Opening Jun and Smith’s Deleuze and Ethics, I’m confronted with Jeffrey Bell’s article “Whistle While You Work: Deleuze and the Spirit of Capitalism”. Bell nails it right in his opening paragraphs:
In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx pointedly argues that within the capitalist system “the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. As Marx contends, and as is well known, it is precisely the power of labor that has become “congealed in an object,” that is, in a commodity (or service) that exists independently and “becomes a power on its own confronting him.” In short, the life which the power of labor has conferred on “the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.” Our work has become a foe, a test and trial we must endure before we can begin to do what we really want to do. Work or play, as Deleuze and Guattari note, has become one of the great molar segments that divides us, an exclusive disjunction that pervades daily life. There is the melancholy of the Monday morning blues; there is the hope that emerges as Wednesday, hump day, draws to a close and there is less of the drudgery of work before us than behind us; and finally how many times have we heard our colleagues at work express joy at the fact that it is Friday. We can even spend our hard-earned cash at T.G.I. Friday’s, for now it is time to play.
Here comes the good part. Jeff continues:
Despite the alienation Marx speaks of, we nonetheless continue to show up for work. The reason we do so is simple: necessity. As Marx puts it, labor has become “merely a means to satisfy needs external to it”– namely, it allows us to put food on the table. It was for this reason that Marx argues that the worker “no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions,” for as this point is clarified a few pages later, animals such as bees, beavers, and ants produce “only under the dominion of immediate physical need, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom.” It is this latter point that will be the primary focus of the following paper. What does it mean to produce in freedom from physical need? [my italics]
Bell nails it, and in a way I’ve never quite heard it put before. This is what autonomy is. Autonomy is not the untenable idea that reason is a free and fully self-present self-direction wherein there is no heteronomy in the form of pre-discursive neurological and affective processes, where the implements we use play no interactive role in determining that of which we are capable and what our goals are, where we are little gods that have complete mastery over ourselves and over the world about us. Again and again (Freud, Nietzsche, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, Marx) the unreasonableness of such a conception of reason has been demonstrated, yet still the armchair warriors insist that this is what autonomy is. They even go so far as to engage in circular arguments, saying ‘but, but, but if we didn’t have this sort of reason we wouldn’t be able to do x”; as if wishing pigs could fly and claiming that it is necessary that pigs be able to fly were sufficient to establish that something is true and to dismiss wide swaths of empirical evidence that it is categorically untrue.
No, autonomy, freedom, if it could come to exist, would be that state of affairs in which we could produce without doing so under the necessity of producing. Autonomy would be a form of existence where we aren’t slaves to necessity or needs precisely because necessity and needs have been taken care of. Note how differently this situates the question. When posed in this way we aren’t directed to idealist incantations about transcendental and self-determining subjects. No, here we’re directed to questions about the materiality of the world, the materiality of our body, the materiality of existing social relations, and our entanglement with the entire ecosystem characterizing these three materialities.
June 20, 2011 at 10:21 pm
A number of Marxist scholars have written on how the goal of achieving a postcapitalist society would involve the self-abolition of the working class qua working class, and have noted how already under capitalism the means of production (technologies and methods of organization) increasingly render the proletariat itself anachronistic, how they produce their own superfluity en route along the path to an emancipated society. Kant was wrong in his moral system only in the sense that it was ahistorical; heteronomous forces, “pathologies” like natural instinct, external necessity, and inclination could not but determine the actions of men in a society where unfreedom remained a fact of life. But his transcendental ideal of moral autonomy can be realized only through the process of history, in the transition to a society built on the principle of total human freedom.
June 20, 2011 at 10:35 pm
“Autonomy is not the untenable idea that reason is a free and fully self-present self-direction wherein there is no heteronomy in the form of pre-discursive neurological and affective processes, where the implements we use play no interactive role in determining that of which we are capable and what our goals are, where we are little gods that have complete mastery over ourselves and over the world about us.”
Good thing no one has ever suggested such a thing! Of course, if they had, you’d be able to cite some textual evidence…
June 20, 2011 at 10:43 pm
Thanks for “educating” me, Ben. At the risk of sounding a bit nasty, do you guys (I’m referring to the handful of orthodox Marxists that have participated on my blog) realize that you sound like “pop-music”, i.e., that you all sound the same or that you seem to have a lock step script that you get procrammed with and all regurgitate when prompted by signals? Your only move seems to be reterritorialization on references and doxa that you’ve been instilled with. The insulting premise seems to be that you assume everyone else–oftenpeople that have much broader experience and learning than yourself –don’t know these things, that they are in a state of ignorance, and are in need of being reterritorialized on your system of references. As a consequence, all of you find yourself in a performative contradiction. You wish to produce change and revolution, yet because you offer only orthodoxy your interventions are so offputting in the manner in which they undermine freedom (“repeat or be excluded!”) that no one wants to join your club. It’s as if the unconscious of your discourse is masochistic, such that through its mode of engagement it strives to sabotage itself so it can maintain the place of what Hegel called the beautiful soul, ie., that subject that is secretly dependent on the order it denounces so as to appear beautiful to itself and that therefore engages in such a way as to maintain the existence of that world it denounces. Do you have anything to contribute to any discussion that actually participates in the discussion and that doesn’t simply attempt to assimilate it to your privileged and familiar references and categories? Or are you merely like the writer of Ecclesiastes, sneeringly proclaiming that there is nothing new under the sun?
June 20, 2011 at 10:52 pm
Brandomizer,
Given that you, a paragon of norms, refuse to post under your own name but to shoot spitwads anonymously, I’m posting your comment against my better judgment. As for evidence of anyone who’s said this, you need only look at Kant’s conception of reason in the second Critique and Groundwork, where reason is to admit of no heteronomous determinations that do not arise from reason itself. Likewise, we can add Brandom to this list insofar as he explicitly excludes the prediscursive from the domain of reason in Articulating Reasons. I’ve already quoted those passages in an earlier post (either my post on black ecology, I think, or commodities). Adorno even makes this very exclusion and separation the focus of all of his analyses and critiques of Kant’s moral thought. Do you guys take the time to even read your own favored figures?
June 21, 2011 at 12:01 am
Levi,
I don’t know the exact term for it, but this reminds me of some thinkers who postulate that someday all grueling labor could be carried out by robots (farming robots, construction robots, cleaning robots) and thus all workers would instead take up the role of technocrats and repairmen who need only fix bots or create new systems when the need calls for it. Again, I don’t know what this type of idea is called, but I suspect it could go one of two ways: A) Laborers suddenly have tremendous amounts of free-time to pursue pleasure-work or B) Capitalism will simply create new relations, IE: The invention of the computer, which would cut the time needed to produce a newspaper nearly in half, simply led to the creation of more newspapers in shorter time, not shorter work days. Or likewise, with the invention of the automobile people could travel further distances in a shorter time, so citizens, rather than living where they worked, now spread out and travelled to work, making the automobile somewhat redundant.
June 21, 2011 at 1:08 am
Oh, and Brandomizer (and this goes for the alleged “Andrew Jackson” as well) given that you deontologists are always going on about contracts and promises as your prime example of categorical imperatives, I’m curious as to how a contract is maintained and honored when identities are obviously anonymous. I’m just keasuring you by your own standard here. One of your ilk, Alexie, tried to tell me that this was irrelevant to normativity years ago before he fizzled out and mistakenly posted under his own name. He then tried to claim that somehow full disclosure was somehow irrelevant to normative reason. One wonders, however, why anKnight of Juridical Norms would have to hide behind anonimity if their behaviour and motives were forthright. No. I think we discover what Nietzsche said about norms here: that they’re priests acting on behalf of a will to power rather than honest interlocutors. Your talk of norms is just an attempt to rig the game in your favor, not a desire to engage in rational discourse. This is why you’re all such bad readers of your own heroes. You look for weapons, not reason. Indeed, you never cared about reason or norms to begin with.
June 21, 2011 at 1:29 am
When saying that free-autonomous production only occurs outside of the “necessity of production,” isn’t it important to differentiate between (for lack of better terms) “inner necessity” (i.e., that feeling of necessity flowing forth from my own exposure to what exists) and “imposed necessity” (i.e., that obligation imposed from the outside, to sell my time for a wage, etc.)? By “inner necessity,” I am not trying to direct my observations toward “idealist incantations about transcendental and self-determining subjects,” but rather toward the necessity of producing things that are “for us”– or “for freedom freed from necessity.” I’m not sure how you would characterize such freed freedom, but it would seem to be an end-for-itself, and it would seem that exercising it on my own behalf exercises it on behalf of the other as well. (I’m reminded of Celan’s Meridian speech where the freeing of existence of the one implies or at least suggests the freeing of the existence of the other– the other and the Wholly Other.)
I’m thinking of this statement by Marx, “[Capital] is … despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development.” What I see in this day-and-age is that even one’s “disposable time” (i.e., “play” time) seems corralled back into the “machine,” that the idea of “for their own development,” is corrupted. All the spectacles and commodities that pretend to offer us a freedom and development of our own capacities to be social, stylish, to self-express and create, in fact do not free us from “labour time” at all. Maintaining self-image itself becomes a way of “being on the clock”– on the imposed necessity of the competitive-economic-political sphere, as opposed to the “outside time” of “inner necessity.” Is there, or isn’t there, a kind of ethical or political imperative to clarify this “for their own”– always split by the undecidable line between imposed and freely chosen?
The strength of Adorno, Foucault, seem to be in their resolute “no-saying” and resistance against the imposition of an “outer necessity” in the guise of an “inner one”– all the way to the point of mobilizing non-identity for the sake of identity (though I’ve often occasion to ask: has the rhetoric/trope of negativity exhausted itself?).
My questions stem from a line by Schelling about artistic creation that’s been ringing in my ear lately: “Production is not purposive but it’s product indeed is.” The main contradiction for him is indeed necessity and freedom, and this is a contradiction that works itself ad infinitum, reaches this working’s pinnacle in the artwork (or “an infinity which no finite understanding can fully unfold”).
I guess my main question is this: does a necessity emerge beyond the (imposed, given, labour-time-bound etc.) “necessary”? Even without any specific “goal,” doesn’t “production unencumbered by necessity” imply something necessary in itself? Even if only the unleashing of singular freedoms, once and each time? Even if only to expose us to this tension freedom/necessity in a way that animates us to reach the limit of interaction, production, representation, etc.?
June 21, 2011 at 3:33 am
Levi:
I don’t know how I insulted you but if I have I’m sorry. I haven’t noticed many other Marxists around here, and I’m not sure why you would even take me to be an ‘orthodox’ Marxist. I’m no Solomon, either; I just make remarks where they seem appropriate. Apparently my remarks were inappropriate and for that I apologize.
You are correct about Adorno’s critique of Kant’s moral philosophy. And Adorno approaches it from multiple angles, too. From a psychoanalytic perspective, he shatters the unity of the conscious ego. More hilariously, Adorno points out how Kant’s attempt to demonstrate the transparency of autonomous moral freedom is urged on by the bourgeoisie’s grasping need to legitimate itself in the realm of formal freedom. He notes how all of Kant’s examples for moral situations are placed within the bourgeois locus of exchange: the cardsharp, the store clerk, etc.
As far as labor being carried out by “robots” or something of the like, I’m certain that there is some reality to this science fiction. Machines have already eliminated countless degrading and repetitive tasks formerly carried out by humans. There has been much agony along the way — the massive unemployment this generates, the poor workers who were forced to toil as limbs of those Cyclopean factory machines — but the payoff has shown both in the productivity and the creation of generalized human knowledge of how such machines work. Automation is a marvelous thing. The problem, as always, is never inherently technological, although instrumental reason can easily tend to dominate technological thought. Instead, the problem is that of social organization. Sorry, Levi, if this all sounds rehearsed, but the truth of the matter must often be retold despite its redundancy.
June 21, 2011 at 5:11 am
Interesting. Agamben has some good stuff in Nudities along these lines, though more in the vein of consumption without necessity. That said, wouldn’t work without necessity be more a matter of exerting effort without any rule of passage for doing so? It may seem like a negligible distinction, but a lot rides on the term “necessity,” For example, there could be a need — possibly real, possibly perceived — to escape mere physical necessity!
June 21, 2011 at 5:23 am
I feel for Drew, especially when I think of Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” It’s great and all about liberating ourselves from the drudgery of property (one of those peculiar “necessities” we live with nowadays) until he starts talking about machines sweeping the floor and doing other sorts of intolerable manual labor: instantly I feel like I’m at the sorcerer’s place after hours with Mickey. That said, if the computer made newspapers defunct as for-profit groups or even just as groups that can secure its members a decent wage, I don’t see where the problem is if we eliminate by other means the necessity of their livelihood hinging on /this work/. The explosion of newspapers may reside in the fact that people are doing it because they want, but for now it probably also says something about people trying to find a balance between what they’re good at, what gives them satisfaction to do and what gets them a piece of the proverbial pie.
June 21, 2011 at 6:11 am
Ursula K. Le Guin thinks this stuff through in “The Dispossessed” and makes what it would take to work under no clear pressure of necessity (as well as what happens to necessary work and how we relate to it) very compelling psychologically.
June 21, 2011 at 11:25 pm
Joe,
“instantly I feel like I’m at the sorcerer’s place after hours with Mickey.”
Fantasia=secret robot-pinko fantasy? :)
Or, just hire people with OCD to clean floors- they actually take joy in cleaning and are probably not alienated from the means of toilet bowl cleansing.
June 22, 2011 at 12:41 pm
[...] has an interesting discussion here of the notion of autonomy in response to an article by Jeffrey Bell on the meaning of autonomous [...]
June 22, 2011 at 12:50 pm
“Autonomy is not the untenable idea that reason is a free and fully self-present self-direction.”
There are workable compatiblist conceptions of autonomy, so I’m inclined to think that the bogey of presence is a straw man. It is possible to understand the capacity for autonomy in terms of deliberative capacities which allow creatures like ourselves to choose and act in accordance with values. Being able to deliberate about what you want (or want to want) does not imply contra-causal freedom, let alone some mythical form of unbroached presence.
However, the idea of absence of necessity here may have gainful employment in a theory of political autonomy. Assuming that we have some kind of conception of individual autonomy (not necessarily the cognitivist kind I’ve recapitulated here) then we have a sense of a being whose welfare is entwined with the range of options available to it. Necessity coerces by limiting options. Scarcity imposes necessity. Thus we enhance the welfare of beings by minimizing scarcity. An argument for Marxist transhumanism.
June 23, 2011 at 11:27 pm
My friend Scott Shershow’s book The Work and the Gift is in this domain.
June 24, 2011 at 2:13 pm
Sorry, I have an off-topic question. Didn’t Deleuze write somewhere that “you should only write about what you love”? I am sure I remember reading this somewhere, but do not remember where, can anyone help? Thank you so much.
June 24, 2011 at 2:33 pm
generative shocks to the system, beyond production?
June 24, 2011 at 4:44 pm
Jeroenn,
In one of the prefaces to Difference and Reptition he says we should only write about what we understand poorly.
June 24, 2011 at 6:07 pm
Drew – Capitalism has already thought up these new relations and we have been participating in them for quite a while.
Thought experiment:
1) Society where all human material needs are created completely by machines
2) Property relations are a small group of people own the machines – vast majority own nothing
3) Political relations, this small minority of machine-owners has significant power
Not too hard to envision, and I don’t see the science fiction.
The question: how does the vast majority receive income needed to buy goods?
Answer: the minority can require certain activities/behaviors in order to receive an income, regardless of their impact on producing material wealth.
OK, so 2nd question: how is surplus value extracted?
If we use a crude Marxist interpretation of profit and the labor theory of value, it would appear that there is no surplus value is created, and without profit such a society would fail. We could even use the word “inevitable”, if we wanted to be arrogant about it.
But such an interpretation is flawed on many levels, one of which is confuse the real with the representational, but primarily is due to a misunderstanding of time.
Time is part of material reality – as Marx clearly spoke of labour-time as the source of surplus-value. (As a note, we should remember that surplus-value is surplus exchange value, not surplus use value.) While it looks as if capital is involved in the capture of surplus material wealth, that is a side effect of the capture of surplus exchange value.
When we understand time as part of material reality, and that a political system needs to harness and organize society’s time, then the necessity of wages equaling the minimum amount needed to reproduce labour-time is a function of capturing time in the guise of capturing physical material wealth.
It appears that the driving factor is physical material wealth, after all we need to eat in order to live. But to live is to extend one’s time in the material world. This isn’t a question of cause/effect or even primacy. It is very easy to idealize time and ignore its material character.
If we accept that time is what comprises surplus value, then we can see a decoupling of the real productive capacity of an economy from the extractive requirement of capital.
The contradiction of capital is that it produces an economic system that can potentially provide the material requirements of the planet, but is unable to allow the planet access to such wealth. In simple terms, if the majority had the time to think about it, they could organize a new way of managing the economy.
Back to our thought experiment: if we understand time as surplus-value, then the time that capital requires the rest of us to engage in “non-productive” activities will continue to generate profit, even though no additional labour-time is input into the creation of the means of subsistence.
So, the proletariat has not ceased to exist, its historical form has shifted from factory workers to broader, more diffuse social strata. But our time is still extracted, is alienated from us.
When Marx spoke about commodity fetishism, I wonder if he realized Marxists would be some of the most egregious fetishists.
What is insidious is that these activities are increasingly unpaid. Now unpaid work is nothing new, the historical example of household work the best known. But this required “non-work” is becoming more and more a part of our daily existence.
So, “What does it mean to produce in freedom from physical need?” I think it first requires a clear understanding of the materiality of time – what does it mean to “own my own time”?
The concept of “… produce without doing so under the necessity of producing” does not quite hit the right note for me. I say that Robinson Crusoe having to go find coconuts is an example of autonomy, perhaps in building the conditions to free up his own time. There is an obvious necessity for Robinson to go produce some edible coconuts. I think that type of necessity is very different from a socially-imposed necessity which purpose is to capture one time’s – that is, a social relation directly opposed to freedom and autonomy (as Tim points out).
June 25, 2011 at 7:46 pm
A point that seemed to be missed by most of these comments – and perhaps not surprisingly since I’d wager only Levi has read the essay in question – is that autonomy is not to be understood as the self-identity of a working-self independent of necessity, but rather the intensive, pre-indiividual processes that are irreducible to the determinate necessities of the self, and thus are not to be understood as autonomous in the sense naive Kantians would recognize (which is fine by me). Thanks Levi for your kind words.
June 29, 2011 at 10:22 pm
[...] Marx argues, because we work under conditions of forced necessity, and because we are alienated from the [...]