ranting about how paperwork is a labor of barbarism and whatnot
I have to get to a work thing soon but had a half thought or two that I want to plant and water, here goes.
Antonio Negri somewhere says something to the effect that one of the things that recommends reading Marx’s Capital is the class hatred it cultivates. Walter Benjamin says two things in the ballpark. One is that social democrats in the late 19th or early 20th century fostered an orientation of the working class to liberated futures instead of an orientation to a shared historical sense of grievance (I think of the old IWW poem and later song, “We Have Fed You All For A Thousand Years” which amounts to saying in part ‘you’ve killed us for ages, we’re owed this world’; the Wu Ming text “From the Multitudes of Europe” makes a similar appeal to longstanding continuity of grievance and similarly fosters a sense of group-ness, a ‘we’ who has been subject to appalling treatment). Benjamin says that replacing the latter with the former, grievance with appealing futures, loses the class hatred that has historically been a source of working class collective power. The other is that he says that monastic orders practiced a set of rituals and disciplines that sought to cultivate in their members a distaste, a revulsion for, the world we’re in, and that this was the goal of his writing as well, though the implication is clearly that he does so Marxistly. I think Negri’s remark about Marx is in that same spirit. These works are products of and contributions to cultures and projects of despising the world as currently organized, cultures and projects that seek to enroll others in that despising, among other goals pursued.
Now, I happen to like all of that and agree with it and I like to think my own work is in a similar spirit - another snowflake or two hoping to help contribute to an eventual avalanche, kinda thing - but what I really want to draw out here is downstream from that. Additional thought-particle: this is all a matter of work, of laboring. These writers are working to generate something, written works, but really the written works mediate, are a vehicle for, a complex set of relationships and processes (I abbreviated that in ‘cultures and projects’) that work through and upon people, encouraging certain ways of being, perceiving, thinking, and acting individually and collectively.
In various things I’ve written I’ve used the terms social imagination - meaning an account (or lack thereof) of how society really works - and moral imagination - meaning an account (or lack thereof) of the relative moral value of different people: egalitarian or otherwise, etc. I think the cultivation of hatred of this society can be parsed into those two categories and their relationship. The social murder analysis, for instance, is an account of this as a necessarily death-dealing society and that analysis has pretty massively different ramifications if one sees the people destroyed as of equal moral worth with one’s self or not (Tony Smith’s account, in his wonderful Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism, of what he calls the moral equality principle and how Marx held a version of it, is a big influence on me and I recommend it highly). Contrariwise, a robust commitment to full equality has pretty massively different ramifications depending on if one has or doesn’t have an accurate account of how this society operates (here too Smith’s account of genuine egalitarians who don’t understand capitalism, again in Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism, is very good and a big influence on me).
I’d say that the texts Marx, Benjamin, etc etc wrote are generally working on both the readers’ social imagination and moral imagination simultaneously though not in the same ways, and not always explicitly, and that the uptake of these texts - better, the lived reality of those texts as embedded in the contexts in which people engage them, make sense of them in light of their lives, relationships, and activities; and make sense of their lives via those texts - is all a matter of labors and production processes, though rarely labors and productions processes validated by the prevailing organization of production in capitalist society. (Part of the specificity of capitalism as way of organizing social production is that certain kinds of work and production get obfuscated and/or naturalized and treated as not work. As I recall it there’s a good note to this effect in Labor of Dionysus by Negri and Michael Hardt.)
Where I really want to get to with this - so far, so preliminary... so what?! (here in my darkest hour I continue, hook in mouth, into the lungs of hell, hoping to see someone set the world afire...) - is that there’s an analog to Marx, Benjamin and Benjamin’s monastic orders in the world they (we!) despise. That is, loosely corresponding to the practices seeking to make the world repugnant are a set of practices seeking to make the world acceptable, or actively embraced. I don’t know what the opposite of monastic is, so for now I’ll call it alt-monastic: there’s Benjamin’s marxist monastics and then there are the monastic orders of capitalism.
A stray Foucault bit floats to just below the surface of my thoughts now, something to the effect that the capitalists and the middle classes practiced versions of disciplines on themselves then generalized them outward, subjecting other people to them. Is that literally true - let alone sufficient - as account of historical processes? I doubt it, but either way, it’s a good heuristic device: the winners stand on the faces of the many dehumanized losers, and their capacity to do so relatively placidly - that they can live with their barbarity and the barbarity of which they are the smug products - reflects the winners’ own dehumanization.
That too is all a matter of work, production processes, making people into certain types, and keeping them so. I’m off again on again compelled by those labors and the dehumanized dehumanizers who are its products. The bits in my book where I talk about industrial physicians and some other writing I’ve done in the ballpark are significantly about this, my occasional posts here at Ye Olde Opene Moat about agnotology are centered on this.
Werner Bonefeld writes, borrowing from another author whose name escapes me unfortunately - one wants to give credit where it’s due - that Theodore Adorno drew our attention to what he (meaning Adorno) called ‘social coldness’, meaning the indifference that lets people live with barbarism. Bonefeld stresses that this isn’t a simple matter of ‘don’t be cold, be warm!’ for multiple reasons. Among them in my view is that to fully take on board the full scope of suffering generated by the death machine of this society would be itself to suffer massively and to some extent unduly. (It’s never the right people feeling awful, so to speak!) Anyone living despite this society has to have some level of coldness, partly because we’re all socialized into it and partly because it’s necessary to survive. Not everyone has the same degree or specific form of social coldness, though, and different forms and degrees are subject to different sorts and intensities of criticism: the coldness of the rulers is more objectionable, involves important differences in kind from, and requires different practices in response than the coldness of social nobodies. And again, these various version of social coldness reflect and enact - just are, and reinforce - patterns of social practice. They’re forms of work, results of work, products of production processes that draw on various sorts of resources.
I’m lately compelled by paperwork as examples of this, in relation to what I’ve written about industrial physicians. I find the juxtaposition of literally bloody violent production in workplaces with the metaphorically bloodless boring completion of report forms by corporate medical personnel gripping like a car crash, hard not to stare in horror at it. I think this example is far from unique because the death machine is lousy with patterns like this, but I think there’s use (at least to me in my own thinking, your mileage may vary) in trying to get at these patterns via attention to their instantiation in concrete instances like this. One result of doing so, I think, is to help make the repugnance of this world visceral in response to immediate phenomena: this part of the world before me is of a piece with, result and reinforcing cause, of processes of destroying people. And that part. And this one. And that one. And...
Alright, this little seedling’s been planted and now I gotta get to work. Later I should look up the actual quotes I mentioned. Making a mental note to do so.
Keep on trucking, friends.