Refusing to Engage

Reading Tronti has been somewhat of an experience.  Consequently, I'm not sure how to proceed with my comments because my reading of Tronti has alternated between fascination and boredom.  Perhaps these two responses to Tronti are closely related because, Tronti, who I've never read before, appears both as  new and sedimented.  Some of the ideas are quite familiar and in this respect we might speak of Tronti as an origin and thus an interesting spark of creativity, but, at the same time, his ideas have appeared over the past forty years in fragmented form, most notably in Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno. Fascination & boredom; new & old.

When one's comments in a symposium appear towards the end, one is both fortunate and unfortunate.  You can, if you are so inclined, pick over the previous contributions looking for gaps, errors, misreadings, and unrealized insights, but you are also left in the position of having to come up with something moderately new -- or, at least, something different.  Unfortunately, my boredom outweighs my fascination and, thus, I find myself having little to say. 

But, then again, maybe boredom is an appropriate response to Tronti. Is boredom not the form of a passive refusal to engage with something -- if not the world in its entirety? Tony Woodiwiss, who recently presented a lecture which I attended on the topic of "What could it mean to take human rights seriously?" made reference to a Situationist text which outlined one hundred and fifty human rights (why stop at twenty, thirty or fifty?), one human right read as "The right to stay in bed as long as you want".  Isn't this disengagement, refusal and boredom to the outmost?  To refuse to even meet the new day?  To refuse to expend any work or labour at all?  To not even make a cup of coffee in the morning (or afternoon)?  One wonders, then, if meeting Tronti on this terrain is not the greatest act of fidelity -- to note, but not act upon?  To see, but not process?  To read, but not consider?  Especially if one is reading in bed!

Perhaps I am making excuses for myself.  Excusing my own laziness and my own boredom and my own apathy.  To feel bad about these, isn't this a betrayal of refusal?  Isn't it to have bad consciousness relative to refusal?  One shouldn't feel bad about refusing.  And, yet, looking at the far superior contributions appearing before mine, I can't help but feel bad.  The refusal of resentiment is to refuse yourself; to condemn my own decision to refuse.  To be like the undergraduate student who writes their term paper the day after it was due and to knowingly hand in a piece of crap just to hand something in.  But, I assure the reader, my intentions from the beginning were good: I did want to say something interesting about my refusal to participate in the recent Canadian elections...

So, here it is, the most passive form of engagement: two questions (stealing the format from someone else!) about the first paragraph:

1. The only two overt references (there are, of course, many, many covert references throughout the text) are to Adam Smith and Karl Marx.  Clearly, Tronti intends this text to be read as an immanent critique of the remnants of the critique of political economy.  There is, however, a gap in this critique that was only identified in 1958 with the publication of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition: that is, the distinction between work and labour.  A distinction that is marginally operative in Tronti's essay, but never realized.  We see this tension throughout.  "labourers are transformed into workers", but there is little reference to working, instead the references remain to labour, "the productive power of labour".  But, at the same time, the "working class is what it does" -- and what does the working class do?  Labour.  Would not the working class work? Why the refusal to theorize the difference between work and labour?  Is Arendt an appropriate reference?  "Here again we find complete unanimity; the word 'labor,' understood as a noun, never designates the finished product, the result of laboring, but remains a verbal noun to be classed with the gerund, whereas the product itself is invariably derived from the word for work, even when the current usage has followed the actual modern development so closely that the verb form of the word 'work' has become rather obsolete."  And again, "The work of our hands, as distinguished from the labor of our bodies -- homo faber who makes and literally 'works upon' as distinguished from the animal laborans which labors and 'mixes with' -- fabricates the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total constitutes the human artifice".

2. If there is a distinction to be made between work and labor, does this in any call into question the analysis of 'capital as a social power'?  If it is work that creates the social -- that is, the lived artifice of society -- does this not mean that work and not capital is the social power?  One can see, of course, the polemical value in attributing work to a political power, and this is very much a polemical text, but, one wonders if the distinction between political power and social power is ultimately sustained by the analysis?  No doubt, there is value in pursuing the analysis of the 'social factory' and the 'real subsumption under capital', but is a more felicitous response possible?

Comments

[geo]

I think it's clear that by refusal, Tronti himself means something more than passivity. Even in this essay, passivity isn't enough, having become "an element of stabilization of capitalist development." Most clearly, he spells out the passivity-activity dialectic: "Obviously non-collaboration must be one of our starting points, and mass passivity at the level of production is the material fact from which we must begin. But at a certain point all this must be reversed into its opposite." This tension is crucial, and I think it's what keeps the "refusal" bound to the "strategy."

[northanger]

i've roused myself from bed to comment here. the best was saved for last. & i'm only half done!

[s0metim3s]

Craig, I liked this and the remarks about boredom and refusal would be good to elaborate.

But I think that's kind of wrong about the distinction between work and labour. This has been a hallmark of marxism since the days of yore. It's not just a tension, in marxism or Tronti's essay - it's a premise that shapes everything.

[TCO]

I'm not sure I've understood this post, but to me there are two distinct set of problems, and a big problem of how to relate them, should we chose that both are valid problematics.

On the one hand, there is the question of distinguishing between the social form of labour - for instance, wage labour - and work and the general application of labour power. Work is what my friends in Bougainville still do when they plant and consume tubers practically outside of any relation with capitalism. The complications are well known: how does labour power vary from context to context, does it really make sense to say planting tubers for festivals is even in some abstract way comparable, via a fungible quantity or in some other way, to mining coal for a wage, and so on. That's one set of issues, broadly speaking, these are political economy issues.

On the other hand, there are questions relating to the relationship between the working person and the work he or she does. Arendt's little anthropological exercise, as I see it, is the distinction between the free application of the worker against the coerced labour of the human tool. Now, this is why I see Arendt (and the early Marx) as essentially a kind of liberal - not necessarily a bad thing, just that this point is made by people like Humboldt or even Adam Smith. She's basically put a phenomenological anthropology spin on the old saying that if a man works a beautiful craft because he must or otherwise he will die, we may admire his work but deplore what he is. Indeed, that's just the Kantian moral doctrine of work, that people shouldn't be tools.

I'm not entirely sure that is what you or Arendt mean, because people ceaselessly iterate how wonderful she is, and basically, this sounds not wrong, I think the issue is profoundly significant, but unecessarily convoluted for such a stock point.

Maybe I have totally misunderstood your argument, but then the question arises of how to relate the issue of human freedom to the earlier one regarding what categories are constitutive of a (sane analysis of) political economy. Tronti's contribution to that, as I see it, is the idea that it would be a surrender to the constitution of work as labour for the proletariat to make claims of the bourgeoisie, or what amount to the same thing from his point of view, use the language and politics of the bourgeoisie to make claims for freedom and whatnot. The 'antihegelianism' consists of holding that the doctrine of human freedom that lives inside the homo faber can't be recomposed by superating the liberal notion of freedom.

Arguably, that's a very hegelian antihelianism...

[Eric]

Craig, perhaps I'm being thick, but the only value I see in making the work-labor distinction is to insist on some purity of noncapitalist work, on an instinct of workmanship as it were. Such a distinction seems at odds with your bit on laziness, which I quite liked. Am I missing something?

For me, insisting on the difference between labor and work--which, as Angela notes, is a defining theme in Marxism--is another way of insisting on the distinction between the base and the superstructure. Tronti's greatness, it seems to me, is to not accept that distinction, to insist that the political (and the legal and cultural and etc.) is part of/is equal to/is the economic (the "material").

[Craig]

Perhaps you are giving too much credit to my comments. It seems a bit overboard to attribute an "argument" to my meandering comments. My questions arise from a tension that seems obvious in the text: "The working is what it does", but the working class "labours". Should it not, then, be the "labouring class"? But, didn't "labour get transformed into work"? To say that one becomes the other suggests an analytical distinction between the two, otherwise it would have been impossible for one to become the other. Yet, after this transformation (this subsumption?), the word persists in reference to the same subject. "Labour power" and "work" remains attributed to the "working class".

There's a number of solutions to the problem: (1) Tronti was careless; (2) the translator was careless; (3) the distinction remains unthought, but recognized; (4) the distinction remains unthought and unrecognized. If the answer is either (1) or (2), then there is no problem. But, if the answer is either (3) or (4), then there is a problem. Should it prove to be the latter, then any concept that rests upon these concepts -- for instance, the distinction between a social and a political power -- is called into question. Or, at the very least, is in need of revision.

This is all my sloppy comments aspired to. The latter solution, of course, is the far more interesting one, whether correct or not.