Seven Red

I read with interest Booga Face’s analysis of The Pursuit of Happyness, a film I haven’t seen, and actually actively avoided. One of the themes that came up in the analysis was the strange placement of efficiency and innovation, and I want to comment on that a bit here. Specifically, BF demonstrates that TPOH expends considerable ideological effort to locate efficiency and innovation as qualities of the entrepreneur rather than complex social networks (on which any autonomy is built). This is certainly the neoliberal doxa, and it saturates the discourse even where it would seem least likely (such as, for example, in the discourse of micro-finance and the like). But I’m more interested in the transposition of efficiency into a quality of the multitude.

Efficiency has always occupied a strange position in Left theory, which is not surprising given that efficiency was usually encountered, concretely, as intensification of exploitative relationships.  Even where efficiency became the watchword of the hilariously named “really existing socialism” (in the awful, if remarkably effective, five year plans and rapid industrialization schemes), it subsequently became precisely the point of attack for those identifying real socialism with its capitalist twin. When efficiency is grouped under the broader category of instrumental reason, it becomes the hinge that allows a whole range of mid-twentieth century thinkers to identify the two while also drawing both into a more general destiny of practice. When Ellul says technics, for example, he almost always means efficiency rather than any concrete technology; it is a mode of encountering the world shared by both capitalist and “real socialist” forms of production. And Ellul is only the most obvious case. You could run the gamut of thinkers who focused their energies on instrumental reason – you pick ‘em: Arendt, Adorno, Habermas – and see the horror of efficiency played out again and again, not, of course, efficiency in itself (as it operates in Ellul), but efficiency as the primary concern of praxis rather than one form of approach among others. One need not invoke Bataille’s fascination with productive excess and waste or Heidegger’s “creation of a standing reserve” to see how else this discourse plays out.

But I think that Booga Face is quite right that efficiency suddenly takes on a positive value in what I’ll repeat – tongue in cheek – as the Italian Ideology, or at least in Negri. Which is an interesting reversal. On the one hand, from the perspective of Marxist theory, it’s quite clear why the category of efficiency escapes the logic of exploitation within this discourse. In traditional Marxist theory, you find two primary forms of capital: constant capital and variable capital, where constant capital is (and this is a very simplified, blogified version) the “means of production,” such as factories and machines, while variable capital is (simplified again) living labor, or the potential of workers to produce. In a nutshell, barring innovation, you can’t squeeze any more “value” (which is to say, profit) out of constant capital: it actually degrades, of course, as Marx describes in some of his funnier passages. But you can squeeze more out of variable capital, it being, well, variable. Concretely, this is the horror of efficiency from the perspective of the worker: increased quotas, extension of the working day, maximum use of every available second of work time, etc. In terms of experience, this is the process through which capital attacks the body (or better, life) most viciously, as even a cursory reading of Taylor’s “experiments” would show you. It’s also the site around which class struggle organized itself from the industrial revolution onward (work slow downs, sabotage, agitation for the eight-hour day, etc.). If variable capital is the site of exploitation, then  efficiency is nothing but the techniques of extruding ever more value from variable capital. That it also requires a particular subjectivity that forgets the Being of beings (or whatever) is only gravy for critique after that. So, this is an old story, and hardly worth this oversimplified retelling at this point.

But the story is necessary to grasp the reversal proposed by the notion of the General Intellect, a concept that serves as the real engine for Negri, Virno, and others. If production has become primarily “immaterial,” which is to say, cognitive, communicative, and affective, then – and this is the strong claim from Negri, as I take it – living labor is transposed with constant capital, because what is constant is the not a factory or a machine, but the totality of cognitive, communicative, and affective practice. It’s not a mistake, in this sense, that the very concept of the General Intellect is taken from Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.” If, for Marx, the machine (that is, constant capital) was a concretized instance of general social knowledge for industrial production (in other words, any given technology is a materialization of the whole of technoscientific knowledge), the emergence of immaterial labor simply bypasses the “material” of the machine. But when it does so, nobody really owns the (non)machine of the General Intellect any more. In effect, capital, in its development, gives away the means of production - in that “constant capital” is no longer materialized in an “ownable” machine,” but distributed to the entirety of the social field. This is why capital, for Negri, becomes absolutely parasitical when it comes to immaterial labor: it is not simply relatively parasitical anymore (Marx’s vampire), since it doesn’t even provide production with a set of means or organizational techniques.

Of course, this is a fiction to some extent; it’s a fiction that does a better job of explaining the frenetic insistence on intellectual property rights over the last 30 years than any liberal explanation I’ve seen. Even, however, if we grant that what immaterial labor really means is that capital overtakes the whole of social life (i.e., that real subsumption doesn’t structurally empower anybody, or that play becomes work rather than the reverse), Negri is still correct that work in such an arrangement is immeasurable from the perspective of surplus value, or that variable capital becomes an extremely troubled category, since production occupies a different “temporality.” The only time of innovation (or of comforting, caring for, and other affective labor) is the time of kairos, which lacks the quantitative dimension that would allow measure. And if variable capital no longer maintains a body-time consistency that can be worked on by the industrial engineer or the mid-level manager, then you need something else to ground value. How about a ridiculous “retreat” to pump up your subjective enthusiasm for the work process? It’s as reasonable and impotent a response as any other (and maybe as terrible as the Taylorist subdivision of the worker’s body). Better yet, how about an entire discipline devoted to teaching workers the subjective experience of kairos as a means of training for the (new) immaterial work process.  Something else to measure value, see?

For Negri, this something else is the financial markets; he’s also correct that finance is a laughable substitute as a measuring device, as the recent confusion relating to the “sub-prime” or “credit crisis” amply demonstrates. Everytime Citigroup or some other bank writes down another $8 billion in CDO losses, they proclaim again that the financial markets have no idea how to measure value – they literally don’t know the value of the assets they even hold. But the other result is that efficiency, which was constituted concretely by techniques of extruding surplus value from variable capital, fails to hit the same object: the body and life of the worker. Certainly, there are no shortage of contemporary organizational theories that promote messy inefficiency as a management strategy; as Virno notes, the old factories used to say “Quiet! Men Working,” while today the mantra is “Network! Talk! You’re at Work!” (The worries that employees in information sectors waste too much time surfing the Internet and IM’ing always seem decidedly half-hearted). But this just indicates a slackening of efficiency as it is classically understood. What’s more interesting is whether efficiency itself is transformed in this process (in its operation and concept) to lose the character that actuated so much critique in modernity. To get to this, I want to work through why Hannah Arendt’s work becomes so central in the “Italian Ideology.” Maybe tomorrow…

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