In an earlier post on Althusser I suggested that attention to (producing) the encounters within organizing be taken as a response to Althusser’s aleatory materialism. I still hold to that. On the other hand, there are other responses.
I’ve been collecting things to read on precarity recently, and it strikes me that there’s a relationship between the precarious and the aleatory.
Capitalism is precarious, write the PrecariPunx. They’re right. Precarious, and aleatory. Franco Ingrassia refers to an aleatory character of life submitted to the market, life as labor power, but there is also an aleatory quality to the processes of subjection by which that submission to the market, to the commodity form, are produced and reproduced.
Reproduction is the securing of future encounters. Security is only relative, of course. Security vs precarity, security and securitization (see the Precarias on the Logic of Security). Security and the state. Flexicurity.
In the ISAs essay, which I need to find my copy of, Althusser inquires into the reproduction of the capital relation. Ideology is less interesting than recasting this in terms of aleatory materialism. That is: how are encounters reproduced? More specifically, the encounters which produce capitalism, how are they reproduced? Taking primitive accumulation as a paradigm case, there are phylogenetic and ontogenetic encounters.
Toby Keith’s song “Can’t buy you money” - the breakdown of the truck is one aspect of an aleatory character of proletarian life.
The exchange between owner of money and owner of labor power (ie, bosses and workers) has an aleatory character. Will the encounter occur? (Purchase in the labor market.) Will the it last? (Lasting employment.) Will labor encounter means of production and produce value? (Attempt to impose work on labor power purchased)
If it’s any use to you the ISAs article is online, with correct pagination etc.
http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/LPOE70ii.html
Comment by Rob — September 16, 2006 @ 9:04 pm
Thanks Rob.
Comment by Nate — September 16, 2006 @ 9:14 pm
Nate, I read your post on Althusser’s Philosophy of the Encounter with great interest. I find myself wondering whether we shouldn’t distinguish between different types of encounters. It seems to me that any organized system is under the constraint of producing the “precarious” so as to continue its operations. For instance, a communications system such as the news must necessarily create the precarious so as to continue reporting, as information being a difference that makes a difference, no longer functions as information once it’s repeated. It seems to me that the same holds true under capitalism. Capitalism must continuously create new products, at the level of form, so as to continue creating new markets. It relies on the production of a remainder so that it might then turn that remainder into a product.
I haven’t read Althusser’s book yet, but is this the same sort of encounter he’s talking about?
Comment by Sinthome — September 17, 2006 @ 6:06 am
hi Sinthome,
I agree completely - encounters qua encounters doesn’t tell us a whole lot. My sense is that Althusser uses the ancient atomist ‘rain of atoms’ account as a way to break out of some bad ideas within Marxism. Some of the basic tenets of the alternative position are that accomplished historical events were not pre-determined, that current historical processes do not have pre-determined outcomes, and that what happens tomorrow is a wide open question (a dice throw, that’s a metaphor he likes quite a bit). In that respect, then, the encounter stuff can serve as basically a story which has a function of helping one shed the opposite of these tenets and to acquire these ones. That’s how I like to read the encounter stuff, anyway. That particular story was not required to produce that effect (that is, the effect could have been had via other means and others could have that effect now via other means - many roads to a similar destination, so to speak). On my read, then, the account isn’t much of an ontology then, because it’s embraced for its result and not held to be a claim about the actual world. I like that read because I don’t much care about ontology. I’m not sure that’s Althusser’s read of his own work, though.
Althusser also tried to develop a reading on Marx in line with this sensibility. He focuses in particular on the encounters that take place as narrated in the final chapters of v1 of Capital, “so-called primitive accumulation.” Capitalism consists of encounters between owners of two commodities: money/means of subsistence and labor power. The conditions of production for labor power as a commodity (or, the conditions for the encounter between owners of money and owners of labor power) were and are primitive accumulation.
We could, though also doesn’t very much, also identify other modes of encounter as well. In another post on this, here - http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2006/08/05/is-an-encounter/ - I tried a little to link the encounter stuff to my own experiences of trying to organize in workplaces. That’s the direction I’m most interested in trying to go with the late Althusser, aleatory materialism and thinking about organization. Althusser gestures a bit toward this at one point as well in POE via a remark about Machiavelli attempting to create the conditions for an encounter (an encounter potentially creative of an Italian people and a state for them, which also suggests that aleatory materialism is not solely the purview of anti-statist/libertarian marxists).
I also think of this encounter stuff as somewhat formal, a procedure or method for producing certain types of knowledge 0 maps and histories - wherein one can map elements onto the atomist picture: void, atoms, fall, swerve, encounter, resultant world. I don’t think this is particularly interesting if one says “Xs and only Xs” - say, workplaces or states or commodities or whatever - “can count as worlds or atoms”, that is a sort of realist read of the account. Rather I think one can take something - say, a firm like Starbucks - and either identify its component parts, that is, as atoms) (supply chains, divisions, employees, etc) or identify it as a component (an atom) of a larger ensemble (the coffeeshop industry in New York or in North America, or the ensemble of companies that seek to use a progressive image as a selling point, etc). One then tries to account for where the whole and the different parts came from, where they seem to be going, what are the forces operating in terms of relative inertia, relative friction, entropy/dissolution and/or presence of potential new positive conditions. Sorry that’s not very clear… If you get around to reading the new collection I’d be keen to hear what you think. I think there’s a lot of resonance in it with Badiou and Ranciere, from what I’ve read of those two. Which makes sense, I guess, since they’re former associates of his.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — September 17, 2006 @ 8:46 pm