Those who have read what Althusser says about Jacques Bidet in "Philosophy and Marxism" might be interested in the following announcement from the Historical Materialism Book Series:
Exploring Marx’s Capital: Philosophical, Economic and Political Dimensions
Jacques Bidet. Translated by David Fernbach. Preface to the English Edition by Alex Callinicos
. January 2007
. ISBN 90 04 14937 6
. Hardback (400)
. List price EUR 129.- / US$ 168.-
. Historical Materialism Book Series, 14
This started out as a reply to Nate’s comment on the post below, but it turned out rather long so I thought I’d post it here.
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I think Nate is absolutely right in his scepticism towards a definitive separation of mental and manual labour. This is one of the things I had in mind with the third concluding point. Obviously this isn’t all that clear (partly due to my muddly mind and partly due to my lack of linguistic capacity), so I thought I would try to make myself clearer.
From the standpoint of a certain scepticism towards the kind of definitive separation of mental from manual labour mentioned above, the question is whether the concept of “immaterial labour” is of any, if not “use”, the at least theoretical relevance. I would say, that if it has any relevance, it is not in the form of an ontological (basically positivist) concept, but rather in terms of what one perhaps could call “limit concept” in lack of a better word (calling it transcendental might be pushing it a bit too far). As a species of “labour”, “immaterial labour” points towards a certain limit in the concept of labour.
It might be instructive to try to make out in what the “immateriality” of “immaterial labour” consist. Offhand I can think if two possible meanings of immaterial in immaterial labour(there are probably a few others as well): in the first one the immateriality is predicated on the labour as such and in the second one it is predicated on labour in a transferred sense, in relation to the character of its product.
If immateriality is immediately attributed to labour as such, one seems to end up in sort of a Cartesian split between thinking and extended substance of the kind you point to in your comment. “Immaterial labour” would in this interpretation be labour devoid of all corporeality, labour of a spectral kind. This definition is obviously unsatisfactory.
If immateriality on the other hand is attributed to labour with respect to the specific character of result of the labour process, that is, either that the process is exhausted into a no-thing, that is, not into some thing, or that the process is not exhausted into some-thing that exists (ex-is-ts) apart from and outside of that process, the immateriality is rather an immateriality on part of the product. Immaterial labour then, is labour which gives rise to immaterial products. This is roughly the position of Lazzarato, Virno, and probably also Negri. The question is then, what happens with labour as such? Virno et al draw the conclusion that labour tout court is an obsolete category, and I think they are moving a bit too fast. I would like to try hold on to the labour part of “immaterial labour”, and from this second definition of immaterial labour try to make out its consequences for labour as such.
From the standpoint of labour, “immaterial labour” taken to mean labour devoid of manual/corporeal aspects is an absurd concept. Of course this is not all that far from what Lazzarato, and in particular Virno says when they say that present day work is no longer labour – “the society of labour has come to an end” says Virno. Here though, it is labour that is absurd, in its being too dense, too “real”. “Immaterial labour” is no longer labour since it is no longer possible to tie the productivity of immaterial labour to the framework of the waged working day. In when used in this manner, in my opinion, immaterial labour posited as the beyond of labour as such seems to ground itself in, or at least imply the kind of Cartesian split of substances mentioned above. The conception of labour from which they want to distance themselves is just one which deals with labour only in terms of manual, strenuous labour (artisan or factory style), but as this distance is taken with regard to an ontological concept the new position seems to turn out equally ontological (though with a different positive content).
To return to the absurdity on part of “immaterial labour”, I think, and this is what I meant by “immaterial labour” as a limit concept, that “immaterial labour” conceived of as labour devoid of manual/corporeal aspects is possible not in an ontological way, but rather as a consequence of the division of labour. As such it is predicated on labour from the standpoint of the immaterial product. From the standpoint of the immaterial product this is perfectly reasonable, a perfectly reasonable absurdity, and this reasonable absurdity points in a negative way to the inadequacy of the type of ontological conception of labour here discussed.
So, to conclude, if “immaterial labour” is of any use or relevance, it is not in terms of a positive content. Rather, it might be relevant in that it might function as a key to unlock the concept of labour from its positivist constraints, from its seemingly unproblematic given character.
As anyone who has read some of his writings know, Antonio Negri has since the late 1970s been of the opinion that the marxian labour theory of value no longer is of any use in the analysis of present day capitalism. This, he says, is due to the changes taken place in the nature of capitalism in the second half of the 20th century (the process of subsumption of the labour process and life in general under capital). Undoubtedly some changes seem to have taken place in the labour process in the recent 30 years or so, and this seems so especially with regard to the mass employment of computers throughout society. But, even though it seems pretty clear that something has happened, the form that this historical change takes in Negri’s work is in my opinion not satisfactory.
Negri casts the historical process which has lead forth to our present situation in terms of a narrative which centers in on a radical break between past and present in the realm of the economic. In the past it was f.ex. possible to sort out simple from complex labour, and as a consequence of this, the production process also actually produced value which, in a fairly unproblematic way, was possible to determine in quantitative terms. In present day on the other hand, the production process has gone through a fundamental metamorphosis: there is no longer any possibility of measuring the value produced since there, as a consequence of capitals subsumption of all of society under itself, is no unambiguous way of determining when and where the working day begins or ends, and thus it is no longer possible to determine the value produced in quantitative terms. Variants of this scheme also operates in Paolo Virno’s and Maurizio Lazzarato’s attempts at conceptualizing the “new” in the new situation (obviously their respective narratives are a bit more subtle than the one presented here, and that is also so for Negri, but I would like to argue that their conceptions all share this basic structure), and this is what one could call, following Lazzarato, the process of immaterialization of the labour process.
The concept of immaterial labour raises many questions in relation to the orthodox Marxist conception of labour and of value, and hence also of the labour theory of value. This is what Negri is occupied with (even though in an unsatisfactory way – see Eriks post “The problematic aura of immaterial labour” below). This is not the only major question in motion within the question of immaterial labour - another one which is also present in Negri, though not in any explicitly thematized way, is one of the major philosophical problems of all time: the epistemological problem of the relation between knowledge and the object of which the knowledge is knowledge.
This problem is present in immaterial labour on at least two levels. The first one is of course that of the status and character of the knowledge or mental/emotional capacities involved and produced in the immaterial aspects of a labour process. The second one on the other hand does not stem directly from the concept of immaterial labour itself, but rather from the operation by which Negri et al determines the historical change in which labour, by becoming immaterial, isn’t labour anymore. These two epistemological problems are closely connected and form something of a doublet, in this sketch though, my focus will be on the second aspect which relates to Negri’s immaterial labour/theoretical practice.
In “Value and Affect” Negri proposes a history of political economy divided into three phases: the classical, the Keynesian and the post-modern. In the first phase, Negri argues, the science of political economy could determine the value produced because there existed use values autonomous of the capital relation which could function as a measure. In the second phase on the other hand, “use value is inside the society of capital”, and as such it was impossible to conceive of any use value apart from exchange value, which then is “repelled” from the capital relation in form of the nothingness of money. In this way money functioned as a measure which was an artificial, self-projected outside to capital. In the third phase, present day that is, the use value of labour power is “situated in a non-place with respect to capital” Negri tells us. This place is neither inside, nor outside of capital, and because this place, as a non-place, doesn’t have any boundaries there is no possibility of determining an outside in relation to it, and thus it is not possible to establish any measure with respect to labour power. Here labour power takes on the character of being “affect”, which Negri following Spinoza defines as the “power to act”.
What is really at stake here for Negri is the possibility for capital to control and dominate the social ensemble of labour processes and thus control the working class. It is at this point that the relation between the science of political economy and the “real” political economy becomes obscure. Negri seems to take as his point of departure the classical science of political economy, and from that point draw conclusions about the “ontological” (understood in the naïve sense of properties inherent to the object in question) status of labour power and the “real” political economy. This seems to presuppose some uncanny correspondence between “science” and “reality”, where the science of political economy of the past could construct valid mathematical models of one or the other kind because labour power actually was inherently measurable. Of course this is no longer the case, since according to Negri the recent development of the structure of the labour process has constituted labour power ontologically (still in the naïve sense) as “affect”, and thus made labour power both un-measurable and beyond measure. This is something that present day science of political economy has to come to terms with, and this process reveals the "interested"/ideological character of this science:
It [the science of political economy] accepts the impossibility to determine any ‘objective’ (and transcendental, as in the case of ‘use-value’, and again transcendental in the case of money) measure of labour force productivity. […] If the measuring of this new productive reality is impossible, because affect is not measurable, this very context, so rich of productive subjectivity, still needs to be controlled. Political economy has become deontological science.
I find the way that the problem is put rather problematic. I have to admit that I find the terms in which it is put interesting - that is the transcendental character of both use-value and money - but the way Negri inserts them in historical narrative is more troubling. First of all it seems strange to introduce “affect” in the guise of an at the same time ontological and historical category – this seems to amount to the worst kind of vulgar historicism but it also points towards the question of in what way it is possible to separate the history of the science of political economy from the history of political economy. Since Negri in the case of “affect” refers explicitly to “reality” as opposed to “science” it should be both possible and desirable to be more precise on the character of this relation.
If one were to detach the terms in which Negri poses the problem from the type of ontological narrative that he connects them to, it might be possible to draw other conclusions about the implications of the tendency towards an immaterialization (or at least the possibility of articulating certain immaterial aspects) of the labour process in many sectors of production. The problem of immaterial labour puts into question the character of the relation between thought and extension, between thought and “corporeality”: the tendency of immaterialization points to a certain change in emphasis from the body/motor to “reason”, “understanding”, “sensitivity”, or “affectivity” (at this point we obviously have entered the first aspect of the epistemological problem). Put in another way, it seems problematic to conceive of labour power in terms of a positive “some-thing” (etwas). At a first glance it might seem paradoxical, but if it is possible to imagine something like the far end of the scale of immaterialization where the labour process would be pure thought or pure sensitivity or relationship, this “unreal” reality actually tells us more about the relationship between science and reality than does reality itself. This is so because in the confrontation with this “unreal” reality, another problem appears. In a certain sense this new problem has always been present, although in an absent way. The confrontation with the “unreal” reality of immaterial labour reveals not so much a new ontological status of labour power as the type of fetish that surrounds the concept of labour and labour power. As it is not possible to conceive the reality of immaterial labour in terms of an unproblematic givenness, measuring it using only common sense becomes troublesome or even impossible. This does not mean that the properties inherent to labour power has changed and due to this measuring is not possible any more – rather it means that the properties inherent to labour power (which certainly have changed) never were inherently possible to measure in the first place.
This tells us three things: I.) that the labour theory of value’s law of value never was grounded in an measure outside of capital in an ontological way; II.) to look for the possibility of measuring and the establishment of a measure not in labour power or the “immediate production process” as such, but rather on the level of social relations; III.) that it is more obvious than ever that the relation between science and “reality” needs to be dealt with in terms of effectivity rather than reflection (distorted or otherwise).
Dwelling on a quote I brought up in the previous post I hope one day to write something about the relation between the bird that figures there and the spider that figures in the chapter on the labour process in the first volume of Capital. Consider these passages: Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on he sold the product for £5 and to that extent became a dealer in a commodity. But the Leipzig literary proletarian who produces books, e.g. compendia on political economy, at the instructions of his publisher is roughly speaking a productive worker, in so far as his production is subsumed under capital and only takes place for the purpose of the latter’s valorisation. A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her singing for money, she is to that extent a wage labourer or a commodity dealer. But the same singer, when engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital. And… A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. The relation between these passages raises a number of questions about the character of the concept of labour process. Hanna Arendt writes that the later of these passages constitutes a sort of exception in Marx’ writings in that it is about work and not labour. I believe this is simply wrong. Arendt might have a point in terms of a description of the character of this process. But her statement does not imply a consideration of the relation this passage holds to the theme of the development of the means of production etc. And besides, Milton, in the former passage, would seem to wind up on the wrong side of the labour/work distinction. In fact, the Aristotelian terms would seem almost reversed. Something is fishy about the concept of labour process. I’d like to consider three possible interpretations: 1. We could take Marx at his words (that is: the words of the opening of the chapter on the labour process in the first volume of Capital) and consider it an anthropological concept. The problem, then, is what it possibly could mean that the labour process carries the process of valorization once the means of production takes the form of machinery. With machinery the imagined end-product is not inherent in the worker – except, perhaps, but with a few engineers – and the process of production could not easily be conceived as the realization of a purpose that is in any way his or hers. If we stick with the anthropological definition of the labour process it would seem that the production process would cease to be a labour process with machinery. 2. We could consider it a construction within the method of systematic dialectics. This would, I believe, accentuate how the character of the imaginative/purposive in the labour process turns from the producer to the instrument (from the subject to the middle term between subject and object), within the chapter under discussion, as the establishment of an abstract form of what later will be machinery. I cannot say that I handle this approach well enough to really understand how the contradiction between labour process and process of valorization then is to be understood, or, for that matter, why Marx uses the anthropological terms in Capital. 3. We could also consider it a conceptual construction made possible by the distinction between intellectual and manual labour implied by machinery, so that, fundamentally, the labour process is not inherent in the human individual, but in the relation between intellectual and manual labour, which is then projected back on the handicraft type of worker, or, perhaps, comes to constitute a transcendental precondition for the conception of handicraft type of work. The object of the concept of the labour process, then, exists at different social levels before and after machinery. I believe that this, perhaps, might be a reason why the age of machinery conceives its prehistory in anthropological terms. The point is not that an imagined end-result never "really" been involved in the production process, but that the conception of the practice of the production process in terms of a realization/phenomenon of this ideal/imagined purpose is not an ontological one, but is engaged critically within the marxian problematic of the production process. Moishe Postone and Jennifer Bajorek are two people that in different ways have argued for a conception of the concept the labour process in terms that seem relatively close to the third point above by way of bringing this concept together with the concept of ideology. Postone have argued that Marx’ dialectical critique is of a presuppositionless character in the sense that he sets out from popular ideological terms, and his critique of political economy is an ideology critique. Bajorek have, quite brilliantly, argued that one should keep in mind how the ideal is defined in Marx’ concept of ideology when dealing with the ideal of the concept of the labour process. But this does still not explain how Milton escapes the concept of labour process. Which is something I will have to come back to. I suspect that it will involve a consideration of the repellation or non-coincidence of labour with itself; a non-coincidence that derives from the value-form but in the machine-form is articulated in the division of intellectual and manual labour, or something like that…
