A World of Work #3

the transformations and arrangements of production

Continuing from last week…

Both too quick and too superficial, it’s not enough to suggest simply that an idea has lost power because it could only appear at a particular historical moment. In fact we might even go further and claim that all ideas are tied to the time of their appearance. The issue is not that an idea has a context, perhaps even a context specific enough to enable the idea to appear - rather the question is whether the idea touches on something beyond the time of its appearance. Communism itself, as an idea, might be said to be a prime example of an idea that could only apear at a historical moment, but that points beyond any historical moment, beyond the time of its appearance⁶.

Let’s return to the characterisation of work with this in mind. Is there something in human work, per se, beyond the historical moment, that can be defined as rational and solidarity producing?

We can see something of this sort made explicit, briefly and almost accidentally, as Guattari and Negri attempt to articulate work and consciousness within their account of class re-composition. They’ve been claiming that there’s a new form of work, of a kind that somehow ‘expresses’ or moves through the worker and is embodied and lived differently to previous moments. As I read this I imagine a scene like the shift from mass factory to social factory, the shift from walking into work with a crowd to a confusing set of interactions with layers or components of a complicated organisation. In addition they’ve claimed that there is a capacity of work to be liberatory because it’s collective, rational and interdependent, and generates solidarity¹. Their communism arises in the midst of this landscape of interests and claims.

Section 3 of Chapter 2 called ‘The new subjectivities’ finds our authors recapping their argument and foregrounding the next move they want to make in their discussion. The argument so far? New forms of subject and new kinds of work have arisen in a complicated interaction and they don’t fit within existing forms of the political.

But it remains to be demonstrated that the innovations of the ‘60’s should above all be understood within the universe of consciousness, of desires, and of modes of behaviour².

They then describe what they call ‘new modes of consciousness’ before pivoting to conrast the new modes with old political forms, in particualr forms of ‘massification of social subjectivity’. Too quickly dismissed as a veneration for individualism and dismisal of collectivity, these passages precede another discussion of what they think work is, is capable of being and is becoming.

In contrast to individual subjects or massified subjects, Guattari and Negri claim that “it is a matter rather of manifesting the singular as multiplicity, mobility, spatio-temporal variability and creativity” (CLU, 40). What’s important here is that this hyper-abbreviated philosophical sentence points to a value, not a tactic, strategy or theory. This is “the only value on the basis of which one can reconstruct work” (ibid).

Of course in practical terms the capitalist has no great interest in this value other than in so far as they can mobilise it in their service. This is no idle, mean dismissal of capitalism. In the 40 odd years since Communists Like Us we have seen how capital has, albeit slowly, re-organised itself and its flows to re-colonise the new forms of consciousness. What’s important for me, however, is that the dynamics that have been developed as part of the process of re-colonisation of our consciousness have their roots in the shifts that Guattari and Negri are grappling with. It’s as though they’re forty years past, looking forwrad on the same history I look back on.

All that aside for the moment, within the text it’s at this moment that we find a useful moment in understanding their concept of work.

The argument goes like this. Work needs to be reconstructed on the basis of the value of ‘the singular as multiplicity’ (so we’re making a positive ethical claim, something like ‘under communism work should look like this’, we can worry later about what that damn peculiar phrase might actually mean).

They then give two examples, each beginning with the phrase ‘a work which…’ with some content which again we can ignore just for the moment. Then comes the following:

(All of which implies redefining the concept of work as the transformations and arrangements of production within the frame of immediate liberation efforts. (CLU, 40, epmhasis added)

Two things, perhaps obvious but worth noting. First, this is a sentence placed in brackets, as a kind of aside. These things - bracketed asides - can act a little like the leaks of the unconscious, slips of the tongue and routes to a hidden underbelly of commitments. Second, this is an explicit redefinition. In other words, an already defined concept exists and this is an alternative, perhaps oppositional concept. There’s a whole world of hurt if we begin thinking about whether we have agency over concepts, how far such agency exists and whether a process of conceptual ‘redefinition’ is anything more than a wierd whimper from a philosopher.

What I like, however, is the highlighted first clause of the new definition. Here, thinking of work as the transformations and arrangements of production opens up something I feel like I can work with.

Recapping a little, the thought was that a distinction between work and play, whilst probably true, doesn’t really map to what Guattari and Negri are talking about in their discussion of new forms of consciousness interacting with new forms of work. It’s not as simple as saying that these new forms of consciousness are hedonistic, or driven by values of creativitity and freedom, or self-deluding themselves into accepting new forms of exploitation because they’re gamified or fun-ified (is that a word?). This ‘play’ thing doesn’t sit well alongside the rational element of work identified as part of Guattari and Negri’s understanding of what work is capable of being. However an element of play, subordinated to a practice of transformations, seems capable of being held broadly within a rational practice.

Work as a practice of transformations is how I think I’d want to start. From this position, where it is possible to say that transformations have both already taken place unconsciously and where the value of those transformations is not pre-given (even the most reductionist evolutionary explanation cannot tell beforehand if something is an adaptation of a pathology), it seems possible to move forward again. (And so it is that I felt blocked in the understanding of their text, in this centrality of the discussion of work, particularly in any kind of connection with freedom.)

to be continued

1. Cited previously here. In terms of the generation of solidarity, I’m minded to read a bit more closely some of the discussion of negative solidarity in Jason Read, Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the politics of work, Verso 2024. I’ll maybe come back to Read’s arguments depending on where the reading of Communists Like Us goes.

The concept of negative solidarity was something that arose in some of my circles a few years back and is interesting in so far as it deepens any half-decent phenomenology of work. I still only find it a useful concept, however, in the absence of something better. Part of this hesitance comes from the way the concept of negative solidarity feels like it stands on the terrain of ideology, not phenomenology. It’s an etic, not an emic understanding. At least that would be my sense. In contrast there is a phenomenology of the position of ‘negative solidarity’ from the inside that can look more complicated. As an example, there is an essay by Morrigan Nihil, Origamy Solidarity, in Engagee, Issue 10, 2021 that explores the position of the ongoing familial carer and in which the curiously spelled ‘origamy’ replaces the word ‘negative’ in an interesting, positive way.

2. Communists Like Us, Semiotext 1990, p38

---