For full enjoyment
k-punk on the neurophysiological effects of capitalism:
> Antagonism is not now located externally, in the face-off between class blocs, but internally, in the
> psychology of the worker, who, qua worker, is interested in oldstyle class conflict, but, as
> someone with a pension fund, is also interested in maximizing their investment. There is no
> longer an identifiable external enemy.
We considered something along these lines in our reading-group discussion of Agamben’s The coming community as a way of explaining Agamben’s puzzling claim that the first-world/third-world division in being replaced with ‘a global petit-bourgeoisie’. It is not simply that class struggle is re-emerging within nation states; rather, a distinct proletarian subjectivity is being replaced with a subjectivity in which workers are both excluded (lumpenproletarian) and forced to act as ‘entrepreneurs’ (petit-bourgeois). Of course, this is ideological (see, for instance, this creepy post), but, like all ideology, it’s ruthlessly materially enforced (Adam Kotsko is writing good stuff on this). k-punk continues:
> The consequence is that, as Christian put it in a
> memorable image, Post-Fordist workers, are like the Old Testament Jews after they left the
> ‘house of slavery’: liberated from a bondage to which they have no wish to return but also
> abandoned, stranded in the desert, confused about the way forward.
Which of course makes me think of Agamben’s discussion of abandonment in Homo sacer; it would be interesting to try and re-read Homo sacer in political-economic, rather than juridical, terms (is that something Virno does?).
One thing we might get from such an investigation is a stronger understanding of something which I was pleased to see k-punk mentioning, which is that our response to the problems of post-fordism must not take the form of a nostalgia for fordism and its welfare state. This is one of the things I like about the term ‘precarity’, for all its cumbersomeness (an early Wombles flyer on precarity explained the word’s Latin roots, and why it is a pun in Italian). The obvious alternative term, ‘casualisation’, fails to understand that this is not a process which simply needs to be arrested; we already are entirely causalised, and so precarity is a condition we find ourselves in.
European precarity activist are at least attempting to find a way out of the desert: the next high-profile attempt probably being the Carnival for full enjoyment, taking place in Edinburgh during the G8. But without a doubt, we’re still largely without direction.
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I read this article in the observer a few weeks ago about the link between the casualisation of the labour market and psychiatric disorder.
Also (off topic), i had my philosophy exam this morning, which went quite well. One of the questions I answered was “Can we only be free in a communist society).
Comment by rachel @ 6/9/2005 8:11 pm
To which your answer was ‘yes’, presumably. Good luck with the rest of your exams.
Comment by Tim @ 6/9/2005 10:27 pm