Work Refusal (25 May 2011)

I spent the past weekend at the Post/Autonomia conference, which, fittingly enough, mostly took place in a former anatomical pathology laboratory -- the sessions were held in a room that was apparently once a morgue. At first, I was afraid that the ideas we were about to discuss (derived principally from autonomist writers like Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzaurato, Mario Tronti, John Holloway, Harry Cleaver, etc.) were possibly coming there to die, but I left feeling much more optimistic about the possibility that concepts like precarity and affective labor and decolonialization can escape the lab and actually be effectual in social activism.

Discussions ran the gamut from hairsplitting (to the untrained non-Spinozan) philosophical discussions of ontological accumulation and being-as-becoming to more hard-core Marxist themes like the composition of the working class, the organic composition of capital, and who comprises the revolutionary agent of history to practical assessments of the efficacy of, say, social media to activate the "multitude" (or, if you prefer, to sustain the Badiouian "communist hypothesis"), and it ended with a discussion of whether academia was at all a useful place for the discussion of any of this or whether it was fatally subsumed by capital. (I contributed a paper about social media as sustaining the entrepreneurial neoliberal self, not sure where/when/if it will be published.)

I took lots of notes while I was there; now I am having a lot of trouble deciphering them. Many of them, if I recall correctly, refer to the evolving strategies of work refusal discussed. The term is a bit of a misnomer. The idea of refusing work can seem odd in the midst of widespread unemployment and generalized precarity (indeed, one of the papers that stood out for me was Maria Isabel Casas-Cortes's tracing of the broadening circles of whom precarity could apply to), but it makes more sense if work is interpreted in the broadest sense to include the various forms of self-production, self-exploitation, and affective, digital and free labor that often go uncompensated by wages anyway. Franco "Bifo" Berardi's paper adopted this theme, advocating what sounded like voluntary simplicity, presumably as a means of thwarting the "hypercomplexity" and overload of our accelerated information processing capacities, though possibly also to escape the labor of consumption that reinforces consumerism, "semiocapitalism" (which I think means something like Baudrillard's conception of consumerism as consumption of signs), and individualism. I'm not sold on voluntary simplicity or some sort of hermeneutics of asceticism; more interesting to me was the implication that resistance could be organized and targeted at choice architecture and over-friendly user interfaces, which tend toward quietly normalizing one-dimensionality. Some of the same themes appear in his essay "Cognitarian Subectivation", which I commented on here.

Matteo Pasquinelli's paper suggested, in line with Christian Marazzi's work, that capitalism is moving to a model of rent extraction through financialization rather than exploiting surplus labor more directly. One might conceptualize this shift as a reaction to mechanization reducing the input of "living labor" into production, which would also be a way to characterize work refusal. I thought it fit with what Adam Arvidsson and Elanor Colleoni argue in their paper "Value in Information Capitalism and on the Internet" (pdf, my summary) with regard to Facebook.

Emanuel Rota discussed work refusal in terms of the right to be lazy, à la Paul Lafargue, whereas Stevphen Shukaitis stressed the necessity of "learning not to work," and the different forms work refusal must take according to different class positions and situations. He seemed to argue that we needed to better recognize affective labor so as to refuse it and cataloged the history of "art strikes," or the refusal of cultural labor. I presumed he meant the refusal not of creativity as such but the supplemental labor necessary for making creativity subsumable by capital -- the organizational and infrastructural labor that supports creative labor as a product, makes it packageable, profitable. This would include, as I conceive it, the branding, the marketing, the "getting it out there" work as well as the sort of care work that allows people to create in a self-aggrandizing mode. Shukaitis seemed to want to repartition work from leisure in order to facilitate the time-space for autonomous personal development, though this is easier said than done, considering that social recognition is now bound up with forms of self-commodification more than ever thanks to social media.

Refusing work is thus a matter of recharacterizing work as "ludic activity" -- which is a way of saying "play" without risking trivialization. But that can't collapse into entertaining oneself -- I am not sure that an art strike is needed; it seems like an attention strike is what's wanted, a refusal to get caught up in interactive entertainments that make our pursuit of distraction productive. Instead, we need what Federico Luisetti described during the session Q&A as a right to be bored -- a right to refuse to be entertained or distracted. It's easy to see this idea gaining momentum as information overload continues to worsen. Boredom will become a figure for the repose and replenishing necessary before concentration is possible, or perhaps even as a metonym for concentration itself. When capitalism wants to hurry us through commodified information at ever increasing speeds to valorize it all, boredom becomes a way of slowing things down, of resisting, of holding out for a minimal self rooted not in accumulation of trivia but in a kind of open-ended blankness.

I suppose I understand refusal of work as resisting personal branding, of refusing to be, as one speaker said, "dragged into networks of consumerism" in search of identity but holding out for other kinds of nurturing community that social networks increasingly obscure. It seems to me a matter of defying the injunction to be reflexive, to instrumentalize self-awareness, and try for self-forgetting. Instead of pursuing measurable attention, which induces one to see the self in terms of capitalistic accumulation and expansion, one could seek forms of intersubjectivity that supply a reciprocal recognition without lapsing into exploitable performativity. (I am failing by my own standards of course.)

Mediation and midlife-crisis movies (14 April 2011)

Perhaps in anticipation of an incipient midlife crisis, I recently watched John Sayles's 1980 film Return of the Secaucus 7 and then The Big Chill (1983), one of the "what happened to us, we used to be so cool!" movies that came in its wake. Though the films are similarly structured -- they both focus on a weekend-long reunion of baby-boomer friends during which they drink a lot, play sports, hookup illicitly and indulge in nostalgic reveries -- they are entirely different in tone.

Sayles's film is loose and subtle, populated with nonactors and aiming for a kind of organic naturalism, whereas The Big Chill is full of histrionic Hollywood stars and ham-fisted thematic exposition. (Early on, Jeff Goldblum has a phone conversation in which he basically explains what the movie is supposed to be about. Very meta.) The acting in Secaucus 7 is not particularly convincing in a conventional sense, but the stiltedness starts to connote authenticity and becomes a kind of transparency. In The Big Chill the acting is anything but transparent, and its badness can't be ignored, especially since they seem to be trying so hard. (What is with Kevin Kline's Southern accent? And when Jobeth Williams makes a pass at Tom Berenger, is she supposed to come across as campy? And is there anything more contrived than the "dance" sequence in the kitchen?)

Secaucus 7 has a timeless indie-ness about it, but it also comes very distinctly from a pre-mediated age. (One telling scene has characters stuck on the highway, wrangling with an actual paper roadmap -- hard to conceive in the iPhone era.) It's shot on location in a nondescript town in New Hampshire. The characters (who have come together in what seems to be an annual ritual) play board games, listen to live music at a town bar, hang out by the river, play basketball at the neighborhood playground, and that sort of thing. The film is saturated in small-town pleasures and pursuits; the only hint of any "glamour industries" is in the characters who work for a senator in D.C., whom they disparage. No one seems to have much money. The emotional significance of everything is muted: One of the visiting couples has just split up and their pain is palpable without being overwrought, sending out ripples through the relations of everyone else. The looming possibility of love's entropic decay serves as a background for the other implicit tensions: a character played by Sayles drunkenly runs through the pros and cons of parenting, a woman in med school sleeps with a local Lothario (played by a young and goofy David Strathairn), a drifter wannabe musician bums money off his friends and considers really trying to "make it." You have a sense that it has just dawned on all of them that life might possibly having turning points and that adulthood inevitably involves a reckoning with the adolescent dreams that may or may not have propelled you to where you are and which may still be malingering in the back of one's mind. It's all meant to ultimately disconcert viewers; the surface mellowness can no longer defer having to deal with life. For people who love one another and have become embedded in one another's lives to continue to get along, they have to embrace conflict. Social being takes inescapable effort.

In The Big Chill, everything has been Reaganized. The film is set at a mansion on the South Carolina coast, and there are Porsches, power suits, cocaine, branded running shoes, VCRs, home video cameras, hideously furnished family rooms with home entertainment centers, and so on. The small town we see briefly appears to already be a gutted relic rather than a living place with its own palpable rhythms. Several of the characters work in media: a TV star, a writer for People magazine, a radio call-in psychologist, and their melodramatic posturing sometimes seems as though it is a consequence of their proximity to the media. It's not clear if this is by design or of it was simply an expression of the zeitgeist, but all the characters exude a smug self-awareness that makes their emotional difficulties seem maudlin and extra contrived. (I think the moral center of the film is Jobeth Williams' square husband, who views all the other characters with contempt, seeing them as the childish narcissists that they are, and simply leaves the scene after basically telling them to get over themselves.) The occasion for their reunion is the suicide of one of their friends, which prompts lots of overwrought and glib soul searching. William Hurt narrates his pain to a video camera, setting the template for Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and while there is no live music in the diegesis, all the characters experience poignant moments scored to 1960s hits, proto-Wes Anderson style. And eventually the rightness of nesting and checking out politically is affirmed, as Kevin Kline praises the cops for protecting his property, Mary Kay Place gets impregnated, and William Hurt hooks up with Meg Tilly to fix up an old house. Conflicts have been discharged for viewers, who can flatter themselves that they have been living right all along. The question of social being becomes irrelevant; there is only private life.

My point is that Secaucus 7 dramatizes how friends help one another get through life, positing a bond that transcends life's phases and stages. The friends as group transcends the ebb and flow in the individuals' lives and gives those individuals a point of orientation, a reason to resist moral drift. The Big Chill shows us the opposite: the evaporation of the concept of collectivity or collective identity and the self-dramatization for friends-as-audience that replaces it. The friend group in The Big Chill has degraded into a social network: the bonds connecting them are wholly nostalgic. They get together to serially justify themselves to one anther but mainly to themselves. They give each other no resources on which to draw to resist rationalizing their lives into hollowness. That's why Jeff Goldblum's blunt and repellant reporter character, who tries too hard to sleep with the deceased's girlfriend and who eagerly exploits the details of his friends' lives for work product, is covertly normative in The Big Chill; though he is tepidly demonized, his character's true function is to authorize the sort of calculating behavior he pursues, represent it as honesty, against which the other characters' hypocrisies can appear. His tactless self-promotion seems like the truth about how people really are. I wonder if the mediatization that becomes so palpable in The Big Chill has something to do with this shift in values. Media form audiences but dissolve communities.

ADDENDUM:
I came across a passage from Hakim Bey's The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) that lays out the contrast I see in the two films.

The nuclear family is the base unit of consensus society, but not of the TAZ. ("Families! -- how I hate them! the misers of love!" -- Gide) The nuclear family, with its attendant "oedipal miseries," appears to have been a Neolithic invention, a response to the "agricultural revolution" with its imposed scarcity and its imposed hierarchy. The Paleolithic model is at once more primal and more radical: the band. The typical hunter/gatherer nomadic or semi-nomadic band consists of about 50 people. Within larger tribal societies the band-structure is fulfilled by clans within the tribe, or by sodalities such as initiatic or secret societies, hunt or war societies, gender societies, "children's republics," and so on. If the nuclear family is produced by scarcity (and results in miserliness), the band is produced by abundance--and results in prodigality. The family is closed, by genetics, by the male's possession of women and children, by the hierarchic totality of agricultural/industrial society. The band is open--not to everyone, of course, but to the affinity group, the initiates sworn to a bond of love. The band is not part of a larger hierarchy, but rather part of a horizontal pattern of custom, extended kinship, contract and alliance, spiritual affinities, etc. (American Indian society preserves certain aspects of this structure even now.)

Obviously the Secaucus 7 doesn't constitute a full-on nomadic "band," but I think the film is gesturing toward a collective identity, something open to a kind of intersubjectivity that assimilation to adult life in capitalist society certainly suppresses. The film is about preserving something like tribal loyalty to one's friends in the absence of concrete external enemies -- or rather when the enemies turn out to be ourselves. Whereas The Big Chill is all about the restitution of the nuclear family, augmented by a certain selfish individualist myopia that epitomized the moral outlook of the Reagan years, and likewise epitomizes neoliberalism in general.

Context externalities (1 May 2007)

In the course of an argument about income and substitution effects between economists Greg Mankiw and Robert Frank playing out on Mankiw's blog, Frank raises the notion of context externalities, which I thought was a helpful way of reframing the question I keep coming back to of whether there's a route to a more direct (a.k.a. "authentic") experience of consumption, and if that route is even desirable.

As decades of behavioral evidence clearly demonstrates, virtually every evaluation is heavily shaped by local context. As Richard Layard put it, “In a poor society a man proves to his wife that he loves her by giving her a rose, but in a rich society he must give a dozen roses.” Because evaluation drives consumer choice, context is an important determinant of consumer demand. The upshot is that almost every consumer choice generates significant context externalities.
Consider, for example, a job applicant’s decision about how much to spend on an interview suit. His goal is to make a favorable impression. But his ability to do so depends far less on the absolute quality of his suit than on how it compares with those worn by other applicants. And when he spends more on a suit, he shifts the context within which other candidates will be evaluated.

Context externalities are pervasive. A good school, for instance, is one that compares favorably with other schools in the same local environment. The amount parents must spend to ensure that their children attend such a school is thus an increasing function of the amounts spent by other parents. The evaluations that guide an employer’s promotion decisions are similarly dependent on context. A worker’s odds of promotion depend less on his absolute performance than on how well he performs relative to his coworkers.

The dependence of evaluation on context lays waste to any presumption that individual decisions about how many hours to work or how much to spend on interview suits will be socially optimal. The general result predicted by theory is that if context shapes evaluation more heavily in some domains than others, too many resources will flow to the most context-sensitive domains and too few to the least context-sensitive domains.

I put in bold the sentence that started me thinking about whether there is anyway to disrupt that evaluation process and thereby restore a sense of agency to the individual (one's consumerism would no longer be a matter beyond one's personal control) while snuffing out these externalities. Those with an undying faith in the sovereignty of the individual might argue that a force of will is sufficient to put an end to such evaluation, that personal weakness is what drives invidious comparison. This has the ring of common sense ("What do you care what anyone else thinks? Why are you so insecure?"), but the fact that it seems like common sense should be enough to make us wonder how ideologically driven the reaction is.

Anyway I need to read further to see what solutions have been devised to control these externalities, and whether or not they are battling human nature itself.