"doing" vs. abstract labor

John Holloway's essay "Cracks and the Crisis of Abstract Labor" (pdf) in Antipode (the Journal of Radical Geography) offers an alternative terrain of struggle to the sort exemplified by unions and labor movements, which in his opinion have been beaten back and are played out, fatally compromised by their acceptance of "abstract labor" -- labor that has been alienated and made commensurate with all other labor, that is labor people do for money and not for joy or meaning or social connection. This is opposed to "doing" -- unabstracted work as manifestation of species being, as self-expression rather than for wages.

Holloway describes the alienation process forced on us by capitalist relations this way:

I bake a cake. I enjoy baking it, I enjoy eating it, I enjoy sharing it with my friends and am proud of the cake I have made. Then I decide that I will try to make a living by baking cakes. I bake cakes and sell them on the market. Gradually the cake becomes a means to gaining an income sufficient to allow me to live. I have to produce the cake at a certain speed and in a certain way so that I can keep the price low enough to sell it. Enjoyment is no longer part of the process. After a while I realise that I am not earning enough money and think that, since the cake-making is in any case merely a means to an end, a way of earning money, I might as well make something else that will sell better. My doing has become completely indifferent to its content; there has been a complete abstraction from its concrete characteristics. The object I produce is now so completely alienated from me that I do not care whether it is a cake or a rat poison, as long as it sells.

As a result of this sort of production-process-based alienation, under the social relations of capitalism, Holloway argues, sociality is sustained by the commensurability of labor.

When the baker sells her cakes and uses the money to buy a dress, then a social integration between the activities of the baker and the activities of the dressmaker is established through the purely quantitative measure of their labours. The abstraction of doing into labour (or the abstraction of labour from the specificities of doing) is both immediately oppressive for the doer and at the same time the creation of a social cohesion (a system) that stands outside any conscious
social control.

This is why the "system" seems faceless, difficult to pinpoint. We generate it when we value effort in money.

If abstract labor sustains capitalism and its lived relations -- if it defines what is "normal" and "realistic" -- then anytime we produce outside of that structure, anytime we are "doing" creates what Holloway calls cracks, which posits "extremely fragile spaces or moments in which we live the world that we want to create." These defy the logic of capital, force a reconceptualization of what sorts of activities and exchanges are "real." The struggle is of course ongoing; just as capitalism must reproduce itself and its hegemonic ideology from moment to moment, so resistance in the form of "doing" must be made again and again. Holloway writes: "The struggle to impose the discipline of labour upon our activity is a struggle fought by capital each and every day: what else do managers, teachers, social workers, police and so on do?"

Against this, we must fight to prevent the subsumption of all forms of production, of doing, under capital:

The root of the present crisis is our insubordination, our refusal to subordinate our lives totally to the logic of capital, to convert all our doing into abstract labour.

The internet is pivotal in this regard. For example, it potentially extends subsumption of everyday life under capital by subsuming identity production, by making our self-fashioning into a kind of exploitable labor that can be quantified. This is why tracking hits on posts and counting Twitter followers, etc., is so insidious. But the internet also promises an alternative method for gaining social recognition through facilitating sharing and the commons -- "collaborative consumption," as a recent business book calls it. It seems to me that social media subsumes the practices of friendship to capital and this is a terrible, terrible thing. It blurs the line between "doing" and "abstract labor" just as it blurs public and private, leaving a never-certain terrain where one can't be entirely comfortable in one's practices or know the scope on which they are being mounted. Sociality blends into surveillance; hobbies blend into social-factory labor; the self becomes an alienated brand, stranding consciousness, which finds it can't know itself in the moment, because identity has become an external thing. Holloway admits that "autonomist movements ... can certainly be co-opted into the decentralized structures of power characteristic of neoliberalism." The big media companies on the internet seem to be intent of doing this co-opting -- actually pre-opting, since most people are introduced to social media, etc., through corporate interfaces, which means whatever they do with them is contained and exploitable. Does it matter if individuals believe they are "doing" when their practices help sustain consumer capitalism? Are these moments "cracks" of resistance, or are they the mortar covering cracks over?

Somewhat grandiosely, I think of what we're trying to do with the New Inquiry in the light of a struggle against abstract labor, as a process of creating cracks, an open-ended social structure for facilitating "doing". Not for money or any of its proxies, but for social possibilities, for a sense of fulfilling the self conceived along different lines from that of an acquisitive self. It is ideally a space for autonomous intellectual activity, as an end in itself, an expression of human capability and creativity. That seems a bit squishy though: such a lofty purpose, when not experienced as a flow state, may seem a bit like purposelessness. The answer to "Why am I doing this" can never go beyond "because I want to" -- and that seems inadequate. The pursuit for social recognition is also slippery" can it be kept separate from capital's preferred yardsticks for recognition (money), which spill over into the perpetuation of status hierarchies. The question then is how to allow recognition to function in an egalitarian way without it being meaningless; also how to motivate human doing without relying entirely on metaphysical motives to be human.

From an interview with Elinor Ostrom

This interview with Ostrom, about self-management of commons property.

If you can talk with the other people who use that resource, then you may well figure out rules that fit that local setting and organize to enforce them. But if community members don’t have a good way of communicating with each other or the costs of self-organization are too high, then they won’t organize, and there will be failures.

I would need to actually read her studies, but the key point here is that you need to define "good" when it comes to finding a "good means of communication." It is not simply synonymous with cheap or free or ubiquitous. My hypothesis is that social media is actually the opposite of a good channel of communication for self-management purposes, that it becomes a distraction from accomplishing commons goals and crowds out the space where good communication might otherwise take root. Social media seems atomizing and isolating to me even though it foments all sorts of weak-tie group formation. Suspect commons management requires strong, strong group ties and the ability to conceive a collective identity rather than a personal profile. I know they are not either-or, but social media seems to have a strong colonizing tendency, conquering other forms of identity making and other mediums for self-expression and assimilating them.

One of the costs of self-organizing is surrendering the individual identity to a certain degree, relinquishing its autonomy and its priority within one's own psyche -- and that flies in the face of social media and the tendency of consumer society generally.

Fittingly Ostrom encourages localism in decision making and rejects consumerism as model for economic growth -- in other words, rejecting nationalized standards for the good life that consumerism imports and preferring instead local notions of what it makes sense to have for a fulfilling life as individual and community member.

"The mirror of production" notes

I read Baudrillard's The Mirror of Production recently and underlined a bunch of passages and scrawled lots of notes into the margins, but I wanted to move some of that material here, and see if any of it might prove useful down the road.

For Baudrillard, capital valorization is basically a process of investing signs with meaning, with "signs" designating the entire gamut of communicative objects and notions and practices. Commodities are only one example, or you could just redefine commodity as anything that can bear meaning within a structure of signification. Capital thus works to make everything signify and then to exploit that process, which extends consumption infinitely.

His specific target in this work, though, is the concept of production, the ideal of productivity, of turning things to account, of making things useful. "Everywhere man has learned to reflect on himself, to assume himself, to posit himself according to this scheme of production which is assigned to him as the ultimate dimension of value and meaning." Use value is a consequence of exchange value, not some pre-existing value inherent in a good. Likewise for being useful, which is an aftereffect, not something inherent in activity -- what counts as useful is tied to capitalist rationality. "Qualitative" accounts of labor only further mystify labor as the only "real" human practice.

This leads to a misrecognition of wealth as work: He quotes Marx: " 'Regarded materially, wealth consists only in the manifold variety of needs.' Is this not the program of advanced capitalist society?" In other words, wealth consists of a surfeit of "meaningful" things for people to do. It doesn't consist of a liberation from effort. Marxism is indicted for not moving beyond the fetishization of productivity and the manufacture of social needs as wealth. Baudrillard seems to have made up a Marx quote to condemn him, though this sounds like the "humanist Marx": "In a higher stage of community society... work will not be simply a means of living but will become the prime, vital need itself."

For Baudrillard, such a view is colluding with capital and transforming humans into alienated labor power in their very being.

in this Marxism assists the cunning of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labor power, thus censoring the much more radical hypothesis that they might be alienated as labor power, as the "inalienable" power of creating value by their labor.

It seems to me that in this line of analysis, Baudrillard flirts with a kind of radical Luddism, a yearning to return to supposed freedoms of the stone age. At best, he espouses a Bataille-style advocacy of expenditure over productivity as the purpose of human life. The issue is "social wealth vs. symbolic wealth":

There is no way of getting around this. Marxist labor is defined in the absolute order of a natural necessity and its dialectical overcoming as rational activity producing value. The social wealth produced is material; it has nothing to do with symbolic wealth which, mocking natural necessity, comes conversely from destruction, the deconstruction of value, transgression, or discharge. These two notions of wealth are irreconcilable, perhaps even mutually exclusive; it is useless to attempt acrobatic transfers.

Capitalism has moved beyond the natural-necessity realm into generating "value" from symbolic wealth, which mocks the Marxist notion of production for human survival and autonomy against nature. Production just reproduces capital in the position of nature, as the controlling limit, as the force determining human capabilities. Capitalist economics and markets make scarcity; they do not solve it. Markets reproduce conditions that make endless series of alienating exchanges necessary.

Even Marxism's transcending perspective will always be burdened by counterdependence on political economy. Against Necessity it will oppose the mastery of Nature; against Scarcity it will oppose Abundance ("to each according to his needs") without ever resolving either the arbitrariness of these concepts or their idealist overdetermination by political economy.

Hence Marxism fails to move us out of the grip of political economy, which is an ideology that reproduces all the immiseration of capitalism.

Anyway, Baudrillard argues this sanctification of labor infects even the notion of play and imagination, which are also made useful and concerned with "quality". "The sphere of play is always merely the aesthetic sublimation of labor's constraints." Beauty is merely something to gamble on, productive of an exploitable result in meaning that justifies itself after the fact. Beauty is proved in its effects rather than a matter of intrinsic form. To put that in autonomista terms, work is opposed by immaterial labor that masquerades as non-work, but is also "productive," making meanings and reproducing labor power in reified, appropriatable form. We are still producing ourselves in non-work time, and producing value, valorizing capital.

***

Baudrillard mentions "the symbolic destruction of all social relations not so much by the ownership of the means of production but by the control of the code." He posits a "planned socialization by the code" via its being "monopolized" by the marketing apparatus -- this institutes "consumption as control." Since we are trapped at the level of symbolic consumption -- since everything we do is interpreted as a consumerist, self-branding gesture -- there is no possibility of affirming revolution. "Whatever one does, one can only respond to the system on its own terms, according to its own rules, answering it with its own signs." This is the consequence of the forces that homogenize every act to a single signifying dimension -- what Baudrillard means, I think, by monopoly essentially.

***
This is the heart of the critique of productivity:

Let us say that the system is structurally incapable of liberating human potentials except as productive forces, that is, according to an operational finality that leaves no room for the reversion of the loss, the gift, the sacrifice and hence for the possibility of symbolic exchange. The example of consumption is significant ... the crisis in 1929 marked the point of asphyxiation: the problem was no longer one of production but one of circulation. Consumption became the strategic element; the people were henceforth mobilized as consumers; their "needs" became as essential as their labor power. By this operation, the system assured its economic survival at a fantastically expanded level. But something else is at play in the strategy of consumption. By allowing for the possibility of expanding and consuming, by organizing social redistribution (social security, allotments, salaries that are no longer defined as the strict economic reproduction of labor power) by launching advertising, human relations, etc., the system created the illusion of a symbolic participation (the illusion that something that is taken and won is also redistributed, given, and sacrificed)... In spite of all its good will (at least among those capitalist who are aware of the necessity of tempering the logic of the system in order to avoid an explosion in the near future), it cannot make consumption a true consummation, a festival, a waste. To consume is to start producing again. All that is expended is in fact invested; nothing is ever totally lost.

We can't escape our consumption being productive at the level of the code; this reproduces capitalism and inscribes it deep into everyday life at the level of self-fashioning:

this also means that each individual, each consumer, is locked into the profitable manipulation of goods and signs for his own interest. He can no longer really waste his time in leisure.104 Inexorably, he reproduces, at his own level, the whole system of political economy: the logic of appropriation, the impossibility of waste, of the gift, of loss, the inexorability of the law of value.

Autonomy and participation are only illusory; they are circumscribed by structural system of production:

They would like to have participation, but participation is revealed each time as being only a better tactic for the wider reproduction of the system. The more autonomy is given to everyone, the more decision-making is concentrated at the summit. The autonomy of the faculties is, as we know, the best means of aligning them with capitalist productivity, just as the independence of colonial nations was the best means of perpetuating and modernizing their exploitation.

And so liberation is basically impossible where it has been reconceived as liberalization:

liberalization is only hyperrepressive. Needs which were once contingent and heterogeneous are homogenized and definitively rationalized according to the models of the system.

"Enlightenment as Mass Deception" revisited

From an article in Fast Capitalism 2:2, "Compliance Fiction: Adorno and Horkheimer's 'Culture Industry' Thesis in a Multimedia Age" by Sam Caslin.

Basically, Caslin uses Adorno to call bullshit on "co-creation" -- marketers' beloved exploitation of consumers to do their job for them: "the actions of the Firefly/Serenity fans suggests an increasing rationalization of consumer culture whereby fans are no longer required to simply consume passively but to become actively involved in the mechanisms of production and market creation." In the same vein as Holt's awesome article about consumer refuseniks.

Co-creation is not an escape from passivity so much as it is a voluntary plunge into deeper exploitation at the level of fandom, of libidinal investment, or whatever you want to call it. The fans would deny that they are being exploited at all, of course, which moves them to a different level than those who cynically "see through" advertising and marketing but use the products and champion the brands anyway.

A good point about the limits of the term "culture industry": "the culture industry thesis critiques a specific type of gentrified, mass-produced artefact aimed at legitimating capitalism" -- that is, what defines culture industry product is that it engenders a specific sort of consumer, or audience that is predisposed to function within capitalism and would feel threatened when it is threatened -- it inculcates a dependence on capitalist structures for obtaining pleasure and self-knowledge, the commodities of knowledge and recognition and social know-how that have been disembedded from earlier modes of distribution. Entertainment is reified, etc., experience is commodity to collect rather than an immersion in the present unmediated (if such an ideal is possible).

"although consumers may have some power within consumer society this only negates the potential for them to have power over consumer society. Modes of production cannot be controlled or challenged from within." This also seems like it might apply to the internet and digital media -- if social media is the problem itself, it can't really be used to undo itself. Social media is a new way for capitalism to homegenize experience and re-present it as "content." What we win through such media strengthens the system that is depriving us of a larger freedom.

žižek on love

In this essay in the New Left Review, Zižek makes some interesting claims about the nature of love, some of which I think I have read or heard elsewhere -- he seems to recycle certain of his own arguments. Anyway:

Love is a choice that is experienced as necessity. At a certain point, one is overwhelmed by the feeling that one already is in love, and that one cannot do otherwise. By definition, therefore, comparing qualities of respective candidates, deciding with whom to fall in love, cannot be love. This is the reason why dating agencies are an anti-love device par excellence.

That echoes to a degree Eva Illouz's argument in Cold Intimacies about the efficiency of relationships conditioned by modern communications technologies and technologies of the self. But it is an almost commonplace idea, really: Love strikes us as a compulsion, a craziness, an overwhelming of our resistance or our reluctance or our comfortable, established ways. It forces us to be different, to go against our grain.

Later Zižek, discussing possible modes of Left resistance in the era of biopower and so on, he declares: "An act is more than an intervention into the domain of the possible -- an act changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility." That seems an even better definition of love, a leap into an impossibility that afterward seems to have been inevitable, inescapable.

What makes that leap possible? How do we act in the face of what is impossible? Falling in love perhaps models how we can suddenly find ourselves acting without an operative sense what is "realistic" or possible. "We will be forced to live ‘as if we were free’. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss, in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the new." Revolution would require a collective love for an idea that enchants each of us as if we were the only one.

Flexibility and resistance

Though I don't think the coining of "altermodernity" is helpful, Micah White makes a good point in this essay:

Could it be that while we’ve been smashing boundaries and crossing borders, consumerism has quickened its global expansion by piggybacking on our identity-blurring efforts?
And now, entering a new era of humanity where postmodernity is slipping into altermodernity, we find that the binaries we rejected are not only blurring but finally collapsing. Unable to say with any certainty what is real or virtual, human or animal, organic or genetically modified, some wish to resuscitate again, but this time with nostalgia, the failed antimodern project of shattering distinctions. While the chorus – composed now of cyberpunks and activists joined by capitalists and technocrats – rejoices in the indistinguishable difference between online and offline, organic and synthetic, man and machine, the most crucial distinction of all – that between resistance and complicity – is collapsing as well. Unless we can discover a way to critique the system without furthering the system, we shall be lost.

One is tempted to say, No duh. Capitalism thrives on constant change and on circulation, not the rigidity of binary oppositions and the structures and hierarchies derived from them. Capitalism promises the chance to perpetually remake the hierarchies around terms that favor you; that's why so many can be induced to participate and support it -- they internalize resistance to capitalism into the system as healthy competition.

Resistance is always becoming complicity because of the labile nature of capitalism; it changes to co-opt resistance practices and make them lifestyle products. Thus subjects have to keep moving without necessarily becoming flexible in the post-Fordist sense and useful to capital as incubators of cool. The practice of resistance becomes the constant, inflexible thing, even though the specific nature of what is resisted must always be changing and perhaps intensifying. We must be ever flexible in our permanent resistance to novelty as an end in itself.

Time discipline and social networks as bridge to new forms of it

The Fast Capitalism article I discussed int he previous post directed me to E.P. Thompson's essay "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" (pdf). It's makes for turgid reading, but it pays off in the last few sections.


Of note: He points out that the language used to sell the idea of rigorous time-keeping shifted:

There were a lot of timepieces about in the 1790s: emphasis is shifting from "luxury" to "convenience"; even cottagers may have wooden clocks costing less than twenty shillings. Indeed, a general diffusion of clocks and watches is occurring (as one would expect) at the exact moment when the industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronization of labour.

Time-discipline became ubiquitous, so it become "convenient" to obey it more perspicaciously -- no longer a luxury of the master imposing discipline; the discipline became internalized and a pressing psychological issue for workers themselves.

In the second to last section, he asks a key question:

In mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labour force merely to "pass the time". But how far did this propaganda really succeed? How far are we entitled to speak of any radical restructuring of man's social nature and working habits?

This is interesting in light of the supposed lax morals of, say Greece or Mexico, whose slack (from the point of view of industrial time discipline) workers are described thusly by one "engineer of growth" as Thompson derides them:

His lack of initiative, inability to save, absences while celebrating too many holidays, willingness to work only three or four days a week if that paid for necessities, insatiable desire for alchohol — all were pointed out as proof of a natural inferiority.

So is the price to pay for an orderly capitalist democracy the subjection to an intense and unpleasant propaganda about time-thrift and to have workers subjected to all sorts of scrutiny to prevent their shirking? Is that price worth paying? Should we envy Greece rather than regard them as Michael Lewis does as self-centered cheats who are incapable of civic duty?

Resisting time-discipline, Thompson argues, is always and everywhere a key site of resistance to capital, to the sort of subjectivation that capitalism imposes, well delineated in some industrial propaganda Thompson quotes:

Wilbert Moore has even drawn up a shopping-list of the "pervasive values and normative orientations of high relevance to the goal of social development" — "these changes in attitude and belief are 'necessary' if rapid economic and social development is to be achieved":
Impersonality: judgement of merit and performance, not social background or irrelevant qualities.
Specificity of relations in terms of both context and limits of interaction.
Rationality and problem-solving. Punctuality.
Recognition of individually limited but systematically linked interdependence.
Discipline, deference to legitimate authority. Respect for property rights . . . .
These, with "achievement and mobility aspirations", are not,
Professor Moore reassures us, suggested as a comprehensive list of the merits of modern man . . . The "whole man" will also love his family, worship his God, and express his aesthetic capacities. But he will keep each of these other orientations "in their place".

These are the values Lewis takes as being basic to civic life -- but that is only so in capitalist culture, where time discipline and wage incentives are all taken for granted. Duty becomes work discipline, not social life in the moment.

The problem of imposing time-discipline, Thompson notes, "may appear as it did in the early years of the Bombay cotton mills, as one of maintaining a labour force at the cost of perpetuating inefficient methods of production — elastic time-schedules, irregular breaks and meal-times, etc." Hmmm. That sounds suspiciously like post-Fordist work arrangements that blur work and leisure and allow for more worker flexibility (and less employer responsibility for their welfare). We appear to be returning to a pre-industrial attitude about work and leisure, only without the life-skills to handle it.

One recurrent form of revolt within Western industrial capitalism, whether bohemian or beatnik, has often taken the form of flouting the urgency of respectable time values. And the interesting question arises: if Puritanism
was a necessary part of the work-ethos which enabled the industrialized world to break out of the poverty-stricken economies of the past, will the Puritan valuation of time begin to decompose as the pressures of poverty relax ? Is it decomposing already ? Will men begin to lose that restless urgency, that desire to consume time
purposively, which most people carry just as they carry a watch on
their wrists ?

If we are to have enlarged leisure, in an automated future, the problem is not "how are men going to be able to consume all these additional time-units of leisure ?" but "what will be the capacity for experience of the men who have this undirected time to live ?" If we maintain a Puritan time-valuation, a commodity-valuation, then
it is a question of how this time is put to use, or how it is exploited by the leisure industries. But if the purposive notation of time-use becomes less compulsive, then men might have to re-learn some of the arts of living lost in the industrial revolution: how to fill the interstices of their days with enriched, more leisurely, personal and social relations; how to break down once more the barriers between work and life.

I think social networks are fulfilling this function of helping people deal with the lost time-discipline -- it preserves the urgency of time-discipline in the leisure/social sphere (consumption is already made urgent as work -- the pressure for novelty, to keep up to be consuming as much as our time allows for and not miss anything, or waste any time not consuming commodities -- that is, idling away and lazing about thee way workers used to, the dismay of social improvers/engineers of growth). Social networks make sure that behavior is still measured, monitored, and archived, while still absorbing free time once micromanaged by Taylorist bosses. Facebook is the new Taylorist boss.

It is the fulfillment of this:

If men are to meet both the demands of a highly-synchronized automated industry, and of greatly enlarged areas of "free time", they must somehow combine in a new synthesis elements of the old and of the new, finding an imagery based neither upon the seasons nor upon the market but upon human occasions.

The social network is that new "imagery" -- remains for me to explain that in detail I suppose.