What in the hell …

The conductivity of the ether is not to be understimated, particularly its capacity to conduct (really, to produce or increase the velocity of) rancor, and feet into mouths.

Jodi did a post at Long Sunday about this recently, it was timely for me. I recently passed on a rather shit review that appeared in Mute of the Cambridge Immaterial Labor conference. I forward the review to the aut-op-sy list without commenting (I was in a rush and didn’t really think about it), thus giving the impression I agreed w/ the review. I’ve subsequently been apologizing via email to folk who were part of the conference, to say that I don’t like the review or its disrespect of the amount of work that goes into hosting an event like that. I’ve also been taking pains to say I do have some disagreements or reservations over some of what I’ve heard of the political projects and analysis that were presented at the conference (basically, project = basic income and analysis = hegemony of immaterial labor) but that these are issues that should be discussed productively and in a comradely fashion.

Disagreement and negative affect entwine easily, and even more so in the ether and in left theory circles, at least in my experience. (Christ, the bile that’s flowed from out- to inbox and back again via aut-op-sy!) I suspect it’s partly a matter of the speed which the interweb allows: one can type with heated fingers then send sans any time to cool down and rethink. It’s also partly a matter of being by oneself, not in the presence of the person one’s dissing on (Jodi’s post takes this up). It’s also I think a holdover, a historical relic or cultural spillover of discussions wherein something very important hangs in the balance - the direction of the Party, expulsion of infiltrators, etc. That would at least seem to explain an air of being world-historical (more simply, of a lot riding on the outcomes) of some of more acrimonious fights about political theory I’ve seen. This can also occur in person, of course (I was in a really bad anarchist theory reading group years ago, and a Capital reading group that had to be put down) and it’s really amazing how rude or cruel some folk are capable of being to others’ faces without blinking, but I think the e-format makes it easier to do so (and easier to do so accidentally) for folk who are less inclined to do so in person.

Part of the dark side of immaterial labor, perhaps. On that note, I’ve read two papers posted on the web sit from that conference, the one by Steve and the one by Emma Dowling. I like them both quite a bit.

Dowling’s paper connects with some of what I’d been thinking about labor power, some of which is addressed in the stuff by Virno I posted recently.

She writes that we should not “take for granted that [immaterial] labour carries with it such a definitive potential for an “elementary communism” internal to the labour itself and external to capital” as HN et al suggest. I find the paper convincing in raising problems about what are seen to be increased liberatory potentials in immaterial labour, about how at least some accounts of immaterial labour flatten out differences in labor process and hierarchies inside the class, and about the idea that immaterial production is not measurable. (Of course, I was already convinced so I’m predisposed to finding this convincing. Folk should read the paper for themselves.)

Dowling writes

“Whereas the potential for the kinds of life activity that my labour as a waitress consisted of existed prior to the capital relation I was bound up in, it was capital that gave it its particular form in the relations established in the restaurant. The exaggerated treatment of the guests, this exaggeration of what any normal relationship would be like, and not least the fact that the relationship was not just about creating social forms of life with them, but in serving them, often engaging in mild forms of prostitution to do so, within a complex power relation that cannot be separated from the capital relations with which it exists, set the measure for this kind of labour. This form of labour was not just alienating because it was performed under command or because it became automated and mechanical as opposed to spontaneous and natural. Importantly, the social relations created were completely altered by the active presence and active intervention of capital. Further to this, the use value of my affective labour was constantly “objectively” established through specific processes of measurement that served to quantify its corresponding exchange value.”

What struck me here is particularly the bit about the potential being prior but the activity not. I’d break it down as follows: the capacity to do a certain type of labor exists prior to the sale of that capacity as the commodity labor power, C(LP). This capacity is less than the set of capacities that the person who sells labor power has. The use of C(LP) by the boss is labor, making someone work. (One of the basic policing mechanisms of this is payment after the fact, the worker’s extension of credit to the boss - working for a while then being paid after the fact - as opposed to many other commodities which are paid for then used.)

Hardt and Negri suggest that there is a liberatory possibility in immaterial labor - in the actuality shaped by capitalism - rather than in the potential, in the immaterial capacity, of labor power as such (the capacity to craft social relations being the most important one that subtends all the rest). This is an overly abstract way to say that HN aim to derive a politics (political composition) from the shape of the labor process (technical composition). The project should be precisely the other way around. The technical composition is a result of/response to the political composition (I’d like to revisit Panzieri on this, if anyone’s game).

Put another way, technical recomposition occurs at least some of the time in order to cause political decomposition. The technical is political, in a negative sense: it has negative results, and is that which we want to negate (destroy the labor process, refusal of work). It is a target, perhaps a terrain, it is not something which makes us what we are or provides us with the range of our possibilities, not something from which to derive the supposition of a new anthropological possibility. At most, it’s something to use as evidence that old overly limited conceptions of our possibilities were too narrow - never right in the first place. (I’ve tried to argue this before, repeatedly.)

Derivation of the political from the technical is I think what makes Negri make the claim here that refusal of work no longer makes sense. He writes, “The refusal of work was imaginable in a Fordist society, but today it becomes increasingly less thinkable.” And “Nowadays workers carry their instruments of labour inside their own heads – so how is one to refuse work, or sabotage work? Should one commit suicide? Work is our dignity.” He specifies further, “There is the refusal of command over work, but that is quite another thing.”

This distinction of labor and command over labor is precisely what Dowling’s paper renders problematic with regard to immaterial labor. Her affective social-life-productive capacities exercised as a waitress have liberatory potentials, certainly. The labor of waitressing, however, does not (beyond those already in the potential within labor power and perhaps a certain weakness of the policing mechanism or strength of workers due to organization), any more than any other kind of labor. This is because it is “performed under command” and even more so “the social relations created were completely altered by the active presence and active intervention of capital.” That is to say, like any labor, qua capitalist use of C(LP), this labor produces social relations in the form of capital. (Which is not to say there is complete domination, the absence of antagonism or other potentials.) The liberatory potentials are in the chances to slow or prevent the setting to work of C(LP), as in Mike’s comments on the Virno, and in the potentials to not be C(LP) at all, potentials which we must subtract from the capital relation. (Not that it’s easy, of course. And the ease with which one fucks up electronically sometimes makes it harder.) Thinking through the capacity to do so - to subtract, to refuse - is useful. Even more so is to learn and think about ways has been done before and is being done now (on this latter Mike’s project springs to mind, as does JC’s recent suggestion along similar lines, among others), and to try to practice these to whatever limited degree one is able to do so in one’s sphere of influence.