comprised of sanitized render ghosts?
The contrary is a process that doesn't grow via destruction, but very literally de-grows constructively. This type of construction is not creating inflation, but devolution. Not centralized competition but cooperative autonomy. Not fragmenting time and dividing people, but reducing expansion, inflation, consumption, debt, disruption, occupation, and death. Not superhumanity; humanity as such would perfectly do.
A woman had stayed in the old town on her own throughout the curfew to take care of her cow, who lived in the back stable. Her daughters had climbed through a waterfall in the Roman-era walls every week to supply her with basic needs. They kept being shot at by soldiers. This went on for weeks on end. When we talked to her, the cow had just had a baby. One of the team members was a veterinarian.
Daughter: Our calf is sick. Please come and see.
Vet: Sure, what happened? Is it newborn? Did it get the first milk of its mother?
Mum: No, it didn't get the colostrum. There was no milk. The labor was difficult. It started five times over and stopped again.
Daughter: The other calf reached first and drank all the milk, we didn't realize it.
Daughter: Mum, where is the calf?
Mum: [calls into the stable] Where is it? My little pistachu, where are you?
4
Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise
A while ago I met an extremely interesting developer. He was working on smartphone camera technology. Photography is traditionally thought to represent what is out there by means of technology, ideally via an indexical link. But is this really true anymore? The developer explained to me that the technology for contemporary phone cameras is quite different from traditional cameras: the lenses are tiny and basically rubbish, which means that about half of the data being captured by the camera sensor is actually noise. The trick, then, is to write the algorithm to clean the noise, or rather to discern the picture from inside the noise.
But how can the camera know how to do this? Very simple: It scans all other pictures stored on the phone or on your social media networks and sifts through your contacts. It analyzes the pictures you already took, or those that are associated with you, and it tries to match faces and shapes to link them back to you. By comparing what you and your network already photographed, the algorithm guesses what you might have wanted to photograph now. It creates the present picture based on earlier pictures, on your/its memory. This new paradigm is being called computational photography.1
The result might be a picture of something that never ever existed, but that the algorithm thinks you might like to see. This type of photography is speculative and relational. It is a gamble with probabilities that bets on inertia. It makes seeing unforeseen things more difficult. It will increase the amount of noise just as it will increase the amount of random interpretation.
And that's not even to mention external interference into what your phone is recording. All sorts of systems are able to remotely turn your camera on or off: companies, governments, the military. It could be disabled in certain places "one could for instance block its recording function close to protests or conversely broadcast whatever it sees. Similarly, a device might be programmed to autopixelate, erase, or block secret, copyrighted, or sexual content. It might be fitted with a so-called dick algorithm to screen out NSFW (Not Suitable/Safe For Work) content, automodify pubic hair, stretch or omit bodies, exchange or collage context, or insert location-targeted advertising, pop-up windows, or live feeds. It might report you or someone from your network to police, PR agencies, or spammers. It might flag your debt, play your games, broadcast your heartbeat. Computational photography has expanded to cover all this.
It links control robotics, object recognition, and machine learning technologies. So if you take a picture on a smartphone, the results are not as premeditated as they are premediated. The picture might show something unexpected, because it might have cross-referenced many different databases: traffic control, medical databases, frenemy photo galleries on Facebook, credit card data, maps, and whatever else it wants.
Relational Photography
Computational photography is therefore inherently political "not in content but form. It is not only relational but also truly social, with countless systems and people potentially interfering with pictures before they even emerge as visible.2 And of course this network is not neutral. It has rules and norms hardwired into its platforms, and they represent a mix of juridical, moral, aesthetic, technological, commercial, and bluntly hidden parameters and effects. You could end up airbrushed, wanted, redirected, taxed, deleted, remodeled, or replaced in your own picture. The camera turns into a social projector rather than a recorder. It shows a superposition of what it thinks you might want to look like plus what others think you should buy or be. But technology rarely does things on its own. Technology is programmed with conflicting goals and by many entities, and politics is a matter of defining how to separate its noise from its information.3
So what are the policies already in place that define the separation of noise from information, or that even define noise and information as such in the first place? Who or what decides what the camera will "see"? How is it being done? By whom or what? And why is this even important?
The Penis Problem
Let's have a look at one example: drawing a line between face and butt, or between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" body parts. It is no coincidence that Facebook is called Facebook and not Buttbook, because you can't have any butts on Facebook. But then how does it weed out the butts? A list leaked by an angry freelancer reveals the precise instructions given on how to build and maintain Facebook's face, and it shows us what is well known, that nudity and sexual content are strictly off limits, except art nudity and male nipples, but also how its policies on violence are much more lax, with even decapitations and large amounts of blood acceptable.4 "Crushed heads, limbs etc are OK as long as no insides are showing," reads one guideline. "Deep flesh wounds are ok to show; excessive blood is ok to show." Those rules are still policed by humans, or more precisely by a global subcontracted workforce from Turkey, the Philippines, Morocco, Mexico, and India, working from home, earning around per hour. These workers are hired to distinguish between acceptable body parts (faces) and unacceptable ones (butts). In principle, there is nothing wrong with having rules for publicly available imagery. Some sort of filtering process has to be implemented on online platforms: no one wants to be spammed with revenge porn or atrocities, regardless of there being markets for such imagery. The question concerns where and how to draw the line, as well as who draws it, and on whose behalf. Who decides on signal vs. noise?
Let's go back to the elimination of sexual content. Is there an algorithm for this, like for face recognition? This question first arose publicly in the so-called Chatroulette conundrum. Chatroulette was a Russian online video service that allowed people to meet on the web. It quickly became famous for its "next" button, for which the term "unlike button" would be much too polite. The site's audience at first exploded to 1.6 million users per month by 2010. But then a so-called "penis problem" emerged, referring to the many people who used the service to meet other people naked.5 The winner of a web contest called to "solve" the issue ingeniously suggested running a quick facial recognition or eye tracking scan on the video feeds "if no face was discernable, it would deduce that it must be a dick.6
This exact workflow was also used by the British Secret Service when it secretly bulk extracted user webcam stills in its spy program Optic Nerve. Video feeds of 1.8 million Yahoo users were intercepted in order to develop face and iris recognition technologies. But "maybe unsurprisingly "it turned out that around 7 percent of the content did not show faces at all. So "as suggested for Chatroulette "they ran face recognition scans on everything and tried to exclude the dicks for not being faces. It didn't work so well. In a leaked document the GCHQ admits defeat: "There is no perfect ability to censor material which may be offensive."7
Subsequent solutions became a bit more sophisticated. Probabilistic porn detection calculates the amount of skintoned pixels in certain regions of the picture, producing complicated taxonomic formulas, such as this one:
a. If the percentage of skin pixels relative to the image size is less than 15 percent, the image is not nude. Otherwise, go to the next step.
b. If the number of skin pixels in the largest skin region is less than 35% of the total skin count, the number of skin pixels in the second largest region is less than 30% of the total skin count and the number of skin pixels in the third largest region is less than 30% of the total skin count, the image is not nude.
c. If the number of skin pixels in the largest skin region is less than 45% of the total skin count, the image is not nude.
d. If the total skin count is less than 30% of the total number of pixels in the image and the number of skin pixels within the bounding polygon is less than 55 percent of the size of the polygon, the image is not nude.
e. If the number of skin regions is more than 60 and the average intensity within the polygon is less than 0.25, the image is not nude.
f. Otherwise, the image is nude.8
But this method got ridiculed pretty quickly because it produced so many false positives, including, as in some examples, wrapped meatballs, tanks, or machine guns. More recent porn-detection applications use self-learning technology based on neural networks, computational verb theory, and cognitive computation. They do not try to statistically guess at the image, but rather try to understand it by identifying objects through their relations.9
According to developer Tao Yang's description, there is a whole new field of cognitive vision studies based on quantifying cognition as such, on making it measurable and computable.10 Even though there are still considerable technological difficulties, this effort represents a whole new level of formalization; a new order of images, a grammar of images, an algorithmic system of sexuality, surveillance, productivity, reputation, and computation that links with the grammatization of social relations by corporations and governments.
So how does this work? Yang's porn-detection system must learn how to recognize objectionable parts by seeing a sizable mass of them in order to infer their relations. So basically you start by installing a lot of photos of the body parts you want eliminated on your computer. The database consists of folders full of body parts ready to enter formal relations. Not only pussy, nipple, asshole, and blowjob, but asshole, asshole/only and asshole/mixed_with_pussy. Based on this library, a whole range of detectors get ready to go to work: the breast detector, pussy detector, pubic hair detector, cunnilingus detector, blowjob detector, asshole detector, hand-touch-pussy detector. They identify fascinating sex-positions such as the Yawning and Octopus techniques, The Stopperage, Chambers Fuck, Fraser MacKenzie, Persuading of the Debtor, Playing of Cello, and Watching the Game (I am honestly terrified of even imagining Fraser MacKenzie).
This grammar as well as the library of partial objects are reminiscent of Roland Barthes's notion of a "porn grammar," where he describes the Marquis de Sade's writings as a system of positions and body parts ready to permutate into every possible combination.11 Yet this marginalized and openly persecuted system could be seen as a reflex of a more general grammar of knowledge deployed during the so-called Enlightenment. Michel Foucault as well as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer compared de Sade's sexual systems to mainstream systems of classification. Both were articulated by counting and sorting, by creating exhaustive, pedantic, and tedious taxonomies. And Mr. Yang's enthusiasm for formalizing body parts and their relations to one another similarly reflects the huge endeavor of rendering cognition, imaging, and behavior as such increasingly quantifiable and commensurable to a system of exchange value based in data.
Undesirable body parts thus become elements of a new machine-readable image-based grammar that might usually operate in parallel to reputational and control networks, but that can also be linked to it at any time. Its structure might be a reflex of contemporary modes of harvesting, aggregating, and financializing data-based "knowledge" churned out by a cacophony of partly social algorithms embedded into technology.
Noise and Information
But let's come back to the question we began with: What are the social and political algorithms that clear noise from information? The emphasis, again, is on politics not algorithms. Jacques Rancière has beautifully shown that this division corresponds to a much older social formula: to distinguish between noise and speech in order to divide a crowd between citizens and rabble.12 If one wants not to take someone else seriously, or to limit their rights and status, one pretends that their speech is just noise, garbled groaning, or crying, and that they themselves must be devoid of reason and therefore exempt from being subjects, let alone holders of rights. In other words, this politics rests on an act of conscious decoding "separating "noise" from "information," "speech" from "groan," or "face" from "butt," and from there neatly stacking the results into vertical class hierarchies.13 The algorithms now being fed into smartphone camera technology to define the image prior to its emergence are similar to this.
In light of Rancière's proposition, we might still be dealing with a more traditional idea of politics as representation.14 If everyone is aurally (or visually) represented, and no one is discounted as noise, then equality might draw nearer. But the networks have changed so drastically that nearly every parameter of representative politics has shifted. By now, more people than ever are able to upload an almost unlimited number of self-representations. And the level of political participation by way of parliamentary democracy seems to have dwindled in the meantime. While pictures float in numbers, elites are shrinking and centralizing power.
On top of this, your face is getting disconnected "not only from your butt, but also from your voice and body. Your face is now an element "a face/mixed_with_phone, ready to be combined with any other item in the library. Captions are added, or textures, if needs be. Face prints are taken. An image becomes less a representation than a proxy, a mercenary of appearance, a floating texture-surface-commodity. Persons are montaged, dubbed, assembled, incorporated. Humans and things intermingle in ever-newer constellations to become bots or cyborgs.15 As humans feed affect, thought, and sociality into algorithms, algorithms feed back into what used to be called subjectivity. This shift is what has given way to a post-representational politics adrift within information space.16
Proxy Armies
Let's look at one example of post-representational politics: political bot armies on Twitter. Twitter bots are bits of script that impersonate human activity on social media sites. In large, synchronized numbers they have become formidable political armies.17 A Twitter chat bot is an algorithm wearing a person's face, a formula incorporated as animated spam. It is a scripted operation impersonating a human operation.
Bot armies distort discussions on Twitter hashtags by spamming them with advertisements, tourist pictures, or whatever. They basically add noise. Bot armies have been active in Mexico, Syria, Russia, and Turkey, where most political parties have been said to operate such bot armies. In Turkey, the ruling AKP alone was suspected of controlling 18,000 fake Twitter accounts using photos of Robbie Williams, Megan Fox, and other celebs: "In order to appear authentic, the accounts don't just tweet out AKP hashtags; they also quote philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and movies like PS: I Love You."18
So who do bot armies represent, if anyone, and how do they do it? Let's have a look at the AKP bots. Robbie Williams, Meg Fox, and Hakan43020638 are all advertising "Flappy Tayyip," a cell-phone game starring the then AKP prime minister (now president) Tayyip Recep ErdoÄŸan. The objective is to hijack or spam the hashtag #twitterturkey to protest PM ErdoÄŸan's banning of Twitter. Simultaneously, ErdoÄŸan's own Twitter bots set out to detourne the hashtag.
Let's look at Hakan43020638 more closely: a bot consisting of a copy-pasted face plus product placement. It takes only a matter of minutes to connect his face to a body by way of a Google image search. On his business Twitter account it turns out he sells his underwear: he works online as an affective web service provider.19 Let's call this version Murat, to throw yet another alias into the fray. But who is the bot wearing Murat's face and who is a bot army representing? Why would Hakan43020638 be quoting Thomas Hobbes of all philosophers? And which book? Let's guess he's quoting from Hobbes's most important work Leviathan. Leviathan is the name of a social contract enforced by an absolute sovereign in order to fend off the dangers presented by a "state of nature" in which humans prey upon one another. With Leviathan there are no more militias and there is no more molecular warfare of everyone against everyone.
But now we seem to be in a situation where state systems grounded in such social contracts seem to fall apart in many places and nothing is left but a set of policed relational metadata, emoji, and hijacked hashtags. A bot army is a contemporary vox populi, the voice of the people according to social networks. It can be a Facebook militia, your low-cost personalized mob, your digital mercenaries, or some sort of proxy porn. Imagine your photo being used for one of these bots. It is the moment when your picture becomes quite autonomous, active, even militant. Bot armies are celebrity militias, wildly jump-cutting between glamour, sectarianism, porn, corruption, and conservative religious ideologies. Post-representative politics are a war of bot armies against one another, of Hakan against Murat, of face against butt.
This may be why the AKP pornstar bots desperately quote Hobbes: they are already sick of the war of Robbie Williams (IDF) against Robbie Williams (Electronic Syrian Army) against Robbie Williams (PRI/AAP), they are sick of retweeting spam for autocratsâ
Now let us go even one step further. Because a model for this might already be on the horizon. And unsurprisingly, it also involves algorithms.
Blockchain
Blockchain governance seems to fulfill the hopes for a new social contract.21 "Decentralized Autonomous Organizations" would record and store transactions in blockchains akin to the one used to run and validate bitcoin. But those public digital ledgers could equally encode votes or laws. Take for instance bitcongress, which is in the process of developing a decentralized voting and legislation system (www.bitcongress.org). While this could be a model to restore accountability and circumvent power monopolies, it means above all that social rules hardwired with technology emerge as Leviathan 2.0:
When disassociated from the programmers who design them, trustless blockchains floating above human affairs contain the specter of rule by algorithms This is essentially the vision of the internet techno-leviathan, a deified crypto-sovereign whose rules we can contract to.22
Even though this is a decentralized process with no single entity at the controls, it doesn't necessarily mean no one controls it. Just like smartphone photography, it needs to be told how to work: by a multitude of conflicting interests. More importantly, this would replace bots as proxy "people" with bots as governance. But then again, which bots are we talking about? Who programs them? Are they cyborgs? Do they have faces or butts? And who is drawing the line? Are they cheerleaders of social and informational entropy? Killing machines? Or a new crowd, of which we are already a part?23
Let's come back to the beginning again: How to separate signal from noise? And how does the old political technology of using this distinction in order to rule change with algorithmic technology? In all examples, the definition of noise rested increasingly on scripted operations, on automating representation and/or decision-making. On the other hand, this process potentially introduces so much feedback that representation becomes a rather unpredictable operation that looks more like the weather than a Xerox machine. Likeliness becomes subject to likelihood "reality is just another factor in an extended calculation of probability. In this situation, proxies become crucial semi-autonomous actors.
Proxy Politics
To better understand proxy politics, we could start by drawing up a checklist:
Does your camera decide what appears in your photographs?
Does it go off when you smile?
And will it fire in a next step if you don't?
Do underpaid outsourced IT workers in BRIC countries manage your pictures of breastfeeds and decapitations on your social media feeds?
Is Elizabeth Taylor tweeting your work?
Have some of your other fans' bots decided to classify your work as urinary mature porn?
Are some of these bots busily enumerating geographic locations alongside bodily orifices?
Is your total result something like this?
Welcome to the age of proxy politics!
A proxy is "an agent or substitute authorized to act for another person or a document which authorizes the agent so to act" (Wikipedia). But a proxy could now also be a device with a bad hair day. A scrap of script caught up in a dress-code double bind. Or a "Persuading the Debtor" detector throwing a tantrum over genital pixel probability. Or a delegation of chat bots casually pasting pro-Putin hair lotion ads to your Instagram. It could also be something much more serious, wrecking your life in a similar way "sry life!
Proxies are devices or scripts tasked with getting rid of noise as well as bot armies hell-bent on producing it. They are masks, persons, avatars, routers, nodes, templates, or generic placeholders. They share an element of unpredictability "which is all the more paradoxical considering that they arise as result of maxed-out probabilities. But proxies are not only bots and avatars, nor is proxy politics restricted to datascapes. Proxy warfare is quite a standard model of warfare "one of the most important examples being the Spanish Civil War. Proxies add echo, subterfuge, distortion, and confusion to geopolitics. Armies posing as militias (or the other way around) reconfigure or explode territories and redistribute sovereignties. Companies pose as guerillas and legionnaires as suburban Tupperware clubs. A proxy army is made of guns for hire, with more or less ideological decoration. The border between private security, PMCs, freelance insurgents, armed stand-ins, state hackers, and people who just got in the way has become blurry. Remember that corporate armies were crucial in establishing colonial empires (the East India Company among others) and that the word "company" itself is derived from the name for a military unit. Proxy warfare is a prime example of a post-Leviathan reality.
Now that this whole range of activities has gone online, it turns out that proxy warfare is partly the continuation of PR by different means.24 Besides marketing tools repurposed for counterinsurgency ops there is a whole range of government hacking (and counter-hacking) campaigns that require slightly more advanced skills. But not always. As the leftist Turkish hacker group Redhack reported, the password of the Ankara police servers was 12345.25
To state that online proxy politics is reorganizing geopolitics would be similar to stating that burgers tend to reorganize cows. Indeed, just as meatloaf arranges parts of cows with plastic, fossil remnants, and elements formerly known as paper, proxy politics positions companies, nation-states, hacker detachments, FIFA, and the Duchess of Cambridge as equally relevant entities. Those proxies tear up territories by creating netscapes that are partly unlinked from geography and national jurisdiction.
But proxy politics also works the other way. A simple default example of proxy politics is the use of proxy servers to try to bypass local web censorship or communications restrictions. Whenever people use VPNs and other internet proxies to escape online restrictions or conceal their IP address, proxy politics is given a different twist. In countries like Iran and China, VPNs are very much in use.26 In practice though, in many countries, companies close to censor-happy governments also run the VPNs in an exemplary display of efficient inconsistency. In Turkey, people used even more rudimentary methods "changing their DNS settings to tunnel out of Turkish dataspace, virtually tweeting from Hong Kong and Venezuela during ErdoÄŸan's short-lived Twitter ban.
In proxy politics the question is literally how to act or represent by using stand-ins (or being used by them) "and also how to use intermediaries to detourne the signals or noise of others. And proxy politics itself can also be turned around and redeployed. Proxy politics stacks surfaces, nodes, terrains, and textures "or disconnects them from one another. It disconnects body parts and switches them on and off to create often astonishing and unforeseen combinations "even faces with butts, so to speak. They can undermine the seemingly mandatory decision between face or butt or even the idea that both have got to belong to the same body. In the space of proxy politics, bodies could be Leviathans, hashtags, juridical persons, nation-states, hair-transplant devices, or freelance SWAT teams. Body is added to bodies by proxy and by stand-in. But these combinations also subtract bodies (and their parts) and erase them from the realm of never-ending surface to face enduring invisibility. In the end, however, a face without a butt cannot sit. It has to take a stand. And a butt without a face needs a stand-in for most kinds of communication. Proxy politics happens between taking a stand and using a stand-in. It is in the territory of displacement, stacking, subterfuge, and montage that both the worst and the best things happen.
7 Duty Free Art
First Chapter: The National Museum
This is a file published in 2012 by WikiLeaks. It forms part of WikiLeaks's Syria files database. The file is called "316787_Vision Presentation "Oct 30 2010 Eng.pptx," in PowerPoint format, dated October 2010.1 It details Syrian First Lady Asma al-Assad's plans for the future of Syria's museums. Her foundation aims to establish a network of museums to promote Syria's economic and social development and strengthen national identity and cultural pride. The Louvre is listed as a partner in developing this plan.2 Both the Louvre and the Guggenheim Bilbao are named as role models for a redesigned National Museum in Damascus.
A conference is planned to unveil the winner of an international competition for the design of this National Museum in April 2011.
However, three weeks prior to this date, twenty protesters were "reportedly killed as 100,000 people marched in the city of Daraa."3 By then, invitations for the conference had already been issued to a host of prominent speakers, including the directors of the Louvre and the British Museum. On April 28, 2011, Art Newspaper reports that the conference has been canceled due to street protests.4 The winner of the architectural competition for the National Museum has never been announced.
Second Chapter: Never Again
To build a nation, Benedict Anderson suggested, there should be print capitalism and a museum to narrate the nation's history and design its identity.5 Today "instead of print "there is data capitalism and a lot of museums. To build a museum, a nation is not necessary. But if nations are a way to organize time and space, so is the museum. And as times and spaces change, so do museum spaces.
The image above shows the municipal art gallery of Diyarbakir in Turkey. In September 2014, it hosts a show on genocide and its consequences, called "Never Again." Its poster shows the former prime minister of West Germany Willy Brandt on his knees in front of the Warsaw ghetto memorial.
But the show is not on. Instead, more than 200 Yazidi refugees are crowding the gallery.
After the Daesh militia crossed and effectively abolished parts of the border between Syria and Iraq in August 2014,6 around 100,000 Yazidi refugees escaped the region of Shingal in northern Iraq. Most of them had trekked on foot across Mt. Shingal, assisted by Kurdish rebel groups, who had opened a safety corridor. While the majority stayed in refugee camps in Rojava, northern Syria, and several camps in northern Iraq, many refugees crossed into Turkey's Kurdish regions, where they were welcomed with amazing hospitality. The city of Diyarbakir opened its municipal gallery as an emergency shelter.
Once settled on mats within the gallery space, many refugees started asking for SIM cards to try to reach missing family members by cell phone.
This is the desk of the curator, left empty.7
In September 2014, this museum became a refugee camp. It did not represent a nation, but instead sheltered people fleeing from national disintegrations.
Third Chapter: Conditions of Possibility
According to the Google Ngram viewer,8 usage of the word "impossible" has dropped steeply since around the mid-twentieth century. But what does this tell us? Does it mean that fewer and fewer things are impossible? Does it mean that impossibility "as such" is in historical decline? Perhaps it just means that the conditions for possibilities as such are subject to change over time? Are both the possible and the impossible defined by historical and external conditions?
According to Immanuel Kant, time and space are necessary conditions for us to perceive or understand anything. Without time and space, knowledge, experience, and vision cannot unfold. Kant calls this perspective "criticism." With this in mind, what kind of time and space is necessary for contemporary art to become manifest? Or rather: What does criticism about contemporary art say about time and space today?
To brutally summarize a lot of scholarly texts: contemporary art is made possible by neoliberal capital plus the internet, biennials, art fairs, parallel pop-up histories, growing income inequality. Let's add asymmetric warfare "as one of the reasons for the vast redistribution of wealth "real estate speculation, tax evasion, money laundering, and deregulated financial markets to this list.
To paraphrase the philosopher Peter Osborne's illuminating insights on this topic: contemporary art shows us the lack of a (global) time and space. Moreover, it projects a fictional unity onto a variety of different ideas of time and space, thus providing a common surface where there is none.9
Contemporary art thus becomes a proxy for the global commons, for the lack of any common ground, temporality, or space. It is defined by a proliferation of locations, and a lack of accountability. It works by way of major real estate operations transforming cities worldwide as they reorganize urban space. It is even a space of civil wars that trigger art-market booms a decade or so later through the redistribution of wealth by warfare. It takes place on servers and by means of fiber-optic infrastructure, and whenever public debt miraculously transforms into private wealth. Contemporary art happens when taxpayers are deluded into believing they are bailing out other sovereign states when in fact they are subsidizing international banks that thus get compensated for pushing high-risk debt onto vulnerable nations.10 Or when this or that regime decides it needs the PR equivalent of a nip and tuck procedure.
But contemporary art also creates new physical spaces that bypass national sovereignty. Let me give you a contemporary example: freeport art storage.
This is the mother of all freeport art storage spaces: Geneva freeport, a tax-free zone in Geneva that includes parts of an old freight station and an industrial storage building. The free-trade zone takes up the backyard and the fourth floor of the old storage building, so that different jurisdictions run through one and the same building, as the other floors are set outside the freeport zone. A new art storage space was opened in 2014. Up until just a few years before, the freeport wasn't even officially considered part of Switzerland.
This building is rumored to house thousands of Picassos, but no one knows the exact number since documentation is rather opaque. There is little doubt though that its contents could compete with any very large museum.11
Let's assume that this is one of the most important art spaces in the world right now. It is not only not public, but it is also sitting inside a very interesting geography.
From a legal standpoint, freeport art storage spaces are somewhat extraterritorial. Some are located in the transit zones of airports or in tax-free zones. Keller Easterling describes the free zone as a "fenced enclave for warehousing."12 It has now become a primary organ of global urbanism copied and pasted to locations worldwide. It is an example of "extra-statecraft," as Easterling terms it, within a "mongrel state of exception," beyond the laws of the nation-state. In this deregulatory state of exemption, corporations are privileged at the expense of common citizens, "investors" replace taxpayers, and modules supplant buildings: "[Freeports'] attractions are similar to those offered by offshore financial centres: security and confidentiality, not much scrutiny and an array of tax advantages Goods in freeports are technically in transit, even if in reality the ports are used more and more as permanent homes for accumulated wealth."13
The freeport is thus a zone for permanent transit.
Although it is fixed, does the freeport also define perpetual ephemerality? Is it simply an extraterritorial zone, or is it also a rogue sector carefully settled for financial profitability?14
The freeport contains multiple contradictions: it is a zone of terminal impermanence; it is also a zone of legalized extra-legality maintained by nation-states trying to emulate failed states as closely as possible "by selectively losing control. Thomas Elsaesser once used the term "constructive instability" to describe the aerodynamic properties of fighter jets that gain decisive advantages by navigating at the brink of system failure.15 They would more or less "fall" or "fail" in the desired direction. This constructive instability is implemented within nation-states by incorporating zones where they "fail" on purpose. Switzerland for example contains "245 open customs warehouses,"16 enclosing zones of legal and administrative exception. Are this state and others a container for different types of jurisdictions that get applied, or rather do not get applied, in relation to the wealth of corporations or individuals? Does this kind of state become a package for opportunistic statelessness? As Elsaesser pointed out, his whole idea of "constructive instability" originated with a discussion of Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss's work "Der Lauf der Dinge" (1987). Here all sorts of things are knocked off balance in celebratory collapse. The film's glorious motto is:
Am schönsten ist das Gleichgewicht, kurz bevor's zusammenbricht.
(Balance is most beautiful just at the point when it is about to collapse).
Among many other things, freeports also become a zone for duty free art, a zone where control and failure are calibrated according to "constructive instability" so that things cheerfully hang in a permanently frozen failing balance.
Fourth Chapter: Duty Free Art
Huge art storage spaces are being created worldwide in what could essentially be called a luxury no man's land, tax havens where artworks are shuffled around from one storage room to another once they get traded. This is also one of the prime spaces for contemporary art: an offshore or extraterritorial museum. In September 2014, Luxembourg opened its own freeport. The country is not alone in trying to replicate the success of the Geneva freeport: "A freeport that opened at Changi Airport in Singapore in 2010 is already close to full. Monaco has one, too. A planned 'freeport of culture' in Beijing would be the world's largest art-storage facility."17 A major player in setting up many of these facilities is the art-handling company Natural Le Coultre, run by Swiss national Yves Bouvier.
Freeport art storage facilities are secret museums. Their spatial conditions are reflected in their designs. In contrast to the rather perfunctory Swiss facility, designers stepped up their game at the freeport art storage facility in Singapore:
Designed by Swiss architects, Swiss engineers and Swiss security experts, the 270,000-square-foot facility is part bunker, part gallery. Unlike the free-port facilities in Switzerland, which are staid yet secure warehouses, the Singapore FreePort sought to combine security and style. The lobby, showrooms and furniture were designed by contemporary designers Ron Arad and Johanna Grawunder. A gigantic arcing sculpture by Mr. Arad, titled "Cage sans Frontières" (Cage Without Borders), spans the entire lobby. Paintings that line the exposed concrete walls lend the facility the air of a gallery. Private rooms and vaults, barricaded by seven-ton doors, line the corridors. Near the lobby, private galleries give collectors a chance to view or show potential buyers their art under museum-quality spotlights. A planned second phase will double the size of the facility to 538,000 square feet. Collectors are picked up by FreePort staff at their plane and whisked by limousine, any time of day or night, to the facility. If the client is packing valuables, an armed escort will be provided.18
The title "Cage Without Borders" has a double meaning. It not only means that the cage has no limits, but also that the prison is now everywhere, in an extrastatecraft art withdrawal facility that seeps through the cracks of national sovereignty and establishes its own logistic network. In this ubiquitous prison, rules still apply, though it might be difficult to specify exactly which ones, to whom or what they apply, and how they are implemented. Whatever they are, their grip seems to considerably loosen in inverse proportion to the value of the assets in question. But this construction is not only a device realized in one particular location in 3D space. It is also basically a stack of juridical, logistical, economic, and data-based operations, a pile of platforms mediating between clouds and users via state laws, communication protocols, corporate standards, etc., that interconnect not only via fiber-optic connections but aviation routes as well.19
Freeport art storage is to this "stack" as the national museum traditionally was to the nation. It sits in between countries in pockets of superimposing sovereignties where national jurisdiction has either voluntarily retreated or been demolished. If biennials, art fairs, 3D renderings of gentrified real estate, starchitect museums decorating various regimes, etc., are the corporate surfaces of these areas, the secret museums are their dark web, their Silk Road into which things disappear, as into an abyss of withdrawal.20
Think of the artworks and their movement. They travel inside a network of tax-free zones and also inside the storage spaces themselves. Perhaps as they do, they never get uncrated. They move from one storage room to the next without being seen. They stay inside boxes and travel outside national territories with a minimum of tracking or registration, like insurgents, drugs, derivative financial products, and other so-called investment vehicles. For all we know, the crates could even be empty. It is a museum of the internet era, but a museum of the dark net, where movement is obscured and data-space is clouded.
Movements of a very different kind are detailed in Wiki-Leaks's Syria files:
From: sinan@sinan-archiculture.com
To: mansour.azzam@mopa.gov.sy
Sent: Wednesday, July 07, 2010 4:06 PM
Subject: Fw: Flight itenary OMA staff
AMENDMENT
Dear Mr. Azzam,
This is to confirm the arrival of Mr. Rem Koolhaas and his personal assistant Mr Stephan Petermann on this coming Monday July 12th. We need visa for them as we spoke before (both are Dutch). Their passport photos are attached. They are arriving separately and at different times. Mr. Koolhaas coming from China through Dubai on Emirates airlines (arriving in Damascus at 4:25 PM), while Mr. Stephan Petermann is coming from Vienna on Austrian airlines (arriving in Damascus before Mr. Koolhaas at 3:00 PM).
They are staying at the Art House or at the Four Seasons hotel until their departure on Thursday (at 4:00 pm).21
WikiLeaks's Syria database comprises around 2.5 million emails from 680 domains, yet the authenticity of these documents was not verified by WikiLeaks. It can be verified, however, that the PR company Brown Lloyd James was involved in trying to enhance the image of the Assad family.22 In early 2011, shortly before the start of the Syrian civil war, a Vogue story, presciently photographed by war photographer James Nachtwey, portrays Asma al-Assad as the "Rose of the Desert," a modernizer and patron of culture.23
In February 2012, one year into the war, Anonymous and affiliated organizations hacked into the email server of the Syrian Ministry of Presidential Affairs, in solidarity with Syrian bloggers, protesters, and activists.24 The inboxes of seventy-eight of Assad's aides and advisers were accessed. Apparently, some used the same password: "12345."25 The leaked emails included correspondence "mostly through intermediaries "between Mansour Azzam, the Minister of Presidential Affairs, and the studios of Rem Koolhaas (OMA), Richard Rogers, and Herzog & de Meuron regarding various issues. To paraphrase the content of some of the emails: Rogers and Koolhaas were being invited to speak in Damascus and, with Koolhaas, these visits extended to project discussions, including for the National Parliament.26 Herzog & de Meuron offered a complimentary concept design proposal for the Al-Assad House for Culture in Aleppo, and expressed interest in the selection process for the parliament project.27 A lot of this correspondence is really just gossip about the studios by way of intermediaries. There is also lots of spam. No communication with any of the studios is documented after the end of November 2010. With protests starting in January 2011, a full-blown uprising began in Syria by the end of March of that year. All conversations and negotiations between officials and architects seem to have stopped as scrutiny of the Assad regime increased in the buildup to actual hostilities. The authenticity of none of these documents could be confirmed independently, so for the time being their status is that of unmoored sets of data, which may or may not have anything to do with their presumed authors and receivers.28 But they most definitely are sets of data, hosted by WikiLeaks servers that can be described in terms of their circulation regardless of presumed provenance and authorship.
Take Saif al-Islam Gaddafi's painting, War (2001). Saif is the son of the late head of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, and was a political figure in Libya prior to his father's deposition by rebel forces backed by NATO airstrikes in 2011. This painting was exhibited as part of a show called "The Desert is not Silent" in London in 2002.
War depicts NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.
The artist writes: "A civil war broke out in Kosovo, which shattered the picture and its theme. The sea unleashed itself, anger fell from the sky, which came up against a stream of blood."29 Saif al-Islam said in a statement at the time: "Not only do we buy weapons and sell gas and oil, but we have culture, art and history."30
In September 2010, OMA expresses the desire to work in Syria.31 A subsequent email from Sinan Ali Hassan "a local architect who acts as an intermediary "to Mansour Azzam flaunts the advantages of such a collaboration: "Rem was the previous supervisor and boss of Zaha Hadid in addition to the fact that he is considered to be more important (if not much more important) than Lord Richard Rogers, in terms of celebrity and professional status."32
From the conversation between OMA and Sinan Ali Hassan, it becomes clear that OMA's proposal might be based on a project proposed in Libya previously: "This would be a similar scope to the Libyan Sahara vision we showed you, and the one that Rem discussed with the President."33
In an interview in June 2010, Koolhaas states that people close to Saif al-Islam Gaddafi had approached him.34 At the time Saif is widely seen as reformer. OMA's project in Libya revolves around preservation and is exhibited at the Venice Biennale.35 The project is later mentioned as a possible precedent for a project proposal for the desert region around Palmyra, Syria. Since the uprising in early 2011, this area has been deeply affected by the ensuing civil war.
At present, the International Criminal Court has requested Saif Gaddafi's extradition from Libya, where he remains imprisoned.36
Fifth Chapter: A Dream
WARNING: THIS IS THE ONLY FICTIONAL CHAPTER IN THIS TALK
To come back to the original question: What happened to time and space? Why are they broken and disjointed? Why is space shattered into container-like franchising modules, dark webs, civil wars, and tax havens replicating all over the world?
With these thoughts in mind, I fell asleep and started dreaming and my dream was pretty strange. I dreamt about some diagrams in one of Peter Osborne's recent texts.
They describe a genealogy of contemporary art; I wasn't focusing on their content, but instead on their form. The first thing I noticed was that the succession of concentric circles seemed to indicate a dent, or a dimple, in any case, a 3D cavity. But why would time and space start sagging, so to speak? Could there be an issue with gravity? Maybe a micro black hole could cause these circles to curve? But then again, it is much more likely that something else caused this dimple.
Suddenly, I found the answer to the question. I started losing gravity and flying up towards space. Peter Osborne was floating around there too, and with an unlikely Texas accent, he pointed down and showed me this sight.
Seen from above, Peter's diagram transformed into a sight.
If you look at it from above, the slight cavity vanishes. It becomes a flat screen. From here on, people just ended up seeing the genealogy of contemporary art in Peter's diagrams instead of a depression indicating that the target had been hit already and that a gaping crater had opened at the site of impact.
Seen from above, the genealogy of contemporary art was acting as a proxy or a screen: a sight to cover the site of impact.
Behind his astronaut's visor, Peter croaked:
This is the role of contemporary art. It is a proxy, a stand-in. It is projected onto a site of impact, after time and space have been shattered into a disjunctive unity "and proceed to collapse into rainbow-colored stacks designed by starchitects.
Contemporary art is a kind of layer or proxy which pretends that everything is still ok, while people are reeling from the effects of shock policies, shock and awe campaigns, reality TV, power cuts, any other form of cuts, cat GIFs, tear gas "all of which are all completely dismantling and rewiring the sensory apparatus and potentially also human faculties of reasoning and understanding by causing a state of shock and confusion, of permanent hyperactive depression.
You don't know what's going on behind the doors of the freeport storage rooms either, do you? Let me tell you what's happening in there: time and space are smashed and rearranged into little pieces like in a freak particle accelerator, and the result is the cage without borders called contemporary art today.
"AND THIS IS WHERE THE FICTIONAL PART ABRUPTLY ENDS"
I woke in shock and found myself reading this PDF document aloud.
Sixth Chapter: And Now to Justin Bieber
The Twitter feed of E! Online on May 4, 2013 has someone posing as Bieber triumphantly blurting out: "I'm a gay."
As you can see, the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has hacked the Twitter account.
Who is the SEA? It is a group of pro-Assad regime hackers. They also hacked Le Monde in France in early 2015. Previously, the SEA had commandeered the websites of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the recruitment division of the U.S. Marine Corps. The group also hacked the Twitter feed of the Associated Press and sent out a false report about a bombing at the White House.37
The above diagram shows the consequences of this tweet on Wall Street. In three minutes, the "fake tweet erased 36 billion in equity market value."38
Anonymous Syria and its multiple allies had hacked the Syrian Electronic Army and dumped coordinates of alleged members onto the dark web.39 The data-space of Syria is embattled, hacked, fragmented. Moreover, it extends from the AP to Wall Street to Russian and Australian servers, as well as to the Twitter accounts of a celebrity magazine. It extends to WikiLeaks's servers, where the Syria files are hosted, and which had to move around quite a lot previously, being ousted from Amazon in 2010. It was once rumored that WikiLeaks tried to move their servers to an offshore location, an exterritorial former oil platform called Sealand.40 This would in fact have replicated the freeport scenario from a different angle.
But to ask a more general question: How does the internet, or more precisely networked operations between different databases, affect the physical construction of museums "or the impossibility thereof?
Seventh Chapter: An Email Sent from Switzerland and the Reply
From: Hito Steyerl mailto:xy@protonmail.ch
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2015 8:05 PM
To: Office Reception
Subject: Request for confirmation of authenticity
Dear Sirs,
I would like to kindly ask you to confirm the authenticity of various email communications between OMA/AMO and Syrian government officials and intermediaries published by Wikileaks as part of their "Syria files" in 2012.
I am a Berlin based filmmaker and writer working on a lecture about the transformations of national museums under conditions of civil war, both in data- and 3D physical space.
There is no intent to scandalize the communication between OMA and the Syrian Ministry of Presidential Affairs. The intent is to ask how both internet communication and the (near-) collapse of some nations states affect the planning of contemporary museum spaces.
In this context it would be interesting to know more about the circumstances that led to the end of project discussions in Syria. I am sure that your office had its reasons for this and it would be great to be able to include these in the discussion.
Pls find below a list of links I plan on quoting.
Best regards,
Hito Steyerl
https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs/2089311_urgent.html
https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs/2092135_very-important.html
https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs/2091860_fwd-.html
Sent from ProtonMail, encrypted email based in Switzerland:
RE: Request for confirmation of authenticity
From: Jeremy Higginbotham <xy@oma.com>
Hito Steyerl <xy@protonmail.ch>
At 26/02/2015 7:13 am
Dear Hito Steyerl,
Thank you for your email. We are not able to confirm the authenticity of the documents linked below.
However, we wish you good luck with your work.
Best regards,
Jeremy Higginbotham
Head of Public Affairs
OMA
Since the Edward Snowden leaks, I started using ProtonMail, an initiative by CERN researchers who are graciously providing a free encrypted email platform. This is how they describe their project, using the map of Switzerland:
All information on the ProtonMail servers is stored under the jurisdiction of the Cantonal Court of Geneva, taking advantage of the privacy laws of Switzerland and the Canton.
All information on the ProtonMail servers is stored under the jurisdiction of the Cantonal Court of Geneva, taking advantage of Switzerland's and the Canton's privacy laws.
But OMA/AMO's friendly response is not stored in a free-port, it is just stored under "regular" Swiss jurisdiction in a former military command center deep inside the Swiss Alps.41 This is the jurisdiction and encryption I use to try to make any potential government interference with some of my data just a tiny bit more cumbersome. I am in fact taking advantage of legal protections that have enabled tax evasion and money laundering through Swiss banks and other facilities on an astounding scale.42 On the other hand, the mere usage of privacy-related web tools flags users for NSA scrutiny, thus effectively reversing its desired effect.43 The screen of anonymity turns out to be a paradoxical device.
The ambiguous effect of policies destined to increase anonymity also figures on a different level of freeport activity.
On February 25, 2015, Monaco prosecutors arrested Yves Bouvier, the owner of Natural Le Coultre, the company involved with the Luxembourg, Geneva, and Singapore free-ports for suspected art fraud: "The investigation is believed to centre on inflating prices in very big art transactions in which Bouvier was an intermediary."44 Bouvier allegedly took advantage of the fact that most artworks held in freeports are owned by sociétés écran (literal translation: screen companies). Since transactions were made through these anonymous proxies, buyers and sellers were not able to communicate and control the amount of commission fees charged.45 The screen that was supposed to provide anonymity for owners may also have worked against them. Invisibility is a screen that sometimes works both ways "though not always. It works in favor of whoever is controlling the screen.
Eighth Chapter: Shooting at Clocks "The Public Museum
As noted earlier, Benedict Anderson suggested that to build a nation there should be print capitalism and a museum. Nowadays, it is not impossible to build a museum without a nation. We can even look at it more generally and see both nations and museums as just another way to organize time and space; in this case, by smashing them to pieces.
But aren't time and space smashed whenever a new paradigm for a museum is created? This indeed happened in France's July Revolution of 1830, of which Walter Benjamin tells a story.46 Revolutionaries were shooting at clocks. They had previously also overturned the calendar, renaming months and changing their duration.
And this is the period when the Louvre was stormed yet again "as during every major Paris uprising in the nineteenth century. The prototype for a public museum was created when time and space were smashed and welded anew. The Louvre was created by being stormed. It was stormed in 1792 during the French Revolution and turned from a feudal collection of spoils "a period version of freeport art storage spaces "into a public art museum, presumably the first in the world, introducing a model of national culture. Afterwards, it turned into the cultural flagship of a colonial empire that tried to authoritatively seed that culture elsewhere, before more recently going into the business of trying to create franchises in feudal states, dictatorships, and combinations thereof.
But the current National Museum of Syria is of a different order. Contrary to plans inspired by the "Bilbao effect," the museum is hosted online, on countless servers in multiple locations. As Jon Rich and Ali Shamseddine have noted, it is a collection of online videos "of documents and records of innumerable killings, atrocities, and attacks that remain widely unseen.47 This is the de facto National Museum of Syria, not a Louvre franchise acquired by the Assad foundation. This accidental archive of videos and other documents is made in different genres and styles, showing people digging through rubble, or Twitter-accelerated decapitations in HD. It shows aerial attacks from below, not above. The documents and records produced on the ground end up on a variety of servers worldwide. They are available "in theory "on any screen, except in the locations where they were made, where the act of uploading something to YouTube can get people killed. This spatiotemporal inversion is almost like a reversal of the freeport aggregate art collections.
The entirety of this archive is not adapted to human perception, or at least not to individual perception. Like all large-scale databases "including WikiLeaks's Syria files "it takes the form of a trove of information without (or with very little) narrative, substantiation, or interpretation. It may be partly visible to the public, but not necessarily entirely intelligible. It remains partly inaccessible, not by means of exclusion, but because it overwhelms the perceptual capacity and attention span of any single individual.48
Ninth Chapter: Autonomy
Let's go back to the examples mentioned at the beginning: the freeport art storage spaces and the municipal gallery of Diyarbakir that had become a refugee camp. One space withdraws artworks from the world by hoarding them, while the other basically sheltered the escapees of collapsing states. How and where can art be shown publicly, in physical 3D space, without endangering its authors, while taking into account the breathtaking spatial and temporal changes expressed by these two examples? What form could a new model of the public museum take, and how would the notion of the "public" itself change radically in the process of thinking through this?
Let's think back to the freeport art storage spaces and their stock of duty free art. My suggestion is not to shun or belittle this proposition, but to push it even further.
The idea of duty free art has one major advantage over the nation-state cultural model: duty free art ought to have no duty "no duty to perform, to represent, to teach, to embody value. It should not be indebted to anyone, nor serve a cause or a master, nor be a means to anything. Duty free art should not be a means to represent a culture, a nation, money, or anything else. Even the duty free art in the freeport storage spaces is not duty free. It is only tax free. It has the duty of being an asset.
Seen like this, duty free art is essentially what traditional autonomous art might have been, had it not been elitist and oblivious to its own conditions of production.49
But duty free art is more than a reissue of the old idea of autonomous art. It also transforms the meaning of the battered term "artistic autonomy." Autonomous art under current temporal and spatial circumstances needs to take these very spatial and temporal conditions into consideration. Art's conditions of possibility are no longer just the elitist "ivory tower," but also the dictator's contemporary art foundation, the oligarch/weapon manufacturer's tax-evasion scheme, the hedge fund's trophy,50 the art student's debt bondage, leaked troves of data, aggregate spam, and the product of huge amounts of unpaid "voluntary" labor "all of which result in art's accumulation in freeport cubicles as well as its physical destruction in zones of war or accelerated privatization. Autonomous art within this context could try to understand political autonomy as an experiment in building alternatives to a nation-state model that continues to proclaim national culture while simultaneously practicing "constructive instability" by including gated communities for high-net-worth individuals, much like microversions of failed states. To come back to the example of Switzerland: this country is so pervaded by extraterritorial enclaves with downsized regulations that it could be more precisely defined as an x-percent rogue entity within a solid watch industry. But extrastatecraft can also be defined as political autonomy under completely different circumstances and with very different results, as recent experiments in autonomy from Hong Kong to Rojava have demonstrated.
Autonomous art could even be art set free both from its authors and owners. Remember the disclaimer by OMA? Now imagine every artwork in freeports to be certified by this: "I am not able to confirm the authenticity of this artwork."
This is the Cultural Center in Surus, Turkey. It is across the border from the city of Koban, the administrative center of the autonomous canton of the same name, which is itself located in the Rojava region of northern Syria. It is not a coincidence that the autonomous entities in Rojava are called cantons: they were modeled after Swiss cantons, to emphasize the role that basic democracy played in initially establishing them.51
After the attack on Koban canton by Daesh fighters in September 2014, the Cultural Center was temporarily turned into another refugee camp, hosting several hundred people who had fled from the besieged region around Koban.
A year later, it was hit by a suicide attack by Daesh, killing more than thirty activists. This incident was the start of a renewed civil war in Turkey, during which Kurdish city centers were razed and expropriated under a state of exception which has by now become semi-permanent.
During the same period, looted archeological artifacts from Palmyra, Syria were recovered at Geneva freeport.
Digital labour the internet as playground and factory (Chapter: Free Labor)
- Author: Tiziana Terranova
- Publisher and date: Taylor & Francis, 2013
Synopsis
A critical concept of the essential role played by free labor and how the digital labor is implemented in its complicated relation to the capitalist society.
Original text
The real not-capital is labor. — Karl Marx, Grundrisse
Working in the digital media industry was never as much fun as it is made out to be. Certainly, for the workers of the best- known and most highly valued companies, work might have been a brief experience of something that did not feel like work at all.1 On the other hand, even during the dot-com boom, the “netslaves” of the homonymous webzine had always been vociferous about the shamelessly exploitative nature of the job, its punishing work rhythms, and its ruthless casualization.2 They talked about “24-7 electronic sweatshops” and complained about the 90-hour week and the “moronic management of new media companies.”3 Antagonism in the new media industry also affected the legions of volunteers running well-known sites for the Internet giants. In early 1999, 7 of the 15,000 “volunteers” of America Online rocked the info–love boat by asking the Department of Labor to investigate whether AOL owed them back wages for their years of playing chat hosts for free. They used to work long hours and love it; but they also felt the pain of being burned by digital media. These events point to an inevitable backlash against the glamorization of digital labor, which highlighted its continuities with the modern sweatshop and the increasing degradation of knowledge work. Yet the question of labor in a digital economy as an innovative development of the familiar logic of capitalist exploitation is not so easily dismissed. The netslaves are not simply a typical form of labor on the Internet; they also embody a complex relation to labor that is widespread in late capitalist societies.
In this chapter, I call this excessive activity that makes the Internet a thriving and hyperactive medium “free labor”—a feature of the cultural economy at large and an important, yet unacknowledged, source of value in advanced capitalist societies. By looking at the Internet as a specific instance of the fundamental role played by free labor, this chapter also highlights the connections between the digital economy and what the Italian autonomists have called the “social factory” (or “society-factory”).4 The society-factory describes a process whereby “work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine.”5 Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the net includes the activity of building websites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces. Far from being an unreal, empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large. Support for this argument, however, is immediately complicated by the recent history of Anglo-American cultural theory. How should we speak of labor, especially cultural and technical labor, after the demolition job carried out by 30 years of postmodernism? The postmodern socialist feminism of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” spelled out some of the reasons behind the antipathy of 1980s critical theory for Marxist analyses of labor. Haraway explicitly rejected the humanistic tendencies of theorists who see the latter as the “pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing the world.”6 Paul Gilroy similarly expressed his discontent at the inadequacy of Marxist analysis of labor to the descendants of slaves, who value artistic expression as “the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation.”7 If labor is “the humanizing activity that makes [white] man,” then, surely, this humanizing labor does not really belong in the age of networked, posthuman intelligence. However, the “informatics of domination” that Haraway describes in the manifesto is certainly preoccupied with the relation between cybernetics, labor, and capital. In the 20 years since its publication, this triangulation has become even more evident. The expansion of the Internet has given ideological and material support to contemporary trends toward increased flexibility of the workforce, continuous reskilling, freelance work, and the diffusion of practices such as “supplementing” (bringing supplementary work home from the conventional office).8 Advertising campaigns and business manuals suggest that the Internet is not only a site of disintermediation (embodying the famous death of the middle man, from bookshops to travel agencies to computer stores), but also the means through which a flexible, collective intelligence has come into being.
This chapter does not seek to offer a judgment on the effects of the Internet on society. What I will rather do is map the way in which the Internet connects to the autonomist social factory. I will look at how the “outernet”—the network of social, cultural, and economic relationships that crisscrosses and exceeds the Internet—surrounds and connects the latter to larger flows of labor, culture, and power. It is fundamental to move beyond the notion that cyberspace is about escaping reality in order to understand how the reality of the Internet is deeply connected to the development of late postindustrial societies as a whole. It is related to phenomena that have been defined as “external economies” within theoretical perspectives (such as the theory of transaction costs), suggesting that “the production of value is increasingly involving the capture of productive elements and social wealth that are outside the direct productive process.”9 Cultural and technical work is central to the Internet but is also a widespread activity throughout advanced capitalist societies. Such labor is not exclusive to so-called knowledge workers but is a pervasive feature of the postindustrial economy. The pervasiveness of such production questions the legitimacy of a fixed distinction between production and consumption, labor and culture. It also undermines Gilroy’s distinction between work as “servitude, misery and subordination” and artistic expression as the means to self-fashioning and communal liberation. The increasingly blurred territory between production and consumption, work and cultural expression, however, does not signal the recomposition of the alienated Marxist worker. The Internet does not automatically turn every user into an active producer and every worker into a creative subject. The process whereby production and consumption are reconfigured within the category of free labor signals the unfolding of another logic of value whose operations need careful analysis.