On Capital

Save for Dr. McCloskey’s talk, I cannot recall an optimistic take on “what we unfortunately call Capiltalism.”  I cannot recall when or even how, but throughout our readings this the semester I’ve come to personify Capital (perhaps in close association with the capitalist) as the ever-present villain in a long narrative. 

Of course, I can sympathize with this notion in so far as exploitation has been part of the equation.  For years I was a factory worker well familiar with the assembly line—better known as “the line” (pronounced with dreadful tones, as in a place no employee wanted to be assigned for the day).  Indeed, at times I felt proud to hold my own against those ladies with so-called “nimble-fingers”.  Still, I cannot recall fleeing the factory workforce because I realized the exploitation of labor-power-value.  (The assembly line has a way of conveying life as both static and in constant flux.  Till this day, I find running on the treadmill to be as comforting as paradoxically dreadful).

So, I ponder, are we reading Capital as the villain?  Though we don’t necessarily acknowledge it (perhaps we don’t need to), I feel this to be the general consensus.  I am reminded of a recent discussion of Othello in class where a brave student went against the grain by questioning: “is Iago really a villain, the villain? Is he not simply there to expose the savageness within Othello?”  As fond as I was at this student’s interrogation of the text—Othello’s racial complex is mostly internalized, so why should Iago be condemned for being a catalyst?—I don’t know that my views of the play stretch as far as to acquit “honest Iago”.

There is a point here: Iago’s numerous motives/reasons for hating the Moor, no matter how richly performed, do more to cancel each other out than they provide an explanation for his constant instigation.  Whether motivated or motiveless, his deeds don’t make him more or less a villain, nor will they satisfy our judgments.  But if Iago produces so much suffering for the sake of producing it, how do we treat Capital’s constant flow?  Is Capital the “bad guy” here whose “evil” doings know no bounds or is devoid of a guilty conscious for its mode of production?

Hardt’s and Negri’s discussion of Capital (and the struggle over Common Wealth) further illustrate the complexity of the villainous Capital, especially in the context Bio-politics.  If, as Hardt and Negri point out, capital can be said to include labor and social life itself, especially when life is “both what is put to work in biopolitical production and what is produced” (142), how is Capital at fault for what we are so willingly (if wittingly) to produce?  As Hardt and Negri further suggest, we are best to understand production not so much in terms of the producing subject and the produced object, but rather both producer and product as subjects.  On the other hand, Hardt and Negri point to biopolitical labor-power as “becoming more and more autonomous, with capital simply hovering over it parasitically with its disciplinary regimes, apparatuses of capture, mechanisms of expropriation, financial networks, and the like” (142).  Were it not for the increasingly autonomous biopower, this so-called parasitical aspect of Capital  projects a villainous entity whose mere presence threatens.

Szeman and Creativity

Having been identified as the creative writer in the room, I wanted to make a couple of comments about Szeman’s discussion about creativity, his main point being that there has been an “approbation of creativity” in our culture.  He mentioned employees in some companies (Google, Microsoft, etc)  having creative time where they essentially do what they want with a couple of hours a day so that they could be creative. We talk about "creative play."

I agree with Szeman. As he said, it’s a weird indictment of capitalism that work itself is separate from being creative. I’d like to run with that a little further. I’m holding a few ideas in my head at once, but I think there’s a connection so bear with me.

If the approbation of creativity means that it is somehow held up and apart, I would go so far as to say that creativity has been commodified. Or, perhaps I should say that the image of being creative has been commodified. Creative people buy Apple products and have a certain eccentric air. You can also buy creativity in the form of pre-fabricated art kits (just walk into Michaels and take note of the prefabricated art-making merchandise). As in “buy our kit for making something and you will be creative when you put it together following our instructions.”

With the approbation of creativity a need, or should I say a desire, for creativity is created in the consumer.  This does not, in my opinion, represent authentic creativity. A desire to be creative, in a way (and I am guilty of this I'm sure), is a desire to be unique in the culture of sameness that Horkheimer and Adorno describe in "The Culture Industry."

As I’m sure you have all learned the hard way, authentic creativity is hard freaking work. I don’t think anyone in business or industry is innovative without knowing the nuts and bolts of what they’re doing. I don’t write a poem when I’m laying around doing nothing, nor do I write a poem simply by engaging in creative “play.” I write a poem after I’ve gone through a good deal of reading and actual writing. A good abstract artist will likely have spent years studying composition and honing basic drawing skills. A jazz musician can improvise well after spending years practicing his or her scales. And so on. Authentic creativity is inseparable from work.

Confessions of an Immaterial Laborer

One of the things I appreciate most lately about this class is the ability for readings to grab hold of popular intellectual snapwords, sexy catch phrases like imagined communities, orientalism, immaterial labor.These keywords are often bandied about in common conversation and theoretically impoverished publications. Traded back and forth like Pokemon cards, the significance and implications of certain words becomes lost in a shuffle of scholarly egos and quick cellphone wikipedia articles. But sometimes, we are afforded an opportunity to more closely examine such terms.The confidence to insert in common conversations “I don’t think that word mean what you think it means.”

Immaterial labor has such a history and contemporary usage. I myself have fallen victim to the false assumption that “immaterial” reflects the form of labor. What Hardt and Negri’s readings have clarified is that immaterial refers to concrete labor practices that result in immaterial production. Though the list of immaterial labour in shaved down to two in Multitude, Empire explicationes three types (2000,293). Negri’s essay “Communist as Critique” parsimoniously clarifies immaterial labor to be “intellectual, affective, and techno-scientific, the labor of the cyborg...while tending toward immateriality, this labor is no less corporeal than intellectual,” (10).

Even after the foundation of what immaterial labor actually entails, some authors neglect the role of immaterial labor as the hegemonic form of labor in the formation of the multitude. The role of technology in this endeavor equally requires attention. For Hardt and Negri, immaterial labor is a peculiar form that depends on the cooperation of the laborers, “cooperation is completely immanent to the laboring activity itself,”(Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 292). The network structured production affords certain opportunities that take advantage of the decentralized and deterritorialized centers of labor, “the labor of informational production (of both services and durable goods) relies on what we can call abstract cooperation,”(Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 296).While attempting to consider the affordances of the new labor hegemon, Hardt and Negri are careful of not crafting a teleology of immaterial labor.

Within this theoretical context, I find immaterial labor as a concept unpersuasive. It sounds simple to understand lending itself to popular use, but it is predicated on sometimes contradictory assumptions about the potential liberating affordances of networks and technology and the cooperation of diverse immaterial laborers. Camfield (2007, p.33) takes on this issue directly when he notes, “we should ask how it is that Hardt and Negri are able to claim that such very different social kinds of concrete labour as that of retail salespeople and computer engineers are all part of their intellectually-linguistically- affectively rich immaterial labor.” Reflecting on my past laboring jobs, I tend to agree with Camfield and similar critics. My employment as an ‘account representative’ at a Bank of America call center is potentially as immaterial as it gets. We were trained to manipulate our communication, affect, and sometimes physical posture to generate the desired product from our clients. Apart  from being  my personal history version of the dark ages, the drastic contrast to my current forms of immaterial labor reveals something about immaterial labor’s affordances. Though I still use some of the techniques I learned at Bank of America to deal with combative student, you might  be surprised (saddened?) about their efficacy, the general trajectory of my days work as a largely symbolic laborer is oceans away from my time at Bank of America, not necessarily in immaterial product, but the laboring form. The disdain and reinforcement of the most pervasive kind of neoliberal ideology during my one year tenure at the call center encouraged a perspective of other laborers that quite excluded the possibility of singularities acting in common.

Stormy weather & German films

Stormy weather all morning: what better thing to do than coming to the Ross to see part 2 of the screening of Bernhard Marsch's films at 305p!

Hope to see many of you this afternoon to watch some fun German independent films & listen to some of Bernhard's many stories :) 

Cologne Group filmmaker Bernhard Marsch at the Ross

Hello everyone,
just a reminder that German filmmaker Bernhard Marsch will screen his short films tonight--Sat 715p--at the Ross; a repeat screening (with some films not shown tonight, but also without some films shown tonight) is tomorrow, Sunday, 305p.

Come on out for a fun event & bring your friends & family :)
Best
Marco

Imre Szeman TODAY

Hello everyone,
this is just a brief reminder of the two main events with Imre Szeman today:

2p: special session. I assume Andrews 207 is available so let's plan on meeting there
530p: lecture at the Sheldon.

See you all soon at these events. Best
Marco

PS: Bring friends, family, students etc to the lecture :)

Graduate Student Workers of the World, Collectivize Your Stipends!

Fodder for thought:
A short interview with the “Duke Collective,” a group of graduate students at Duke University who in 2012 began to collectivize their grants, stipends, and awards. They currently number 8 students with more scheduled to join over the summer.