I’m taking advantage of a little more free time than usual to do some more translating. I’m working on a piece by the Precarias a la Deriva on militant research, which originally appeared in the excellent book Nociones Communes, which collects some contemporary militant resarch materials from some people in Spain, Italy, and Argentina. (There are plans underway to translate the whole book, but I haven’t heard from the folks involved in a bit, so I don’t know where that project’s at.)
In any case, I’m translating the piece, and it’s set wheels to turn in my head. There’s discussion in it of precarity. The piece strikes me as having the same problematic quality that I’ve come to find in Negri. My friend Ben tells me that what I’m reacting to is presentism, a term I’d not heard before. That is, there’s an emphasis on characteristics of the present being novel, rather than being (instantiations or modes, perhaps changed ones, of) old characteristics. Regarding precarity, the question for me is quite simple. Is it not the case that “[t]he condition described today as that of the precarious worker is perhaps the fundamental reality of the proleteriat”? Furthermore, “the modes of existence of workers in 1830 are quite close to those of our contemporary workers.” (These quotes are from Jacques Ranciere. I found them on page xxxiii of Donald Reid’s introduction to Ranciere’s Nights of Labor. The quotes are from an interview with Francois Ewald, “Qu’est-ce que la classe ouvriere?” in Magazine litteraire #175, July-August 1981, p64-65.)
Put simply, what’s taken for new is rather quite old. I like that point. And yet… I wonder if it’s a little simplistic. Now, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to embrace simplistic answers, so maybe that’s not a problem. Then again, resolution are made to be broken. (Whether at the personal level on up to the UN.)
Benjamin, in his 1918 essay “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” (Selected Writings v1, p100-110), writes “[t]he central task of the coming philosophy will be to take the deepest intimations it draws from our times and our expectations of a great future, and turn them into knowledge by relating them to the Kantian system.” This project will be one of “linking a truly time- and eternity conscious philosophy to Kant,” a project which for Benjamin will not happen without facing obstacles and problems, both ones internal to the various perspectives being joined and ones of their compatibility. Two such key problem, both of which Benjamin sees as Kantian problem and only the first of which Kant adequately addressed, are “the question of the certainty of knowledge that is lasting, and, second, (…) the question of the integrity of an experience that is ephemeral.” (100.) “For universal philosophy is continually directed toward both the timeless validity of knowledge and the certainty of a temporal experience which is regarded as the immediate, if not the only, object of that knowledge. (100-101.)
The forging of the coming philosophy will require not a simple taking up of Kant, of course, but rather demands a critical assessment of his work. Among the categories to be transfigured is that of experience. “For an objective relation between the empirical consciousness and the objective concept of experience is impossible. All genuine experience rests upon the pure “epistemological (transcendental) consciousness,” (…) pure transcendental consciousness is different in kind from any empirical consciousness, and the question therefore arises of whether the application of the term “consciousness” is allowable here.” (104.) “With a new concept of knowledge (…) not only the concept of experience but also that of freedom will undergo a decisive transformation.” (105.) Benjamin’s program for the coming philosophy also includes a need for “beside the concept of synthesis, another concept, that of a certain nonsynthesis of two concepts in another” (106), which he and Adorno will later produce in different versions, in their discussions of “dialectics at a standstill,” the explosive dialectical images and monads which both made so much of.
Benjamin doesn’t resolve the temporal questions posed in the essay, though his later reflections on fate and character, on materialist history, and on homogeneous and empty time vs full now-time expand and respond to this demand. In a sense, though, these developments may perhaps be more prolegomena to the coming philosophy than instantiations of it. That Benjamin doesn’t complete his coming philosophy can perhaps be seen in Adorno’s need, toward the end of his life, to address the same problematics in Aesthetic Theory. The thematic of shudder in that work is partially an attempt to address the relationship between the pre/meta-historical and the present moment.
In a different moment, Adorno addresses similar thematics thus: “The relation to the new is modeled on a child at the piano searching for a chord never previously heard. The chord, however, was always there; the possible combinations are limited and actually everything that can be played on it is implicitly given in the keyboard.” (32.) Adorno doesn’t complete the coming philosophy either, and perhaps it’s not until that happens that the problematic relationships to time and history that give me pause will be able to be adequately addressed.
The scylla and charybdis are the overstatement and understatement of the present’s novelty and its similarity in relation to the past. I suspect that Benjamin’s now-time, and a temporalized version of various accounts of singularity, may be a way to short circuit or escape from these tangled relations (new or old is simply not the right classificatory grid), but I’m not sure.
The other question I have is what is stake in all of this, why the drive to declare the new (and, in other quarters, to re-declare the continuance of the old, a la Sparts at meeting I used to go to who would exhort everyone that Lenin’s analysis of imperialism was uncomplicatedly true of the present in an untransformed way)? I suspect it’s partly political, and partly psychological: “The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself.” (Adorno, 32.) That is, the declaration of the new, particularly a new that relates vertically to the old, a relationship of surpassing, of progress, expresses a desire to have done with the old and break with the past. That is surely laudable, and we should in a sense demand the impossible, take our dreams for reality. But we should know that is what we do if we do so. And there may be other ways to express the desire for the new and forge bodies in our enunciations of the present that don’t involve the play of present novelty and antiquity.
funny to come across this, quite by accident. i had also started to translate “preguntas, enjambres…”, we should probably coordinate these things, no? as not to waste time/effort. and it would be great to have whatever translations you do in order to hang them on the website.
as for the question of novelty: i think the more interesting debates about precariousness are not posing it as an absolute novelty (especially not among those of us looking at feminized sectors - domestic work, sex work, communication, etc - there i’d say the emphasis is rather more on continuity and transformation: of non-recognition, affective manipulation, ethnic stratification, etc.) but rather as a shift relative to the still-existing vestiges of the fordist order (unions, equality discourse, etc.). and since the point is to really intervene on the present terrain, one has to take existing institutions pretty seriously. no?
be in touch for these translation questions, okay?
maggie
Comment by maggie — January 10, 2006 @ 1:14 pm
hi Maggie,
An email should be in your in box before you read this! Thanks for getting in touch. I wasn’t clear, partly because I’m still thinking this stuff through. I think it really is the case that there’s a novel precarity - I, for one, live in circumstances much more precarious than I had growing up or than my parents had at my age. But, like you said, it’s not an absolute novelty. It’s a relative novelty. I was hanging out with some friends in the UK once who are a few years older than me, many of them had been really into punk when they were younger, they were squatters, they were on the dole. One of them said “I didn’t realize the welfare state was more of a blip than the norm!” I think that’s a lot of it, the change in welfare and labor law regimes, in many ways a turning back of the clock (though of course, things are different today, it’s not a simple back-in-time kind of thing).
I agree completely about the need to intervene on the present terrain and to take existing institutions, the existing playing field, seriously. The main question I have is to do with an attribution of a new capacity to act or organize to the present day precariat. I don’t see the PAD doing this, though I think Negri definitely does. The main thing I have in mind is the (admittedly very little) stuff I’ve seen on bio-sindicalism. I like the idea, insofar as I understand it, but it sometimes sounds like its a new idea. That’s fine, but what’s not claer to me is if it’s a new idea for some people, or a new idea as such. That latter is what I really don’t like, as the bio-syndicalism, insofar as I understand it, sounds to me a great deal like the ’solidarity unionism’ practiced in the IWW today and for 100 years (as opposed to the business unionism of the AFL-CIO). I especially don’t like it when it’s proposed as something that is newly possible (possible for the first time today) because of some change in the process of production. I hope that makes sense, and I hope it’s clear some of this is provisional. I’m still figuring out this precarity stuff and what I think about these questions of the relationship between present and history.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 10, 2006 @ 6:15 pm
Hey Nate,
Sorry about the longish quote, but hopefully you’ll find it useful re. novelty vs. continuity. It’s from Thoburn’s book. Unfortunately he forgets Rose’s warnings later, which is something I’m trying to write about now. Needless to say, I prefer “configurative” approaches to epoch-making ones. But the two are endlessly intertwined, no?
Comment by Eric — January 10, 2006 @ 10:12 pm
hi Eric,
Thanks for this. I’ve still not read that book and need to. I’ll have to think more about this. My sense is that Negri does read Deleuze’s control society thing as an epoch, but then maybe I’m the one making the misreading somewhere along the line. I’m not sure.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 11, 2006 @ 1:30 am
Hi Nate (of 2006)!
This is the second time in two days that I’ve come across you randomly through a google search. Yesterday it was for ‘politicizing sadness’ (the Colectivo Situaciones text that you translated - thanks very much for that - i saw them speak last week, they mentioned that phrase, and i found this essay to flesh it out very well - also, I should tell you that Stevphen S. gave you a shoutout in his intro to their talk). Anyways, today I was looking up ‘bio-syndicalism’ and found your blog comment here. I was interested in the term from reading “Who’s Afraid of Immaterial Workers? Embodied Capitalism, Precarity, Imperceptibility” by Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos (on pp.13-14 of http://www.preclab.net/text/06-TsianosPapado-Precarity.pdf ) - which might give a better description of the idea than the PAD article (though i haven’t read that yet). Regardless, I basically agree with your point in your comment that the IWW has been doing something like biosyndicalism for over 100 years. In fact, I was thinking the same when I was reading this essay. However, I think that, while the IWW approximates biosyndicalism and gets out of the national compromise with the liberal state of trade unions, I think that the IWW could possibly improve its effectiveness through changing its mode of functioning to better approximate this biosyndicalism. Admittedly, I have thought and read way less about the IWW than you have, so I’m posing this challenge, not as an argument that I can back up, but rather as an opening for posing a question to you. Do you know of any good readings on the IWW in relation to recent work on precarity and immaterial labor? I.e., can you refer me to some of your own blog posts where you talk about this stuff and have relevant links?
I love how time and space collapse on the internet. I’m writing you from 6000 miles away, picking up a conversation you had over three years ago. Ha! I wish I could meet up with you for coffee tomorrow to talk about this stuff in person — we’ll do that in January for sure. Until then, whenever you get a chance, could you shoot me an email about my above question?
thanks!
avec solidarité,
eli
Comment by Eli M. — October 18, 2009 @ 5:50 pm