A World of Work #8

developing distinctions

Again, let’s recap the discusssion a little. In thinking of work and an initial hypothesis about what it is, the idea that it’s a transformation and arrangement of production can be picked up from Communists Like Us (Negri and Guattari). In contrast to making a distinction between work and play, the key aspect here is that work is bound into production and in particular the transformation process at the heart of production.

Extending this thought, the idea of production is then considered as a material reality. In other words, work is a transformation and arrangement of material reality, as distinct from realities that we might class as spiritual, ideal or meaningful. Taking account of social reproduction theory gives us an expanded version of production, just in case you were stuck thinking that it only concerned factories or mines. The production of material reality extends into those aspects of life we often consider natural or background - having children, cooking, cleaning, educating, caring for the sick and elderly.

Finally the way these material realities are encountered is firstly, not as changeable situations subject to a full range of human choices grounded in reason but rather as immutable necessities, organised by a set of values into what’s considered useful, good, efficient, effective and such like, something Kathi Weeks notes as central in her The trouble with work. Secondly, drawing on Marx and his methodology for understanding of capitalism as mediated through thinkers like Mario Tronti, there are plural stories here - the object, in other words, has a perspectival character. That is to say, the object (work) actually appears in different forms dependent on social positions, depending on the subject position (who it is) from which the object is perceived. Crudely speaking, there is a proletarian and a bourgeois perpsective on work¹.

The next question is whether this rough extended definition is any use. Does it exclude anything, for example, or does everything become a form of work in this scenario?

One of the early lessons I was taught as a philosopher was that of making distinctions². It’s perhaps one of the reasons that philosophy sometimes appears obsessed with splitting hairs. The bad version of this uses a process of defining and redefining to avoid any actual discussion with a kind of dismissal move - you’re confused, what you think you’re talking about and what you’re actually talking about are quite distinct and if you could simply understand the right distinction you’d find your questions to be stupid. Such is life I suppose. Every tool can be wielded badly.

That said, the danger of any definition is that it appears meaningful but can’t do any actual work. If everything falls under my definition then nothing is defined. If everything is good, then nothing is good. If everything is beautiful, then nothing is beautiful. The distinction is implicit in the definition - this thing, but not that (on pain of not being a distinction, or a definition). The trouble, however, is that it’s an easy mistake to then try and define something by its negative. Work cannot be defined by what it is not, even if the definition of work must of necessity produce a category of things that are ‘not-work’. The result of a definition cannot be used to produce the definition without a vicious circle arising, one of the major difficulties of any philosophy that operates, as it were, on the basis of negation rather than affirmation - and one of the reasons Hegel is so wrong and so infuriating.

Weeks has an interesting discussion in the introduction to her text³ during the course of which she makes clear how she is using the concept of work. In her case it is co-extensive with what we think of as wage labour. Her discussion uses a number of distinctions that it organises in such a way as to enable her to try and get at the role of value and domination with work. The danger of this, of course, is that it has to assume this element of value and domination, then organise its distinctions to enable this to be foregrounded in an interesting way. It’s much the same, of course, with any hypothesis and at least one of Weeks central hypotheses is something along the lines of ‘work is a crucial feature of social domination’. I don’t particularly disagree, and Weeks discussion is a great account of the way in which work plays a critical role in social domination.

This is a useful discussion and what Weeks points to matters because too often relations of domination and power - and much of the chatter that arises from readers of Foucault falls foul of this error - are reduced simply to ideological values. Bad ideas lead to bad things, is the basic thesis of these liberal theorists of domination and power. Which is, let’s say, naive, or simplistic. Bad ideas, good ideas - often things happen in spite of, not because of such things. Domination isn’t caused by bad people, nor prevented by good people. Rather it takes place as a set of relations. Ideas are one element of those relations, although often after the fact effects rather than causal in nature. Ideas don’t make the world the way it is, but they’re very often able to provide excuses for it when someone asks questions. It never just is the way it is. It has a history, or an evolution.

So whilst Weeks discussion is interesting and useful in avoiding a naive ideology based account of work or the world, I’m more interested in the role of work in the machine of human life, in the role it plays in the complex and conflictual role that the human species finds itself in.

Marx has something like this interest when he talks about the role of labour within human species being, but a lingering anthropocentrism, perhaps a lingering humanism, defines the extent of Marx’s interest. Here’s an inflection point. Is the question of work solely something that is of interest with regard an investigation or critique of capitalism, or is there something else that occurs when we begin to think about a critique of work in itself? Is it even possible to distinguish the two?

1. If the concepts of proletarian and bourgeois are read as simply value judgement (‘good proletarian, bad bourgeois’) that misses the point. They describe or name two positions that can be held within the mode of production that is capitalism. ‘Boss and worker’ aren’t accurate as they describe domination relations (ie: who present as in control, in charge, able to offer commands) that are determined by prior relations of ownership and control of the means of production.

2. Perhaps the greatest example of this central tool is found in Plato, The Sophist. The definition of the angler (Sophist, 219a - 221b) is the classic central example, but the whole concept of the dialectic in Plato, of the division/seperation and collection/gathering moves, is the basis for this central role in philosophy for the making of distinctions.

3. Kathi Weeks, The problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics and postwork imaginaries, Duke, 2011.

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