The Double Shift

The Double Shift

Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work

Jason Read

First published by Verso 2024

© Jason Read 2024

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The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Names: Read, Jason, author.

Title: The double shift: Spinoza and Marx on the politics of work / Jason Read.

Description: London; New York: Verso, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023032347 (print) | LCCN 2023032348 (ebook) | ISBN 9781839767623 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781839767647 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Work—Philosophy. | Work—Social aspects. | Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. | Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632-1677.

Classification: LCC HD4904 .R39 2024 (print) | LCC HD4904 (ebook) | DDC 306.3/6—dc23/eng/20231127

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For Colleen

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Pulling a Double, Part 1:
The Work of the Economic in the Political

2. Pulling a Double, Part 2:
The Work of the Material in the Mental

3. Pulling a Double, Part 3:
The Work of Action in Production (and Vice Versa)

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Even in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, no one thinks alone. The material in this book benefits from the support of numerous people who have read parts of the manuscript or who have invited me to present parts of it in conferences. Here is a partial and incomplete list of the people I would like to thank: Bill Haver, Jackson Nichols, Philip Wohlstetter, Sean Landis and the rest of the folks at Red May Seattle, Vittorio Morfino, Adriel Trott, Jeffrey Gower, David Buxton, Jeremy Gilbert, Ben Trott, Panagiotis Sortis, Yves Citton, Frédéric Lordon, Étienne Balibar, Fredric Jameson, Franck Fischbach, Agon Hamza, Marcelo Starcenbaum, Warren Montag, Elana Jarl, Bojana Cvejić, Greg Seigworth, Hasana Sharp, Sandro Mezzadra, Gigi Roggero, Anna Kornbluh, and Eva Cherniavsky. I would like to thank Sebastian Budgen, Richard Seymour, Jeanne Tao, and everyone at Verso Books for helping shape this project. I would also like to thank the students in several semesters of PHI 241: The Politics and Philosophy of Work at the University of Southern Maine for providing feedback and discussion in what has become an ongoing process of research and reflection. Lastly, and not least, I would like to thank my dog Bento for knowing when it is time to get away from the desk and for his constant companionship (even if that meant sleeping beneath the desk).

Abbreviations

All citations in this book are included in the footnotes by author, title, and page number. The one exception to this is Spinoza’s Ethics, which is cited in the footnotes according to the standard method outlined below.

Spinoza’s Works:

E

Ethics Demonstrated in Geometric Order (. . .) (Ethica . . .)

App

Appendix

Ax

Axiom

C

Corollary

D

Definition

Def. Affs.

Definition of the Affects

Dem

Demonstration

Lem

Lemma

P

Proposition

Pos

Postulate

Pref

Preface

S

Scholium

Introduction

Work is all around us. For most of us, it is the basis of our economic life, in the form of wage labor. It is the condition for procuring food, clothing, and shelter, not to mention all those other objects of desire. Work is not limited to that purely economic function, however; it is also embedded in our culture, society, and politics. The creation and protection of jobs seems to be the dominant political demand and function of politics. Every politician, regardless of party, claims to be the one who can create jobs. Work expands from the economy to politics to become central to social existence. To have a job, to contribute to society and pay taxes, is taken as fundamental to one’s standing in society as well as a necessary condition for one’s own self-regard. To be unemployed, without work, or to engage in an activity that is not valued in terms of wage labor, is to be held in contempt and disregard. Work is at the center of economic, political, and ethical life.

Understanding and engaging critically with this situation entails moving beyond the very concepts and schemas that define critical thought. Case in point: a more or less common conception of ideology takes its bearings from Marx’s figure of base and superstructure. The economy, including work, the sale of labor power, is the base; ideology is part of the superstructure, which is defined by both its dependence on and separation from the economic base. As much as ideology works in the service of the economy, reproducing the relations of production, it does so in and through its distance from the economy. Ideologies engage with morals, religion, and nation, and, in doing so, they necessarily reproduce the conditions through which workers return to work each day, but they do so without directly addressing the economy or the world of work. Ideology serves the economy—that is, reproduces the relations of production—by eliding it or not addressing it at all. The corollary of this view of ideology is a view in which the economy—capitalism—is bereft of any meaning, any symbolism. It is, as Marx described it, a system in which all of the values and norms of culture and society are dissolved in the “icy waters of egotistical calculation.”¹ The economic world is not only disenchanted but without meaning, axiomatic in its function. These two ideas—the extra-economic nature of ideology and its corollary, the meaninglessness of the economy—which appear in a nascent form in Marx’s writing, have only continued to develop to become basic tenets of critical thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The economy has been presented as an iron cage, as functioning through axioms devoid of meaning and motivation, while ideology has subsumed all of culture. The division between ideology and economy has become as entrenched in contemporary thought as the division between mind and body; in each case it is a matter of two separate systems functioning together precisely because they are separate and distinct.

Understanding an ideology of work—specifically, one in which work plays a role politically and ethically—disrupts this division, forcing one to grasp the way in which the economy is not just the base of ideology but is its own ideology. In other words, in capitalism work always already functions as an ideology. Work is not just part of some base, determining the superstructure from below, but entails its own ethical and political evaluation, which is to say its own ideology. As much as the idea of work as an ideology short-circuits the division between base and superstructure, it also solves a nagging problem of the very definition of ideology. In The German Ideology, Marx’s most sustained but also partial and fragmented writing on the concept of ideology, Marx puts forward two theses about ideology. First, contra the claims of the original ideologists, German Idealists, Marx argues that “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”² This assertion of the practical and material basis of life is then put to the test by Marx’s definition of ideology, which asserts that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” This raises an important question: If consciousness is truly determined by life, by living conditions (including working conditions), how do the ruling ideas ever become ruling ideas? How do people live in a world dominated by ideas that do not correspond to their lives and their material conditions? Marx’s definition of ideology as the ideas of the ruling class was, in some sense, preemptively critically interrogated by Machiavelli, who argued that in order to rule, the ruler must appear to be of the people, to share their values, norms, and ideals—most importantly, their religion. In other words, an ideology can only become dominant if it at least incorporates the perspective of the ruled. The ideological function of work would perhaps resolve this tension between Marx and Machiavelli, offering a connection between the consciousness of the ruling class (predicated on the necessary extraction of value from work) and the life of the ruled class (predicated on the necessity of work as a way of making a living). The ideology of work connects experience, life, with consciousness, with the ruling ideas and ruling conditions.

As much as the ideology of work offers a redefinition and foundation of ideology, the contemporary politics of work necessarily also exceeds ideology, at least as it has been conventionally understood. Work is not just a matter of ideas, or even practices; it necessarily encompasses an experience that exceeds the terrain of ideas or even of consciousness. Work is lived on a level that is affective as much as intellectual. There is suffering, exhaustion, and humiliation in work, but there is also a sense of accomplishment through work and even an attachment to the trials, tribulations, and difficulty of labor as they become sources of pride. Work has become such a powerful linchpin of ideology precisely because of the way in which it organizes and is organized by the most immediate and thus seemingly natural aspects of human existence, suffering and striving, needs and desires, so much so that it appears to be less a practice and an institution than a fact of life. These affective dimensions underlie and exceed the more conscious thoughts and ideas surrounding work. At the same time, that work is lived at a level that passes below an explicitly formulated ideology, experienced intimately as a structure of feeling, it is also elevated to a level that exceeds any specific ideology to become almost mythic in encompassing all ideologies. As much as Prometheus was a figure of work, of the transformation of nature by work, work is our generalized Prometheus, in that there is no problem, personal or political, that cannot be solved by work, by working harder. Work has become the answer to every problem, the solution to everything—not only for ensuring one’s economic status but also for defining relationships, one’s sense of self, and other fundamental elements of everyday lived experience. In a society that increasingly eschews politics, or collective action, as a way of remedying or transforming life, work is that last remaining activity of transformation left to us. This is work stripped of any collectivity, any solidarity, to become a sheer test of individual will and intention.

Spinoza and Marx

Work is the central problem, the object, of this book. It defines the problem but not the method. The method, or philosophical orientation, is framed in the intersection of Marx and Spinoza. That Marx would be a point of reference for a study of work should go without saying, though the relevance of Spinoza remains to be articulated, as does the intersection of Spinoza and Marx. What is perhaps most challenging about thinking the relation of Marx and Spinoza is that it exceeds the two dominant models for understanding the relation between two philosophers, namely, influence and disagreement. While it is true that Marx studied Spinoza and copied passages from Spinoza’s writing, specifically the Theological-Political Treatise into his notebooks, the intersections between their thought exceed the few points of reference found in the latter. Nor can the relation between Spinoza and Marx be a relation of opposition or argument, in which Marx’s thought can be understood as an argument with or negation of Spinoza. Not only do they not directly respond to each other, but their objects of investigation and modes of inquiry are too different to allow for a direct comparison. The relation between Marx and Spinoza thus has to be invented, not ex nihilo but from points of contiguity and connection of two seemingly disparate philosophical texts, contexts, and practices. These points of connection are found not in a direct relation of influence or opposition, but in the way in which the points of contact of their thought open up new concepts and articulate the basis for a new reading of both Marx and Spinoza.

There are multiple attempts to articulate the virtual, or possible, relations between Spinoza and Marx. For the purpose of this project, the relations explored deal with the intersection between work, ideology, and politics. Each of these can be considered as both a point of interrogation and provocation, where Spinoza and Marx overlap on some fundamental point or orientation, but also where the relation between the two opens up a way of thinking that cannot be reduced to one or the other. Both Spinoza and Marx put practical activity, work, at the basis of human existence and consciousness; in each, there is a striving and an acting that is prior to, and the condition of, thought and reflection.³ As much as this practical orientation grounds and determines thought, it does so in a way that is a condition for mystification and distortion as much as for knowledge and understanding. How we perceive the world, rightly or wrongly, is a product of the way that we are determined to act in it. For both Marx and Spinoza, ideology (or the imagination) is the original form of consciousness (or, as Étienne Balibar suggests, conscientia sive ideologica), the most immediate form of knowledge; our awareness of our desires and our individual thoughts is ideological in that it occludes the causal conditions of our desires and thoughts.⁴ Of course, ideology is a woefully underdeveloped concept in Marx, emerging briefly in the manuscript of The German Ideology only to be abandoned, at least in name, and gnawed away at by so many different theorists. What Spinoza offers is an insistence on the material nature of ideology in terms of its causal conditions and effects, and, more importantly, its embodiment not only in ideas but also in imagination and affects. Such a development is not without precedent in Marx, but it is more fully articulated in Spinoza and is more necessary in thinking the ideological as inseparable from the embodied nature of work—that is, as something that entails pain, pleasure, fear, and desires.

The relation between the social order (in terms of production and reproduction) and individual life is a relation of immanence rather than expression or linear causal determination: the individual and society are two different ways of expressing the same thing, the same relation. This statement cuts two ways. First, individual existence is nothing other than an effect of the social order; it is social through and through (which could be considered the Marxist emphasis). Second, social relations can only exist, can only perpetuate themselves, if they are intimately lived at the level of imagination, affects, and desires (which could be considered the Spinozist dimension). To read Marx with Spinoza is to read both of these moments into each other, to see the individual and the social as two sides of the same coin.⁵ This shapes and alters how we think about politics as much as social relations: or, more to the point, politics cannot be thought of as practice independent from social existence, including the mundane facts of the labor relation, or an event that ruptures the coordinates of day-to-day life. Indeed, politics is shaped by social relations. Thus, to briefly sum up the thesis that will be developed in the rest of the book, the central terrain of intersection between Marx and Spinoza is immanence: immanence understood in three senses, in terms of the immanence of economics to politics (which is also that of politics to economics); of ideology to bodies (and bodies to ideology); and of praxis to poiesis (and poiesis to praxis). These three different double shifts constitute the method and theoretical orientation of this book.

The Double Shift

These three “double shifts” describe ways in which practices, concepts, and problems do double work, shifting from one aspect of reality to another. The first is that of the economic and the political. To some extent this is the question of any engagement with Marx, for which the figure of the base and superstructure is the most immediate and common representation of the connection and hierarchy of economics and politics. In what follows, I take a different provocation as a starting point, one based on a lesser-known passage from Marx. In volume 3 of Capital, Marx writes:

The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of production to the immediate producers—a relationship whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power—in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the specific form of the state in each case.⁶

This passage (which forms the basis for the reading of Marx in chapter 1) puts forward a different reading of the intersection of the economy and politics than the more familiar topography of base and superstructure. It differs on two fundamental points. First, it stresses the immediate identity of economics and politics—wherein the economic relationship directly determines the political rather than acting through the state, law, and ultimately ideology—as a series of mediations. Second, and no less important, the economic in this sense is not ownership of the means of production or the demand to extract surplus value, but the labor relation. The connection is between work and politics, between the relations of hierarchy, cooperation, and domination in the labor process and the relations that constitutes the state. In part, this political dimension is found in the dual nature of the labor process, which is, as Marx argued, both concrete labor (a specific task or function) and abstract labor (an interchangeable activity). These two sides of the labor process, concrete specificity and generic indeterminacy, shape and determine the fundamental political problem of hierarchy and equality.

If such a determination seems too rigid, deterministic, and mechanical, that is perhaps because it is necessary to examine its “innermost secret,” the specific relation that constitutes the intersection of the economy and politics. The labor process directly acts on the political edifice because it acts on and shapes not just the production of commodities and wealth but also much of people’s understanding of themselves and the world. In other words, it produces subjectivity as much as commodities. In chapter 2, I argue that the double shift of the economic into the political (and vice versa) has as its corollary the double shift of the material into the mental (and vice versa)—the way in which material relations shape ways of thinking and ways of thinking act on material relations. This is another point where Marx and Spinoza intersect and transform each other. It is not just a matter of reiterating Spinoza’s assertion that things and ideas, mind and body, were two different ways of looking at the same thing, the same substance, but rather of positing that these two different ways of understanding the same thing have to be understood in terms of both their identity and nonidentity. Spinoza’s reflections on the identity and nonidentity of mind and body, habits, and the imagination make it possible to theorize the way in which ideology emerges directly from material relations as well as the way in which ideology also distorts and deviates from its material conditions. Work is situated at the intersection of both of these tendencies: the ideology of work is at once a direct reflection of material conditions, as a material imperative that is transformed into an ethical ideal, and a distortion, as the ideal of a well-rewarded work ethic that increasingly deviates from a reality of increasingly demanding but poorly compensated jobs. Ideas and ideologies of work both cling to lived reality and warp it, and it is precisely this tendency to reflect and distort that reproduces our individual and collective attachment to work.

These two double shifts, from the economic to the political and from the material to the mental, ultimately lead to a third double shift, in which action (the way we comport ourselves in the world, relating to others) shapes and determines production, and production (the material conditions of work) shapes and determines action. Or, in more classical terms, praxis determines poiesis and poiesis determines praxis. This double shift, in some sense, is the culmination of the other two, of the double shift of economics into politics, and the material into the mental (and vice versa), since the myths and ideologies that shape work are situated at the point of intersection of action, informing and shaping politics, and production, following the transformations of the labor process. This double shift of production onto action and action onto production means that all action, even the seemingly mundane task of going to work each day, is strategic, is an attempt to realize particular goals, but also that all such strategies are necessarily determined by not only the material conditions that shape their conditions but also the larger ideological and cultural relations that shape and determine how and what people can imagine. Understanding work, wage labor, as a strategy, entails understanding its material and ideological conditions—conditions that expand beyond the immediacy of the labor relation to general cultural views and attitudes toward work.

In the chapters that follow, these three double shifts—economics to politics, material to mental, production to action—form the basis of a philosophical orientation that is put to work and illustrated by examinations of popular culture and politics, and particularly of their intersections in the popular imagination. As much as popular culture is, in many ways, the escape from the world of work and its concerns, constituting a distraction, it is shackled to its opposite, especially in the way in which it engages with the ideological and mythic dimensions of work.

In chapter 1, I examine two films from the late nineties, Office Space and Fight Club, that reflect a profound anxiety about the dominant regimes of office work and the emergent regimes of service work and emotional labor. These anxieties demonstrate that work, wage labor, is as much a matter of the production and reproduction of subjectivity, of identity and a sense of self, as it is as about the production of things or wealth.

This leads to the second interrogation of popular culture in chapter 2, an investigation into the television shows Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. I argue that the popularity of these shows stems from the way in which they refract and engage with fantasies and fears about work. Most importantly, they reveal to what extent ideas about the mastery of one’s work and self-mastery constitute modern strategies not only for making a living but for realizing the good life. For all of their melodrama of drug dealers and corrupt lawyers, the two shows stage and, in some sense, subvert the dominant mythology of our society: that being good at one’s job can transform one’s fate and lot in life.

In chapter 3, I examine the films Compliance and The Assistant, which show how work compels people to identify with their own subjection. Each demonstrates the extent to which people adapt to and adopt their material constraints, identifying with the very conditions that determine them. Popular culture constitutes a feedback loop of existing ideologies and attachments to work, reflecting them and intensifying them. In order to develop this relationship between popular culture and work, I turn to Yves Citton’s concept of “mythocracy,” a concept that articulates the way in which ruling ideas maintain themselves as ruling ideas by rearticulating the fears and hopes of the ruled.⁷ It is in popular culture that we can see not only the domination of work over the popular imagination but also the moments of imagining and feeling that cannot be captured by the demands of wage labor.

These examinations into popular culture pave the way for a larger examination into the predominant ideological orientation of the current moment, what I call, following Alex Williams, “negative solidarity.”⁸ Negative solidarity is not just an inversion of solidarity, a focus on the individual rather than the collective, but one in which any collectivity, any connection between one individual’s struggles and another’s, is actively refused. Negative solidarity is a transformation of one’s own particular destitution into a virtue—a virtue that is founded upon an attachment to the trials and tribulations of work. It is the belief that because one has suffered through work, or believes that they have suffered, then others should too. Any attempt to improve one’s conditions is seen as a betrayal of the validity of one’s suffering. This solidarity is negative in the sense that the only way it operates is downward, reducing everyone to the most disadvantaged position. However, this negative solidarity is still solidarity, albeit a thin one, in that it makes work, especially the difficulty of work, the basis of recognition and social belonging. A critique of negative solidarity is a matter of understanding the way in which this solidarity is both the spontaneous ideology of work itself and the foundation of contemporary politics. Spinoza famously asked the question as to why people fight for their servitude as if was salvation; I argue that the answer to such question can be found in the way in which people increasingly identify with work, seeing it as the key to their sense of self-worth and a better life, to their salvation, and not as the basis of their subjection, of their continued subordination to work.

Finally, the book ends with a brief provocation regarding what it would take to develop a politics and an imaginary that would change work. To this end, I consider the film Sorry to Bother You as a liberatory rearticulation of imagination, affects, and understanding. The film illustrates what it might be like to imagine an affirmative and transformative idea of solidarity. The concluding chapter also makes the point that work must be contested at the level of affects and imagination, as well as at the level of understanding and concept. This is necessary because work, being a worker, structures not just our economic life but also how we envision who we are and what is possible. In place of the negative solidarity of work, which makes our individual trials and tribulations a point of pride, it is necessary to construct a rebellious solidarity—one that recognizes work as our subjection and collective action as our liberation against a negative solidarity that presents the individual work ethic as salvation and collective action as nothing other than the road to subjection.

1

Pulling a Double, Part 1:
The Work of the Economic in the Political

The question of the relation between politics and work is generally thought to entail the traversal of a series of divisions and mediations that separate politics from economics, base from superstructure. In Capital, volume 3, however, Karl Marx short-circuits such divisions, proposing an immediate understanding of the relation between politics and economics, market and state, distinct from the famous edifice of base and superstructure. In the latter conception, as part of the super-structure, politics rests on the economic base, on the forces and relations of production, passing through a series of mediations up to the political struggles over ideology. In the former, Marx places at the basis of politics neither the forces nor relations of production, but something more immediate: the labor relation. As Marx writes,

The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of production to the immediate producers—a relationship whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power—in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the specific form of the state in each case.¹

Such an “innermost secret” is perhaps even more debatable than the determination of the superstructure by the base. The labor relation would seem to be too disparate, too heterogeneous to play such a determining role: not everyone under capitalism labors, or labors directly in the production of unpaid surplus labor. Moreover, “the specific economic form” would seem to vary greatly from country to country, industry to industry, and even from job to job within the same industry.² Marx’s statement functions as a fundamental provocation, posing the questions as to how a particular aspect of society, and a specific laboring relation, can do the work of not only the economy, producing goods and value, but of politics, structuring relations of sovereignty and dependence.

Not only does Marx’s assertion of an immediate relation between work and politics pose a challenge to the demands of Marxist theory, which asserts a hierarchy and mediation of base and superstructure; more importantly, it subverts the commonly held belief that work is outside of politics. In conventional understanding, work, the labor relation, appears less a particular social and economic institution than as a general fact of life. The terms and language that we use to speak of work, such as “making a living,” suggest an immediate relationship between work and life. Working appears as fundamental to life as eating, sleeping, and drinking, and even more so because it is a necessary condition of all three. Thus, the first critical task of any discussion of work and politics—perhaps the first task of critical thinking in general—is to denaturalize what we take for granted, what appears as natural. It is necessary to see beyond the seemingly self-evident necessity of work to recognize the institutions, histories, and conflicts beneath the surface.

Working for a Living

Capitalism, Marx argues, appears as an immense accumulation of commodities, but it is a particular commodity—labor power—that is in some sense the secret to deciphering both the appearance and reality of capitalism. Labor power is unlike all other commodities in that it produces value, producing more than it costs. However, it is also like other commodities in that it is a commodity bought and sold on the market with a seller and a buyer. The seller, the worker, wants to get as much for their commodity as they can; the buyer, the capitalist, wants to get what they are buying for as cheap as possible, and once purchased they want to get as much as possible out of it. The struggles over prices and over the quantity of what is sold are no different than any other commodity. As Marx writes,

The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working day as long as possible, and, where possible, to make two working days out of one. One the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the worker maintains his right as a seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to a particular normal length. There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides.³

Unlike every other commodity, labor power is sold, alienated, but not exchanged. The worker cannot part with it, since it is his or her body and mind, but it is now under the control of another, of the capitalist, the boss that dictates how it will be used. The worker is positioned as an owner of a commodity, of labor power, before selling it, but, once it is sold, once it is put to work, it belongs to someone else. As philosopher Pierre Macherey writes, detailing this division in the subject of labor power,

The condition for the wage system to produce all its effects is therefore that the worker has been put in the position of a divided subject, remaining entirely master of their labor power, has alienated only its use, which supposes that this force can be materially separated from its use.⁴

Much of what Marx wrote in 1844 in terms of “alienation” or “estrangement” reflected this paradoxical alienation of the self, of subjectivity, through the inalienability of labor power, as a commodity that cannot be separated from one’s existence. Because the worker could not simply part with labor power, leaving their body and mind at the factory in order to pick it up ten hours later, they were subject to the alienation of their time, thoughts, and very activity belonging to another. It is possible to argue that much of the structure of capitalism, and the experience of living under capitalism, stems from the way in which the sale of labor power is both identical to and different from the sale of other commodities; the same competition and effects of supply and demand, but a fundamentally different experience, as it is a commodity that cannot be separated from one’s life and existence⁵—most importantly in that the seller, the worker, cannot simply part with it once sold but has to live its sale through the exploitation of labor power, through all the ways in which the boss extracts more labor. In other words, labor power is both like and unlike other commodities, and that difference and identity is integral to both how it is structured as a commodity and how it is experienced as a form of alienation.

Capital can be read as an exploration of the unique and contradictory status of labor power as a commodity. The unique status of labor power, as not just another commodity but itself a source of value, stems from the difference between its cost and its productivity. The cost of labor, the wage, is determined by the cost of its reproduction, the conditions that reproduce it and make possible the return of the worker to the workplace. However, once put to work, its production necessarily exceeds its cost. What the worker sells is a potential, a capacity to work. This potential is actualized by the capitalist, which gives it a particular task and objective. The capitalist enterprise, in whatever form, must necessarily take on the task of transforming what is potential into what is actual. Macherey describes this transformation:

From this point of view, we could say that when the capitalist occupies themself with their workers’ labor-power, which they have acquired the right to employ in exchange for a wage, treating it as a “productive power” whose productivity they intend to increase in order to produce relative surplus value—they practice metaphysics not in a theoretical but in a practical way.⁶

Metaphysics becomes practical, becomes practiced, as the potential of labor power is actualized through all of the various techniques of management that make up the working day, from supervision to the technological organization of the labor process. The working day is structured to transform a capacity, an ability to work, into an actuality, work performed. This transformation of potential to actuality is less a mystery to be contemplated than an everyday reality that goes on so often that is not even noticed.

The peculiar status of labor as a commodity, its identity and non-identity to other commodities, shapes both the structure of capitalism and the experience of selling labor under capitalism. As Isabelle Garo, one of France’s leading scholars of Marx, argues,

The originality of Marx’s approach attaches to the dialectical nature of his analysis of contradictions, which is no mere juxtaposition of opposed tendencies: the capitalist labour process is not alienating in one respect and emancipatory in another, but it interweaves these two tendencies at the very heart of the labourer’s individuality and of social relations.⁷

It is not a matter of deciding once and for all if the labor relation, and its difference from other forms of direct domination, are good or bad, but of understanding the interplay between emancipation and alienation throughout the labor relation—to which it is necessary to add that the emancipation and alienation are so intertwined that it becomes necessary to see the alienation in emancipation and vice versa. The split between the two sides of selling labor power, of being both a seller and being sold, are lived in a relation of autonomy and heteronomy that political theorist Kathi Weeks argues is more of an antinomy than a dialectic.⁸

Although the terms Garo and Weeks use are fundamentally different, relating to different ways of thinking contradiction, their points are similar in that it is impossible to separate the aspect of the wage relation that relates to emancipation from alienation. As Weeks argues, selling one’s labor power, working for a living, is often taken as the epitome of autonomy and self-reliance. It is seen as synonymous with the freedom from dependence on others, whether in the form of an immediate dependence on family or of the more indirect, and withering, dependence on state or public assistance. However, this independence comes at a cost of dependence, first and foremost on the particular employer, but also on the conditions of that particular capitalist—technological and social—and, ultimately, on the entire status of the world market. This process goes on behind people’s backs, as Marx argued. Indeed, it is nearly impossible for any one person to grasp the way in which their simple act of going to work each day is itself dependent on a slew of social, political, and technological conditions that remain out of sight and largely out of mind. These conditions include the wage labor of others that prepare and sell the commodities that one can buy with their wages, but they also include activities that are not waged, the care work and cooking and cleaning in the home that are necessary conditions of wage labor but are not counted as labor. The sheer complexity of the mediations of one’s particular existence makes it all the more tempting to grasp wage labor itself as an immediate act of making a living. As Moishe Postone writes in his study of social domination in capitalism, “This apparently transhistorical necessity—that the individual’s labor is the necessary means to their (or their family’s) consumption—serves as the basis for a fundamental legitimating ideology of the capitalist social formation as a whole, throughout its various cases.”⁹ The specific socioeconomic necessity of working in order to procure commodities is given the veneer of an anthropological, or even biological, necessity of survival.

It is not just the complexity of the conditions of wage labor that is obscured, but also its relation to exploitation. For Marx, one of the fundamental differences between capitalism, and everything that came before (particularly feudalism), has to do with the concealment of exploitation. The feudal peasant who worked partly on the lord’s land and partly on their own plot of land was acutely aware of the difference between the work they did for themselves and the work that they did for the lord.¹⁰ Their entire working day was structured around a physical and temporal break between the two. The worker under capitalism works for both their own wage, for the cost of their labor power (what Marx calls necessary labor), and to produce surplus value, the source of capitalist process. This surplus can be produced by multiple methods, for instance, by simply extending the working day so that the worker keeps working long after they have made their wages (as indicated in the passage above) or by making the time spent working so intense, so productive, that more working time is spent producing a surplus.

All of this will discussed below, but here it is worth emphasizing a seemingly mundane, but incredibly significant fact: there is no temporal or spatial indicator of this division between necessary and surplus labor. There is no bell that sounds, nor any announcement which states, “Attention, workers: you have made your wages. The rest of the working day is surplus.” Such an announcement would invariably lead to revolution, or, at the very least, mass walk-offs. The difference between the cost of labor power and its productivity, a difference foundational to capital, is obscured by the wage that presents labor power as a commodity paid for like any other. The wage relation is both the economic basis of capitalism and the kernel of its ideological justification in that it conceals exploitation behind the exchange of wages for labor. As Marx writes,

All the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, all capitalism’s illusion about freedom, all the apologetic tricks of vulgar economics, have as their basis the form of appearance discussed above, which makes the actual relation invisible and indeed presents to the eye the precise opposite of that relation.¹¹

Marx begins Capital by addressing the way capitalism appears: as an immense accumulation of commodities. It is possible to see the particular commodity of labor power as entailing a particular appearance through the wage—one that effaces not only the mediations and complexity of social relations, obscuring dependency, but also exploitation. What it occludes is no less important than what it includes, what it represents. Not only does the wage obscure exploitation; it also makes visible a particular kind of participation, one that abstracts the individual from the social conditions of their production and the social effects of their production. The wage relation obscures exploitation, and the collective conditions of work, in favor of treating it as a purely individual attribute.¹² The wage, then, is part of what could be called the “spontaneous ideology” of capitalism, the way in which economic relations generate and reproduce their own way of looking at the world. It only appears to be “spontaneous,” or, rather, its spontaneity is the effect of a kind of editing and selection, as aspects of social relations are concealed and revealed.¹³ Intertwined with this distortion of social relations are the ways in which this spontaneous ideology functions as an ideology, as a justification of the existing order, precisely through its ability to address actual desires and needs. The wage is as much a condition of freedom and flexibility as it is a distortion of actual conditions of dependence.¹⁴ To use Garo’s terms above, in its indifference to the specificity and limitation of needs, it is emancipation, but in its occlusion of exploitation and the conditions of production, it is alienation.

Real Abstractions and Concrete Relations

Moving beyond the intertwining alienation and emancipation of the wage relation and its spontaneous ideology entails moving beyond the appearance of wage labor into its constitutive conditions. Moving from appearance to conditions entails moving from the concepts of the market, the commodity and wage labor, to those of production, to Marx’s concepts of concrete labor, abstract labor, and living labor. Initially, concrete labor and abstract labor are the conceptual corollaries of exchange value and use value; the first is defined by concrete particularity, and the second is defined by abstract equivalence. As much as the two sides of labor are initially given as the simple basis of the two sides of the commodity form, use value and exchange value, it is important not to overlook the particular insights of these concepts on their own terms. The idea that labor is the source of value is, after all, not Marx’s discovery: it can be found in the political economies of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. What is unique to Marx is the dual nature of labor, abstract and concrete, which Marx argues is “the secret to the whole critical conception.”¹⁵ The duality of labor is not only a way to understand the contradictions of the commodity; it also has its insights into the labor relation itself and its role as not only the basis of value but also as the hidden edifice of the political relation.

As with the use value of the commodity, there is no immediate mystery to concrete labor; it is the specific work of weaving, tailoring, forging, and so on—the specific work of an individual undertaking a particular task. As much as this concept seems self-evident, like something from a children’s book dividing a village into butcher, baker, and candlestick maker, there remains the question of how these specific and distinct labors interact. As with use value, the emphasis of the concept is on the concrete qualities, in this case those of different kinds of labor. My labor, your labor, is then singular, specific, and thus cannot be exchanged with that of others. It is possible to then see concrete labor as something irreducibly specific: as being not only the specific task of a specific job according to the division of labor, but also the specific endeavor of an individual body and mind. As with use value, it is hard to comprehend how something so singular as one’s individual labor can be exchanged at all; this is, of course, the riddle that Capital opens with, an attempt to think the ground of that which is already taken for granted. It is equally important to note that this question is not posed by living conditions under capitalism’s immense accumulation of commodities. Exchange is simply assumed as possible in the daily activity of the purchase of commodities. Marx’s solution that commodities are exchanged, are equivalent, based on the labor power is an answer to a question that daily experience does not pose. That labor is the solution to the riddle that commodities are equivalent despite their qualitative differences, because of a quantitative equivalence of labor power, provokes the question of the equivalence of different laboring activities. The different labors of different individuals are no less heterogeneous than the use value of different commodities. How, then, is abstract labor possible? Marx would seem to offer two conditions that would explain the existence of the apparent oxymoron of abstract labor. First, Marx covers what could be considered an anthropological ground of abstract labor, arguing that the different forms of labor have as their common denominator the fact that they are produced by different human beings. As Marx writes,

If we leave aside the determinate quality of productive activity, and therefore the useful character of the labor, what remains is its quality of being an expenditure of human labor-power. Tailoring and weaving, although they are qualitatively different productive activities, are both a productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc. and in this sense both human labor. They are merely two different forms of the expenditure of human labor.¹⁶

This assertion of a natural, human basis of abstract labor, of a communality, is contradicted by, or at least put in tension with, Marx’s assertion that the abstract nature of labor is not an anthropological given but a social process. It is the very fact that labor is exchanged, is treated as interchangeable, that provides its abstract commonality. Its common basis is not to be found in the recesses of the human body but in the social relations themselves. As Marx writes in the same section, “However, let us remember that commodities possess an objective character as values only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labor, that the objective character as values is therefore purely social.”¹⁷ Marx seems to vacillate with respect to the ground of abstract labor, placing the abstract quality alternately in the biological identity of humanity as a species or the social relations of a capitalist society. In one instance, it is an attribute of humanity in general, a commonality that all labor, despite the difference of task, has humanity itself, the body and the brain, in common; while in the other explanation, the commonality is less anthropological and more social: labor is made interchangeable by the social relations that treat it as such.

These two different perspectives, anthropological or social, realist or nominalist, are resolved in the notion of an essence that is itself the product of social relations, an abstraction that emerges in history, through social relations. As the philosopher Georg Lukács describes this historical moment in its negative terms,

In the nineteenth century, millions of independent artisans experienced the effect of this abstraction of socially necessary labour as their own ruin, i.e. they experienced in practice the concrete consequences, without having any suspicion that what they were facing was an achieved abstraction of the social process; this abstraction has the same ontological rigour of facticity as a car that runs you over.¹⁸

Abstract labor often manifests itself in the failure of individual workers to keep up with its standard and pace, but, nonetheless, it is the product of disparate different individuals working at the same rate and pace. It is a collective production of humanity that produces its own generic essence. As Marx writes in the sixth of his “Theses on Feuerbach,” the “human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.”¹⁹ Abstract humanity is not the precondition of abstract labor power but rather, in some sense, its result, a product of the interconnected nature of disparate labor intersecting in the same productive process.²⁰

If the capitalist mode of production is understood as not only a production of things, of commodities, but also a production of capitalism itself, of a social relation, then abstract and concrete labor cannot be separated from their effects on subjectivity. Viewing these two types of labor not from the side of the commodity or their relation to value but their relation to work means that they could be identified with two different aspects of the labor process. Concrete labor corresponds to the qualitative aspect, which includes, in part, the actual task with its specific demands and constraints, but also its place within a hierarchy of other tasks. Abstract labor, on the other hand, corresponds less to the particular conditions of this or that job than to the general conditions of labor itself, especially these conditions related to general standards and norms of productivity. These two sides are intertwined and inseparable in the actual labor process: no concrete labor is done outside of the general demands of abstract labor, and abstract labor cannot exist without being a specific kind of work producing specific things. They are also intertwined in the experience of work, which is always both a concrete and particular task and an attempt to conform to the abstract and general demands of productivity. There is, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues, a double truth of work: one pertaining to how it is structured, divided between abstract and concrete labor, and subject to the division of labor; and the other pertaining to how it is experienced, how those divisions shape and are shaped by the striving and experience of individuals.²¹ Concrete labor is the basis of much of what we discuss when we discuss the experience of work, defining, in some sense, the constraints and conditions, frustrations and joys of the workday. It is the specific challenge of doing a particular job. At first glance, it would appear that abstract labor is outside of the immediate experience of work; that, to paraphrase Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s influential study of the division of mental and manual labor, in the labor relation (as well as the exchange relation), “consciousness and practice go separate ways”: the worker is focused on the specific concrete task at hand while the abstract quantitative dimension, the average productivity, goes on behind the worker’s back, in the reorganization of the production process and the adoption of new technologies.²² The worker, qua individual, is focused on their particular labor, the task of their job and its particular constraints, but their labor is part of a production that necessarily exceeds their understanding and awareness. However, this is only a partial approximation. The paradox is that, despite being outside of experience and consciousness, abstract labor has effects on consciousness and experience. Or, we might say that what constitutes the experience of work is to be found in the intersection and contradictions of concrete and abstract labor—that is, in the intersection of concrete tasks and general demands of productivity.

Marx associated abstract labor not only with the economic imperative to render all labor interchangeable and equally productive, but also with a general shift of cultural and political values. The interchangeability of the labor of different individuals on the factory floor necessarily has effects that exceed it. The indifference of abstract labor to its specific concrete utilization translates into an indifference to the specific character of the person performing it. As Marx and Engels write, “Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class.”²³ The use of labor power in the abstract creates the ideal of abstract humanity; the capitalist workplace is increasingly structured to put to work the labor of anyone whatsoever, regardless of skill, strength, or gender. As Marx indicates in Capital, the effects of this transformation extend well beyond the restricted domain of an economy, to a workplace that employs men, women, and children all over the globe to encompass a cultural transformation, including even religion:

For a society of commodity producers, whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, and in this material [sachlich] form bring their individual, private labors into relation with each other as homogenous human labor, Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e. in Protestantism, Deism, etc. is the most fitting form of religion.²⁴

Abstract labor short-circuits the divide between the worldly concerns of the economy and the lofty ideals of religion, cutting through the various levels of the superstructure. Abstract labor and, with it, an abstract humanity is a “real abstraction,” an abstract notion that has become effective in history and practice. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels stressed the disruptive nature of abstract labor on a society, identifying the general trajectory of capital with the general tendency of abstraction. As Marx and Engels write, “All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”²⁵ Abstract labor has for its corresponding anthropological postulate the idea of abstract humanity. An equal and exchangeable humanity was created not through the laws that proclaimed the rights of man but through the labor process that extracted the same activity, the same amount of work, from every individual.

The Communist Manifesto is Marx and Engels’s most dramatic formulation of what could be called the utopia of abstract labor, one that is intertwined with the identification of the revolutionary aspect of capital itself. In that take, it is capitalism, or more specifically the bourgeoisie, that “has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations [and] has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors.’ ”²⁶ The most immediate example that Marx gives of this revolutionary dimension is in the abolition of the gendered division of labor in the imposition of indifferent abstract labor. Capital was supposed to initiate the society of abstract labor; however, this revolutionary tendency of capitalism has failed to manifest. Not only has capital failed to eliminate the gendered division of labor; it has deepened this division through the separation of production from social reproduction. The former is waged, while the latter is unwaged, and this division between waged and unwaged underwrites and reinforces the gender division of labor. The same capitalism that created the worker created the housewife.²⁷ While the former was dominated by the compulsion of abstract labor, the latter was subject to a fundamentally different kind of labor and different kind of compulsion. That one works for a wage is in some sense explained by the wage form itself, which is its justification and recognition; unwaged work requires another explanation and another representation. As feminist political theorist Silvia Federici argues, “Housework was transformed into a natural attribute, rather than being recognized as work, because it was destined to be unwaged.”²⁸ The differences that were supposed to disappear with capital get a new lease on life, paid off in part by the wage form itself. The gender division of labor is initially produced and reproduced by the division between waged and unwaged work. This division persists even as the housewife, and the identity of a life exclusively dedicated to unwaged labor in the home dissipates, becoming a luxury few can afford. As long as “women’s work,” including the care of children and the elderly, is seen as a natural attribute of their gender and not a skill that is acquired through social relations, it is devalued and unpaid.²⁹ The gender division of labor outlasts the figure of the housewife through the continued devaluation of the work of care, cleaning, and service associated with the home and the reproduction of capital. While much has been written about Marx’s predictions regarding the demise of capitalism, his pessimism regarding its future and long-term viability, it is possible to argue that Marx had misplaced optimism in its revolutionary tendencies, its ability to do away with the past, melting it into thin air. Perhaps capital was never as revolutionary as it made itself seem.

Marx’s tendency to stress the revolutionary dimension of capitalism poses a fundamental dilemma for understanding the reproduction of capitalist society. The ceaseless revolution of all social relations, the drowning of all religion and tradition in egotistical calculation, and the reduction of various callings to simple wage labor raises the question of capital’s own reproduction: How could a society so unstable, so bereft of symbolism and hierarchy, even reproduce itself? Of course, Marx’s answer, or the answer that Marx ultimately came to, was that capitalism was not without its own stability, its own values, and even its own symbolism, its “religion of daily life,” comprising money, capital, and labor.³⁰ It is worth noting, however, that this question, of labor as a form of social cohesion, had already been answered avant la lettre by Hegel, who in many ways tried to theorize how labor could be the basis of social recognition and cohesion precisely because it is abstract and indifferent to its particular activity. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right places labor at the foundation of both the individual’s self-respect and social recognition, providing the linchpin between the individual and society. What Hegel stresses is not the recognition of the labor of the individual on account of the particular job or task in producing particular use values; it is not a matter of recognizing the work of the farmer, baker, or university professor in terms of their particular craft. Rather, labor is a valued source of recognition because it is, in some sense, generically useful and interchangeable, viewed in terms not of its specific concrete labor but of its general social function. Work is a process of education, an education inscribed in the materiality of things and the interconnectedness of social relations:

Practical education through work consists in the self-perpetuating need and habit of being occupied in one way or another, in the limitation of one’s activity to suit both the nature of the material in question and, in particular, the arbitrary will of others, and in a habit, acquired through this discipline, of objective validity and universally applicable skills.³¹

Work sands off the rough edges of particularity, making individuals interchangeable and dependable. It is precisely the universality of need and the interchangeability of functions that is the basis for recognition and respect. To translate this into current values and vernacular: one is worthy of respect not because one provides a valued service or produces a needed commodity, but simply because one has a job. This could be understood as the grounds for a model of social recognition, and thus a new basis for an immanent critical evaluation of work. As philosopher Axel Honneth argues, the ideal in this case is not that of unalienated labor—an impossible “craftsman” standard of autonomy, identification, and control—but that one’s labor is socially recognized as labor, as a contribution to society.³² This recognition takes place only after the worker has been subject to the disciplinary regime of labor and made interchangeable. Hegel not only recognized the ethical ideal of abstract labor, of labor as a norm regardless of its products or end, but made labor an integral aspect of the ethos of the modern state. The worker is the antechamber of the citizen: it is only because individuals are made universal and interchangeable in the workplace that they can be treated as such by the state. For Hegel, work is not just an economic activity, a condition for the production of goods and services necessary for the material condition of the state, but an ethical one as well—“ethical” not in the sense of rules or norms that determine a sense of right or wrong, but “ethical” in the sense of an ethos, or ethical life (Sittlichkeit). As such, work is for him the basis of the constitution of collective and individual identity.

Marx refers to the construction of “abstract labor,” the various ways in which disparate labors are brought into relation and made equivalent, as a process that goes on behind “men’s backs.” People, for the most part, are unaware of the way in which their individual labor and activity has become part of a general social process, focusing on the specific task at hand and their role in it. However, that is not to say that abstract labor is without its effects. The worker sells their labor power to the capitalist, but the capitalist has to make sure that this work is of average productivity. Labor power is sold as potential, as a capacity to do work, but this potential is actualized in the workspace as the potential to work is transformed into actual work, concrete tasks and work done. As much as labor is actualized in various concrete tasks and jobs it still continues to linger as potential, as capacity. The worker must perform specific tasks, do particular work, but at the same time remain in some sense identified with its capacity, to have potential to learn new tasks and take on new skills.³³ Or, to put it in the parlance of our times, the worker must “be productive” while continuing “to have potential.” The ethic of abstract labor is an identification with productivity as a generic capacity. Productivity becomes a norm, a standard of behavior, which functions precisely because of its abstraction from and indifference to specific activities.³⁴

As much as abstract labor can be considered an ethic (and the basis for recognition) or a discipline (and the basis for containment), it can also be grasped in terms of its inherent negativity, its alienation. The norm of productivity is indifferent not only to differences of gender, age, and ethnicity that divide humanity, but to the very limitations of humanity. As Marx writes in the Grundrisse, contrasting the precapitalist world with the capitalist one:

Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems to me to be lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production . . . In bourgeois economics—and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds—this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end.³⁵

This is a different sense of alienation than Marx famously wrote about in the 1844 Manuscripts: not the alienation from the specific activity of one’s labor, but absolute productivity as alienation from the necessarily finite and limited nature of being a specific human being. Productivity itself is an alienation from labor, from labor understood as a necessarily concrete, specific, and finite activity. Productivity is not the telos and goal of labor but is, in some sense, a distortion of labor in that it effaces its specific goals, methods, and social relations. Infinite production, ever-expanding productivity, is an alienation from the finite, specific, and social dimension of work.³⁶ Philosopher André Tosel refers to this as a kind of fantastical illimitation—an ideal of productivity that overcomes all cultural and natural limitations.³⁷ The demand for increased productivity not only dispenses (supposedly) with divisions of gender, race, and ethnicity but also challenges the very limits of the necessary conditions of labor itself, pushing the need for sleep, for rest, for care, to new minimums. Capitalism sees sleep, food, and the body’s need for rest not as facts of a finite existence but as barriers to be overcome through new technologies and inventions, from the lights that keeps factories running all night long to emails and texts that extend the time of the office to twenty-four hours.³⁸ Marx argued that the same capitalism that creates new needs reduces the needs for some. Far from a particular characteristic of the nineteenth-century factory, the demand to overcome the limits of sleep, to invent nutrient-dense shakes that eliminate the need for lunch breaks, are as much Silicon Valley as they are the industrial revolution.³⁹ As abstract labor becomes a norm and an ethical standard, defining individuals as worthy of recognition insofar as they participate in the productive process, the productive process exceeds their particular existence, alienating them from their finite existence.

Abstract labor is only one half of the labor relation. As much as it constitutes the basis for exchange value, and is thus the aim and focus of the capitalist production process, it is impossible to engage only in abstract labor. Rather, every labor must be both concrete and abstract, incorporating both a specific task or job and a general ideal of productivity. Concrete labor, like abstract labor, must have its subjective dimension, its particular ethic and alienation. Its ethic, its positive dimension, are as qualitatively diverse as concrete labor itself. Sticking with Hegel, it could be argued that if the Philosophy of Right posits the ethic of abstract labor, of being socially useful, then the Phenomenology of Spirit posits the ethic of concrete labor. In the well-known section of the latter on the dialectic of master and slave, the slave ultimately gets recognition, a sense of his or her subjectivity and capability, not from the recognition of their labor but from the transformation and self-mastery of work itself. Taken at a standstill, and out of its context, the self-consciousness of the slave is what would be called, in most other contexts, the satisfaction of a job well done, in which externalization and transformation of the world becomes the basis for an emergent sense of subjectivity. Hegel’s two texts split on the division between abstract and concrete labor: in the Phenomenology it is the concrete matter of the individual’s effect on the world that is recognized, while in the Philosophy of Right it is the abstraction of labor, the way it transforms particularity into universality, that is seen as the basis for ethical and political belonging. Hegel’s philosophy provides the map of two normative models of work. The first is that of expression, of self-realization through an individual job or task that would correspond to the particular demands and challenges of specific concrete labor. It is the satisfaction of a job well done according to the specific demands of a given trade or job. The second is less about the specific nature of the job than the more universal recognition of the formative and socially necessary nature of any work as work.⁴⁰ As will be demonstrated below, these two models—the ideal of individual expression and social recognition—continue to have effects not only in Hegel, or in philosophies of work, but in general attitudes toward work.

The difference between these two normative models, or ethics, could be understood as reflective of the historical development of Hegel’s thought; alternatively, their relationship could be understood dialectically, wherein one text focuses on labor as an internalization of social norms and standards, and the other on the externalization of capacities and subjectivity. In other words, the opposition between labor as expression and discipline, as the externalization of one’s subjectivity and the internalization of social norms, reflects not so much two different views on the same thing as the dialectical nature of labor itself.⁴¹ Labor is a process of both internalization and externalization, a discipline that becomes mastery. The chronology of Hegel’s texts is in some sense an inversion of the process of labor itself; internalization comes before expression, apprenticeship before mastery. To transform the world, and remake it, it is necessary to first subordinate oneself to its rules and logic. As Hegel writes in The Encyclopaedia Logic:

Reason is as cunning as it is mighty. Its cunning generally consists in the mediating activity which, while it lets objects act upon one another according to their own nature, and wear each other out, executes only its purpose without itself mingling in the process.⁴²

The basic schema of labor—a raw material that is transformed not so much by directly acting on it, by mastery, but by introducing a natural process or an instrument as the force of change between the worker and it—ultimately provides the schema for the very direction of history. Just as labor is the realization of human mastery through its negation, its passive submission to the world—even Prometheus used fire—reason realizes itself by negating itself. Work is made possible by subordination to nature, just as history is realized through conflict and passion. What both forms of action have in common is their cunning and teleology, their tendency to arrive at their ends by a negation of their mastery.⁴³ Labor is the model for all action, including reason’s action in the world.⁴⁴ Of course, this cuts both ways: the more labor is used to define the concept, the more the concept (or thinking) defines labor. As Marx argued, the more Hegel makes labor the model for thought, the more it appears that labor itself is conceived of abstractly. “The only labor which Hegel knows and recognizes is abstract mental labor.”⁴⁵ Externalization and realization is a mental process, a process of thought; actually existing labor is determined by social relations that exceed and undermine this logic.

Universal and Particular Work: Spinoza and Marx

The limitations of Hegel’s understanding of the relation between work and thought prompts our first engagement with the intersection of Marx and Spinoza. At first glance, this would seem the most unlikely point of intersection. Spinoza says very little about work or labor in his writings. However, the few references prove to be more provocative than it would first appear. Spinoza does not engage with labor as a social institution but with the more general ontological problem of determination, of the causal relations of how one acts and transforms the world while being shaped by it. It is work considered as a physics of determination and causation rather than labor as social relation. As Spinoza writes,

That thing is called free which exists from the necessity of its nature alone, and is determined to act by itself alone. But a thing is called necessary, or rather compelled, which is determined by another to exist and produce an effect in a certain and determinate manner.⁴⁶

It so turns out that the only free thing, the only thing determined solely by its own nature, is God or nature, the infinite causal power of the universe.

The assertion that a free thing acts by the necessity of its own nature makes it clear that Spinoza is trying to think outside of the standard opposition of freedom and necessity. For Spinoza, even infinite power is not to be confused with a free will. God, or nature, is not constrained by anything external to it, but it also produces all that it is able to without reserve or transcendence. God, or nature, is determined to do everything it is capable of doing, determined by its nature. The corollary of this is that finite things, modal existence, must necessarily produce—or, to use the translation for which Pierre Macherey argues, “operate” (operandum)—effects in determined ways.⁴⁷ To operate is always to operate under specific conditions determined by other things, by their relations. If one considers that operation defines the entirety of modal, finite existence, which is always working from within conditions, acting through them but also transforming them, then all of modal existence is a kind of work, in the sense that it always operates on given conditions through the mediation of an instrument. The material and instrumental aspects mean that all work is conditioned. Operation would seem to describe the entirety of action: everything we know and experience necessarily acts and operates through others things according to determinate conditions, but, at the same time, all of this operating is itself nothing other than the infinite causal power of the universe.⁴⁸ In contrast to a philosophical tradition that conceives of an opposition between freedom and necessity, Spinoza asserts not only that one always acts in and through determinate conditions, but that this determination is not just a limitation, not just a mark of finitude, but also the condition of liberation, an increase in our capacity to act.⁴⁹ As finite things, we are affected by the world around us, but nothing is entirely an effect: we also operate on the world, have effects. As Spinoza writes, “Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.”⁵⁰ In other words, everything we do is in some sense constrained and determined by the world we act on, but everything also has effects. These effects increase the more that we combine our actions with others: the only way to overcome our finitude, the way that we are overwhelmed by the word, is to overcome our individuality, to connect with others.

All such operations, all such acting, operates with a telos, with an end in view. We are, as Spinoza argues, conscious of our appetites, our desires, and act accordingly. At the same time, we are naturally unaware of the causes of things, including our desires, and thus unaware of the conditions of our action (a point to which we will return in subsequent chapters). As Marx argued, we act, and make history, under conditions that are not of our own choosing. These conditions include not just the material conditions of the production and reproduction of life, but also the social world. That we are conditioned beings, shaped by the social relations and our condition as finite, limited things, is a common philosophical foundation for both Spinoza and Marx.⁵¹ For both, we are shaped by nature, by not just our needs and desires but by the social relations that exist to meet them, and it is this passivity that exists prior to any contemplation or activity. These relations not only constitute a limitation of our capacity to act, determining us, but are also the condition for our activity, for an increase in our capacity. As Spinoza writes, “It is scarcely possible for men to support life and cultivate their minds without mutual assistance.”⁵² Work is situated at the juncture of humanity’s finitude and infinitude. According to André Tosel, this metaphysics of work as part of humanity’s finitude and dependence sets Spinoza apart from his contemporaries:

What distinguishes Spinoza from Locke and Hobbes, two heralds of the mastery and appropriation of nature by the human subject, is what seems to link him to the past: his sense of interdependent relationships, the rejection of any theoretical anthropocentricism, the recognition, non-religious however, of the link which links humanity to other natural beings.⁵³

That one must necessarily act on the world in determined ways is a symptom of our finite nature; that this work can be combined with that of others is a necessary condition not so much of overcoming finitude—that would be impossible—but of combining, augmenting, and reassembling finite forces so that they become the conditions of action rather than its limitations. Our capacity to act is necessarily part of the entire action of the universe; thus, the more it encompasses others, the more power it manifests.

Beyond this general causal aspect, there are two points at which Spinoza reflects on the way in which work, or labor, affects or shapes the way in which individuals perceive the world, shifting from a general ontology of finite activity to anthropology of labor. The first is in his understanding of how one’s history, character, and habits—what Spinoza calls ingenium—shape how one interprets and makes sense of the world. Spinoza offers his own variation on Marx’s point that “life determines consciousness”—that what and how we think is shaped by how we live and produce:

For example, a soldier, having seen traces of a horse in the sand, will immediately pass from the thought of a horse to the thought of a horseman, and from that to the thought of war, and so on. And so each one, according as he has been accustomed to join and connect the image of things in this or that way, will pass from one thought to another.⁵⁴

Interpretation is itself determined by causal conditions and relations; how a hoofprint appears to one depends on how they have encountered it before, and those encounters and relations shape future interpretations.⁵⁵ Signs and images have different effects depending on different histories. In the examples that Spinoza gives, the salient difference is not that of a culture, nation, or language but the division of labor. Soldiers and farmers interpret the same sign differently because the history of their labors has shaped their character (ingenium) differently, shaping their bodies but also the association of ideas that forms the mind. For Spinoza, as for Marx, life determines consciousness, including how one makes sense of and interprets something like hoofprints in the sands. Spinoza thus describes human beings as spiritual automatons, arguing that minds are determined by causal relations, the causal connection of ideas, to which it is possible to add that spiritual automatons are programmed, or wound up differently, according in part to the division of labor. Not only does work shape the world; it ultimately shapes us as well, forming the dispositions that we use to make sense of the world.

In one sense, work, the division of labor, informs the particular different interpretations that we have of the world. In a more general way, however, it also shapes the very conditions through which we make sense of the world. First, in the appendix to part 1 of the Ethics, Spinoza argues that, since we come into the world ignorant of the causes of things but conscious of our desires, we make sense of the world through our desires and actions, confusing how things affect us with how they actually are, confusing how we organize our thoughts with the causal order of the world. A false, or inadequate, idea is a confusion of what something is and how it affects us. As Spinoza writes,

For when things are so disposed that, when they are presented to us though the senses we can easily imagine them, and so can easily remember them, we say that they are well-ordered; but if the opposite is true, we say that they are badly ordered, or confused.⁵⁶

The terms we use to evaluate the world, such as order and disorder, good and bad, are fundamentally inadequate, a confused intermingling of our own impressions and the outside world. This does not mean that they are utterly useless; in order to have any meaning at all, they need to be returned to their cause, to human desires and projects. As Spinoza argues, to the extent that terms like “perfect” and “imperfect,” “good” and “bad,” have any meaning at all, it is not because of the qualities of things; rather, the terms only have meaning relative to a particular endeavor or task. As Spinoza writes,

For example, if someone sees a work (which I suppose to be not yet completed) and knows that the purpose of the author of that work is to build a house, he will say that it is imperfect. On the other hand, he will call it perfect as soon as he sees that the work has been carried through to the end which its author has decided to give it. But if someone sees a work whose like he has never seen and does not know the mind of its maker, he will, of course, not be able to know whether that work is perfect or imperfect. And this seems to have been the first meaning of these words.⁵⁷

Something can only be judged perfect or imperfect if I know the ideal, the model that one is aspiring to create. It is through our projects, and only through our collective and individual endeavors, that terms like “good” and “bad” have any meaning.⁵⁸ As with Marx, work, production, has an irreducible mental component. As Marx argues, it is the irreducible mental component that separates the worst architect from the best of bees.⁵⁹ However, for Spinoza the mental component can lead to confusion as much as to knowledge, as we unknowingly project our own intentions and desires onto the world and, at the peak of superstition, see the world itself as the product of the intentions of an all-knowing (and anthropomorphic) God.

Work, labor, is the source of both confusion and knowledge, of the idiosyncrasies of the imagination, the different associations of farmer and soldier, as well as the shared sensibility of human endeavors. It would be easy to see the associations of the farmer or soldier as an inadequate and limited form of knowledge (restricting the associations and meaning of the world to one’s immediate pragmatic concerns and limited experience) and the general ideas of perfect and imperfect, complete and incomplete, as the basis for adequate ideas because they are more general, capable of being applied to any activity. However, such a division overlooks the fact that particular associations can be true—sometimes, hoofprints really are signs of a battle—and, more importantly, that the universal notions of productivity can be the sources of confusion and distortion. Rather than map the idiosyncratic and general onto inadequate and adequate, imagination and reason, it might then be worthwhile to consider them in terms of the division of human activity as concrete and abstract labor. Concrete labors all develop their corresponding perspectives, ideas, and interpretations of the world. The remnants of these can be found in the allusions to various trades and skills in many figures of speech that carry with them fossilized mentalities and practical concerns. We talk about “the whole nine yards,” for example, without understanding what specific practice, concrete labor, or endeavor it refers to. Remnants of particular divisions of labor constitute various idioms. In contrast to this, there is what could be called the ideology of abstract labor: in this, it is not a matter of the particular constraints of a specific job or task, but of the general parameters of work. Or, to stick with the terms of language and rhetoric, specific jobs and concrete languages define the special places, while abstract labor defines the common places.⁶⁰ According to Spinoza, the same processes of association and connection that inform our idiosyncratic interpretation of signs make the general associations of language possible. The connection between the word and the thing is nothing other than a relation, or relations of relations, repeated, reinforced, and disseminated. The only difference between a singular association, hoofprints suggesting war, and a general association of a sound or symbol with a thing is the repetition and extension of the connection. As with concrete and abstract labor, these different senses and sensibilities of signs can reinforce or contradict each other. Whenever we talk about or think about anything, we are always dealing with both our idiosyncratic meanings and interpretations, the particular association shaped by our experience, and a more general meaning shaped by shared language, collective practices, and activities. The singular and the common coexist side by side, and we pass imperceptibly from one to other.

As Spinoza argues, universals are terms that would seem to have a common meaning but are often determined by a particular memory or association. For example, when people use the word “man,” they often have different images in mind:

Those who have more often regarded men’s stature with wonder will understand by the word man an animal of erect stature. But those who have been accustomed to consider something else, will form another common image of men—for example that man is an animal capable of laughter, or of a featherless biped, or a rational animal.⁶¹

We could say the same thing about “work,” which refers to a physical act of transformation, an anthropological act of meeting needs, an ethical act (in Hegel’s sense) of shaping and forming character, and the institution of selling wage labor.⁶² These different meanings are not just different senses that could be enumerated in a dictionary, for they relate to different experiences and practices that shape one’s understanding. Work is experienced in many senses, but it is often spoken about as if there was one dominant sense or meaning. As Spinoza adds, “Hence it is not surprising that so many controversies have arisen among the philosophers who have wished to explain natural things by mere images of them.”⁶³ Debates and discussions about work, like so many philosophical debates, are often contentious precisely because of these different meanings. The assertion that people need to work—a statement that claims some kind of anthropological basis for labor as providing for needs, or ethical basis as shaping a sense of self—will be used to make an argument for the necessity of wage labor as a specific institution, equivocating between the anthropological and economic meaning of the word. Different senses and images of work, whether anthropological, physical, ethical, or economic, are constantly coming into conflict.

Hegel’s Philosophy of Right documents one persistent contradiction of different senses and understandings of work. This problem comes to light with the status of the unemployed that are created by the specialization and modernization of capitalism. These newly unemployed, what Hegel refers to as the rabble, bring to light a contradiction between two different senses of work that emerges in trying to solve the problem of those without work:

If the direct burden [of support] were to fall on the wealthier class, or if direct means were available in other public institutions (such as wealthy hospitals, foundations, or monasteries) to maintain the increasingly impoverished mass as its normal standard of living, the livelihood of the needy would be ensured without the mediation of work; this would be contrary to the principle of civil society and the feeling of self-sufficiency and honour among its individual members.⁶⁴

To provide resources without work is to overlook its fundamental ethical meaning, creating individuals who have their all of their needs met except their need for recognition and belonging. The opposite solution is just as one-sided, just as flawed. Providing the rabble with work in order to provide a sense of pride and belonging necessarily comes into conflict and contradiction with the economic dimension, contributing to overproduction. Work’s status as simultaneously economic and ethical, providing for needs both material and spiritual, means that any attempt to focus on one side of the relation has disastrous effects for the other. It is impossible to have work as an ethical task of discipline without economic effects, just as it is impossible to provide needs without undermining the ethical dimension of work. It is worth noting that this contradiction is not so much resolved by Hegel as it is displaced, outsourced to the colonies.⁶⁵ As we will see in later chapters, the tension between the ethical and economic understandings of work continue to produce effects long after the nineteenth century.

Returning to Spinoza’s engagement with the ontology, anthropology, and epistemology of work, it is possible to grasp the possibilities and limits of such an approach. As much as the generic discussion of labor as a general problem of causality, habit, and striving makes it possible to extend the analysis to other historical situations (as will be demonstrated in subsequent chapters), it severely curtails Spinoza’s understanding of nascent capitalism. Money, it turns out, appears only once in the Ethics, identified as that which “occupies the mind of the multitude more than anything else.”⁶⁶ Spinoza considers money to be primarily indexed to desire. It is desired because it is an object that can be attached to any joy, becoming the general equivalent of desire. Its capacity to buy not only objects but also the capacities and abilities of others in the form of labor is not addressed—it is primarily a mercantilist rather than capitalist conception of money.⁶⁷ Spinoza’s manner of addressing work as an ontological problem of production and action, and as an anthropological problem of knowledge and signification, leaves the institutional and the political dimensions undetermined. His assertion of the importance of social relations for individual well-being, that nothing is more useful to man than man, as a general idea of utility is broad enough to be applied to almost any economic relation. Every division of labor in society, no matter how anarchic or planned, can be understood as a use of men by men. Spinoza’s recognition of the mutual utility of human relations does not give a specific institutional form, but it does, at least, suggest that this utility is predicated on a fundamental difference and diversity. We are useful to each other as we are engaged in diverse and different tasks.⁶⁸ Thus, as much as Spinoza’s ontology and anthropology of labor necessarily augments and transforms Marx’s thought, it is still necessary to draw on Marx in order to give it historical and social specificity. At the same time, Spinoza’s understanding of the affects and imagination explicates and expands upon Marx’s understanding of the intersection between work and subjectivity (a point to which we will return in subsequent chapters).

Formal and Real Conditions

In Capital, Marx briefly defines the labor process independent of any social formation. In this definition, labor is any process where a raw material is transformed by working on it with an instrument. To this Marx adds, as we have seen, that all work has a necessary mental component. Real subsumption, or what Marx refers to as the specifically capitalist mode of production, fundamentally alters this ahistorical schema, destroying the mental component of work and the mastery of the individual worker. There is a gradual shift of knowledge from the worker to the machine. Whereas formal subsumption maintained the worker’s existing knowledge and mastery of the production process, real subsumption displaces this in two ways. First, it does so by the increased socialization of labor: as more and more workers are placed in the same factory or workshop, under the control of the capitalist, the more the productive power of their labor increases. As Marx writes in the chapter of Capital on “co-operation,”

The special productive power of the combined working day, is under all circumstances, the social productive power of labor, or the productive power of social labor. This power arises from cooperation itself. When the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of this species [Gattungsvermögen].⁶⁹

Marx sees the increased power of workers to operate in one direction, in an increase in productive capabilities. Writing a half century later, and from what could be considered the other side of the class divide, industrial engineer Frederick Taylor saw this capacity of the species working in a different direction: a multiplication of the natural tendency to take it easy, which “is greatly increased by bringing a number of men together on similar work.”⁷⁰ The simultaneous intensification of productive capacity and of potential recalcitrance on the part of the combined worker produces a new problem: that of discipline, or management, which endeavors to increase the aggregate productive capacity while simultaneously reducing the capacity to resist.⁷¹

The first aspect of this increase in both aptitude and docility is a decomposition of the individual worker as the organizing principle of production. Work in the factory is divided so that each worker is in charge of only a part of the overall process. As Marx states, “The commodity, from being the individual product of an independent craftsman, becomes the social product of a union of craftsmen, each of whom performs one, and only one, of the constituent partial operations.”⁷² The division of labor ultimately becomes a division of the worker as well. Far from being the subject of the process, the bearer of tools and knowledge, the worker becomes a conscious organ of a productive mechanism that exceeds it. As Alfred Sohn-Rethel writes, “Automation amounts to the socialization of the human labour-power which, in certain aspects, it surpasses in its scope of capability, range of action, its speed, reliability and precision, though only in a restricted and set specialization.”⁷³ This can be understood as a combination of the two alienations, an alienation of infinitude and finitude, as the worker becomes part of a combination that exceeds their own particular efforts and limitations, making them part of the collective worker while simultaneously reducing them to a part of a larger machine. Marx explains: “The collective worker, who constitutes the living mechanism of manufacture, is made up solely of such one-sided specialized workers.”⁷⁴ The worker under real subsumption is simultaneously more than and less than the worker in the early stages of capitalism; more than, in that their work includes productive power that exceeds their individual efforts, but less than, in that they are only a part of this process and do not comprehend the whole. This is a fundamental transformation of the nature of subordination. The increased productive power is also a subordination to the dictates and demands of capital: to be productive is not defined by this or that concrete labor, by producing some need or service, but to be productive for capital.⁷⁵ Marx famously wrote that to be a productive worker was not a piece of luck, but a misfortune. It is also an increasingly arbitrary one, at least from the perspective of the concrete labor involved; the same activities, from caring for children to posting on social media, can, depending on the situation (which is to say depending on their relation to capital), be productive or unproductive. The more the work is reduced to a part of a process that exceeds their understanding and activity, the more they are disconnected—one could say “alienated”—from the purpose of that activity. The increase of the collective capacity is also a reduction of the attachment of the individual to the ethic of work itself. As Marx argues, “This ‘productive’ worker cares as much as about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and also couldn’t give a damn for the junk.”⁷⁶

The more complex and interconnected the labor process becomes, the more its function and meaning exceed logic and its methods necessarily exceed the consciousness of individuals:

The interconnection between their various labors confronts them, in the realm of ideas, as a plan drawn up by the capitalist, and in practice, as his authority, as the powerful will of a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose.⁷⁷

Marx had emphasized the role of the division of labor earlier, in The German Ideology, but there he was discussing the division in society—one that split the classes between those who think about and interpret the world and those who are left to work. It was a division of social roles integral to the genesis of ideology and the critique of the state. Now, it is a matter of a division internal to the work process itself, as every job is split between conception and execution. How work is done is increasingly decided by managers and overseers. The less the worker knows or understands the productive process, the more control is necessary. At the same time, the increase of cooperation increases the possibility of resistance, and thus supervision and control become an increasingly integral part of the production process. If the worker in formal subsumption was a subject in both senses of the term—a subject of knowledge and subject to an increasingly internalized authority—the worker in real subsumption is simultaneously something more or less than an individual subject, at once part of an increasingly collective productive process and reduced to a conscious organ, to part of the labor process.

Returning to the question of the ethic of concrete labor, it is worth noting that this ethic is as heterogeneous as concrete labor itself. Different jobs and different tasks have their own norms, standards, and ideals of what it means to do a job well. The ethic is as varied as the use values they produce: doing a good job as a carpenter or a nurse is as distinct in its demands and norms as building a table and caring for a patient. Just as every concrete labor produces specific use values, its ethic, its norms and ideals, is specific to the distinct labor process and social relations it entails. There is also a corresponding alienation, a finitude of weakness and limitation to a specific task. Individuals in particular jobs are reduced to being seen as nothing other than what the job entails. As the concrete labor engages only part of what human beings are capable of, the individual is reduced to only those activities and capabilities. As philosopher Étienne Balibar writes,

This process modifies the status of the human body (the human status of the body); it creates body-men, men whose body is a machine-body, that is fragmented and dominated, and used to perform one isolable function or gesture, being both destroyed in its integrity and fetishized, atrophied and hypertrophied in its useful organs.⁷⁸

One could argue that the opposite is equally true: that the existence of “body men” implies the existence of men without bodies, the “egghead” or “pencil-necked” bureaucrat. The finitude of being this particular body, with its history and relations, is then overlaid with a secondary finitude that ties particular individuals to specific jobs and a place within a social hierarchy. Concrete labor ties individuals not just to a specific task, but to a task that becomes an identity and thus a limitation of what one is seen as capable of. The job that they are doing becomes all that they are capable of doing. The division of different labors has an anthropological significance, transforming the very identity and diversity of humanity. If the alienation of abstract labor was that of an impossible and infinite productivity, then the alienation of concrete labor is that of finitude of an individual reduced to one task, one ability, one skill. It is the ability to look at an individual reduced to doing a particular repetitive, boring, or stressful job and see not the alienation of human potential but its realization, to believe that that is what this person is meant to be doing. It is precisely because of the “anarchy” of the social division of labor, the fact that no one is born into a particular job or task, that the division of labor in society seems so natural. It is because no one is ever “made” to do anything, forced by the state, that everyone appears to be doing what they were made to do. The process by which one ends up at this or that particular job, the reproduction of the relations of production, is occluded. Only its end product remains: an individual doing the particular job. The end result becomes the explanation.

If abstract labor has its philosophical corollary in the statements of the equality of man before either God or the nation, then the philosophical corollary of concrete labor has a much longer history in every attempt to justify the division of labor through an appeal to the divisions and hierarchy of humanity itself. The first philosophical justification of the division of labor is perhaps found in Plato’s Republic, where it is founded on two principles. The first, which develops the foundation of the city, of the social order, is that none of us is self-sufficient, dependent on others for many things. This is followed by a second principle, “that each of us differs somewhat in nature from the others, one being suited to one job, another to another.”⁷⁹ Universal dependency and the variability of mankind are the foundation of the social order. This idea of a hierarchal division of humanity is not simply a remnant of some ancient idea of hierarchy; on the contrary, it is possible to find a similar statement in the most famous modern argument for the division of labor—that of Adam Smith. Smith goes much further than Plato in extolling the virtues of the division of labor: it does not just stem from our insufficiency and diversity of natures as its cause, but is the condition of increased productivity. Smith’s division of labor produces wealth, progress, and ultimately different natures. Smith writes about the different nature and skills of individuals,

The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education.⁸⁰

What Plato posited as the cause of social division, the differences of nature, Smith posits as an effect. Plato argued that it was because people were not all alike that some should be assigned to different tasks according to their natures, but Smith argued that people become different due the habits acquired from doing different kinds of work. The basis, or grounds, of the division of labor shift, from some essence dwelling in the soul to an effect of education, custom, and habit; but what does not change is the role that this division has in establishing the social order. The social order is founded as much on differences—of task and job—than it is on some shared nature. It is worth noting, at least in passing, the different effect that this has on Plato’s and Smith’s politics. The entire political project of the Republic is a matter of finding the right people for the right job, a politics that cannot be separated from an ideal of the polis as order. Smith, however, gives no thought to the seemingly utter contingency that makes some people philosophers and others street porters. In Smith’s account, individuals might seem freer, less subject to an authoritarian order, but they are, as Marx put it, “more subjected to the violence of things”—free from the authority of rule but subject to the contingency of existence.⁸¹ Of course, the contingent nature of this violence is only apparent; for the most part, the sons and daughters of street porters become porters, and the opportunity to become a philosopher stems from a similar class dynamic.

Marx’s real point of difference with both Plato and Smith is the distinction he makes between two aspects of the division of labor—namely, the social division of labor and the division of labor in the production process. Plato’s focus was on what Marx would call the division of labor in society (the division of social roles and tasks that makes one person a baker and another a farmer), whereas Smith focuses on the division of labor internal to an existing industry or trade (the division of tasks in a pin factory). These two divisions are not only distinct, one taking place in society in general the other within a specific industry; they are also inversely related. As Marx writes in The Poverty of Philosophy,

It can even be laid down as a general rule that the less authority presides over the division of labor inside society, the more the division of labor develops inside the workshop, and the more it is subjected there to the authority of a single person. Thus authority in society, in relation to the division of labor, are in inverse ratio to each other.⁸²

In Capital, Marx returns to this theme of the two divisions of labor, in society and in the workshop, only now it is expressed less as a law of the social order than as a particular spontaneous ideology, a particular consciousness. To bourgeois philosophy, anarchy in society—an anarchy that is understood as the freedom and creativity of the market rather than the violence of things—has as its necessary corollary total subjection in the workplace. They are each the condition of each other; the anarchic competition of capital has as its conditions the disciplinary control of work.

The same bourgeois consciousness which celebrates the division of labour in the workshop, the lifelong annexation of the worker to partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as an organization of labour that increases its productive power, denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and the self-determining “genius” of the individual capitalist.⁸³

To reframe this idea of the inverse relation of the two divisions of labor as a relation between the two ethics, that of abstract and concrete labor: the two ethics of labor reinforce and augment each other precisely by being related to different dimensions of social life. The social division of labor, which is left unorganized and unregulated, corresponds to abstract labor understood as a potential, a capacity to work, while the division of labor in the workshop corresponds to concrete labor, to a specific task. It is precisely because no one is ordered to engage in any particular kind of labor—that nothing, at least in the form of law, prevents anyone from becoming a street porter or a philosopher—that the job one ends up doing seems less a matter of the “violence of things” than an effect of natural talents and abilities. Plato’s social order returns, not as a divine myth about the order of society, but in the daily confidence that the people who end up in their place did so because of their natural talents. The more freedom and equality are defined in terms of capital, as freedom to purchase things (including labor power) on the market, the more they necessarily carry with them their opposites: the constraint and inequality of the labor process.⁸⁴ Capitalism must be identified not with abstract labor but with the incomplete and uneven intersection of concrete and abstract labor (and their corresponding ethics and alienations).

As much as the ethics of abstract and concrete labor reinforce each other, constituting a picture of society in which freedom is the alibi for constraint and constraint is the condition of innovation, as specific practices and norms of practice they come into conflict. The concrete demands of a specific job, especially as this job is identified with a particular ideal of a craft or skill, often contradict the abstract demand of productivity. The specific demands of concrete labor, of a particular craft or job, claim their rights and standards against a generalized demand to produce more and more efficiently. This might seem like a residue of some pride of craft, and thus limited to crafts and other forms of concrete labor that produced a finished good, but all sorts of work—including the service work of waitstaff or flight attendants—have their internal standards of what it means to do a good job, a standard that is challenged by increases in productivity.⁸⁵ In a different manner, the ideal of abstract labor—an ideal that recognizes all work as work, as productive and part of society—can also undermine the hierarchies and exclusions of a particular division of labor. The lowest workers in society, even those who do work that is widely considered servile or morally suspect, can still make a claim for recognition through their standing as workers.⁸⁶ To call something work, as in housework or sex work, is to argue for its value and its inclusion in society. Concrete labor can be the basis for a contestation of the demands of producing abstract labor, or abstract labor can become the basis for contesting the hierarchies and exclusions of different types of labor and different type of people. In a given historical situation, the ethic of concrete labor can contest the alienation of abstract labor, as the specific task and its standards are opposed to the generic norm of productivity, or the ethic of abstract labor can contest the alienation of concrete labor, as the hierarchy of jobs becomes a hierarchy of the people doing them.

The division between the ethical and alienating dimension of abstract labor—between that which forms the basis of a subjectivity and a sense of self, and that which undermines and exceeds all subjectivity—is not rigidly established; indeed, it cuts between different historical moments, different sites of labor, and even different individuals. Indifferent and abstract productivity is both the condition of liberation, providing the basis for overcoming limits of gender and race, and the condition of subjection, providing a norm that few can live up to. Pure quantitative productivity is both a source of liberation and subjection.⁸⁷ A similar point could be made with respect to concrete labor, which appears as both an ethic and an identity (that is, a place in the social order) and a limitation and reduction of one’s abilities to the skills and abilities demanded by that place. How they appear, and intersect, depends, in part, on the particular conditions of the labor situation, but also on how and in what way these general characteristics of the division of labor are thematized and symbolized in a given situation. If abstract labor takes on symbolic form as an ideal of universal and interchangeable humanity, then the symbolic dimension of concrete labor would not just be of a differentiated humanity, with different individuals performing different tasks according to their nature, but a necessary hierarchy of tasks and individuals. For the most part, Marx considers such divisions to be part of a precapitalist world, a world divided into castes. Such divisions are still organized around the principle of use value, and a division of labor that takes the individual craftsman as its model. Capitalist production displaces both of these foundations, those of the individual product or craftsperson: its goal is the production of exchange value, and it is organized around the productive process of which the individual is just a part. The actual history of capitalism provides an illustration of this tension, as ideals of flexibility and indifference confront the reality of hierarchy and inequality. Reconciling universality and hierarchy often entails or demands a supplement, another ground for the explanation and justification of a hierarchy that cannot be justified on the basis of the wage relation alone. The wage relation imposes an abstract dependency on everyone; every worker must sell their labor power in order to survive. In that sense, it is indifferent to differences of race, nation, and ethnicity, but that abstract dependency is only actualized in and through specific labor relations, specific bosses, and specific social contexts, which have their own histories and relations of domination and subordination.⁸⁸ These relations, which are in some sense exterior to capitalism, become interior to it as part of the justifications of the hierarchy and inequality of different concrete labors within capitalism.⁸⁹ It is not that precapitalist hierarchies and exclusions persist as remnants of the past, but that they are retooled, made fully functioning parts of the division of labor.⁹⁰ Racial and ethnic hierarchies are not exceptions to the interchangeability of abstract labor but its necessary supplement. If gender divisions and their corresponding hierarchies are, in part, sustained and transformed by the divisions between work that is waged and work that is unwaged, between work done in public and work in the home, then it could be said that divisions internal to the wage relation, hierarchies between different kinds of labor, sustain and maintain hierarchies of race and ethnicity (and vice versa).⁹¹ Far from melting into air, they are remade in the divisions between head and hand, execution and conception, production and marketing, back room and front of house. If the interchangeability of labor cannot be separated from the abstract identity of humanity, then its hierarchy cannot be separated from a conception of humanity hierarchically organized in terms of different abilities. Moreover, these two sides of humanity necessarily reinforce each other. It is because capitalism is predicated on abstract labor, on the indifferent exploitation of human potential as potential, that differences and hierarchies of the exploitation of labor appear naturalized as differences of potential and possibility.⁹²

The two sides of labor, abstract and concrete, are not two sides of a coin, coexisting side by side, but two sides of a dynamic contradiction that has multiple effects. First, as I have argued, there is the split between abstract and concrete labor. Then, each of these are, in turn, split into what I have termed “ethics” and “alienations”—aspects that can be identified with and form the basis of an identity, and aspects that exceed any such identification are lived as a form of excessive demand or constraint. As much as abstract and concrete labor can be divided in terms of their ethic and their alienation, split between positive and negative dimensions, they can also be considered as a practice, as material conditions, and as representations. Abstract labor is the name for both a social process undertaken across the disparate sites of production and the image or idea of humanity produced in its wake. Concrete labor represents both specific divisions and hierarchies of labor, and the corresponding idea of a hierarchy of human nature. The multiplication of these divisions and relations means that these relations can only be thought of in their concrete and historical articulations, as well as in terms of the specific shape of this history. The first articulation, that of specific concrete labors with the imperative of productivity, of abstract labor, makes up the history of labor—a history defined by changing developments in concrete labor, new jobs, new tasks, new skills, and deskilling, as well as the changing conditions of the abstract demand for productivity and its measure.⁹³

The relation of abstract and concrete labor is also experienced on a much smaller scale, as the formation of an individual life. The contradiction between the demands of an ever-increasing productivity and the needs of a particular job—or, framed differently, between an abstract demand indifferent to an individual who performs it and the talents and abilities of that specific individual—is not only experienced differently, with different strategies and ways of coping; it is both the effect and cause of individuation. As philosopher Lucien Sève writes in developing a Marxist theory of personality,

This productive activity of men, being a social activity, is entirely governed by the objective dialectic of social relations—and in this sense, which is that of economic theory, men appear only as support for economic categories; but on the other hand, being an activity of men, it also immediately constitutes a fundamental aspect of their individual life process. These are two sides of the same reality.⁹⁴

The social or historical dimension of the contradiction of abstract and concrete labor, and its individual resolution, are two sides of the same process—the same relation viewed from two different angles. There is the general history of the changing nature of the relation between abstract and concrete labor, between potential and its actualization, and there is the way in which each individual has to reconcile the relation between potential and actual, between the demand to work to be productive framed generally and the specific demands of a job. In each case, the contradiction between abstract and concrete labor is not a contradiction that only manifests sporadically, in moments of crisis, but an ongoing point of tension that must be constantly negotiated. The point of their conflictual connection could be termed “living labor.” Marx used this term primarily to foreground the opposition between the worker and the accrued power of capital, of dead labor, but the term also incorporates labor as it is lived, traversing these contradictions. In this case, the lived dimension is the tension between concrete skills and abstract potential, concrete limitations and abstract possibility. Working, selling one’s particular labor power, is to live in a gap, an interval between abstract potential and concrete activity, between task and execution, between ethic and alienation.

Work Like It’s 1999: Representations of Abstract and Concrete Labor

Abstract and concrete labor provide less an overarching logic in which an ethic, an identification, in one area necessarily leads to an alienation in the other, than a schema in which the particular articulation of ethic and alienation, identity and difference, must be thought from a given situation. This situation can be a specific historical moment in the organization of labor, a particular job or, in this case, the representation of work in film or television. These different situations are less isolated instances than they are different variations of the relation of abstract and concrete labor. It is perhaps surprising to see film or television mentioned as a possible representation of work since the most immediate connection between work and film and television could be more accurately described as a disconnection. Film and other forms of entertainment are what we turn to in order to escape work. However, at the same time, film cannot entirely avoid the world from which it provides an escape. As the philosopher Franck Fischbach argues, film is a necessarily social media: social not just in its reception but also in that its raw material is made up of the relations that define social life.⁹⁵

The social dimension of film means that, occasionally, a film emerges that not only engages with work but does so critically. In 1999, two films were released that offered a critical perspective on work, Fight Club and Office Space. At first glance, not much unifies these two movies except the fact that they came out in the same year and the fact that neither were huge successes commercially or critically, eventually finding their audience through the dissemination of video and television.⁹⁶ What unifies these films, albeit only partially, is the perspective they offer on work: both are anti-work films. Or, more to the point, they are anti-work films that are situated at a particular moment in the transformation of labor. Both movies offer criticisms of the world of white-collar work, of office spaces and cubicles, but their criticism was offered at precisely the point where that kind of work was already undergoing transformation. These films are situated in relation to three types of work: the work of the office, their primary critical target; the emerging forms of service work and emotional labor, which bring with them new forms of subjection; and the bygone world of physical labor and craft work, which often appears as an ideal of meaningful work and autonomy. “Appearance” is the operative word; it is less a matter of the dominant form of work, in terms of either numbers of people employed or overall economic impact, but a dominant image of work. As I have argued with respect to Spinoza, the idea of work is always shaped by a particular image that shapes and distorts the general definition. These three types of work can be labeled dominant, residual, and emergent along a historical timeline: office work is dominant; skilled manual labor is residual; and services, with their emphasis on emotion, expression, and relation, are emergent.⁹⁷ This temporal dimension is underscored by the way in which the three different types of work situate the different ethics and alienations of work. In brief, it is possible to say, returning to the question of the representation and experience of abstract labor, that, at any given moment, a particular concrete labor appears as the particular figure of the alienation of abstract labor. The corollary of this is that a different kind of concrete labor is often seen to embody the ethical identification with concrete labor. Criticism that remains at the level of concrete labor is often left to oppose one kind of labor to another.

The first of the two films, Mike Judge’s Office Space, is about three employees of a generic software firm on the eve of the millennium bug glitch. The plot, which concerns a software designer who increasingly begins to shrug off his work after being accidentally left in a hypnotically induced stage of relaxation—a storyline that segues midway through the film into an attempt to embezzle money from the company—is less a central narrative than a loose structure on which to hang several observations of working life. These observations range from the mundane, a perpetually jamming copy machine, to the particular constraints of work in the technology sector. The film’s central protagonist, Peter, struggles with the fact that he has multiple supervisors all overseeing his work, and that matters of form and appearance take precedence over his actual task. The correct coversheet attached to his report is more important than the actual content of the report. The demands of conflicting management are increased when the company brings in a consulting firm to restructure the firm. Every employee is required to meet with the consultants, to answer the now often-repeated question, “Just what exactly is it you do here?” Everyone must define their job to the consultants, effectively reapplying. Job interviews were perhaps always a performance in which one not only dressed better than the job required, but also demonstrated a willingness and desire to work that went above and beyond the day-to-day requirements of the job. Almost invariably every interview asks, “Why do you want this job?” And, as everyone knows, you cannot say, “Because I need money to survive.” The interview is a performance, but now that performance is repeated to the point where it becomes coextensive with work itself.⁹⁸ What the film reveals is a shift in the ethic and demand of work; as the actual product of one’s labor becomes harder and harder to directly quantify or measure, there emerges a slew of new standards and evaluations to measure work.⁹⁹ These standards and evaluations constitute less a measurement of the concrete labor of writing and repairing software code than their own form of concrete labor: filling in reports on the work one is doing is more important than the actual work.

This emphasis on measures or performances is further illustrated by a minor plot in the film having to do with Joanna, the employee of a restaurant called Chotchkie’s, modeled after casual dining establishments like TGI Fridays or Applebee’s. Its walls are decorated with irreverent street signs and other tchotchkes, and its employees are required to display pieces of what are dubbed “flair,” buttons or other pins that demonstrate personality. The buttons and display of managed personality reveal in the form of physical tchotchkes a fundamental reality of waiting on tables: it is primarily a form of emotional labor, of using one’s voice and face to convey a particular form of friendliness and comfort, to produce a desired effect on the customer.¹⁰⁰ The flair required of the employee of Chotchkie’s is only a crude version of the performance of emotional labor, but as such it reveals a particular paradox of emotional labor: the imposed demand for sincerity and commitment, a requirement of self-expression.¹⁰¹ Joanna’s manager chastises her for not wearing enough of what is considered “flair,” buttons or other decorations of her uniform, but she is wearing the required fifteen pieces. The fact that she is doing only the bare minimum is precisely the issue. Her boss demands that she express herself, that she take an interest in her job. As the cultural theorist Mark Fisher writes, “The flair example also points to another phenomenon: hidden expectations behind official standards.”¹⁰² The scene at Chotchkie’s is one of the most discussed and memorable scenes, at least judging from the number of views of the clip on YouTube. Despite the fact that the film is primarily oriented at the world of office work and cubicles, its criticism of service work is perhaps what is most often recalled, precisely because service work most directly expresses what is at stake in contemporary labor, regardless of its setting. Sianne Ngai offers a kind of prehistory of flair in discussing the “smiley” image that became the basis for the ubiquitous “Have a Nice Day” bags in her study of the aesthetics of labor. As she stresses, it is not just that the smiley is abstract, indifferent from the particular coordinates of a specific face, but that its abstract cheer is precisely the affect that we have to put forward in contemporary capitalism.

For the smiley is not just an image of abstract personhood but also an uncanny personification of the collectively achieved abstractions of the capitalist economy: abstract labor, value, capital. Its unflinching gaze as we encounter it daily as a cookie, on a price tag, or in a comic book, confronts us with the conditions of generalized commodity production.¹⁰³

Flair is thus a particularly acute form of the demand of subjective commitment and engagement demanded by even white-collar office work. While the latter requires no flair and, in some sense, discourages displays of personality (except on designated Hawaiian shirt days), it still requires the worker to demonstrate a kind of surplus commitment that is both dedicated and generic. The film illustrates this not just through the demand to sell and resell one’s job by interviewing to consultants, but through the demand that employees be available to come in on Saturday, to show a surplus level of dedication that goes beyond the confines of the work week.

The film’s critique of work is summed up by the tagline “Work Sucks.” At first, it appears as a totalizing criticism of work. Peter increasingly argues that the problem is not the specific difficulties of his job but work itself. He plainly states his preference to do nothing at all. At one point, he and his coworkers describe the question used by high school guidance counselors to help students find their ideal career. The counselor asks, “What would you do if you had a million dollars?” The question is supposed to reveal one’s true passion, freed from the constraints of economic necessity, and thus one’s true job. It is the foundation of the adage that if you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life. In their discussion, Peter states that he never could come up with answer. There was no hobby or passion, such as fixing old cars, that he would turn into a career. It is this lack of passion that makes him want to do nothing, and which perhaps led him to end up with a career at the software firm despite lacking real interest in it. His friend Michael counters that the reason he ended up a software designer is that the whole premise is “bullshit to begin with.” The existing division of labor leaves no room for everyone to pursue their particular passion: there are necessary concrete labors to which no concrete desire corresponds. Or, as Michael puts it, “If everyone listened to her, there’d be no janitors, because no one would clean up shit if they had a million dollars.”¹⁰⁴ Capitalism cannot be a system of people pursuing their own passionate interest, because there will always be forms of concrete labor that do not correspond to passions or hobbies. On that reading, it is possible to say that “work sucks” because the entire idea of work, of the demand to express oneself and pursue one’s interest, necessarily does not match with the existing demands of the labor process in terms of both the hierarchy of jobs and the level of subjective commitment.

Despite this uncompromising criticism of the world of work, the film includes its own norm, its own valorization of work. This appears first in the character of Peter’s neighbor, Lawrence, who works in construction. He offers Peter a different way of looking at work, a different ethic. Lawrence’s job is free of the clichés and interactions that Peter finds so annoying. Not only does he never hear anyone utter the phrase “Someone has a case of the Mondays”; he thinks that such a sentiment would get their ass kicked. Lawrence also helps Peter dodge the demand to work on Saturday, pointing out that all he has to do is avoid the boss on Friday afternoon and not pick up his phone on Saturday morning. If the boss cannot get in touch with him, he cannot ask him to work. Here, it is worth noting that the film’s focus on coming in on Saturday is a relic of its time. Had the film been made a few years later, there would be no need to come in on Saturday: the work could be done from home, and there would be no possibility of missing the boss’s call (or email) over a cell phone.¹⁰⁵ Increased communication and contact through cell phones and smartphones are also the possibility of increased discipline and surveillance. In the face of a job that increasingly demands more—not only extensively, with work being extended into Saturday (and even Sunday), but also intensively, with the increased demand to demonstrate the requisite flair—the display of subjective commitment to work and one’s job, the concrete labor of construction with its demarcated workweek and minimal demands on one’s emotional life, seems ideal. That Lawrence represents the ideal of concrete labor, and a different ethic of work, is reflected in the final scene of the film. Peter and his friends’ plan to embezzle money has failed, but a fire set by another disgruntled employee has left it undetected. Crime and crisis averted, Peter’s friends go on to work for another software company, but Peter ends up working in construction. As Peter describes his new life, “This isn’t so bad. Making bucks, getting exercise, working outside.”¹⁰⁶ In the end, it is not work that sucks but the particular work of software design—or, rather, a kind of work which is intellectual, collective, and immeasurable, in which the performance of dedication, the ability to show the proper commitment and dedication, matters more than the work itself—that sucks. That makes for less of a compelling tagline, however.

Office Space got its philosophical justification ten years later in the book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford. In that book, Crawford recounts his own transformation from an employee at a policy think tank to the owner and mechanic at a motorcycle repair shop. Despite the fact that intellectual work is generally socially valued in that nearly everyone is encouraged to attend college, this social value is at odds with individual ideals and passions. Intellectual work offers no real satisfaction because its effects are hard to discern, and easy thus to distort or fabricate. A policy analyst working at a think tank can always brag about his importance, but an electrician knows when she has had an effect—the lights come on. Crawford cites the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel on this point: “The man who works recognizes his own product in the world that has actually been transformed by his work.”¹⁰⁷ The transformation of the world of things, of objects, offers an objective standard with which to measure one’s impact or effect on the world.¹⁰⁸ This stands in sharp contrast to the kind of work that demands a subjective demonstration of commitment. Or, as Crawford puts it, the work of manual labor speaks for itself, while the work of someone working in the world of ideas, symbols, and people lends itself to subjective distortions. Crawford returns us to Hegel by way of Kojève, and to the contrast between two different ethics: the ethic of concrete labor, of the specific effect that a job has on the world, as positioned against the ethic of productivity of abstract labor as a general commitment to work. This ethic of abstract labor appears as an alienation as it becomes impossible to work all of the time, and to be available every Saturday. This opposition between the ethic of concrete labor and the alienation of abstract labor is deflected through the oppositions between two different types of concrete labor. The first concrete labor, that of a software designer in a company in which managerial standards of productivity overwhelm and overshadow the actual task at hand, is perceived as an alienation. It is an alienation because its concreteness is located more at the level of performing emotional labor for management than actually performing a specific productive task, which brings it closer to the work of a server (and of performing emotional flair) than it would first seem. The other concrete labor, that of construction or manual labor, with its corresponding benefits of exercise, being outdoors, and, implicitly, a limit to the working day and week, is perceived as an ethic, as something one can meaningfully do. The demand of abstract labor is manifest through intellectual labor or service work; it is through the latter that it becomes possible to perceive its particular indifference to the qualitative limits of the particular task or job. The dominance of abstract labor over living labor, of productivity over the specific dictates of the task at hand, is experienced as a tension between two different forms of concrete labor. The alienation of one particular kind of concrete labor, the labor of service work or the intellectual work of software design, leads to identification with the ethic of a different kind of labor, that of manual work. The film is, ultimately, less a critique of work in general than the way in which the demands of productivity and subjection are manifest through a particular kind of concrete labor.

If Office Space offered a comical view that “work sucks”—a view that ultimately tempered that criticism by subtly claiming that only certain kinds of work truly suck—Fight Club offers what appears to be a more totalizing criticism. Its most quoted line, “Working jobs we hate so we can buy stuff we don’t need,” offers an unflinching criticism of both work and consumption in capitalism, and the way that they shape and inform each other. Like Office Space, its critique is framed between different concrete labors—between office work, service work, and physical labor—and their contrasting ethics and alienations.

In Fight Club, white-collar culture, cubicle culture, is portrayed first through its narrator,¹⁰⁹ who works for an unnamed major car company as a recall coordinator. As he describes his job to a fellow passenger on a plane, his job is to assess the viability of large recalls of automobiles due to production flaws. As he explains it,

My job is to apply the formula. A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at sixty miles per hour. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: Do we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, a, and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, b, then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, c. A times b times c equals x . . . If x is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.¹¹⁰

The narrator is not as horrified by this job as his fellow passenger is. He appears neither to hate his job with any real passion, nor to enjoy it. The scene of him describing the formula is intercut with a scene of him inspecting a burned-out wreck. The man who shows him the car makes ghoulish jokes about the way the driver’s body fat melted into the car seat. The narrator expresses neither macabre enjoyment nor embarrassment for what he does, presenting it as a simple fact of life. It is not even clear that he sees it as something that he actively does, or how he contributes to the overall process. Although we see him traveling around the country, inspecting damaged cars, it is never entirely clear what role he plays in the process. He speaks of it as something “we” do, referring to the company as a collective, rather than something “he” does, his own role. His own capacities and activity appear as something that is already part of a larger system. As Georg Lukács describes this alienation from potential, “The specialized ‘virtuoso,’ the vendor of his objectified and reified faculties does not just become the [passive] observer of society; he also lapses into a contemplative attitude vis-à-vis the workings of his own objectified and reified faculties.”¹¹¹ The narrator sees himself as just part of the equation. As he explains, “My job was to apply the formula. It’s simple arithmetic.”¹¹²

The job that the narrator has fits the definition of what anthropologist David Graeber calls a “bullshit job,” a concept he first defined in the magazine Strike! in 2013. The short piece went viral (and, in a turn befitting Fight Club’s “Operation Mayhem,” was even made into faux advertisements that were posted as guerilla art in the London Underground). What is a “bullshit job”? To cite Graeber’s answer,

A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.¹¹³

The narrator never utters such a sentiment, never seems to consider the role or purpose of his job, but Graeber’s definition fits the film’s aforementioned and much-quoted line. Graeber’s definition matches the overall perspective of the film: what is alienating about contemporary work is not that it is physically exhausting, or even, as in Office Space, that it demands too much time and too much subjective commitment, but rather that it is pointless, having no real meaning and presenting no real challenge other than that of getting through the day. The jobs of white-collar workers seem to be at best pointless and at worst pernicious. They are not necessary in the “hunter-gatherer sense of the word,” to cite Fight Club. Or, as Graeber writes in a formulation that fits the film very well, “Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at.”¹¹⁴

To return to the narrator’s job: the world would perhaps be a better place if car companies did not assess their recalls against their costs, weighing them against the cost of a class action suit. That the latter involves death, that there would be fewer lives lost in a recall, is something the film underscores, cutting from his matter-of-fact description to a charred wreckage of a car where a family burned to death. The formula that the narrator presents of the company’s calculations is nothing other than a basic cost-benefit analysis; in other words, the formula that he applies is more or less identical to what passes for rational thought in capitalist society: getting the maximum for minimum expenditure. Capitalism is presented not as a specific mode of production predicated on the exploitation of labor, but as a specific cost-benefit analysis gone awry. The jobs we hate only get us things we do not need. In this sense, the criticism of work is also a criticism of consumption. Rather than see consumer society as a space of freedom, of the realization of his inclinations and desires, the film presents it as a world of artificial needs. The narrator refers to himself as a “slave to the IKEA nesting instinct,” as someone whose tastes and desires are less an expression of his individual will and taste than a product of the industry.¹¹⁵ The only difference between work and consumption is that in the former, the “I” is lost in an indifferent “we” that eludes individuality or responsibility, whereas the latter is an attempt to find an “I” in a system designed to efface it. The question of consumer society is “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?”¹¹⁶ At first glance, work and shopping, production and consumption, are differentiated in terms of “we” and “I,” collective and individual, “we work” but “I shop.” The attempt to individuate oneself with respect to consumption is a quixotic one, however, for the individual who is marketed to is as much a product of advertising as the modern white-collar worker is the product of a cost-benefit formula.¹¹⁷

The unreality of the narrator’s individual life manifests itself in the form of insomnia, rather than as a specific criticism of corporate life. Insomnia cuts through the division between waking and sleeping—you are never really awake or asleep—and through the division between work and home life, making everything a “copy of a copy.” His attempt to escape this existential impasse, to feel something real, first arrives through his disingenuous participation in support groups for various fatal and debilitating conditions. His real escape comes when he meets Tyler Durden on a business trip. The narrator explains that the encounters he has on planes are “single-serving friends,” an hour or two of small talk not unlike the tiny packages of butter or cream that accompany an in-flight meal. When the narrator asks the inevitable question “What do you do?”—a question he asks even before exchanging names—Tyler first responds by asking “Why, so you can pretend that you are interested?” But it turns out his job requires no lengthy or morally compromised explanation of a company’s cost-benefit calculation: he makes and sells soap. He opens up his briefcase and reveals it to be filled with his wares. The narrator’s fascination with Tyler begins at that point. Tyler is introduced as someone who can pierce illusions and ideology. As Anna Kornbluh points out in her critical study of the film, he is first introduced pointing out the illusions of the airplane evacuation procedure and crash-landing protocols—all illusions of safety in the face of a real air-to-air collision or accident at 30,000 feet.¹¹⁸ He seems not only to see through the theatrics of safety but to have real knowledge, to be capable of actually doing something, rather than just automatically applying a formula. As it transpires, he makes and sells not only soap but a less anodyne product: napalm. As in Office Space, the interaction between these two characters is one between intellectual and manual labor in which manual labor is idealized. Here, however, the ideal is not the escape from an ever-encroaching workday but the ideal of being able to actually do something: to make soap or napalm, grow food, wire a bomb, or win a fight.¹¹⁹ To be able to do something is to be able to be someone.

The connection between doing something and being someone underlies the film’s portrayal of fighting. Soon after meeting, Tyler and the narrator begin an underground fight club where people from all walks of life battle it out. The fights are not so much about technique and clear winners, losers, and champions as they are an attempt to connect with something real. The world of Fight Club is distinct from the world of work; it allows supply clerks to become more than supply clerks, and, in contrast to the world of consumption, offers a different masculine ideal, a different reason to cut your hair short and keep your nails trimmed, than the image offered by Calvin Klein. Fighting is not about winning or losing but about the ability to confront a challenge. When the topic of fighting is first brought up, it is introduced as something most people, especially the sort of person who ends up working as a recall coordinator, avoid; and in avoiding it, they also miss out on any knowledge of their real capacities. Fighting is an escape from the world that measures everyone by their job or what they own. Fighting is a different standard, a different way to assess oneself than what is offered by work or consumption.

As much as Fight Club is critical of the emptiness and alienation of work, it also addresses some of the potential and power of insurrection through work. The fight clubs expand to “Operation Mayhem,” seeking, through guerilla tactics of subversion, to liberate others from being measured by the alienations of work and consumption. Most of their campaigns are aimed at the world of consumer society: we see them erasing videotapes at a Blockbuster, getting pigeons to defecate on luxury cars, destroying satellite dishes, and blowing up an Apple Store. Work is not only not a target; it is also a source of power, at least implicitly. As Fight Club changes into Operation Mayhem, it takes advantage of work as a space of insurrection, particularly the work of a largely service-based economy. This starts with Tyler, who uses his part-time job as a projectionist to intercut scenes of pornography into films, disrupting the continuity and coherence of the film. As in Tyler’s introduction on the airplane, he is presented as someone who sees through the illusions and fictions through which society functions. The prospect of work as a site of contestation is brought up a second time: when Tyler and a group of Operation Mayhem participants confront a chief of police investigating subversive “underground fight clubs.” They make the following statement of their collective power: “We cook your meals. We haul your trash. We connect your calls. We drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us.”¹²⁰ Service work appears not as subjection, an excessive demand on one’s personality in the form of flair, but as the possibility of constant subversion, even as this subversion takes more or less minor forms—distorting films, contaminating the food of the wealthy, and so on. Indeed, these largely constitute a series of pranks carried out as an expression of frustration. Nevertheless, there remains the idea that the very workers who maintain society, protecting and caring for the wealthy, could turn against it. This image of a society of workers unified and acting in concert only appears once more in the film. When the narrator tries to subvert Tyler’s plan to blow up the buildings of credit-rating agencies, he finds himself confronted on every side by people in on Operation Mayhem: the police, the waiter at a restaurant, even the passengers on a bus are part of the plan. This solidarity appears only in the negative form, as thwarting the protagonist’s attempt to prevent destruction. Its positive dimension, its ability to constitute a collective basis for a politics, is only seen obliquely. We hear only that security guards, cops, and janitors all conspired to pull off the massive work of demolition, but we never see the moment of organization. The power of collective organizing is more stated that seen.

Fight Club’s critical stance toward service work is framed primarily through its existential dimension. It is criticized not for demanding too much of workers, intensively and extensively in terms of commitments and time, but of utilizing too little, squandering their potential. “I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all of this potential, and I see squandering. Goddamn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars.”¹²¹ The problem with these jobs is not so much that they are bullshit jobs—one could argue that pumping gas or waiting on tables is not as pernicious as a recall coordinator, as they do not harm society—but there is a way in which they seem unnecessary and devoid of real purpose. Pumping gas was already on its way out in much of the United States when the film was released, and, while waiting tables continues to be an integral part of the service economy, it often feels superfluous and unnecessary.¹²² There is always the sense that one could do more. Alienation, in this case, is the sense that one could or should be able to do more with one’s life than just wait tables or pump gas. It is the alienation of human potential, what Marx called species being, in a specific task, a specific concrete labor that fails to live up to one’s potential or capacities. It is not that people are being asked to do too much by their work, kept working through weekends and demanded to express themselves, but that work demands too little. It is the picture of an entire generation that has squandered its potential in the bullshit jobs of the service economy.

Fight Club’s criticism of a lost generation is also a criticism of changing gender dynamics: “Generation X” is seen as a “generation raised by women,” to quote Tyler Durden, a generation with missing fathers and therefore a missing sense of masculinity and purpose. As in Office Space, there is the sense that this loss of purpose and meaningful work is coupled with denigration of masculinity—although in this case, the criticism is framed less in terms of what is perceived as the “feminizing” threat of service work than through the transformation of masculinity from a set of capabilities to an appearance. At one point the narrator looks at a Gucci underwear advertisement and asks, “Is that what a man looks like?” contrasting a body sculpted to appear fit against a body honed by combat. Aside from this moment, and a few lines about missing fathers, the film does not really examine the intersection of work and gender. The film’s one female character, Marla, is not even seen to work. She sells stolen clothes and pilfers her dinner from Meals on Wheels. Marla is also seen as fundamentally a liar, as dishonest and hypochondriacal, but this is not connected to what she does for a living. What is perhaps overlooked by the film’s central characters, so desperate to escape the world of work and consumption, is that Marla seems to have already evaded both, but quietly. She has already shed the shackles that the men in Fight Club are desperately trying to lose, but because she evades them, rather than struggling vocally against them, this goes almost unnoticed by the men on and off screen.

As much as Fight Club offers a total criticism of existing society in which the only possible response is to blow it up and start over, returning to a hunter-gather society, it still posits the ideal of authentic work as a norm. Authentic work, in this sense, is not physical work, as much as the film respects the crafts that fashion soap and bombs from the detritus of modern life, but it is meaningfully chosen work. One of the aspects of Operation Mayhem is referred to as “human sacrifice.” Tyler Durden goes into a convenience store carrying a pistol. When he emerges, he is holding the cashier, Raymond K. Hessel, hostage at gunpoint. His object is not to rob the store but to reset Raymond’s life. He asks Raymond what he really wants to do with his life. Raymond replies that wants to be “a veterinarian” but then confesses that too much education was required. Tyler then takes his driver’s license and threatens Raymond that he will return in months and kill Raymond if he is not on his way to studying to complete his dream. When the narrator expresses shock and horror at Tyler’s cruelty, Durden’s response is that he has liberated Raymond. His brush with death will make living seem all the more meaningful and will set him on an authentic path. “Human sacrifice” is a kind of pop analysis of finitude. Death makes life meaningful, and it is only through the confrontation with death that we properly, authentically make a choice. Without death, one would waste their life away working at a convenience store and living in a basement apartment. Of course, such an intervention presupposes that any failure to realize one’s dreams and aspirations is solely a failure of the will.¹²³ The reminder of death makes it possible to live authentically. As we saw in Office Space, the guidance counselor asked, “What would you do if you had a million dollars?,” a question that is supposed to locate one’s true passion. In Fight Club it is a different question: “What would you do if you truly knew that you would die?” It is a question of motivation. The two criticisms converge on the idea that there is a job that everyone is supposed to do, and that they just need the clarity and passion to pursue it.

While the “human sacrifice” program of career counseling seems out of sync with the film’s criticism of the totality of capitalist society, there is a common thread that connects the critique with the apparent exception: in each case, it is a matter of a subjective purpose, meaning, and engagement. Fight Club offers this in the moment of the fight itself, following a different standard than the elusive evaluations of white-collar work or consumer society. The fight is ephemeral, however; you still have to return to work the next day. Operation Mayhem can initially only offer fleeting interruptions of consumer society. Its ultimate goal, however, the world that Tyler wants to create, is one in which there is a new reality that is not just grasped in the momentary encounter with danger or death but permeates one’s life. As Tyler states,

In the world I see, you’re stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You will wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your life. You will climb the wristthick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. You will see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison on the empty car-pool lane of the ruins of a superhighway.¹²⁴

An authentic life is one assessed by the standards of survival itself. These are the only standards that would not seem arbitrary or imposed. Leather is no longer a fashion statement but dictated by its particular utility, its use value defined by durability. In that sense, they could be said to be natural, or even objective, but at the same time, there is the idea that these standards would be actively chosen. There would be no more need to drag someone out of a convenience store pointing a gun at their head, for the conditions of scarcity and survival would constantly position the gun over one’s head.

Like Office Space, Fight Club resolves the contradiction between abstract and concrete labor by seeing concrete labor as something that can be mobilized against abstract labor, use value against exchange value. Objective scarcity and existential commitment combine in a world of work that is both objectively necessary, demanded by the dictates of survival, and freely chosen, a matter of commitment. It is the ethic of concrete labor, of a labor entirely determined by use, need, and necessity. The ethic of concrete labor ascribes everyone to a particular job, perhaps pounding corn or hunting elk, dividing the world into hunter and gatherers with little choice. It longs for authority, for a sense of certainty that can only come from the brute necessity of survival, but it wants this necessity to be freely chosen. The two things that the film puts together, the harsh necessity of survival and the commitment to choice, have historically been at odds. Choice, the ability to select a job, emerges with the abstraction and indifference to labor produced by the disruption of tradition by capital. It is only when the generic category of a job emerges as a real abstraction, when the labor relation is indifferent to the history and background of who is working, that it becomes possible to even ask the question “What do I want to do for a living?” Fight Club’s response to an economy governed by bullshit, by pointless jobs and lack of purpose, is to long for necessity and commitment. But in doing so, it can only pit the dream of concrete labor, of an ethic of labor, against the alienation of abstract labor.

Viewed together, Office Space and Fight Club offer overlapping images of work. These images are split in two between the alienation of abstract labor and a particular valorization of concrete labor. With respect to the criticism of the alienation of abstract labor, of the demand for productivity, they describe the way in which increased productivity encroaches upon the time and life of workers (in the case of Office Space) and compels someone to do something that is either pernicious or pointless (in the case of Fight Club). In a similar manner, they both offer an ideal of the ethic of manual labor as a specific kind of concrete labor. Manual labor is seen as free from the artificial standards of productivity and the bullshit of intellectual or emotional labor. Every universal definition of work is shaped by a particular experience and particular sense of work. This applies to both criticisms and celebrations. In both films, the dominant critical image of work is dominated by a particular kind of white-collar or service work, of work that produces an effect on people or social relations; because of this, the dominant valued image is that of manual labor, or work that actually has some effect on the world. Such a criticism falls short not only of a critique of capitalism, but of work as well. It is for this reason that it is possible to see in each film an image of an ideal of work, of a job that gets you exercise outdoors, allows you to pursue your passion to be a veterinarian. In not going far enough, this could scarcely be called a criticism, for it merely juxtaposes an ethic of good, meaningful, or enjoyable work against an image of its alienation. As much as both films take aim at work as such, they ultimately end up smuggling in an ideal of finding joy and purpose through work. In particular, Fight Club’s artisanal soap production seems like the precursor to someone leaving the white-collar world to find a new purpose in opening a microbrewery or starting a food truck. Twenty-five years later, Fight Club seems less like a subversion of the existing order than the precursor to the rise of artisanal entrepreneurship, not to mention the popularity of mixed martial arts. In a similar way, if Office Space can be understood as a protest against the way in which abstract labor, productivity in general, remade concrete labor in its image, overstepping the limits of the workweek, then its creators’ next project, the television show Silicon Valley, revels in a world where that division has been entirely blurred, in which it is impossible to separate the working day from the weekend.¹²⁵

Lastly, it is worth noting that these films are relatively silent on the intersection between the division of concrete labor and their effects on the hierarchies and divisions internal to humanity. The only exception, at least in Office Space, is the way in which the gender division of service work stands as a more blatant instantiation of the emotional labor underlying white-collar work in general. That the division of labor intersects with other divisions across race, nation, and ethnicity is something about which both films are relatively silent, for the most part reflecting the anxieties and concerns of a white-collar work force that is also primarily white. This might be the real limit to their subversion.

Conclusion

To return to the passage from Marx cited at the opening of this chapter, if the labor relation determines the political relation, giving the shape to sovereignty, this is because the labor relation is always already political in at least two senses: not just in the sense that it entails relations of hierarchy, command, and obedience (which it undoubtedly does) but because these relations are inseparable from their representation, symbolization, and justification in ideas of the social order and images of humanity.

The labor relation produces its own spontaneous ideology. Or, more to the point, we could say that there are always multiple possible ideological dimensions at work in the labor relation: there is a conflict and contradiction between abstract equality and concrete hierarchy, between the social and individual dimensions of labor, and between work as an ethic, as something that reinforces identity, and as alienation, as that which exceeds and undermines identity. In turn, ideologies and imaginaries of hierarchy and inequality, from race to gender and nation, act on the hierarchies of the wage relation while also being transformed by it. Politics is always already economic, not just in the sense that it serves economic interests or goals but that its very figuration of how to act is framed by the spontaneous ideology of the labor relation. Economics is also always already political, not just in that it entails power relations but also in that it cannot be separated from representations and imaginations of power and hierarchy. Work is central to political life because it structures both the reality and imagination of daily life.

The double shift of the political into the economic and the economic into the political passes through the contradictory unity of abstract and concrete labor. Abstract labor and concrete labor are two sides of every labor process, but their inseparability has to be understood as such. This contradiction is not just a matter of the tension between the quantitative demand of productivity and the qualitative demand of a specific task, but the way that this tension spills out into contradictory ethics and alienations—and, ultimately, into different representations, or imaginations, of the social order. As we will see in the next chapter, the double shift of the economic into the political, and vice versa, extends into a second double shift between material conditions and their representation. The contours of this double shift can already be seen in the way in which concrete and abstract labor are both material practices, and also carry with them representations not just of their own particular ethic (as well as their particular alienation) but ultimately of the entire social order.

2

Pulling a Double, Part 2:
The Work of the Material in the Mental

As we saw in the last chapter, the double shift of the economics of the labor relation into politics is both a matter of power relations, of hierarchy and command, and the representation of those relations, of the individual’s place in the social order. That the labor relation entails its own individual ethos and representation of social relations means that the immediate connection between work and politics not only short-circuits base and superstructure but also necessarily redefines what is understood by ideology. In reexamining ideology, it is perhaps necessary to return to Marx’s initial formulation, not as an authoritative answer to all future questions but to understand the underlying conceptual commitments, problems, and tensions—to see ideology less as a definitive concept than as a problem of the relation between material conditions and their representation. In The German Ideology, Marx makes the assertion that “the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class,” but this assertion of identity is only possible because of the divisions and fragmentation of social life.¹ The very existence of ideology presupposes a split and a break between the identity of consciousness and life, a split between mental and manual labor. This division affects not only the production process, which is increasingly split between conception (the managers, engineers, and designers) and execution (the workers, from manufacturing to services), but the larger social divisions as well. As Marx is quick to add, in a bit of speculative anthropology that follows this assertion, this split has its origins in the first intellectual labor of religious speculation, as the first intellectual laborers were the priests.² Those who work, who must occupy their time with their hands, must, when they consider matters outside of the immediate purview of their intellectual labor, necessarily turn to those who have the resources to think and the means to distribute them. The division between mental and manual labor not only determines the relation between classes but within classes as well. As much as the ruling class is split between its pragmatists (concerned with the actual tasks of running enterprises) and its ideologues (those that disseminate its ideas), the working class has its divisions as well—its thinkers and its doers. Of course, these divisions are only partial; practical activity and thought, or intellectual activity, cannot actually be divided between individuals or groups of people. As much as people can be represented as “body men” or “eggheads,” thinking and acting are inseverable dimensions of human existence. As we have seen, Marx argues there is an unavoidable mental dimension of human labor: to work is to conceive and think of what one is doing. As we will see, the divisions and unity, the splits between thinking and doing as well as their continuity, reflect less a rigid division between classes and groups than a split between different aspects of ideology.

Marx’s assertion that life determines consciousness and that ideology is the ideology of the ruling class sets up a philosophical problem as much as a political one. How to reconcile the consciousness that emerges out of life, out of one’s experience and activity, with the ideological consciousness that comes from outside of it, the perspective of the ruling class? As we saw in the previous chapter, there is a spontaneous ideology of work that emerges from the labor relation, from the wage, and from the division of labor. This ideology is a direct reflection of the way in which work is organized, instituted, and represented. For example, the wage effaces the social conditions of work—the work that produces and reproduces wage labor through care and housework—as well as the collective dimension of work by presenting it as an individual commodity. It also, of course, obscures the very existence of exploitation, of the difference between its cost and the value it produces. There is a spontaneous ideology of the wage, which presents labor power as any other commodity paid for at its full value, obscuring the exploitation and irreducibly collective nature of work. One can find a similar spontaneous ideology in the division of labor, in terms of both the social division of labor and the division of labor within a given industry or workplace, which occludes relations of exploitation through a purely technical appeal to matters of skill and knowledge. Louis Althusser coined the term “spontaneous ideology” to refer to this and argued, in his posthumously published manuscript on the reproduction of capitalism, that the labor relation produces its own ideology. As Althusser writes,

This ideology that “makes the workers go” comprises the following basic elements, which are so many illusions and impostures, yet “are successful” as long as the workers’ class struggle does not combat them: 1) the bourgeois legal illusion according to which “labor is paid for at its value”; 2) the corresponding legal-moral ideology which has it that one must “respect one’s labor contract” and, through it, the enterprise’s house rules and regulations; 3) the technicist-economist ideology which has it that “there must, after all, be different jobs within the division of labor” and such-and-such individuals to fill them. This ideology does a great deal more to make workers “go” than repression does.³

This spontaneous ideology is the foundation of the ideology of work, but it does not entirely explain it: it is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. There are elements of the ideology of work that not only exceed the basis of this spontaneous ideology but necessarily come into contradiction with it. In some sense, the work ethic, or at least the belief that work is not only adequately rewarded but is the path to wealth and success, is directly contradicted by day-to-day experience working at the same job for the same wages. Work is often lived as an experience of denigration while being idealized as the basis of recognition.⁴ Contrary to the tendency to see work as part of the economic base and ideology as something detached from the economy, as something concerning religion, ethics, or philosophy—areas of thought that are, in part, defined by their separation from practical reality—work has its own ideological dimension. As we will explore in this chapter, this ideological dimension is, in part, spontaneous, shaped by the labor relation. However, this spontaneous ideology does not encompass the entirety of the ideology of work. There is a valorization of work that is all the more persistent in that it deviates from the reality of work. How these two aspects cohere challenges not only the idea of ideology as something separate from the base but, as we will also see, the notion of ideas as something distinct from the body, intellect distinct from affect, interest from desire.

The Affective Composition of Labor: Marx and Spinoza II

Frédéric Lordon, an economist and philosopher, makes the provocative statement that Spinoza should be understood as providing an answer to a question that Marx posed but could not answer: Why do workers continue to work for their own exploitation rather than revolution? Why do workers continue working for others every day?⁵ To say that this is a question Marxism does not answer is a bit misleading, for there are indeed answers to this question throughout Marx’s writing. The most immediate is to be found in the destruction of any alternative, any way of living outside of the market and labor, without which it is the worker’s “drive for self-preservation and propagation” that keeps the worker returning to the factory gate.⁶ As we saw in the previous chapter, the very institutions of wage labor give this natural drive an ideological veneer. Or, as Marx suggests in the next paragraph, survival is always mediated by social relations and their representations:

The Roman slave was held by chains; the wage-labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads. The appearance of independence is maintained by a constant change in the person of the individual employer, and by the legal fiction of a contract.⁷

There is no social relation without its corresponding representation, its corresponding ideology. This ideology does not only distort or misrepresent these conditions; it compels people to act with respect to this representation, chaining them in ways that they cannot perceive or see.

Lordon is satisfied with neither the simple imperative of survival nor its ideological inflection as adequate explanations for the reproduction of the relations of production. Reproduction of the relations of production is neither entirely a matter of bodies nor of ideas, but of their necessary intersection. What is missed in this split between material conditions and their representation, between mind and body, is desire as the intersection of mind and body, or, as Spinoza puts it, “appetite plus consciousness.” Reproduction of the relations of production is not something passively subjected to, like a condition of survival, or consciously believed, but actively willed—desired. To demonstrate this, Lordon turns to Spinoza’s understanding of desire. For Spinoza, “desire constitutes the very essence of man insofar as it is determined, from any given affection of it, to do something.”⁸ Spinoza’s definition combines the striving to persevere, the conatus that defines everything, desire being the specific human manner of striving, with the fact that every finite thing is necessarily determined and affected by other things, by other encounters. We all strive to persevere, but how we strive and what we strive for are determined by our affects, our joys and sorrows, which are in turn defined by our history. This history determines us not in an external way, by limiting our will and capacity to act, but by intimately shaping not only how we act but what we desire. Spinoza primarily considered this history in terms of individual relations that make up a biography. What we desire and what we fear is, in part, shaped by how we have been affected by it; if something has been the cause of joy, or even if we mistakenly believe it be, we will desire it. The same thing can be said for pain and sadness. As Spinoza argues, we are born ignorant of the causes of things and conscious of our desires, which means that we are often ignorant of the causes of our desires. We often think that we freely desire something just because we cannot recall or grasp how we have been shaped to desire it. As Spinoza states, “The infant believes that he freely wants the milk; the angry child that he wants vengeance; and the timid, flight,” all unaware of the way that they have been affected, influenced, and determined.⁹ What Lordon adds to Spinoza’s account, to the causes that one is not aware of, is the social-historical aspect of the formation of desire—namely, striving. The things that shape our desire, our very striving, exceed the encounters we have directly lived, to include the social and economic conditions that shape our world. Lordon focuses on the intersection of labor and consumption as the primary space for the production and reproduction of desires. Or, to take an example we discussed earlier, “money occupies the mind of the multitude more than anything else,” not just because of one’s individual experience of buying the things that one desires with it but because of the historical condition of being born in a world where money, as Marx writes, “is the alienated capacity of mankind.”¹⁰ The conditions that directly determine our desires exceed our biological memory or lived experience. The institutions of capitalism—specifically, money and labor—are integral to our desires because under its conditions they are the necessary precondition of any desire or any action.

Lordon draws from two different aspects of Spinoza’s philosophical anthropology. The first, as is noted above, is what Lordon refers to as the intransitive nature of desire. As much as desire constitutes humanity’s essence, it is not a desire for any specific object, for wisdom, or even for life itself, survival. Everyone strives for what they imagine, or think, will increase their power to act. The act of striving is universal, but what one strives for is not. The objects and inclinations of desire are made rather than given. What they are made from are the series of encounters and relations into which an individual enters; encounters and relations that include one’s biography, the history of one’s individual desires, but exceed it to include the structural conditions of one’s desires. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Spinoza argues that the mind has a tendency to dwell on things that increase its joy and power.¹¹ Lordon argues that the effect of this is less some innate tendency toward liberation than an explanation of how people can put up with the most limited possibilities for joy and power. This second observation seems most appropriate to the world of work, not so much in the pleasures that are created by management (casual Fridays, forced socialization, etc.) but in the pleasures that one invents to get through the day—the camaraderie and little games that make work bearable. After all, how many people have been confronted by their tendency to stay in some dead-end job with the claim that “it is not so bad”? This assertion is generally followed by the invocation of those little bits of joy, fun, and sociality that can be wrested from almost any job to pass the time and make things slightly enjoyable.¹² Our tendency to find joy in every situation is as much a source of subjection as it is the basis for liberation.

For Lordon, the labor relation has to be understood as a massive channeling of desire. Contrary to what the apologists for capitalism claim, there is nothing given in supposed individual self-interest that would dictate the latter taking the form of selling one’s labor power in exchange for a wage in order to purchase commodities. Capitalism cannot be understood as the putative expression of self-interest. Capital, like any other mode of production, is founded not on the putative natural self-interest of individuals—an utter fiction, precisely because there is no self that is not shaped by its biographical and social history—but on the way in which that self-interest, or, more to the point, desire, has been affected or modified by social relations. What and how we desire is an effect of the different social relations that determine the affections and, thus, the direction of our striving. Desire is both an effect of the social order, which ascribes it its goals and orientation, and, at the same time, a cause, keeping the entire system functioning. Or, as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus, “Desire is part of the infrastructure.”¹³

Lordon offers a history of striving under three different regimes of capitalist exploitation, corresponding to the emergence of capitalism, the rise of consumer society, and contemporary neoliberalism. This history is mapped onto two axes; the first, drawn from Marx, is considered in terms of the division between production and consumption, the two separate spheres of activity. Within this, the division between abstract and concrete labor, between the generic imperative of productivity and the specific pleasures of this or that job, plays a secondary role. The second axis, drawn from Spinoza, is that of joy or sadness, understood as an increase or decrease in one’s power and capacity.

From these two axes, it is possible to chart the history of capital. The first phase of this history corresponds to the initial formation of capitalism, what Marx called formal subsumption. The primary institutional basis for capitalism, at this stage, is the absence of any alternative to wage labor, the destruction of the commons or any sustenance economy which would provide non-commodified conditions of existence. The “passion to be reckoned with” at this stage of capital is “fear,” to paraphrase Hobbes, who, perhaps without meaning to, captured better than Spinoza the affective composition of primitive accumulation.¹⁴ Fear is a motive, a driving force orienting the striving, the conatus, but a limited one. People compelled by fear will work, but only as much as it is necessary to stave off the punishment they fear. Those who do not work do not eat, and it is the fear of starvation or homelessness that keeps one working. Fear is not only a limited incentive; it is also a fundamentally unstable one. Fear can drive one to revolt almost as much as to obey. From this, then, Lordon maps a second stage that roughly corresponds with Fordism. For Lordon, the institutional effect of Fordism is one of the destruction of the pleasures and pride of concrete labor, the pleasures of a particular skill, in favor of a general shift of the desire for recognition or realization away from labor toward consumption. Ford’s “five-dollar day” establishes an affective economy, exchanging sadness and frustration at work for the pleasures of the newly emergent consumer society. The final, or at least most recent, change in this affective economy reorients pleasure toward work; however, it is no longer the pleasure of a particular skill, job, or a result, but the pleasure of employment itself. It is a desire that is, as much as possible, modeled on abstract labor. As much as there still are pleasures in concrete labor—and Lordon follows Spinoza in arguing that individuals will always affirm their power of existing, in other words, find whatever pleasures there are to be had in the workday (from those associated with the task at hand to the gossip and “water cooler talk” that accompany every work experience)—the modern ideal is, as much as possible, an indifference to the specific job in the name of flexibility and productivity.

Lordon’s focus on the demand to maximally align the worker’s desire with that of the corporation highlights some of the shifts in corporate strategies used to manage workers. To take one recent example, Apple’s stores, which rank as the most profitable by square foot among other retailers, pursued a very particular strategy for increasing this alignment.¹⁵ This began in the hiring and selection process, which was made intentionally arduous in order to cultivate a sense of selection.

Apple’s solution was to foster a sense of commitment to a higher calling while flattering employees that they were the chosen few to represent it. By counterintuitively raising the bar of admission, crafting a long series of interviews to weed out the mercenary or misanthropic, Johnson soon attracted more applicants than there were posts. Those keen enough to go through the onerous hiring process were almost by definition a better “fit” for the devotional ethos of the brand, far more receptive to the fiction that they weren’t selling things but, in an oft-repeated phrase, “enriching people’s lives,” as if they’d landed a job at a charity.¹⁶

The job interview is restructured to become one that focuses less on selection than on producing certain feelings of loyalty. This selection to produce a sense of selectivity is supplemented by the way in which the pleasures of consumption are made part of work.

Lordon argues that since the beginning of the twentieth century, capitalism has identified us primarily as consumers. Accordingly, the dominant representation of the economy in society generally takes the perspective of the consumer. Labor unrest and strikes are presented in terms of how they affect prices or consumer convenience, not in terms of how they address working conditions. Even work is being restructured by consumption. Apple transforms the labor relation by bringing consumption into retail. The interview process is meant to select the kind of people who are loyal consumers and then use that loyalty, in lieu of increased wages or commissions, as a motivating force. As one former employee states, “You’ve always been an evangelist for Apple and now you can get paid for it.”¹⁷ Apple is uniquely positioned to scramble the relationship between consumer and worker, making work an extension of consumption. After all, it is a company that distributes free stickers with every major purchase, which is not that surprising except that people actually voluntarily put them on their car bumpers and laptops. Moreover, its low wages actually work to eliminate from the labor pool workers with responsibilities to children or other loved ones. The combination of consumer identification with corporation or brand and limited attachments to others produces the ideal employee.

Beyond a few other brands with a high degree of loyalty, and a similar market share, it is hard to imagine workers in other industries falling prey to the same tactics. This is why organization theorist Peter Fleming has argued that Lordon has failed to understand the purely ideological function of claims regarding worker motivation in contemporary capitalism. For Fleming, the idea that everyone should love their job passionately, should find it as a calling because of their passion for the product or the brand, is less an actual statement of an affective ideal than a subtle threat to anyone who fails to do so. It is how companies present themselves, but not how they actually function. Lordon argues that “neoliberal capital is the world of the girlfriend experience,” underscoring the demand to feel passionate about whatever job or task.¹⁸ In response to this, and doubling down on the misogyny of the allegory, Fleming writes that neoliberalism is that of “the deranged girlfriend experience.”¹⁹ Its dominant strategy is not an alignment of desire but a threat of abandonment, coupled with an ever-shifting set of demands. Its ultimate effect is not mobilization and motivation but a demoralized acceptance. (To return to the example of Office Space, the need to constantly restate one’s purpose and contribution creates a constant fear of being seen as redundant.) Fleming does not contest that there is an affective dimension to management, just that it is primarily one of fear rather than joy. Despite the difference of love or hatred, Fleming and Lordon agree that contemporary management has as its central goal the maximum commitment or engagement of employees. This maximum is defined by two intersecting pressures. The first is the nature of work itself: the increased predominance of service work and human interactions within the economy demands more of employees in terms of their subjective alignment with corporate goals. A factory worker’s mood or attitude was irrelevant to the task, but the same cannot be said of a call center worker or even an employee in a fast-food restaurant. Second, the way corporate goals have been evaluated have also changed. As Lordon argues, the predominance of financial capital over other forms of capital, of stock price over profits, leads to an emphasis on immediate returns more than long-term profitability.²⁰ These tendencies converge on the maximum extraction of work, of performance, from the worker.

Lordon’s insight is to bring the affective dimension—joy and sadness—into the realm of the labor relation. However, he does so in a way that is framed primarily in terms of two relations, relations to the work itself or to what the wage makes possible, and two affects, hope and fear. Primitive accumulation, or the early stage of capital that it brings about, is defined by a relation to the wage governed mostly by fear; Fordism by a relation to the wage predicated primarily by desire, by consumer goods; and neoliberalism by a relation to labor governed primarily by desire. Lordon’s three periods make the fundamental error of any periodization of history: presenting history as the displacement and transformation of self-contained epochs. Workers driven by fear of losing their wages were not totally displaced by Fordist dreams of consumption, just as working to consume has not been displaced by the neoliberal fantasy of being an entrepreneur driven by one’s own passionate investment in work. These different organizations of desire coexist not just in the same world, distributed across a global economy that combines sweatshops, modern factories, and technology entrepreneurs (often within the same company or producing the same commodity): these different labors coexist in the same country, the same city, and, if we consider them in terms of their primarily affective dimension, in the same individual. Sometimes, one works just to pay the bills, and the fear of not being able to do so is what drives one to work; at other times, one is motivated by the possibilities of consumption. All of this is topped off by the desire to do the work that one loves. These different affective orientations define less three separate epochs in the history of capital than different affective orientations one might adopt over the course of the working day. Moreover, Lordon’s emphasis on a particular affect and a particular affective orientation—love or fear, aimed toward the activity or toward the wage—risks overlooking one of Spinoza’s central insights about affects, namely the ambivalence of affects. Spinoza argues that the human body is “composed of a great many individuals of different natures” and that, when it comes to the objects of desire, “one and the same object can be the cause of many and contrary affects.”²¹ This complexity gives rise to the vacillation of the affects. The same object, money, can be an object of both fear (the fear of not making rent) and hope (the hope of being able to afford the latest consumer good) and the same individual might experience their work, alternately, as something both hated and loved. Spinoza argued that we are in some sense spiritual automatons, but the complexity of the human mind and body means that we are inconstant automatons, oriented by different experiences and conflicting desires.²² We are not automatic, entirely predictable, because we are subject to conflicting and contradictory causes—ones that make the conditions for reproduction the same as the causes of deviation (or, as we will see below, what Chantal Jaquet calls nonreproduction). Nonetheless, Lordon’s fundamental project, and orientation—to define what could be called “the affective composition of labor”—offers insight into the conditions that both reproduce and unravel the labor relation.

Lordon is not alone in theorizing the affective dimension of labor. After all, affects, hopes, fears, frustrations, and satisfactions are integral to both our everyday experience of work and its structural organization. It is thus not surprising that other attempts to theorize work do so through the emotions and the affects, even if they do not share Spinoza as a point of reference. In a manner that draws more from Freud than from Spinoza, psychoanalyst Christoph Dejours argues first that work is fundamentally a matter of the gap, or interval, between a task and its execution.²³ Work exists because there is something to be done, and as much as the what and how of work are dictated by management, the fact that the work exists at all—that it is not done by machines—means that there is an interval between conception and execution to be traversed. In performing this work, one invariably encounters things that did not go as planned; work is always as much an invention as an execution. Work for Dejours is a kind of reality principle. The encounter with the real is manifest affectively; it is through our frustrations that we become aware of a world that is something other than our intentions and desires.²⁴ Dejours argues that there are two different “reals” that work confronts us with, two different vectors for the frustration of our desires; the first is the material world of objects that often exceeds or fails to correspond to our wishes, and the second is the social world of interpersonal relationships. These two aspects of the real—one on the side of the object, or the activity itself, and the other on social relations, on recognition—more or less correspond to the two ethics and norms of work in Hegel. The first is that of a craftsperson externalizing his or intentions in transforming the world, while the second confirms to work as an internalization of social norms—to which Dejours adds that each of these can be considered sources of realization and frustration. In other words, sometimes it is what we have to do that drives our joy and sadness at work, and sometimes it is who we have to work with.

Dejours not only expands the vectors of affect from hope or fear attached to the wage or work; he also poses a fundamentally different affective question. It is a matter not of the orientation of desire but of the organization of pain or suffering. The division between the social and material world of work, between the different realities that one confronts, makes it possible to understand how the joys of one can compensate for the frustrations of the other. There are jobs with a high degree of risk and danger at the level of their material conditions, but that are compensated for by pleasures and recognition at the level of subjective organization. Dejours’s example is test pilots, for whom the danger of their work is made up for by a recognition of their bravery. One could argue that the opposite is also true: that there are jobs in which it is the social dimension that is difficult and in which the pleasures are to be found in the concrete task. It is not the suffering, the difficulty, that defines the affective dimension of the work, but how that suffering is distributed.²⁵ The joys and sorrows of work are found not only in either the wage or the activity itself, as in the case of Lordon, but in the way in which labor as an activity has a material dimension and a social dimension. These two dimensions intersect not just in each laboring process, but in each laboring individual.

The relation between Lordon and Dejours is not so much a matter of picking one or the other, of choosing the organization of desire or the frustrations of the encounter with the real, as it is one of understanding that every labor relation has its particular affective composition. The joy and sadness, desire and frustration, are two sides of the same relation. This affective composition can be understood in its broader, macro sense, in which early capitalism, Fordism, and neoliberalism are organizations of desire, or suffering. Or it can be understood on a smaller scale, as each job, each work situation, has its own affective dimension, its particular pleasures and frustrations. Or, more to the point, it is precisely to be found in the intersection of these two dimensions. As such, the affective composition of labor is both something orchestrated at the level of the firm and something that exceeds it. At the level of the firm, it includes all of the strategies that might either lead to an increase of morale or those that isolate and frustrate workers; more often than not, it is a combination of the two, as workers who are isolated and fragmented from each other, demoralized in terms of their collective power, are encouraged to identify more and more with the corporation, with management. The affective composition of labor is both the combination of general fears and specific pleasures, as a general sense of precarity and pleasure is combined with the specific, albeit limited, pleasures of a given job; or, alternately, the pains and tribulations of a specific job are measured against the general pleasures of consumer society.

That labor is affectively composed does not necessarily mean that the work itself involves the composition and dissemination of affects. The affective composition of labor is not the same as emotional labor, as labor which involves the cultivation or simulation of an affect in order to produce affects in others, as in the work to produce satisfied customers or caring for patients. There is an affective composition of labor, a particular articulation of fears, hopes, and desires, even when there is not a demand to embody or elicit any particular affect as part of the job. As the example of flair in Office Space illustrates, however, these two aspects can overlap, as the demand to produce a particular affect, the fun and friendly atmosphere of flair, often overlaps with the demand to embody a particular aspect, the willingness to commit fully to a job. As Ivor Southwood has argued in his study of the mutations of emotional labor, in work where the conditions of employment are not guaranteed, or are precarious, emotional labor is no longer oriented toward the customer, client, or patient but toward the boss or manager.²⁶ Workers do not just smile to sell a product but to demonstrate their dedication, even when there is no one to sell to. Even someone restocking shelves in a supermarket after business hours, when no customers are present, can be cited for failing to demonstrate appropriate commitment to the corporation or job. Appearing to love one’s job becomes part of the job as motivation and professional attitude becomes the measure or standard of performance. One must constantly demonstrate one’s commitment and passion to work for the manager or supervisor. The division between jobs oriented toward customers (or front of house), in which emotional labor plays a significant component, and jobs oriented toward employees or management (or back of the line), in which emotional labor plays a smaller role, has broken down in the face of a constant demand to communicate and display the right professional attitude.²⁷ This is less a universal trend than a specific articulation of the affective composition of labor. Just as the affective composition of labor varies in terms of the predominance of this or that affect—hope or fear, sadness or joy—it can also be differentiated in terms of how much of an emphasis is placed on the performance of an affect. Emotional labor has grown in both extensity and intensity in the years since Hochschild conducted her study of flight attendants and debt collectors; it has extended to various jobs that have not been defined by their affective dimensions, and the service industries that have always had an affective dimension have come under increased scrutiny and surveillance through technological innovation and the outsourced management that such technology makes possible.²⁸

Not only does the affective composition of labor combine the structural conditions of the economy with the specific articulation of a given workspace; the former also functions as a general backdrop for the latter. The difference between the two, between the general “structure of feeling” and the specific affective tonality of a given job, is itself a driving force of capitalist society.²⁹ Spinoza argues that the same object can affect different people differently, and that even the same person can be affected differently by the same object at different times.³⁰ This difference leads to the fundamental ambivalence of affects, the fluctuations that lead one to go from loving or hating the same thing. It also leads to a fundamental nominalism, as Spinoza goes on to argue: there are as many loves and hates as there are objects and subjects to love and hate, although even that number is multiplied by the shifting affective composition of day-to-day life. In capitalism, this nominalism and vacillation of affects becomes itself an alibi for subjection. The more the structural conditions of capitalism, specifically the demand to sell wage labor, are taken for granted and naturalized, the more individuals focus on this or that particular job or particular boss as the object of anger or hope.³¹ This focus on the specifics of a given job not only dulls any criticism of work under capitalism, reducing it to criticism of this or that bad job or horrible boss; it also functions as its own internal motivation and drive, perpetuating subjugation to the general system. Everyone strives to change their work, to change the conditions of their employment, but this change is less focused on the general conditions of wage labor than it is on the specific conditions of a given job. As sociologist C. Wright Mills describes this particular frame of acceptance,

One type of work, or one particular job, is contrasted with another type, experienced or imagined, within the present world of work; judgments are rarely made about the world of work as presently organized as against some other way of organizing it: so also, satisfaction from work is felt in comparison with the satisfaction of other jobs.³²

The belief that the next job will be different, that a career change could bring new forms of happiness and satisfaction, is the engine of the affective economy of capital—an engine that functions not only despite the fact that it breaks down, but because it breaks down. Experiences of frustrations fuel the fantasy of a better job. The individual fantasy of the dream job is itself a kind of “cruel optimism” toward the conditions of work in general.³³

The Mythic Composition of Labor

Returning to Lordon’s analysis, it is possible to say that there are two intersecting limitations to his theorization of the affective composition of labor. First, there is a tendency to reduce this affective composition to the structural coordinates of the wage relation. This in turn becomes the basis of a periodization that sharply divides between early capital, Fordism, and neoliberalism without allowing for the uneven and incomplete nature of the development of these different strategies across the same society and across the same individual’s life. The second limitation of Lordon’s analysis is closely aligned with its strength. Lordon understands the structural transformations of the capitalist economy—its emergence from precapitalist relations, the increased productivity and wages of the Fordist era, and the demand for more and more mobilization in the era of neoliberalism—not just as impersonal forces making up something called the economy, but as transformations that can only take place, can only become effective, in that they are immediately lived and experienced, shaping desire. For Lordon, this is not some new phenomenon, something exclusively associated with the current capitalism (as some theorists of neoliberalism claim), but was necessarily always the case. Historically, the formation of capitalism and the rise of consumer society were as much transformations of desire, hope, and fear as they were of economic and political structures. Accordingly, the history of capitalism is not just a history of transformations of the forces and relations of production, but also of what people strive for and how they strive for it. Lordon goes to great lengths to demonstrate the intimacy of the economic. In doing so, he almost exclusively considers the spontaneous dimension of this affective composition: its production and reproduction through the institutions of wage labor and the general structure of capitalist accumulation. What Lordon overlooks, for the most part, is the role of the more explicit, less spontaneous form of ideology that is not immediately organized in social life but functions through its disconnection from it. In some sense, these two limitations intersect. It is in failing to see the heterogeneity of the present that Lordon does not see that any identity of the present moment—its ability to hold together in the image of capitalist society, consumer society, or neoliberal gig economy—is an effect of the second dimension of ideology, the aspect that acts at a distance from the actual relations of production.

It is not entirely true that Lordon overlooks this aspect of ideology. He cites literary theorist Yves Citton’s Mythocratie: Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche (Mythocracy: storytelling and the imaginary of the left), arguing that the impersonal orientation of desire passes through persons both real and fictional, “whose imitability passes through the power of the story.”³⁴ The labor relation cannot be separated from the narratives that we use to make sense of it, and orient ourselves, from Horatio Alger’s myths of days gone by to modern-day Silicon Valley gurus who extoll us to find our true passion and calling. As much as Lordon invokes Citton to supplement his analysis, arguing that the impersonal restructuring of desire through the wage relation is not without its personification in specific individuals and narratives, it also exposes a rift between the two orders of ideology, a rift predicated on their fundamental similarity.

Spinoza famously wrote that “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things,” a passage that has challenged readers of the Ethics. Grasped in terms of a post-Spinozist social theory, it is possible to argue that Spinoza’s formulation can productively be paired with Marx’s assertion of the identity of consciousness and life. Ideas and the imagination, like bodies and desires, must be grasped in terms both of their internal striving, their consistency, and of their finitude, their determination. Contrary to a long-standing bias in the history of philosophy to treat ideas and things as two fundamentally different orders of reality, Spinoza posits a fundamental identity of thought and existence—an identity that, paradoxically, makes it possible to grasp their points of divergence and intersection. Of course, as I have already argued, the very idea of ideology necessarily presupposes a difference as well as an identity; in order to be the ruling ideas, the concepts and narratives that rule must be different from the experience and conditions they rule over, but, at the same time, they must be produced by those conditions. There is a limited efficacy of true ideas insofar as they are true; ideas do not have effects on their own but require conditions in order to exist and be disseminated.³⁵ Spinoza’s assertion regarding true ideas can be understood as a mirror image of Marx’s claim regarding ideology. As Étienne Balibar describes the structure of ideology in The German Ideology,

The ideological mechanism, which can equally be read as a social process, will come to be seen as an astonishing conversion of impotence into domination: the abstraction of consciousness, which is an expression of consciousness’s incapacity to act in reality . . . becomes the source of power precisely because it is “autonomized.”³⁶

Contrary to his critical contemporaries, such as Feuerbach and Stirner, who believed in the power of ideas, and thus the weapon of criticism, Marx underscores that ideas only have power, only have effects, under particular material conditions that give some no time to think and others the means to spread and disseminate their ideas. Ideas have a causality that is derived not from them as ideas but from the social relations that produce and circulate them.

For Spinoza, there are largely two different types of ideas: inadequate and adequate. Adequate ideas necessarily express their cause, grasp the conditions of their production, while inadequate ideas obscure their causes and conditions. They are a confused jumble of the body that perceives them, including its desires and history, and their actual conditions. As we have seen with respect to such terms as order and disorder, beauty and ugliness, such judgments are a disordered intermingling of what we perceive, what affects us, and what we desire. That inadequate ideas do not express their causes do not mean that they are not themselves causally determined. As Spinoza writes, “Inadequate ideas follow from the same necessity as adequate ideas.”³⁷ The mystifications and distortions that make up what Spinoza refers to as the imagination have their necessity, their causes, their material conditions. As much as the imagination entails inadequate knowledge both of ourselves and of the world, it still, in some sense, is an effect of both, a product of the associations and connections that make the mind a kind of spiritual automaton as well as the social relations that shape an individual’s experience.³⁸

The imagination, like desire, is shaped by its relations, its encounters and affects; past associations form the basis for new connections and associations. As Spinoza describes this spiritual automaton, “Each one, according as he has been accustomed to join and connect the images of things in this or that way, will pass from one thought to another.”³⁹ As with the account of desire in the Ethics, Spinoza’s emphasis is on biography, on lived experience: the soldier and the farmer’s associations are framed by hoofprints in the sand, by signs of something absent rather than a direct experience. As much as Spinoza’s examples invoke the immediacy of knowledge from experience, his definition of immediate knowledge, the first kind of knowledge, includes what we know “from having heard or read certain words.” Spinoza not only includes knowledge from signs in the first kind of knowledge: all experience is in some sense made up of signs, in that we often experience things that reveal to us something of our body, our way of being affected, and something of another body, something affecting us; how we make sense of these relations depends on a third relation that frames our interpretation.⁴⁰ There is no direct relation between the sign and what it is a sign of, signifier and signified, nor could they be said to be arbitrary; rather, there is a tripartite relation: sign, interpretant, and signified. The third, the interpretant—how the sign is interpreted—is itself the effect of previous encounters and signs. Hoofprints in the sand signify different things to farmers and soldiers because of the history that shapes the basis of their interpretations.

Spinoza’s recognition of the role of signs and words as constitutive of experience has a political as much as an epistemological dimension. Spinoza wrote under the dominance of the authority of scripture, an authority that has waned. As much as we could say that we have passed to a different regime of signs, it is possible to articulate several elements of Spinoza’s semiotics. First, as part of the first kind of knowledge, signs are always inadequate as a form of knowledge. They do not reveal or disclose the conditions of their production or dissemination. It is because of this that interpreters have no other ground than previous interpretations and desires. They always require an interpretation, and, often, another sign to shore up that interpretation. We not only interpret signs according to our particular histories and relations, seeing different things in a hoofprint, but do so according to our own desires, hopes, and fears. As we strive to live, we strive to interpret, and vice versa.⁴¹ There is a necessarily centrifugal force of these interpretations, as the singularity of experience and history compels different individuals to interpret signs differently. Any dominant interpretation must necessarily be imposed. As Spinoza writes, “To counteract this unfortunate tendency, immense efforts have been made to invest religion, true or false, with such pomp and ceremony that it can sustain any shock and constantly evoke the deepest reverence in all of its worshippers.”⁴² This is why, when Spinoza writes that the object of revelation is nothing other than obedience, the obedience he refers to is twofold. It refers, first, to the matter of scripture—what it is about, tales of what is to be done—but also to what maintains and sustains scriptural meaning, and that is obedience to a particular regime of signs and associations. Obeying is both the cause and effect of the sense of the sign; our habits shape how we interpret signs, and how we interpret and understand the world shapes our habits.

At the core of this investigation of interpretation and scripture is a rethinking of what it means to obey. First, Spinoza asserts that complete and utter obedience is an impossibility. Due to the irreducibly singular nature of any one individual’s encounters, people cannot be expected to think the same or judge the same, and it is too much even to expect people to hold their tongues and keep their opinions suppressed.⁴³ Because of this, any contractual notion of a surrender of right and power must remain merely theoretical. “Nobody can so completely transfer to another all his right, and consequently all of his power, as to cease to be a human being.”⁴⁴ The redefinition of power as that which is inalienable because it is natural, part of the individual and collective body, leads to a transformation of what it means to obey. In the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza gives two different statements regarding obedience. The first, in keeping with the idea of a social contract, differentiates between subjection and liberty by considering the motives or reason underlying one’s actions, searching for the rational core of obedience. That one obeys the rule of a sovereign is not enough to consider that action proof of obedience. As Spinoza argues, “The reason must enter into account.”⁴⁵ There are times when our obedience to the law is nothing other than rational behavior; stopping at a stoplight is as much about self-preservation in the face of oncoming traffic as it is obedience to the law. Obedience, servitude, is, then, restricted to those moments when we do something that is not in our interest. This first thesis of obedience is corrected and contradicted by a second thesis in the following chapter, in which Spinoza states that obedience is a matter not of inward motivation but of outward compliance. It is the simple fact that one’s action corresponds with that of the sovereign or ruler that constitutes obedience, regardless of one’s motives or desires. This focus on the effect rather than the cause, the action rather than motivation, opens up the terrain of possible ways that people can be made to obey. As Spinoza writes,

For whether a man is urged by love or driven by a fear of threatened evil, since in both cases his action always proceeds from his own intention and decision, either there can be no such thing as sovereignty and right over subjects or else it must include all the means that contribute to men’s willingness to obey. Whenever a subject acts in accordance with the commands of the sovereign power, whether he is motivated by love, or fear, or (and this is more frequently the case) a mixture of hope and fear, or by reverence—which is an emotion compounded of fear and awe—or whatever be his motive, he acts from his ruler’s right, not from his own.⁴⁶

In many ways, Spinoza’s point here is the opposite of that of Hobbes, his contemporary. Whereas Hobbes wanted to claim that fear and liberty were consistent, that we are still free to act even when threatened with force, Spinoza claims that obedience and hope are consistent—that positive incentives, such as love or desire, are as much a part of obedience as negative threats. The carrot is as much a part of political power as the stick. More to the point, Spinoza’s dialectic of obedience, simultaneously reducing it to the bare minimum, to only those actions which counter self-interest, and expanding it to include every possible motivation, including self-interest, is an attempt to deal with another problem that Spinoza outlines in the same two chapters: that of right and power.⁴⁷ While Spinoza begins with a sort of social contract, in the next chapter he adds that such a picture is only a theory; right is power and thus cannot be transferred. This inalienability of power hinges upon the irreducibility of the way one makes sense of the world:

It would be vain to command a subject to hate one to whom he is indebted for some service, to love one who has done him harm, to refrain from taking offence at insults, from wanting to be free of fear, or from numerous similar things that necessarily follow from the laws of nature.⁴⁸

Interpretations are founded upon past encounters, past relations, and habits—what Spinoza calls ingenium, a word that is translated as “habit” or “character.” This character, or habit, is both the irreducible ground of politics—people cannot surrender their right to feel, understand, and think—and the terrain of politics, that which is ultimately acted upon to produce obedience.⁴⁹

As has often been remarked, Spinoza made the question “Why do the masses fight for servitude as if it were salvation?” central to his political thought. The immediate answer to this question is superstition, which is a particular regime of signs and affects, a particular way of feeling and interpreting the world. As much as this seems like a question from a bygone age, Spinoza’s insistence on superstition, on imagination as the cause and effect of obedience, anticipates Michel Foucault’s famous assertion that the “soul is the prison of the body.”⁵⁰ The most effective form of control or obedience is when people obey the state, or capital, while appearing to obey only themselves.⁵¹ Just as desire has to be understood as an effect, a product of social relations and individual biography, obedience too is an effect of the habits and relations that shape thoughts and desires. These practices and habits attempt to shape the character of individual character (what Spinoza calls ingenium) in accordance with a collective national or religious character, creating the same associations, the same desires—resolving the double bind so that people obey the sovereign in appearing to obey only their own desires.⁵² As Spinoza writes in describing the ancient Hebrew state, “Therefore to men so habituated to it obedience must have appeared no longer as bondage, but freedom.”⁵³ Avant la lettre, Spinoza investigated what sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato called “noopolitics,” the ensemble of techniques that act on ideas and desires, shaping attention and memory.⁵⁴ Or, to put it in Spinoza’s terms, if character, ingenium, is the inalienable ground of politics, unable to be destroyed, then politics acts on the conditions of this character, shaping the fears, desires, and associations that are the basis for thought and striving.⁵⁵ What cannot be destroyed or ignored can be transformed.

In adapting Spinoza’s thought to the modern age, the massive increase of signs within, or even over, lived experience demands a reconsideration of the mediations of experience. It is tempting to see this surplus of signs and images over experience as nothing more than the complete loss of unmediated experience. Philosopher and media critic Bernard Stiegler has argued that there is a kind of proletarianization of daily life. Just as Marx identified proletarianization as a kind of dispossession of the means of production, followed by a dispossession of the skill and knowledge necessary for production, Stiegler argues that we must see a third proletarianization, a dispossession of the skills and knowledge to engage and interpret the symbols that make up our life.⁵⁶ For Stiegler, every memory, including artificial memory of things read and images seen, necessarily conditions future interpretations. How we make sense of things stems from our encounters and experiences. This leads Stiegler to conclude that our experiences now are entirely preprogrammed. While Stiegler’s theory of a kind of semiotic dispossession does offer a stunning illustration of how the ruling ideas become the ideas of the ruling class, suggesting a kind of intellectual dispossession that follows and solidifies material dispossession, it does so by entirely evacuating any striving, any activity, from interpretation, making us passive automatons.⁵⁷

In response to this thesis of alienation and passivity, Yves Citton argues that interpretation must be situated at the intersection of passivity and activity—that it is both how we are shaped by the world and how we shape it. As much as we are profoundly influenced by the images, narratives, and stories we encounter, so much so that they shape our future interpretations, our relation to such narratives is also informed by our own desires and inclinations. What Citton proposes is a different variation of Spinoza’s general problem of conatus, striving, and the affects. In order to understand the function of contemporary power—of the power over opinions, choices, and desires—it is necessary to escape the binary of freedom versus determination, to think about the way in which all actions can be affected, modified, and shaped by others.⁵⁸ Every action, every idea, and every desire must be understood to be simultaneously an effect and a cause, the result of other processes and relations and the condition of its own striving. This duality is not static, invariant, but, at least for beings as complex as us humans, the extent to which something is an effect and a cause varies according to the relative degree of activity and passivity. The imagination is both the fundamental condition of ignorance, the first kind of knowledge, and the point where a way of thinking becomes a way of acting. To illustrate this point, we only have to look at Spinoza’s argument regarding excessive pride, or thinking too highly of oneself; despite the binary logic that governs most of the affects, opposing joy to sadness and love to hate, there is no opposite of misplaced pride, no capacity to think less of oneself than is accurate. This is due to the effect of the imagination on action: “For whatever man imagines he cannot do, he necessarily imagines; and he is so disposed by this imagination that he really cannot do what he imagines he cannot do.”⁵⁹ The imagination is a “meta-conduct of conducts” in that it determines not actions but how one thinks of the very possibility of action. Citton’s emphasis on such a meta-conduct of conducts stresses two fundamental aspects of contemporary power: this power operates on individuals who are not directly constrained or coerced by overt force and thus it follows that this power is necessarily “soft,” acting upon desires and beliefs that shape and determine actions rather than upon actions themselves. That which is seemingly immaterial—imagination, hopes, and dreams—is itself the condition and ground of the material actions of bodies.

This meta-conduct of conducts is shaped, in part, by the narratives and stories that we read and watch, that make up mass culture. Citton’s focus on narrative is less on the supposed content of narratives, on the specifics of things represented, than on the fundamental practices and gestures of interpretation. Or, put differently, the life that determines consciousness includes the practices, habits, and gestures of interpretation as much as our experiences of work and other forms of immediate actions. Our immersion in the world of a novel, film, or video game is not something cut off entirely from our living engagement with the world, but a modification of it. The same affective responses, the scream at a horror film, the sadness of the death of a character in a novel, and so on, traverse the liminal space between consciousness and life; the relation to the fiction is shaped by and shapes the relation to the world. As Citton writes,

Reading a novel, watching a play or a movie pushes us to not only mimic, but to experience certain relational gestures “from the inside” of the characters mind, as it were. That such an experience, repeated dozens, hundreds or thousands of times, tends to build certain habits in the reader-viewer seems rather obvious: we learn to act (in real life) by experiencing relational gestures in narrative immersion.⁶⁰

These habits are constructed around meta-scenes. Meta-scenes are not the specifics of a given story, but the way in which every specific story must draw from a general matrix of possible and desirable actions, drawn from a general economy of affects and attention.⁶¹ One particular entrenched and pervasive meta-scene in the cultural industry is that of the isolated and exceptional individual. This is, of course, the figure of the lone hero, rebel, and so on that reverberates across multiple formats and genres, from literature to video games and from fantasy to history, intersecting with other modes of individuation, and other practices, such as politics and law, becoming a meta-scene that structures our relation to worlds both imaginary and real. Individual action, rather than collective action, is the meta-scene of our imaginary. Our stories are riddled with “chosen ones,” our histories populated by “great men,” and our lives driven by the idea that we alone can change our action and our fate. These individualistic stories permeate our existence, to the point that even when affected by a massive structural shift in one’s living conditions (such as layoffs that affect an entire industry), we look for individual responsibility or, worse yet, take individual responsibility for conditions that exceed our control.⁶² The power of what Citton calls “mythocracy” stems from a particular short circuit, a particular and ongoing metalepsis, between the imagination and acting in the world, as each is constrained and shaped by the other. There is a double determination: our imagination is shaped and determined by actions and relations in the world, while our actions and relations in the world are shaped by our imagination.

Spinoza stressed the conditioned nature of our desires. Our desire, our striving, is oriented more by past encounters, by our history, than any teleology, or quality of the object. As Spinoza writes,

From all this, then, it is clear that we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it.⁶³

What we desire is, in part, shaped by what we have enjoyed; what has given us pain or pleasure shapes and conditions our future desires. It is for this reason that Citton considers the imagination to be not unlike a worn channel or riverbed: past impressions condition future and interpretations. In order for a story, a narrative, to be compelling, it must, in some way, work within the existing field of values and ideals. As Citton writes, “The art of storytelling aims to know how to seize (preexisting) desires and beliefs, attracting and influencing them for its benefit.”⁶⁴ If the production of Hollywood has gravitated so strongly to remakes of everything from comic books to cartoons, it is precisely because those narratives are the source of so many already-established desires and joys. When it comes to commercial value, selling films and television, it is cheaper to mine the raw materials of past joys, past associations, than to create out of whole cloth entirely new ones. What is true of commercial viability is also true of ideological, or mythocratic, power and belief: the most entrenched narratives retrace and reinforce existing hopes and fears, joys and sadness, twisting them ever so slightly to new ends. As Citton writes,

Something “makes sense” within a population only to the extent that certain relevant existential issues make this population sensitive to certain problems. These issues “matter” insofar as they “make material” for debate through the vocabularies, slogans, images and narratives circulating within this population—but they pre-exist them, in a still largely amorphous state, and are thus available to be “informed” and oriented in a particular sense.⁶⁵

As Citton argues, the most obvious example of this relation between preexisting anxieties and fears being rescripted and turned toward different ends is the way in which precarity and economic insecurity have become the basis for xenophobic fears and racist sentiments. Inadequate ideas of one’s own conditions, an inability to understand the true source of economic insecurity under capitalism, leads to other causes being substituted. Moreover, once these interpretations have been created and disseminated, they have their own causal force and power. They shape how people think and imagine.

In mythocracy, as in other forms of power, the traditions of the dead generations weigh on the living, as old habits inflect and influence new interpretations. This is not an entirely determinant vision of the imagination, however, in which the present is interpreted in terms of the past, reliving the same nightmares. As Citton writes, drawing on Spinoza’s theorization of the power of the intellect in part 5 of the Ethics:

The particular power of the human (and the fulcrum of our emancipation) is thus localized in our ability to re-link differently the images, thoughts, affects, desires and beliefs that we associate in our minds, the sentences that come out of our mouth, and the movements that emanate from our body.⁶⁶

Just as the existing narratives turn and slightly twist our existing sensibilities and desires, reshaping them for other ends, we too can rework these narratives and sensibilities. Or, more to the point, we cannot but engage in such a reworking; every reading, every interpretation, is a struggle between different sensibilities, different affects and intentions.⁶⁷ We all do this inevitability, as our own histories and encounters shape our reception. The real question is, how does a particular story, a particular interpretation, cease to be an idiosyncratic response but become the basis for a new way of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Citton’s emphasis on storytelling cuts between two formulations of ideology in the history of philosophy. The first, as we have already seen, is Marx’s assertion that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. It is the assertion that ideology stems from the working classes’ tendency to adopt and adapt to the values of the ruling class, seeing themselves not as workers but as potential capitalists. The second, albeit first chronologically, is Machiavelli’s assertion that the ruler must appear to be of the people, governed by the same norms, beliefs, and habits.⁶⁸ For Machiavelli, the basis of these beliefs was religion; it was important for the Prince to appear religious, but we can extend Machiavelli’s point to include the general idea that ruling ideas must in some sense be of the dominated class, incorporating their values and norms. The ruling ideas may be the ideas of the dominant class, but they must be articulated in and through the ideas of the dominated class.⁶⁹ Or, as Althusser puts it, “The prince must take the reality of popular ideology into account, and inscribe therein his own representation, which is the public face of the state.”⁷⁰ Citton offers a way out of this alternative, stressing that it is not a matter of choosing “the ruling” or “dominated class” as the source of the dominant ideas, but of recognizing how the former become the latter.⁷¹ Or, framed more simply, what comes from us from “on high” has its source “down low,” and vice versa. This process of inversion and transformation necessarily passes through the affects and desires, by acting on hopes and fears. The ruling ideas can only become ruling ideas if they orient, and reorient, the desires and strivings of the ruled, incorporating their experience. It is for this reason that work is often a linchpin of ideology. Work, selling one’s wage labor, is the predominant experience of the ruled class, the source of not just joys and frustrations but also the sense of existence; the goal of ideology, or mythocracy, is to attach these affects, joys and sorrows, to a myth of individual worth and success.

What appears to be transcendent—the state or, in this case, the economic order—is actually immanent, produced in and through the different strivings and affects that make up individual and collective life. This immanent transcendence is made possible first by the social, or, more properly speaking, transindividual nature of affects.⁷² Affects are less particular modes than modulations of our collective and individual life; my hopes, fears, loves, and hates are influenced and shaped by the affects of others. This is true of the most fundamental affects, love and hate, which not only relate to others but are altered by their relations. Affects are less the one-for-one attribution of particular feelings for particular things than they are situated in a network of interrelations, functioning as both effects and causes, shaped by our encounters and, in turn, shaping our actions. Even the most intimate affect is profoundly social. We never love or hate alone; the very affects that form the intimacy of our striving, our desire, are refracted by social relations. Something that is loved by others seems more worthy of love precisely because of that affective imitation, and, as Spinoza argues, it is difficult to love something alone. The collective nature of our affects is not something we directly perceive; just as we strive for something because we believe it to be good, perceiving our desires as qualities of the object, we also believe our desires to be ours alone. We do not seem to notice the collective nature of our affects and desires, believing ourselves to be not only the causes of our desires, as kingdoms within a kingdom; we attribute our desire not to the social relations from which they emerge, but either to the qualities that the object possesses or to our own individual (and autonomous) volition.

The imitation of the affects that define social life, shaping our desires, is, for the most part, fluctuating. The phenomena of tastes, public opinion, and trends illustrate the fluctuating waves of hope and fear, love and hate. In order for such affects to become stable, they need to be instituted. Institution is an effect of the affects, constituted by similar affects, but it is also a cause. This can be seen most immediately in money, which, as Spinoza argues, condenses all possible desires, “occupying the mind of the multitude more than anything else.”⁷³ The value of money is an effect of desires, but it appears as the condition of them. This circle can be expressed simply in the formulation “People want money because people want money.” It is a powerful organizer of desire because it is a powerful organization of desire.⁷⁴ For Spinoza, collectivity is necessarily sustained by such common emotions—common emotions that are both the condition and the effect of collectivity. As Spinoza writes,

Since men, as we have said, are led more by passion than by reason, it naturally follows that a people will unite and consent to be guided as if by one mind not at reason’s prompting but through some common emotion, such as a common hope, or common fear, or desire to avenge some common injury.⁷⁵

Such a common emotion does not exist spontaneously; it is produced as much as it is productive of social cohesion and relations. These different affects and desires coalesce in a common object, a common institution that they produce, but this, in turn, becomes their condition. This circularity of effect becoming causes is the culmination of the fetish aspect, of failing to recognize the collective and social nature of our affects. It appears that money has value, or, in the case of politics, that the state has authority, and that is why we desire or obey. But the institution in question is an effect of the affects that constitute it; it is, at the same time, a cause. The institution is a fetish of the affects that constitute it (a point to which we will return in chapter 3).

The constitution of such institutions remains a lingering question. If everyone desires and interprets according to their own particular character (or ingenium), their own particular history, then it would seem to be nearly impossible to constitute a common affect. The attempt to create a common affect by force, as in the case of a theocracy, is an impossible task, becoming harsher and more restrictive in its attempt to restrict the plurality of interpretations. However, where religion fails, what Marx called the religion of daily life, the fetishes of money and work, succeeds.⁷⁶ Money is desired by the multitude because of the way it functions as the intermediary between one’s desire and any possible object of desire. If Spinoza argued that money occupied the minds of the multitude more than anything else because it was the condition of desires, then, for most people in a capitalist society, it can be argued that work is the occupation behind that occupation, as work is the condition of money for most working people. More importantly, work is represented as the condition of money: the mythic idea of money as the reward of hard work, rather than inheritance, investment, or monopoly control of markets, extends far beyond the biographical connection. As much as there is an affective composition of labor, the organization of the various affects in and through a specific workplace, there is an affective composition toward labor, as work itself is the source of common hopes and fears. The demand to work becomes its own affective imperative. However, this affective dimension is much more ambivalent and complex than the relation to money—ambivalent because work is the source of both hatred and love; complex because work, wage labor, is not just the condition of money, and thus of other desires, but has its own recognition and thus its own affective dimension. Wage labor is the condition for acquiring material desires and needs, and as such is the object of both joy and sadness, hope and fear, but it is also the source of recognition and respect, of what could be called spiritual needs. Of course, these two things are constantly intertwining, so much so that it is often difficult to separate material conditions from their myths.

Despite the common point of reference, Spinoza (as well as a common project underscored by their citation of each other’s writing), Lordon and Citton end up illustrating two different aspects of what could be considered “ideology.” What Lordon emphasizes is its spontaneous aspect, the way that a restructuring of desire, of hopes and aspirations, operates through the very structures of the wage relation itself. Early capitalism, Fordism, and neoliberalism, to take his three periods, are not ideologies that emerge from the intellectual labor of a ruling class but effects of the transformation of working conditions, wages, and the conditions of consumption. They are not effects of the superstructure but of the base, stemming from economic relations. “Ideology” is not the right word here, and Lordon avoids it in order to stress the visceral and immediate nature of subjection. It is the restructuring of desire. In contrast to this, Citton draws our attention to the way in which even our most fundamental striving necessarily engages our thinking and is thus necessarily structured in part by the narratives and scenes through which we engage with the possibility of acting. In one case, the emphasis is on the “order and connection of things,” the structures of the labor relation that determine a particular orientation of striving; in the other, the emphasis is on “the order and connection of ideas,” the narratives and ideals that determine a particular imagination. Or, framed differently, Lordon and Citton could be understood as articulating the two different alienations as presented by Alexandre Matheron in his study of the social and political dimensions of Spinoza’s thought. As Matheron describes it,

The progress of consciousness is subject to a double alienation. On the one hand there is a “social alienation” [aliénation mondaine], which can be called economic, provided that we give this word the largest possible sense: by which we unconditionally attach value to particular objects that surround us, valuing them as positive or negative, which we consider to be “goods” (worldly goods) or as “bad,” and which we will now devote our lives to pursuing and fleeing. On the other hand, there is an ideological alienation, both cause and effect of the first: that by which we transpose our passions and beliefs into an ontology, developing an inverted vision of the world, a vision outlined by the traditional view of the cosmos: a universal teleology and hierarchy of goods, which gives a privileged position to man, and, as the keystone of the system, an undefined God. It is this double alienation that will control the whole course of our emotional life.⁷⁷

Matheron’s figure needs to be updated on both sides of the division. First, in terms of the social alienation, this alienation is not just an alienation of objects seen as bearers of value, but of our own striving, our own labor. Second, in terms of the second, the ideological alienation, its more modern form focuses less on the anthropomorphic God than on the specific kingdom within a kingdom of the individual subject. The two alienations reflect the fact that both in our immediate activity—our work and desire, as well as our reflections—we are alienated, which is to say disconnected from the real conditions of our acting and thinking. The merit of each of these explanations is, at the same time, their limitation. The strength of Lordon’s account is in demonstrating the reorientation of desire is not some matter of the superstructure, requiring the work of ideology and the culture industry, but is directly inscribed in the labor relation itself, illustrating a spontaneous ideology that is so spontaneous, so embodied, that the term “ideology” would seem to be out of place. The strength of Citton’s argument is in stressing that all subjection is as much imagined as it is lived, that we actively struggle for our subjection as if it were salvation. We reproduce the very desires that reproduce the relations of production. These strengths are connected to limitations, most notably that, taken in isolation, either the structural (which is to say spontaneous) or mythic (which is to say mediated) understanding of ideology is necessarily insufficient.

Returning to the relation of abstract and concrete labor discussed in chapter 1, it is possible to map Lordon and Citton’s analysis onto the two dimensions of labor, abstract and concrete, albeit in ways that one might not initially suspect. Lordon’s attention to the general structure of labor as restructuring desire relates to abstract labor. In fact, one could argue that Lordon shows how it is not that abstract at all, at least in a conventional sense: it is immediately lived in the manner in which even the formal conditions of working for a wage and adapting oneself to the flexibility of the job market reorient desire. The abstract is lived concretely, even intimately. Citton’s investigation into the mythocracy of work can be seen to conform to concrete labor, but perhaps in an even more surprising manner: it is because concrete labor, the specific task of one’s particular job, often seems senseless in its particularity and functional limitation that the myths of work as an ethical and transformative force are invoked. Concrete labor must be subject to abstractions, to myths of the meaning and value of work, to be worthwhile at all. The concrete is lived abstractly, even mythically. The myth of a kind of work ethic, of the transformative and transforming nature of work, is more often invoked in terms of work that is senseless or demeaning. “It will build your work ethic” is the justification often given to the worst, and worst-paying, jobs. In any case, in every job, every specific labor situation, there is a specific articulation of material conditions and their representations, which is to say there is an orientation of both the mind and body.

Framing the relation between Lordon and Citton in this way raises the question of the relation between these two organizations, one of desire, the other of imagination; one of minds, the other of bodies. As we have seen, there is perhaps no question more difficult, and no area of inquiry more important to Spinoza scholarship, than the question of how to make sense of the identity and difference of the order and connection of ideas and things. Chantal Jaquet, for one, has suggested that the relationship between ideas and things be considered a “logic of alternation.” In other words, sometimes, in order to grasp the order and connection of ideas, it is necessary to look into the order and connection of things, and vice versa. Jaquet is thus giving a name to what is already in some sense at work in Spinoza’s thought. As we have seen, when Spinoza describes how we form the inaccurate ideas of things through universal notions, he does not refer to the mind and its limitations, but to the body and the limits of the imagination. Universals are formed when “so many images . . . are formed at one time in the human body that they surpass the power of imagining.”⁷⁸ Ideas like “man,” “horse,” or “dog” are the products of a kind of sensory overload. Unable to comprehend the plethora of singular instances, a vague generality is formed—one that is always tinged by a particular image. In order to grasp the order and connection of ideas, it is sometimes necessary to turn to the body and its limitations. The converse is also true. Spinoza’s lengthy enumeration of the various affects—beginning with the basic joy and sadness and expanding to incorporate all of the various jealousies, fears, sorrows, and hopes—necessarily encompasses a mental dimension. As Spinoza states in his definition of the affects, “Love is a joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause.”⁷⁹ The same is true of hatred. As the genesis of different affects expands beyond the primary geometric elements of love and sadness to encompass all of the conflicts, vacillations, and jealousies of life, the dimension of thought or imagination increases. There are a lot of thoughts, a lot of connections and associations, underlying even the most immediate affects. Affects, even the most fundamental ones, cannot be separated from the imagination or the interconnection of ideas. As much as ideas only cause or influence other ideas, and bodies only affect other bodies, the fundamental difference is undercut by the fact that they are two different ways of grasping the same thing. As Jaquet writes,

Consequently, although the order and connection of the ideas of the affections is the same as the order and connection of the body’s affections, this does not mean that all affects concern the mind and body in the same way. Each of them has a specificity so that one can be more involved than the other. Although an affect has two sides, they are not uniform; its physical and mental aspects do not always have the same importance and do not overlap on a one-to-one basis according to a correspondence.⁸⁰

Affects and imagination are both bodily and mental, are both the body’s capacity to affect and be affected and the mind’s ability to form and connect ideas, but they are not always equally so. In some situations, it is going to be the connection of bodies that is necessarily most pertinent, and in others, it is the connection of ideas.

Returning to the divide of sorts between Lordon and Citton, between the imagination that passes through the restructuring of the labor relation and the mythic organization of the imagination that passes through the culture industry, we can see that there is a similar logic of alternation. Sometimes it is sheer economic compulsion that compels people to return to work each day, but at other times this economic compulsion is itself inflected and transformed by narratives of responsibility, duty, and self-reliance. “I pay my own bills” is both a general description of the need to sell one’s own labor power in order to survive and a point of pride and self-respect in a culture defined by an individualistic work ethic.⁸¹ The logic of alternation, then, defines its own kind of ambivalence, as the same action, practice, or even belief can be understood to vacillate from an immediate organization of bodies and desires to one of beliefs and myths. Our attachment to work is both an effect of its material necessity, a necessity that compels us to frame our life in terms of the pleasures and pains of work, and its mythic significance, a significance that shapes our imagination in terms of what is possible and desirable.

Self-Made Men: Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul

Citton’s concept of mythocracy offers a new way of reading and interpreting popular culture—one that focuses on the way cultural forms reflect existing desires and affects, giving voice to hopes and fears while simultaneously channeling them toward ideological goals and objects. Central to both of these dimensions is work. The world of work, of wage labor, is a source of anxieties and fears—fears of unemployment and job cuts, fears of inadequate pay—but also anxieties regarding lack of respect; at the same time, work, wage labor, especially as an individual strategy for personal gain, is often seen as a way of addressing these same anxieties. Work is both the source of life’s problems and their solutions.

Two shows that illustrate this mythic transformation of work are Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. The first is the story of Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher in New Mexico. As has been often remarked, the event that precipitates Walter White’s transformation from schoolteacher to meth dealer is the rising cost of health care; Walter worries that his lung cancer treatment will bankrupt his family, leaving them destitute with his demise. The show’s initial premise stemmed from the peculiarities of health care in America. A common response to the show was a joke that set the show in some other country, Canada or France, with state-funded health care. The comic strip version of this has Walter learning the news of his diagnosis in one panel and then learning that everything will be paid for in the next, resolving the conflict of the show immediately. However, as much as such a punch line might illustrate something about the regressive nature of health insurance in the US, it overlooks the extent to which work is not just an economic concern in the context of the show but is very much an ethical one as well. It is through work that Walter White recognizes himself as a father and a provider, which is to say as a man. The first episode also introduces Walter White as someone affected by anxieties of work at the level of subjectivity, of work as it shapes identity and subjectivity. He teaches in front of a room of lethargic and disinterested students, only to be subject to the added indignity of moonlighting by washing their cars to make ends meet. Economic anxieties do not only manifest themselves in the show’s premise but also permeate the show in terms of fantasies and anxieties about wealth and work. This is what differentiates Walter White from the usual popular culture figures of the criminal underworld: his entire struggle and trajectory, his entire transformation, is framed in and through his knowledge, skill, and dedication as a worker. It is his ability as a chemist, his ability to synthesize methamphetamine (or “crystal meth”), as well as his ability to lie that define his fate. Moreover, his entire endeavor is framed not only by the economic pursuit of work but by its ethical meaning, an ideal of work. Even his initial transgression, selling meth and getting involved in the illegal drug business, is, at least initially, motivated by the most traditional of values: being seen as a provider for his family. As such, Breaking Bad’s popularity stems in part from its ability to capture both the anxieties and fantasies about work.

What complicates matters is that Breaking Bad was followed by its spin-off, or prequel, Better Call Saul. In some sense, the latter is burdened by the particular narrative constraints of the prequel, which often supplies a kind of excess of backstory, connecting characters and points alluded to in the previous series; it also underscores the former show’s focus on the theme of work and identity. The arc of Better Call Saul, which centers on how Jimmy McGill eventually became Walter White’s corrupt lawyer, Saul Goodman, offers a thematic counterpoint to Breaking Bad. Whereas the first deals with an almost Promethean transformation of the self through work, the latter deals with the destruction of a person’s life and character by the obstacles and difficulties encountered in the labor market. Better Call Saul has become a success both critically and, to some extent, commercially, but it has not produced the same identification with its central character. This might have something to do with the fact that Saul, as he will eventually come to be called, is the very personification of a corrupt lawyer, a career and skill with which few identify, but it also stems from the fact that the show subverts the former series’s fascination with work as a means of self-transformation, focusing instead on the way work and the pursuit of a career can break or unmake a person. Taken together, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul constitute a kind of dialectic of how one can be made and unmade through work.

As we have seen, there is a double determination of ideas and images of work. Work is situated at the intersection of the spontaneous ideology, following and mirroring the contours of a labor relation defined by concrete and abstract labor, and a second, more mythic aspect, focusing on the meaning of work. One of the defining characteristics of the latter is what could be called the Horatio Alger myth, a variant of the Protestant work ethic in which anyone can become rich and successful with enough hard work. The story of the crime boss’s rise to power could be considered a more melodramatic variant of this, the same rags-to-riches story but with enough violence and intrigue to make it compelling television—removed enough from our concerns that it can pass as entertainment, but close enough to our dreams that it can capture our attention, reflecting and transforming existing hopes and fears. The ideal of work, of hard work as that which transforms oneself and the world, is the meta-scene that connects the fantasy with reality.⁸² The more spectacular version becomes more than just an allegory of the everyday dream, as its melodramatic tensions and contradictions reveal more quotidian tensions and contradictions in the latter that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

In Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, allegory and reality intersect and augment each other. Class transformation is a lingering backdrop to both series. The transition from law-abiding citizen to criminal mastermind in the former, or from con man to law clerk to criminal lawyer in the latter, is intertwined with another transformation: that of class status. In Breaking Bad, a backstory that is more alluded to than developed—which sketches Walter White’s trajectory from humble beginning to a brief career as a research scientist with a lucrative firm, before becoming a high school teacher—suggests that there is a class transformation prior to the spectacular rise that makes up the show. In a similar vein, Better Call Saul alludes to the backstory of both Charles and James “Jimmy” McGill, sons of a modest bodega owner in Illinois. By the time the story of the show begins, Charles (or Chuck, as his brother calls him) is the partner of a major law firm with tastes, demeanor, and disposition that are indistinguishable from someone who was born into that class position. He reads the Financial Times, enjoys fine wine, and was even married to a classical violinist, embodying all the tastes and habits of what is often referred to as the upper middle class. He is virtually indistinguishable from Howard Hamlin, his partner in the firm who, as the son of a founding member in the firm, comes from an entirely different class background. What is striking in both of these instances is that the class transformation is largely offscreen and outside of the general narrative of the show. Vince Gilligan, the creator of both shows, has gone so far as to explain this bit of context in an interview, explaining that what undermined Walter’s relationship with his girlfriend, Gretchen, was Walter’s discomfort with the wealth of her family.⁸³ Prior to “breaking bad,” Walter had tried to break through the barriers of status and class, and, in a similar manner, before we meet Saul we learn that Chuck managed to transform himself from his modest beginnings to a partner in a successful law firm. These stories that form the backdrop are much more mundane, and much closer to the actual fears and aspirations of much of the audience than the stories of drug dealers and con men that make up the main plot. These trajectories of class transformation are attractors in Citton’s sense, existing desires that the story captures and transforms.⁸⁴

In the backdrop of Walter and Jimmy’s transformation is a particular trajectory of mobility that Chantal Jaquet calls nonreproduction, or a transclass relation. Jaquet’s concept of nonreproduction cuts between two different discourses on class and class reproduction. On the one side there are the various theories of social reproduction, from Bourdieu to Althusser, who focus on the mechanisms—social, political, and ideological—that reproduce the relations of production, keeping people in their class position. The sons and daughters of bodega owners often end up working at the bodega, while the sons and daughters of partners at law firms can one day make partner. On the other side, there are the various ideals, or even ideologies, that claim that anyone can make it, can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and transform their class position. These two discourses are divided as much by their respective anthropologies as their politics. Reproduction, the reproduction of the relations of production, is understood to be the effect of multiple causes (economic, ideological, familial), while nonreproduction is generally attributed to the univocal and ahistorical effect of the will (ambition, or some other such attribute). As much as the side of nonreproduction is undermined at the level of theory, offering little more than homilies to the undaunted human spirit, it does have a case for itself at the level of experience: people do transcend their class position. This is the challenge of Jaquet’s concept of “transclass,” to think nonreproduction not as the effect of some individual agency or will, but as itself produced in and through the multiple determinations of reproduction.⁸⁵ The multiplicity of causes that reproduce the social order—material, affective, imaginary, ideological—do not just reinforce it but, in their multiplicity, also hold potential discord in their common score.⁸⁶ The school can be as much a site of nonreproduction, of exposure to different norms, habits, and ideas, as it is an institution of reproduction of the social order.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul can be understood to produce their own particular perspectives on nonreproduction, its conditions, possibilities, and limits. Class transformation (or its failure), Walter’s failure to fit in among his upper-class classmates and Chuck’s success at becoming partner, are generally alluded to more than presented; they are more backdrop than narrative. What we get in its place is a far more spectacular, and one could argue entertaining, transformation of a chemistry teacher into a drug kingpin as well as that of a former con man turned mail clerk into a corrupt lawyer. The story of how one becomes a drug dealer or criminal lawyer becomes a kind of metalepsis, a general schema in which acting in the fictional world intersects with acting in the real world. The former provides the sense that orients the latter, while the latter provides the affective investment that grounds the former. As Jaquet argues, the nonreproduction that traverses and transforms class, like the reproduction that sustains and maintains class identity, involves and entails a representation of a model to be emulated; in other words, transforming one’s class is as much a matter of imitation as reproducing one’s class position.⁸⁷ Non-reproduction is an imitation of the affects, of different class tastes and comportments. This is, then, a second reason for the displacement of television fiction; it functions to make the fantasy of class transformation entertaining by introducing a minimum of difference necessary for enjoyment—capturing desires all the more effectively by acting at a distance from them. A story of the son of a bodega owner becoming a partner in a successful law firm, or of an individual from humble beginnings becoming a research scientist with a million-dollar technology firm, would not just be dull; its proximity to daily life would, perhaps, produce anxiety as much as entertainment. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are narratives of transclass, of transformation, in which the spectacular, the world of crime and drugs, make it possible to engage with the mundane transformation, changing one’s class status. The transformation of a chemistry teacher into a drug dealer is also a transformation of work itself; the drug trade purges work of its recognizable boredoms and anxieties, making the mundane exciting. The everyday is given a spectacular form that makes it palatable as entertainment.

Aside from the connection of narrative in which one show is the prequel to the other, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are connected by at least two particular formal devices that define the look of each. The first could be described as an “irrational point-of-view show.” Actions are shot from an angle or perspective that not only correspond to no potential point of view of any person in the scene but are what could be called “object point-of-view shots.” Scenes are shot from within drains, trunks of cars, from outside of a tub where a body is being disposed of, or a hole where a gun is being buried and hidden.⁸⁸ Sometimes, these point-of-view shots are simply used to set up a scene, functioning as a disorienting establishing shot that is clarified as it is eventually revealed what we are looking at. Often, these shots form something of visual puzzle in which the viewer must try and decode what they are seeing. What prevents these images from becoming just puzzles, what Gilles Deleuze refers to as an “empty aestheticism,” is the way in which their displaced or paradoxical point of view returns us again and again to the intractable material world of objects and machines, as they stand as the necessary condition of human action. Often, the frame is only confusing until we see the character enter the shot: what appears to be just a reddish tint reveals itself to be blood as a cloth emerges to clean it up, or a blue color that fills the screen reveals itself to be crystal meth as it is shattered from above. The object frames a subject that only enters with effort. Sometimes the image challenges our expectations as well: a reddish liquid is sometimes just steeping tea. The images underscore the fact that the world of work, the material world, is itself both the condition and displacement of individual intentions and actions. Objects exceed our intentions and perspectives, and sometimes even seem to actively thwart them.

The odd angle of the close-up is reflected in both shows’ tendencies to dwell and focus on actions that are often unseen or left out of the narratives of most crime shows. The most obvious is the manufacture, or “cooking,” of meth that takes central stage in Breaking Bad and is often left offscreen in most television programs, which focus on the more violent work of selling drugs or the more glamorous world of drug kingpins. Similarly, corrupt lawyers are regular fixtures on television, but often as background characters in shows focusing on cops and criminals. Only Better Call Saul focuses not just on the specific work of a criminal lawyer but on how one becomes one in the first place. In both series, the day-to-day, behind-the-scenes grunt work of crime is also front and center: the disposal of bodies, the destruction of evidence, and the laundering of money are not just the background actions but the central foci of episodes. In the world of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, crime is work.

The second formal innovation is the use of montage in both shows. Deleuze argues that montage is an indirect image of time, as the different images and sequences present an overall temporal transformation.⁸⁹ The images and sequences of individual acts add up to a larger transformation of the whole situation that exceeds them. In Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, the montage is frequently one of work, of the transformations of day-in and day-out actions, often set to music. The music not only provides a soundtrack and a rhythm to each scene but frames it; when the music is over, the montage comes to an end. The rhythm underscores that we are often seeing scenes of repetition, the process of cooking meth day in and day out or of serving as a public defender. As an indirect image of time, montage is as much a matter of qualitative transformation as quantitative accumulation. It is not just that the different moments add up to the passage of time but that something is transformed in the process. Montage is a visualization of the process by which quantitative change becomes qualitative change. Deleuze’s theory of montage was developed in relation to efforts by pioneers of early cinema, such as D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, to transform our very perceptions of action and time. The montage lives on in Hollywood in a mostly bastardized form in which it is generally used to compress time, to suggest by a series of images a longer transformation, such as the training montage in boxing and martial arts films. The work montage is a version of this; it aestheticizes monotony and repetition by connecting them with transformation.

The formal characteristics of the montage, the repetition and transformation, reflect and comment on a particular way of weaving together the repetition of work into a larger strategy. As sociologist Richard Sennett argues, working life often hinges upon “time’s arrow,” on an ability to make different days add up and accumulate to the building of wealth, seniority, and ultimately social standing. “Routine can demean, but it can also protect; routine can decompose labor, but it can also compose a life.”⁹⁰ As Sennett argues, this arrow is less an inevitable effect of the passage of time than it is the way in which time has been institutionalized and managed. As much as Sennett argues that time is the one resource left to those on the bottom of society who have nothing, this resource is not without its conditions. Time’s arrow has as its condition such things as seniority, union contracts, and so on that make it possible for the days to add up to something that can accumulate in the form of savings and equity. The arrow of linear accumulation assembles the repetition of the day’s tasks into a quantitative accumulation transforming concrete labor, this or that activity, into a qualitative transformation—not the abstract labor of capital accumulating in the form of profits for the owner, but the days that add up into a savings or retirement for the worker. The days add up into something more than a sum of their parts.

The shows differ with respect to their use of this particular visual strategy. Many of the montages in Breaking Bad are of days of work producing meth that adds up to an accumulation of wealth. There is repetition as the same burners are started up and the same containers of meth are weighed, but they add up to piles of money. One of the lingering images from the show is that of Walt and his wife, Skylar, looking at a pile of money in a storage unit—a pile that has come in so fast that Skylar admits that she has stopped counting it and started weighing it instead. Breaking Bad presents the fantasy that working—doing the same thing, day in and day out, and doing it well—will add up to an accumulation of wealth. Time’s arrow is harnessed. Saul, however, is often less fortunate. His days repeat, representing clients, but never quite adding up to any real accumulation or transformation. The second episode of the first season focuses on Jimmy’s attempt to build his reputation and career by taking court-ordered public defender cases. Two particular images punctuate this montage. The first is Jimmy in front of the mirror in the courthouse bathroom straightening his tie and proclaiming, “It’s showtime!” This scene is itself a reference to the 1979 film All That Jazz, in which Roy Scheider (playing a fictionalized version of famed stage director Bob Fosse) begins each of his hectic overworked days with the same exclamation in front of the mirror. That All That Jazz is a story of a man working himself to death is something worth noting for those who catch the reference. For those who do not, the second repeating image underscores the same idea. The shots of Jimmy representing hopeless and penniless clients are also interspersed with shots of a coffee cup dropping from a vending machine. As Jimmy’s attempts to represent his clients get more and desperate and harried, and as the cuts get quicker and quicker, the cup dispenser malfunctions, suggesting at the visual level that breakdown and burnout are as much the result of hard work as accumulated wealth. The montage of the work image not only stages the relation between repetition and transformation, between the quantity of days adding up and a qualitative change, but does so in such a way that the connection between the two, between repetition and transformation, is never guaranteed. Pounds of meth add up to the accumulation of a fortune, but days spent putting on a show representing clients are as disposable as coffee cups.

As Sennett argues, the accumulation of wealth is not just the effect of time’s arrow, of the linear accumulation of time, but necessarily has its institutional and material conditions. Days can only accumulate under particular conditions. Here, it is worth reflecting on the differences of Walt and Jimmy. Walt produces a product, albeit an illegal one; given the conditions to distribute it, he is able to accumulate wealth in the same way that pounds of meth add up. Jimmy is in a different situation: he provides a service, one that relies on his image or reputation. There is no linear accumulation of cases, but one particular case could transform his career. This is what happens when Jimmy meets with a client, Mrs. Landry, to draw up a will. In his discussion with her, Jimmy happens to learn that Sandpiper Crossing, her retirement community, is overcharging its clients. This eventually becomes the basis of a large class action suit. Jimmy’s life as a lawyer, both legal and illegal, is thus one defined not so much by the linear accumulation of days that add up but by the chance encounter of events that transform into possibilities.

These are two different types of labor and two different ethics. The first is an ethic of thrift and hard work, the second one of probabilities and calculation.⁹¹ Both shows focus on characters who calculate and strategize, but calculation takes on a different shape for Walter and Jimmy. Walt calculates quantitative accumulation, initially calculating to the dollar how much he will need to raise to protect his family and later understanding his value in terms of a combination of pounds of meth multiplied by its purity. Jimmy calculates as well, but he deals less with quantities of products than qualities of relations, with possibilities rather than things that can be measured.

Work is by definition strategic: any attempt to arrive at particular goals necessarily involves a thought process of how to arrive at those goals. Wage labor, by which we mean the process of selling one’s labor power in order to live, is the intersection of multiple strategies. There is the strategic relation with the matter or task at hand, and there is the strategic relation with the intersubjective relations through which this takes place (the two realities, material and social, that Dejours posits). There is also another strategy: that of engaging in wage labor as the means to realize one’s desires. That this is a strategy at all is often effaced by its naturalization and normalization; wage labor does not seem like a strategy, a particular way of trying to realize one’s needs and desires, as much as it does a universal fate.

Both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul make explicit this strategic dimension, doing so at the level of narrative and as well as that of form, as actions and thoughts are situated within a larger set of concerns and tactics.⁹² The strategic dimension of Breaking Bad is initially very simple. It is a strategy to break the law in order to provide for one’s family, to put one’s skills as a chemist to work in a field where they are most lucrative. Despite the odd rationality of this plan to prepare for the future, Walter is initially presented as a man liberated by his fate. He is between two deaths; he knows that he is doomed but is not yet dead. He is free to sabotage the car of an obnoxious driver or kneecap a teenager who mocks his son’s cerebral palsy. These are the rebellions of man liberated from the constraints of respectability and consequences. In some senses, Better Call Saul reverses this. When the show begins, Jimmy McGill is trying to make a career for himself as a lawyer; this functions more as a constraint than a liberation, as he has to give up the cons and scams that defined his previous life. As such, Better Call Saul is at least initially less about breaking bad than trying to make good.

As much as Walter begins to “break bad” out of an immediate financial exigency, providing for his family in his anticipated absence, it is not entirely a matter of a material calculation; there is also the sense of self, the ethical dimension of work inflected through the masculine ideal of being a provider. Not only does Walter want to provide for his family; he wants to be recognized as a provider. In season 2, as Walter lives longer than initially anticipated, he is increasingly concerned with being recognized as the provider of his family. He first refuses the help of his former business partner from Gray Matter who offers to pay for his treatment; to do so would be to admit the position of class inferiority that he refused in the show’s backstory. Indeed, he refuses even the appearance of accepting charity and thus being dependent on others. Walter’s son, Walter Junior, creates a website asking for donations to pay for his father’s cancer treatment—a precursor to the GoFundMe sites that have become integral to how many pay for health care.⁹³ Walter’s lawyer, Saul Goodman, understands the website is the perfect medium for laundering and funneling Walt’s drug money to his family. Walter’s meth money, close to half a million dollars, can be made to appear as the culminative effect of multiple small, anonymous donations. Walter initially refuses, demanding that he must not only be the material cause of his family’s fortune; he must also be recognized as such. Walter White is thus caught in a contradiction between two different senses and meaning of work: work as an economic activity producing money and work as an ethical activity that creates self-respect. The contradiction that Hegel found at the level of the state, Walter lives intimately. He wants to be recognized as the breadwinner, as the provider for his family, but the work he does by definition precludes this: he cannot tell his family that his money comes from his cooking crystal meth. In this sense, Breaking Bad restages, in its own intimate way, the tension between the material and symbolic nature of work.

This conflict between work as an ethical relation, a formation and recognition of the self, and an economic relation continues throughout the series, but it is complicated and augmented by an additional set of conflicts. As the show progresses, “breaking bad” becomes less a rebellion than a job. Walter’s quick fix for his family’s financial problem becomes itself a kind of career. Walter’s first partner is his former student Jesse. The division of labor between them is fairly basic: Walter cooks meth, and Jesse sells drugs. This division is as much moral as it is technical, as Walter White wants nothing to do with the unsavory elements of the drug trade. Jesse, however, proves incapable of living up to the task, and the two immediately find themselves with supply chain issues, searching for a new supplier. At first, this narrative follows the established clichés of the drug trade, with battles over territory and product, but it changes, especially in terms of the mythocracy of work, with the introduction of Gustavo “Gus” Fring as Walt and Jesse’s distributor. Gus Fring is both a high-level drug dealer and, perhaps more importantly, the manager of Los Pollos Hermanos, a chain of fried chicken restaurants. The restaurant chain provides not only his cover, allowing him to ship trucks across the country and the border, but also the model of his business. He moves Walter and Jesse’s drug production from a battered RV to a state-of-the-art lab concealed beneath an industrial laundry.

Walter’s skill and knowledge, his ability to cook, is both a condition of Gus’s empire and a limit to his control. As much as it is imperative for Gus to have Walter work for him, it is equally imperative for him to control the process and knowledge of production. This sets up a conflict over the knowledge and control over the labor process—a conflict that has defined much of the history of capital. At its historical emergence, in the period of formal subsumption, capitalism relied on the already-existing knowledge of workers in the form of various formal and informal technical skills and abilities, but as capital develops more and more control over the labor process, it necessarily endeavors to contest this control, dispossessing workers of not only the means of production but the knowledge as well. Here, the setting of the fast-food franchise is both plot and historical allegory. In the story of the series, the franchise is the perfect cover, as trucks cross the border and drive all over the Southwest. The history of fast food is one of an immense proletarianization of short-order cooks and waiters, as skills from cooking hamburgers to taking orders become part of machines. The ideal of the industry is one of zero training time for employees. It is not the production that is automated; rather, the machines themselves time the cooking of burgers and fries, reducing the worker’s contribution to the bare minimum.⁹⁴ In fast food the worker has become what Marx referred to as the “conscious organ of the machine,” a hand that flips burgers or an ear that listens to customer’s orders.⁹⁵ A similar process underlies Walter’s conflict with Gus. Gus seeks to expropriate Walt’s knowledge and formula, first by providing an assistant that is secretly training to be his replacement and, later, by making Jesse his replacement. Walter counters first by killing his replacement and then, ultimately, by killing Gus; or, framed in terms of the show’s allegorical representation of the anxieties of work, he kills both outsourcing and his boss.

Walter’s entire trajectory—his transformation from teacher to Heisenberg, drug kingpin—is framed around the ideal, even the fantasy, in which one could be so good at their job that they can protect themselves from any threat—that one can become not only one’s own boss but the master of one’s fate. This fantasy of autonomy culminates in the final season of the show. After killing Gus and taking charge of the entire operation of meth production and distribution, thus becoming his own boss, Walter is surprised and dismayed to learn that he has operating expenses he still has to pay, and that his meth empire depends on people that he has never seen. These include not only the costs of distribution but also paying off former members of Gus Fring’s organization who are now in jail, paying them “hush money” so they do not identify Walter or his operation.⁹⁶ This is underscored by one of the show’s favorite visual devices, the large piles of cash neatly counted and stacked that represent success. Walter’s new associate Mike divides the cash into three piles of over $300,000, gradually subtracting the different operating costs and hush money for the people in jail. What is striking is that the audience is just as surprised as Walter, for the individuals from Gus’s organization have been largely invisible to the audience as well. The dependence of the individual despite their individual skills and abilities on a larger, and often invisible, network of others is even illustrated in the show’s central drug. Methamphetamine is fairly unique in the illegal drug trade in that its production requires an industrially produced chemical (usually this is extracted from ephedrine, found in cold medicine). Meth is thus emblematic of neoliberal ideology, in which the image of autonomy is often predicated on the effacement of the work of others (and industrial processes) that are the precondition of our autonomous action.

One last detail about Gus Fring is worth noting: he not only maintains a fast-food restaurant as a cover for his drugs empire but seems to actually run it. More often than not, he is at one of his franchises dressed in a shirt and tie, overseeing his employees or cleaning a fryer. This is a persistent theme throughout both shows, in which the front of a running a business becomes a full-time business. Work is the ultimate cover because working is an alibi for existence. Similarly, not only do Walter and Skylar launder their money through a car wash; they actually run it, spending their days there. This focus on the real work behind every front is further illustrated by the fact that, even though the show deals with massive amounts of money, it is relatively free of any ostentatious expenditures, or even enjoyment of what money can buy. This could be understood as a variant of Marx’s take on the ethos of the capitalist: “Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production.”⁹⁷ However, this focus on accumulation for the sake of accumulation is underwritten by an affective dimension; money is accumulated on the basis not of desire but of fear. One accumulates money not because of the things that it can buy but what it can protect one from. This begins with Walter’s initial fear of what will happen to his family when he dies but culminates as new fears develop: fears of rival gangs, of being discovered, of needing to hide his identity. Money is the resolution of every possible fear. Fear turns out to be just as infinite as desire: when money is your protection against enemies, there is always need for more.

The affective dimension of fear is manifest at the conclusion of the last season of Breaking Bad. In the final episodes, Walter has used the remainder of his money to disappear, and he is living under a false name in a cabin in New Hampshire. He still has one barrel of money. His retirement is one of squalor and isolation. He is warm and he has food, but nothing else. He is just surviving. At the same time, his partner Jesse is kidnapped by white supremacists and forced to work, cooking meth. These two fates—retirement spent either in poverty and isolation, or in unending work—are the two nightmare visions, two visions of hell, of contemporary Americans who worry that their retirement will leave them only with the barest life or, worse yet, that they will be forced to keep working with no hope of ever retiring. What is striking about this nightmare vision, at least when it comes to Jesse, is that it comes in the form of one of the show’s rare dream sequences. We see a scene of Jesse finishing a hand-carved wooden box, carefully sanding it and applying oil to its surface, before the illusion fades in the face of reality. Jesse is actually chained in a dungeon cooking meth against his will. (The wooden box was referenced in a previous episode, when Jesse discussed it with his rehab support group as an example of a personal accomplishment.⁹⁸) This lingering image of the craftsman over its opposite, a dungeon meth lab, could in some ways be seen as critical engagement with the fantasy that structures the entire show: the ideal of individual expertise as not only self-realization but as escape from the difficulties of the world. Despite this momentary shift to a dream, a shift that illustrates the ideology of work that is at the center of the series, the show returns to this ideology in its closing episode, as Walter uses his skill and talent to dispatch his enemies and restore his fortunes to the family.

The antithesis to the ideal of self-mastery appears in the form of Better Call Saul. If the former show dealt with the fantasy—the ideal that if you are good at something, even if that thing is cooking meth, then you can ultimately dictate the terms of your existence—the latter is, in some sense, about how skill is not enough. Of all of the backstory and revelations of the latter show, perhaps the most surprising is that Saul, or at the time Jimmy McGill, was at one point a good lawyer. Jimmy McGill finds himself practicing elder law early in his career. While he does skirt the ethical norms of the profession with the way he produces his commercials and solicits his clients, he is, at least in the beginning, a conscientious lawyer who makes his client’s needs paramount. Indeed, it is through his very attentiveness to them that he stumbles upon the major class action suit mentioned above. In some sense, this could be a career-making case, but in Jimmy’s situation, it ultimately unmakes him, turning him from Jimmy McGill to Saul Goodman. The story of Jimmy is that of one who is perpetually undone by his career, despite his talent and ability.

It is less a narrative about breaking bad than one about the difficulty of walking the straight line. Jimmy’s difficulty is less an inability to change—to cease being a con man, as his brother claims—than his ability to see every social relation as an opportunity. This stems, in part, from the particular kind of labor that Jimmy is involved in: one that foregrounds relations with others, persuasion, and appearance. There is no accident that “It’s showtime” is Jimmy’s mantra before entering the courtroom: he is a showman. Sometimes this entails dressing as Matlock, the television character beloved by retirees, before showing up at a retirement community to canvas for clients, and sometimes this means fabricating exculpatory evidence for a client. One of these is legal, albeit in poor taste, while the other is illegal. However, in the eyes of Jimmy, those differences do not matter as much as the opportunities themselves. Philosopher Paolo Virno has described “opportunism” as less a moral character, or lack thereof, than a product of a particular historical situation defined by the labor situation. The precarity and flexibility of contemporary labor demand that workers shift among different rules and norms. The end result is that every set of rules seems arbitrary and negotiable. As Virno writes,

The neutral core of the contemporary emotional situation, susceptible to opposing manifestations, consists of a familiarity with the possible, in so far as it is possible, and of an extreme proximity to the conventional rules which give structure to the differing contexts of action.⁹⁹

For Jimmy, the rules of the game, the norms of propriety that define the ideal of the lawyer, as well as the stricter codes of the bar association, are just limitations on what is possible or effective in the pursuit of clients and winning cases. Jimmy draws his sense of possibility not just from his sketchy past as a con artist but from the entire range of the cultural industry: he plays a lawyer by imitating the images of law, and lawyers, that his clients have seen on TV. In his hands, the “cultural industry” becomes a means of production, a way to shape and transform people’s expectations and ideas.¹⁰⁰

The expansion of possibilities, and flexibility of rules and norms, has as its corollary the increasingly arbitrary nature of power and authority. It is because there is no objective or quantitative standard of what constitutes a good lawyer that one is increasingly subject to idiosyncratic and personal forms of evaluation. As Virno describes the problem with an evaluation of work that is primarily subjective and relational, “How can one evaluate a priest, a journalist, a public relations person? How can one calculate the amount of faith, of purchasing desire, of likeability that these people have managed to muster up?”¹⁰¹ Jimmy’s trajectory as a lawyer, like many forms of work that vanishes in the act of producing, such as service work, is punctuated not only by uncertain opportunities and events but by the immense sway that singular individuals have over the conditions of employment. This is the corollary of the power of singular events and cases to make one’s career—if one big case can make a career, a singular encounter or instance can also unmake it. The increased power of the event or situation also entails the increased importance of specific individuals and relations. As Virno writes, “In other words, virtuosic activity shows itself as universal servile work.”¹⁰² In the case of Jimmy, this means that his brother, Chuck, as a senior partner of Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, has incredible sway over his career. When it is first revealed that Jimmy has put himself through law school at night and passed the bar, it is Chuck who prevents him from being hired. Chuck later prevents the firm from hiring him a second time, even when he brings his impressive class action suit to the firm.

The fact that Jimmy’s trajectory is thwarted by his brother would seem to shift the show’s narrative away from work toward a family drama. However, his brother is just a particular instance of the servile and oddly personal nature of service work. Marx understood the transition from feudalism to capitalism to be, in some sense, the displacement of personal relations of domination—the direct relation of lord over servant—by impersonal relations of domination embodied by the wage and abstract labor.¹⁰³ The shift to work that can be broadly characterized as services, including practicing law, entails a return to personal forms of domination because of the specific and subjective nature of the service performed. This is not a reversal, a return to a feudal past, but, in some sense, a negation of a negation, as the impersonal domination of the market, of the need to find a job, is mediated through the particular tastes and opinions of the people whose job it is to evaluate and enforce its rules. In the work of a lawyer, just as a server or performer, “the product is not separable from the act of producing”; it ends when the case is closed, the meal is finished, or the show is over. Its only lasting effect is in the memory of the client, customer, or boss, and these impressions define one’s fate.¹⁰⁴ As a worker engaging in such works, one is dependent both upon the general structure of employment and the specific power of the boss: as work becomes more subjective, concerning talents and abilities, the power of a specific boss increases; all it takes is one bad recommendation to ruin a career.

At first glance, the fates of Walter White and Jimmy McGill could not be more opposed. Walter’s transformation into Heisenberg is a self-transformation framed through a mastery of work. Walter becomes the man he dreams of—a worker and provider—vanquishing his boss, his rivals, and anyone who stands against him. He may die in the end, but not before making sure his children get his money and a better place in society, living a version of the American dream. This is what made Heisenberg a figure of identification and fantasy for fans of the show. In contrast to this, Jimmy McGill’s transformation into Saul Goodman occurs through his acceptance of defeat, his recognition that there is no way to escape the deadweight of expectations, and of one’s background. Despite this difference in terms of ends and outcome, a difference that places one in line with myths that reinforce the ideal of work and the other as something of an antithesis, the two shows are unified in a set of shared assumptions about work. First, each presents work, even if that work is not exactly wage labor, as the path to transform oneself and one’s life. The work that is undertaken is not a collective enterprise, not a matter of solidarity with others, but a singular and competitive endeavor. Work is simultaneously an individual strategy and the individual’s strategy, the way that one proves oneself and one’s capabilities in the world. The only way to escape one’s past and prepare for the future is to work harder and work smarter. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul address our quotidian concerns—paying for health care, getting a promotion—but in such a way that preserves their affective intensity while obscuring their mundane specificity.¹⁰⁵ The shows are situated at the intersection of the hopes and fears that structure our lives and the actions that structure the fictional world of drug empires and crime syndicates. The first sets the scene, makes it possible for us to invest and identify with the story, while the second captures the imagination and desire. Between the two levels, there is a particular meta-scene, a particular figuration of agency and acting that takes work and individual skill at work as the primary and exclusive means of acting on and changing the world.

Double Shift: Economics and Ideology of Work

The first “double shift” asserted the immediate identity of politics and economics, but this immediate identity, or determination, proved to be much more complex. It is perhaps better described as double determination, in that the effect of the labor relation on politics was, in part, because the labor relation was itself political—not just in the sense that it entailed power and hierarchy, control and domination, but also a representation and thematization of those relations. The double shift between politics and work cuts both ways: politics is shaped by the labor relation, and the labor relation is shaped by politics. This brings us to the second “double,” the one between ideas and practices, material conditions and representations. This is a double shift that works in both ways. Material conditions short-circuit mental representations, producing their own spontaneous ideologies; at the same time, mythic narratives insert themselves into practices and desires. Material conditions shape desires and understanding, moving from the material to the mental, and mental representations shape and determine actions and practices. It is a logic of alternation that posits the material at the heart of the mental, including the affects, and the mental at the basis of the material, including desires and practices.

The relations that I have developed here can only be fleshed out in their specific articulations. These doubles, that of the economic in the political and the mental in the material, can only be thought in and through their intersections in a particular conjuncture. Each of these double relations are the condition of the other: the double between the political and the economic makes possible the short circuit between practices and representations, and vice versa. As we have seen, the labor relation is, in part, defined by an interval between the task and its execution, or, in its specifically capitalist form, between abstract labor and concrete labor. This gap defines and shapes what could be considered living labor. It is how we live the interval between the task and its execution, between what is demanded of us and how we fulfill that demand which defines the experience of work, and a working life. The gap or interval is filled not only by the experience of work, the particular and singular way that one does the task at hand, but the various ways in which one thematizes or understands the task. In other words, it makes all the difference in the world whether one understands one’s work to be a calling, a necessary means to consumption, or a senselessly imposed burden. The interval of task and execution is filled with various ideologies: thought abhors a vacuum. This interval is the space between the spontaneous ideologies—the ideology defined, in part, by the practice of wage labor in general and the specific types of knowledge of different types of work, on one hand, and the disseminated myths of work defined by a broader cultural sensibility that encompasses more mediated forms of culture, on the other. This cultural sensibility defines the terms through which individuals strive and strategize. The mythic and affective composition of labor is framed between its specific site and conditions, and the general economic or cultural dimensions of work.

3

Pulling a Double, Part 3:
The Work of Action in Production
(and Vice Versa)

In Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, working, wage labor (albeit of an illicit or illegal nature), appears not just as a way to make money, to survive and even prosper, but as a strategy to increase recognition and power. Part of the mythic dimensions of these series is in their ability to attract attention and identification through a detour in which the conditions of living becomes their own fantasy. Wage labor is simultaneously naturalized—seen as a way to make a living, the necessary condition of survival—and valorized—seen not just as a simple means to live but a means to recognition, respect, and authority. Wage labor runs the gamut from the means of realizing our most basic biological needs to our desires for purpose and recognition. How has labor come to encompass the entire terrain of action, becoming not just the means to acquire the goods necessary for survival but also the fantasy of power and recognition? Why has wage labor increasingly become a strategy not only for meaningful activity—seen not just as something that one does to survive but as a basis of a sense of purpose and self—but also for effective action, a better way to secure happiness and success than political action or involvement?

What Does It Mean to Act? Double Determination

Just as wage labor has occupied more and more time and energy, taking up more of people’s lives, work has come to occupy more and more of the imagination, becoming not just one activity but the very model of all activity.¹ Work has inserted itself into our vocabulary, attaching itself to study (“homework”), care (“housework”), and exercise (“working out”). We are told relationships are work, parenting is work, and so on. Indeed, work has remade the world in its image. The enlarged sense and meaning of labor have as their corollary the obfuscation of what it means to act outside of the confines of work. As Paolo Virno writes,

Nothing appears so enigmatic today as the question of what it means to act. This issue seems both enigmatic and out of reach—up in the heavens, one might say. If nobody asks me what political action is, I seem to know; but if I have to explain it to somebody who asks, this presumed knowledge evaporates into incoherence. And yet what notion is more familiar in people’s everyday speech than action? Why has the obvious become clothed in mystery? Why is it so puzzling? The answer is not to be found in the customary realm of ready-made response: the present unfavorable power balance, the continuing echo of past defeats, the resignation that postmodern ideology endlessly foments.²

Virno’s question of the nature of action is situated against the exhaustion of the traditional categories and distinctions that have framed Western thought. In this tradition action, praxis, is understood to be irreducibly collective, something that can only emerge in and through relations with others. The speech and deeds that define action only make sense, in some sense only exist, in and through the relations with others, through their freedom to act and react. However, this collective nature of action comes at the expense of its absolute separation from poiesis, from the material production of not just things but the conditions of life. Production is governed by necessity, by the brute necessity imposed by the body and nature. This demands a strict separation of action from production, which for Aristotle means an exclusion of all those associated with the necessities of life, from slaves to craftsmen. In order for action to be free, in order for it to be expressive of individuality and constitutive of community, it must be freed from the necessity that defines the material world, and from our physical bodies; it must be rigorously separated from production, from a natural order dominated by necessity. That we cannot be free from our needs, from the necessity of work, means that work too will be defined by domination. As Aristotle writes describing this situation, “If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others . . . chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.”³ The division between the realm of necessity and freedom cuts through the division of labor, defining those who are dedicated to necessity—such as slaves, women, and craftsmen—and those whose lives are dedicated to freedom and action—the men who inhabited the public sphere of great deeds and words.

Hannah Arendt’s revival of this distinction in twentieth-century political philosophy dispenses with the division of humanity into the naturally servile and free, focusing instead on the logic of the different activities of labor, work, and action. For Arendt, action and production have to be understood not just as two different activities, belonging to different classes of people, but ultimately as two fundamentally different ways of engaging with the world. The focus on the logic of particular activities is further complicated by the introduction of a third term, labor. Labor would seem to be synonymous with work. However, Arendt excavates a lost distinction that can be found in John Locke’s seventeenth-century formulation “The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say are properly his.”⁴ Arendt is not interested in this statement in terms of a logic of appropriation, of property (as in Locke’s assertion that labor founds private property), but in terms of the distinction between labor and work, bodies and hands as two different relations with the world. “Labor” refers to not only what the body does, in terms of the physical and unskilled work, but what is done for the body, for the necessities of life. Labor is tied to the reproduction of life and is thus cyclical; the tasks that we do to preserve life, the preparation of food and even care and cleaning, are no sooner completed than begun again. In contrast to this cycle of labor, “work” is necessarily instrumental and teleological, aimed toward an end for which everything is just raw material. In the world of work, everything becomes a means to something else, even as these ends make up an artificial world of things that is fundamentally different from the natural world.⁵ “Against the subjectivity of men stands the objectivity of the manmade artifice, not the indifference of nature.”⁶ Work may make the world, but it is the action that is done in the world that defines it and our place in it. It is how we act, how we speak and what we do, that both defines us as individuals and shapes the political world defined by plurality. Action is necessarily anti-teleological in that its ends are, in some sense, unknown and unknowable because they necessarily take place in and through the freedom of others. A political speech or gesture necessarily has unknowable effects because the person making it is unsure how it will be received by others. “In acting, in contradistinction to working,” Arendt writes, “it is indeed true that we never know what we are doing.”⁷ Labor reproduces our natural existence, work produces the world of things (the made world that we reside in), and action creates the human world of individuality and plurality, the world of politics.

Arendt’s focus is not just on the division between these different activities and ways of comporting oneself, but on what happens when the distinctions between them break down. As she argues, the distinction between labor and work has already broken down in our ways of thinking and talking. This breakdown is not just a loss of the distinction of words, but the way in which work has become more like labor, cyclical and repetitive. Work no longer has an end, a thing that stands the test of time, but is instead begun again and again. This is the closest Arendt comes to thinking in terms of wage labor. Working to make a living imposes a cyclical repetition on tasks and activity that were formerly oriented toward their teleological completion in a final product. It is no longer a matter of making a thing, an object that is also an end, but of repeating the same activity in order to make a living. “An element of laboring is present in all human activities, even the highest, insofar as they are undertaken as ‘routine jobs’ by which we make a living and keep ourselves alive.”⁸ For Arendt, our consumer society is a society in which everything is made to be consumed and used up, in which the cyclical repetition of nature has been artificially extended into the world of consumer products. Technology becomes obsolete and clothes go out of fashion in the same cycle of birth and decay that defines the natural world. All work has become labor; this is how Arendt understands Marx’s theory of labor power as a kind of return to nature. “Marx’s consistent naturalism discovered ‘labor power’ as the specifically human mode of life force which is as capable of creating a ‘surplus’ as nature herself.”⁹ Labor as a pure natural fertility has displaced work, just as consumer goods have replaced the lasting products of work.

As much as such an assertion offers a criticism of consumer society, it is not in this transformation that Arendt finds the real crisis. The real danger, the danger that she sees rising in the twentieth century, is not the reduction of work to labor but the reduction of action to a kind of work—in which case politics becomes instrumental and teleological. In modern thought, politics is supposed to make history, to produce the revolution the same way a worker makes a table. As much as Arendt’s criticism here is aimed at Marx, which embodies both the reduction of work to a more naturalistic labor process and the reduction of action to work, its terms expanded beyond it. Even in the liberal tradition, the social contract can generally be understood to be more of a work, a production of interests and desires, than action.¹⁰ On a broader level, Arendt’s criticism of the instrumental work encompassing political action can be understood as a criticism of contemporary democratic politics—one in which candidates and speeches are engineered and tested by focus groups before being rolled out like new product lines of automobiles. Work is understood to be fundamentally anti-political only because, for Arendt, work itself is absent of politics, of relations; the cooperative and antagonistic relations that Marx argued are internal to work, shaping cooperation, are more or less effaced in terms of the figure of the singular worker transforming nature. “There can be hardly anything more alien or even more destructive to workmanship than teamwork, which actually is only a variety of the division of labor and presupposes the ‘breakdown of operations into their simple constituent motions.”¹¹ Arendt’s assertion of the anti-social nature of labor and work, the first being caught in the mute necessity of life and the second having a public nature that only becomes manifest in exchange, in the market, in some sense duplicates one of her essential assertions regarding totalitarianism: that it isolates individuals. As Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism,

In isolation, man remains in contact with the world as the human artifice; only when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one’s own to the common world, is destroyed, isolation becomes altogether unbearable. This can happen in a world whose chief values are dictated by labor, that is where all human activities have been transformed into laboring. Under such conditions, only the sheer effort of labor which is the effort to keep alive is left and the relationship with the world as a human artifice is broken. Isolated man who lost his place in the political realm of action is deserted by the world of things as well, if he is no longer·recognized as homo faber but treated as an animal laborans whose necessary “metabolism with nature” is of concern to no one. Isolation then becomes loneliness.¹²

Production and action, poeisis and praxis, are opposed to each other not as necessity and freedom, but as isolation and relation.

Arendt’s updating of Aristotle can be firmly situated in the midst of the anxieties of the twentieth century. Arendt’s image of work, of production, and of a mass society of producers is part of the twentieth-century anxiety over mass production and standardization. Her concerns about the instrumental and isolated nature of production has as its backdrop the image of the Fordist factory churning out consumer goods along an assembly line. Totalitarianism is, accordingly, the world made into a factory. Situating her project in a particular time period makes it possible to grasp its limitations. As Paolo Virno writes,

So then, I maintain that things have gone in the opposite direction from what Arendt seems to believe: it is not that politics have conformed to labor; it is rather that labor has acquired the traditional features of political action. My reasoning is opposite and symmetrical with respect to that of Arendt. I maintain that it is in the world of contemporary labor that we find the “being in the presence of others,” the relationship with the presence of other, the beginning of new processes, and the constitutive familiarity with contingency, the unforeseen and possible.¹³

For Virno, all work that engages with, communicates with, and reacts to others has taken on the qualities of action, of unpredictability and contingency that define action—unpredictability and contingency that stem from the social and collective nature of action. Virno’s claim is not limited to anything like the specific concrete labor of various forms of public relations but is extended to include anyone whose job involves dealing with and interacting with others, with all of the uncertainty and improvisation it entails. Even the mundane job of constantly interacting with customers in retail involves uncertainty and indeterminacy. Much work in the service sector is routine, even repetitive, but anyone who works retail or food service has stories of dealing with unanticipated situations and unpredictable people. Everyone has had to create new responses to deal with irrational or difficult customers. It is in wage labor that we use the skills of speech and action that used to define the public sphere.

For Virno, this is less a new concrete labor, a new specific skill, but a new reconfiguration of abstract labor. As we saw in chapter 1, abstract labor was always a matter of putting to work potential as potential; abstract labor must actualize itself in specific concrete labors and tasks while, at the same time, remaining a potential, a capacity that is not realized in any particular acts. What contemporary capitalism puts to work are not just actualized potentials, not this or that habit, but the very potential to create habits itself.¹⁴ This putting to work of the capacities of humanity as capacities has to be understood as the basis of not only new subjections, more personal forms of domination (as we saw in the last chapter), but also a transformation of alienation. It is not an alienation of a reduction to a specific concrete labor but the alienation from one’s generic capacity to learn new skills, to interact in different situations. This capacity, one integral to social and political life, has become someone else’s private property.¹⁵

Virno’s reversal of Arendt’s formulation keeps the same terms—action and labor, praxis and poiesis—but the oppositions are inverted by the social and technological dimension of contemporary capitalism. As Virno argues, the injunction to be quiet at work has been replaced by an incessant demand to communicate during work, a demand that cuts across all sorts of jobs transversally, from the greetings of service work to the communication of constant feedback and evaluations underlying modern management. Communication, in other words, has become integral to work. Virno’s inversion of Arendt’s concerns about action and production is not simply a rectification of a prediction, but the recognition that action and production are less ancient ideals to be restored than activities transformed by the changing nature of technology and society. Action is not some activity defined in strict opposition to production but is necessarily shaped and transformed by it. What it means to act, and the capacities of action, are fundamentally altered by transformations of production, by the technological and social transformations of work. In turn, the capacities of production are shaped and transformed by action, by politics, provided that we expand the latter to include both the structure and orientation of the forces of production—in other words, recognize that politics is immanent to production not just in terms of the power dynamics in every labor situation but also by the fact that all production serves ends that are as much political as they are technological or social. Virno’s historicization points to another way of thinking production and action, not as two opposed orientations that can only contaminate or undermine each other, but as the intersection of action and production, of social relations and material conditions. This is what André Tosel describes as the double determination of action by production and production by action. Acting and production are doubly determined; each shapes and determines itself, as actions affect actions and production determines production, but is also shaped or determined by the other. Our actions are shaped by production, by the conditions of production, and production is in turn shaped by action, by politics.¹⁶ Rather than attempt to articulate the point of difference between production and action, a political sphere of action and a social sphere of production, it is necessary to think the point where the two not only intersect but also affect and determine each other. This can be considered another double shift, the work of production in action and action in production. Or, more to the point, the intersection of politics and economics demands thinking all action as necessarily determined by production and all production as necessarily organized by action.

This double determination of production by action, and action by production, can be found throughout Marx’s writing. For instance, The Communist Manifesto’s invocation of the political power of the proletariat passes through the changing nature of production. As Marx and Engels argue, modern industry, with its large-scale factories, and the accelerated means of communication of the telegraph produce the conditions of the proletariat:

The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another.¹⁷

For the proletariat to come together as a class requires the rise of largescale industry and even the increased means of communication such as the telegraph and the railroad. Production thus produces the conditions for action. At the same time, one of the earliest victories of the proletariat, the Ten Hours Act, had effects on production as much as politics, as much as Marx champions the latter. “In place of the pompous catalogue of the inalienable rights of man,” he writes, “there steps the modest Magna Carta of the legally limited working day, which at last makes clear when the time which the worker sells is ended and when his own begins.”¹⁸ This collective political action had its most profound effects not on the state but on the organization of production. The reduction of the working day to ten hours not only liberated the time of workers; it also profoundly transformed production. This is especially true if one situates the reduction of the length of the working day within the larger structure of capitalism, as Marx does in Capital.¹⁹ The reduction of the working day to ten hours necessitated a shift from the extraction of surplus predicated on the length of the working day to the production of surplus value predicated on the increased intensity of production. The conditions of production are thus produced by political action, just as the conditions of action are made possible by the transformation of production.

Double determination is less an attempt to understand the ultimate cause of historical change, looking for the determining instance, than an attempt to see the specific intersections of production and action that define each conjuncture. It is a matter of examining the way in which production—the material conditions of economic activity—shapes action, just as politics, as the collective organization of social life, alters and transforms production. There is neither pure politics, unencumbered by material conditions and conflicts, nor is there a pure logic of technical production untouched by politics or conflict. Tosel’s immediate polemical target in developing this idea is a particular variant of Hegelian Marxism that considers the process of revolution to be a matter of freeing the rational productive forces from the fetters of capitalist competition and exploitation.²⁰ On this reading, it is not a matter of liberating action from production, praxis from poiesis, as it was for Aristotle, but production from action in order to liberate a purely technical rationality from the constraints of political goals and ideals—replacing the government of men with the administration of things.²¹ Production untethered to the irrational demands of capitalist profit and capitalist competition could become a general force for productivity that would make it possible for everyone to enjoy the same standard of living.²² Tosel associates this with the idea of the dialectic as a process of reason liberating itself from its contingent and limited conditions, but there is a contemporary name for the idea of technological progress liberated from political goals or limited economic ends: accelerationism.²³ Accelerationism is the idea that the basis for social progress and social transformation is to be found in the technological development that capitalism fosters. The task, then, is to liberate technological production and scientific rationality from its subservience to the irrational ends of capitalist competition and profit. The two variations both work on the same premise: that it is possible to separate a rationality, understood in the case of the latter to be technological and scientific, from politics and political conflict. In place of this ideal of the liberation of production from action, the double determination of practice by production and production by practice posits that there is never apolitical production, just as there is never reason outside of society. Tosel refers to this as communism of finitude—a communism that is not predicated on the infinite perfectibility of rationality as technology but rather works from and within determinate conditions. There is no organization of production that is not also a politics, a social relation. “The free association of producers” about which Marx wrote is still an association and still requires social-political relations. There is no way for the government of men to be replaced by the administration of things; we are always dealing with both social relations and material conditions. As finite beings, we necessarily are not only determined by our needs, constrained to produce and reproduce our existence, but we are also determined by politics, by social relations.²⁴ As Spinoza put it, “We operate to produce effects in a certain and determinate manner.”²⁵ There is no production that is not action, no praxis that is not poiesis, and vice versa.²⁶

The double determination of action and production dispenses not only with the teleology of production liberated from action, from social relations or politics; it also transforms what is understood as rationality, as humanity’s capacity for thought. Reason cannot be identified with a purely technological rationality, unencumbered by political goals, as in the case of a certain reading of Marx; nor can it be identified with a kind of practical wisdom of the good life freed from necessity, as in Aristotle. If it can be neither identified with praxis or poiesis, with action or production, it is because it must be thought of as simultaneously immanent to both and as the site of their intersection. As Tosel writes,

While the ancient tradition interrogates the nature proper to humanity from the triplet poiesis, praxis, theoria, supposed to represent the hierarchy of distinctly human kinds of life, Spinoza recomposes poiesis, praxis, theoria in the unity of the same form of life. Every form of life, every bios is a specific unity of poiesis, of praxis, and theoria. Or rather, in each kind of life, in each individual body, there is a relation to other bodies in nature (poiesis), and to other bodies of the same human essence (praxis), corresponding to a modality of the existence of the mind or spirit of knowledge (theoria).²⁷

It is possible to refer to this as a triple determination, one in which thought, action, and production all act on and determine each other, but, as I argued in chapter 1, it is more accurate to consider thought to be the intersection, the place where action and production affect intersect and transform each other. There is no labor without an idea of what one is doing or producing, an irreducible mental component, just as there is no action, no politics, without a conception or an idea of what one is doing. Thought, rationality, cannot be identified with either production or action, because it is immanent to both action and production, defining the points of their intersection and divergence. Just as production and action are thoroughly historical, the former shaped by the transformations of technological conditions and the division of labor, and the latter by the different social and economic relations that drive and determine the history of capitalist accumulation, thought is thoroughly historical as well. Understanding thought as historical means not just understanding the different topics or things for one to consider as something that change over time, but to understand the very process of thought itself to be historical, which also means social. Marx argues that consciousness “is therefore, from the beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.”²⁸ Or, to put this in Spinoza’s terms, it is not a matter of asserting the “I think,” of the individual thinker, but that “men think (or we are aware that we are thinking).”²⁹ Thought is social and historical, which is to say transindividual, before being individual.³⁰

Double determination means thinking all action, all strategy, as both an effect and a cause. Operating in the world is making history, but not under the conditions that one chooses—to which it is important to add that the conditions include not just the material or even political conditions, but also the mental conditions, the way in which the world is thought and imagined, knowledge and ideology.

Strategy upon Strategy: Spinoza and Marx III

It is from this perspective, from that of the determination of acting by production and by production by action, that we can return to the question of strategy. Every strategy is situated by the material conditions that provide not only its tools and instruments but also the social relations that shape its imagination. Every strategy is situated; as a conscious intent it is as much an effect as a cause, the effect of past actions as much as it is the condition of future actions.³¹ The situated and determined nature of strategy can be grasped by Spinoza’s and Marx’s specific philosophical strategies. Their strategies can be found in the particular critical interventions that take place in the opening sections of Capital and the Ethics, “The Fetishism of Commodities and Its Secret” and the appendix to part 1 of the Ethics. These texts are well known. The first has given us the concept of commodity fetishism, reification, and various criticisms that extend far beyond its specific engagement. The latter has been described by Althusser as the matrix of every possible theory of ideology, providing a criticism of the spontaneous ideologies of the free subject and the anthropomorphic god.³² Their influence on later theories of reification and ideology cannot be ignored. Beyond or prior to this history, however, there is the specific role they play within their respective texts and arguments.

Both texts can both be described as preemptive, in the sense that, as much as they are situated within their particular arguments, discussing the particular problems of the commodity form and of the anthropological-theological imaginary, they necessarily come before their philosophical conditions. Spinoza’s text begins to expound something of the human tendency to see ourselves as a kingdom within a kingdom, before developing the fundamental propositions detailing knowledge, affects, and desire, which make up parts 3 and 4 of the Ethics. Marx’s text presents Robinson Crusoe, the medieval world, and the famous “free association of producers” before developing the very idea of a mode of production, the social structure. In each case, this preemptive strike is necessary: both Spinoza and Marx recognized that what they were asserting went against the prevailing common sense—the prevailing consciousness of the subjectivity, God, and the universe, according to Spinoza, and the entire economic and social order, according to Marx. They also recognize that the causes or conditions of this “spontaneous philosophy” are not ideas and propositions, not arguments of philosophers, but life, understood as causes and conditions that shape actions and imagination. They are the point where each philosophy confronts its absolute enemy, its absolute outside, whether it be in the form of the entire anthropo-theological imaginary of a free subject and a teleologically oriented God, or in the reified and ahistorical acceptance of the value form. They are the point where the concept intersects with polemic, where an argument confronts the world, and worldview, that is opposed to it.

What is confronted by each of these texts is less a specific philosophical position, or a figure from the history of philosophy, than an entire common sense or way of thinking. Both the section on “Commodity Fetishism” and the appendix of part 1 address the way in which the world necessarily appears to everyone: as a common sense. They are more interested in the spontaneous philosophy of capitalism and religion than the explicit doctrines of economy or theology. This spontaneous ideology is both a product of a particular state of production, a particular organization of technological and social conditions, and the precondition of a way of thinking and acting; in other words, it is doubly determined. In the first case, it appears to be made up of objects, commodities that possess value in and of themselves, independent of any human action. In the second case, that of Spinoza’s critique of anthropomorphic and teleological thought, there is the way in which the world appears, first as something exterior to us—as something that we act on that, if it is governed at all, is regulated by an unknowable but human-all-too-human God. Despite the difference of cause—a difference that relates to the critique, in each case, of religion and political economy—each passage deals with the question of value, with the extent to which the value that a thing embodies, in terms of its worth or merit, is itself a quality of a thing or a subjective state, a mode of imagining. Of course, this might seem like a mere equivocation with respect to the concept of value, a vacillation between the ethical and economic meaning. What sustains this connection in this case is that, for Spinoza and Marx, there is an overlapping sense of the fetish, the way in which an activity is attributed to an object. Our desires are misrecognized as qualities of the object, or our labors, in the collective sense, are distorted to become the value of the commodity. Value, the worth of things, the estimation of something as good or bad, is not an intrinsic quality, nor is it a purely subjective state. It is something produced by actions, structures, and relations. For both Marx and Spinoza, value has to be thought in terms of its genesis, a genesis that includes the structures and relations that constitute it, and the way that it necessarily appears.³³

Despite this convergence, it is possible to see a strong divergence in terms of their objects of criticism, not just in the sense that Spinoza is a critic of religion and Marx is a critic of political economy, but in the broader sense that Spinoza is examining the spontaneous philosophy of the subject and Marx is examining the spontaneous illusion attached to the object, to the commodity. In Spinoza’s text, the first illusion is that of individual autonomy. We are born ignorant of the causes of things and conscious of our desires. From that original ignorance it follows “that men think themselves free, because they are conscious of their volitions and do not think, even in their dreams of the causes by which they are disposed to wanting and willing, because they are ignorant of [those causes].”³⁴ In Marx’s text, the constitutive illusion is that of a world of objects, the way value appears as an attribute of things, rather than as the product of a social relation. As Marx writes of the commodity,

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible.³⁵

Or, to put it in Spinoza’s terms, for Marx we are ignorant of the production of things, but conscious of their value. What we perceive, or are aware of, is the value of the commodity; what is effaced or obscured is the process of production. The critical and polemical texts have different objects of criticism: for Spinoza we are ignorant of ourselves, of the subject, while for Marx we are ignorant of the world of objects.

While such a division is faithful to the overall logic of both texts—Spinoza is, after all, a critic of the illusions of a free subject and Marx of the fetish of the market—it overlooks a crucial point of overlap, the nexus where a perception of the world becomes an understanding of the self or where an understanding or misunderstanding of the subject shapes an understanding of the world. With respect to Spinoza, it is not just a matter of being unaware of ourselves, of the causes of our desires, but that, from this opacity, we interpret or misinterpret the world of objects. It is possible to argue that there is a theory of fetishism of the object, a fetishism that obscures the social relations of imitation and collective desire in the same way that the commodity obscures the social relations of labor. As Tosel argues, “Before the fetishism of the commodity that Marx has analyzed, and which corresponds to an industrial capitalist society, Spinoza criticized the fetishism of the object of utility, which corresponds to a society dominated by simple instrumental activities.”³⁶ As much as Spinoza’s thought could then be understood to characterize a precapitalist economy, an economy focused on the fetishization of use value rather than exchange value, later sections of the Ethics converge with Marx’s thought on a fundamental point integral to the latter’s critique of capitalism. Fetishism, as Tosel argues, can be extended from the commodity to the way in which the economy is perceived to be less a social relation, the product of human actions, than a natural relation, a product of its own natural laws.³⁷ It extends from the fetish of the object to the religion of daily life, from the social relations perceived as a quality of objects to the object-like quality of social relations. Spinoza offers an understanding of the affective tenor of this fetishization. As Spinoza stresses, the more we imagine a thing to be necessary and not free, the less we become angry or indignant.³⁸ The more that we understand the economy to be governed by its own laws, the more we understand its various effects not as the product of a social system but as facts of life, the less we become angry or indignant at its vacillations. Spinoza’s critique of the subject, of the kingdom within a kingdom, extends from that to become an entire imaginary and affective constitution of the world.

In a similar manner, Marx’s criticism of the way objects appear as bearers of value necessarily encroaches on the subject as well. This can be seen primarily in the way Marx fundamentally displaces the subject as the origin of meaning and value. The illusion, the value of commodities, is not the product of individual misrecognition or even some limitation of human consciousness, but is a social process.³⁹ Nonetheless, it is a social process to which individuals contribute, but they are unaware of the role their participation plays. Commodity fetishism is less a subjective error, a misunderstanding of the world, than a necessary appearance of a social process, a social practice that also produces subjectivity. The fetishization of commodities extends, ultimately, to the commodity that one brings to the market in their person, namely labor power. It is not just commodities, things, that are fetishized, seen to possess value, but also subjective qualities and states that are all seen to have values, just as the world of things does.⁴⁰ As Georg Lukács writes,

Subjectively—where the market economy has been fully developed—a man’s activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article.⁴¹

One looks at the aspects of one’s personality—one’s talents, interests, or physical appearance—and sees them all as so many commodities, so many ways of developing one’s value on the market. The constitution of objectivity becomes a constitution of subjectivity, as value is a way not only of seeing the world, but of seeing one’s own activity and possibility. As Marx describes this process of subjectification, “The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition, and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws.”⁴² The external world is not just accepted as a matter of fact; it ultimately reshapes and remolds the subject. Marx’s understanding of the fetishization of commodities extends inward into the subject’s own capacities and existence as commodities sold as labor power.

There is a fundamental tension at the heart of Marx’s understanding of the constitution of the subject as a bearer of labor power, a tension that has defined much of the history of Marxism in the twentieth century.⁴³ The tension has to do with how much this remaking of the individual into labor power, into an employee, is experienced either as an ethic (something constitutive of identity), or as alienation (a loss of sense of self). It is a question of how the person selling their labor experiences this relation. Is it perceived as a loss of self, time, and autonomy, an alienation from what one could be, or is it an expression of their desires, a realization of self? In posing it this way, I am approaching the question of alienation and its limits from a different direction than that from which it is conventionally understood. It is less a matter of humanism, of the supposed human essence that underlies any such theory, than it is of its efficacy to describe and capture the experience of work. The concept of alienation presupposes an experience of alienation, that selling one’s labor is experienced as sadness, loss, and negation of one’s potential. Alienation can be understood as a way of grasping a particular affective composition of labor, a dominance of the sad affects, of fear, frustration, and anger.⁴⁴ That alienation corresponds so well to much of the experience of work during the heyday of Fordist production explains, in part, its popularity as a critical concept during the same period.⁴⁵ This also makes it possible to understand its decline in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The critique of work as alienating has been incorporated not just by critics of capital but also by the entire field of human resources management, which has, since the middle of twentieth century, incorporated the alienating effects of labor into strategies of human relations.⁴⁶ The critique of the alienating effects of labor has led to various attempts to transform the workplace, not by establishing worker control but by infusing work with activities meant to be fun and engaging. The influential responses to alienation are to be found not in the debates about work and human nature in philosophy, but in the way in which work, at least in some fields, has been restructured to offer different sorts of engagement. Moreover, the more people live their social lives in and through work, the more work is transformed from an alienation of human beings from human beings to the only social contact, the only social life some have. It is not alienation that we see in contemporary work but, more often than not, motivation, a desire to realize oneself in and through employment.

What Spinoza adds to this is the idea that this reshaping is not just an adaptation to an external force, a willingness to deal with the way of the world, but is often actively assumed and strived for. If we return to Spinoza’s definition of the striving that defines every human life, of desire—“Desire is the very essence of man in so far as his essence is conceived as determined to any action from any given affection of itself”—what is striking is that it does not assert determination as the opposite of desire but instead posits desire as an expression of determination.⁴⁷ It is a matter not of posing an opposition between determination and desire, but of thinking desire as itself a determination. “To be disposed in a particular fashion is immediately to desire to do, think, and be according to this disposition.”⁴⁸ For Spinoza, determination is to be found not only in those instances where one feels constrained or coerced but in those where one actively, even passionately, desires something. In order to overcome seeing oneself as a kingdom within a kingdom, it is necessary to see the way in which passions and desires are not opposed to determinations but are reflections of them. As Spinoza writes,

The drunk believes it is from a free decision of the mind that he says those things which afterward, when sober, he wishes he had not said. So the madman, the chatterbox, the child, and a great many people of this kind believe that they speak from a free decision of the mind, when really they cannot contain their impulse to speak. Because this prejudice is innate in all men, they are not easily freed from it.⁴⁹

To Spinoza’s formulation we could add that the employee freely believes that they want to work. What is called motivation is nothing other than identifying with one’s compulsion. In each case, it is a matter of grasping a determination, a heteronomy, not just in those moments that feel constrained or confined but at exactly the point where one feels free.

What is the process by which determination becomes desire? Frédéric Lordon and Yves Citton have given us two different variations of this, the first focusing on the material conditions and the latter on the symbolic dimension. As I have argued, these two aspects are, in some sense, two different ways of looking at the same thing, the same social relation, grasped in terms of bodies and their coordination and minds and their automation. However, they also function in different ways in understanding the orientation of desire. In the first, it is imposed through necessity; as selling one’s labor power becomes the only condition of survival, living is aligned with making a living through wage labor. Wage labor appears to be the only way to make a living because all other ways are effaced. The constraints of society appear less as particular institutions, regimes of accumulation, and social relations but as the way things must be; their historicity and contingency are effaced in the present order. This structural condition is supplemented by an ideological dimension insisting not only that one must identify with their job, find their passion in their labor, but that such a condition is also to be actively desired. Having to work, to dedicate oneself entirely to work, is presented twice, as it were—once as a necessary condition for survival and the second time as aspiration integral to one’s identity. To frame it according to the division of work and action, we could argue that work is defined as both production and action, both as the constraint of necessity tied to survival and something freely undertaken to identify and distinguish oneself. The particular double determination in capitalist society is one in which work vacillates from a necessary fact of life to an object of desire, from making a living to finding meaning. The often-asked question, “What do you do for a living?” vacillates between these two senses; at once, it indicates something of necessity, of one’s economic situation, and freedom, one’s supposedly chosen path in life. It is both what one has to do and who one is. Work as necessity and work as subjectivity, as body and as mind, do not just coexist as two different ways of grasping the same thing but are subject to their own logic of alternation as material necessity and ideological meaning reinforce but also undermine each other.

At this point, it necessary to return to the differences of Spinoza and Marx’s preemptive critiques, despite their overlaps and intersections. Spinoza, in the appendix to the Ethics, criticizes the illusion of the free subject, while Marx in his section on commodity fetishism criticizes the illusion of the objective value of objects, of commodities. This objective value culminates in the way in which the economy itself appears less as the production of individual actions and relations than as its own law-like structure. The supposed opposition of their critical objects obscures to what extent these two spontaneous ideologies, the individual as a kingdom within a kingdom and the fetishization of the economy, necessarily reinforce each other. The more that the social and economic world is presented as governed by unchanging laws that define the market, the more that the only possible response to such a world can only be located on an individual level. Individuals must adapt, conform, become competitive, figure out the best way to sell their particular commodity, their labor power.⁵⁰ The more the economic order is presented as a set of natural laws, the more the only possible response is an individual one that puts an emphasis on both adapting to those laws, on flexibility, and on responsibility as ethical norms. As Grégoire Chamayou writes, “Economic irresponsibility and ethical responsibility, the concrete dissolution of morality and abstract calls to moralization, go hand in hand while forming a contradictory unity.”⁵¹ The fetishism of commodities (and with it the economy) and the individual as kingdom within a kingdom may have been articulated through two different critical strategies, but in contemporary capitalism they converge in a world in which the economy as a system of natural laws and the free subject are two contradictory sides of the same world.

Seeing the Better and Doing the Worse: On The Assistant and Compliance

The process by which individuals adopt and identify with the determinations that shape their world is rarely explicitly addressed in popular culture, perhaps because this is, in part, what popular culture largely does (with the exception of a few anti-work films). This is its mythic function, transforming determinations into desires. However, there are two films that not only explicitly focus on this process but do so in terms of the world of work. Compliance and The Assistant are both about the way that necessary conditions of work are not only accepted, understood as necessary, but become part of an individual’s subjectivity and desire. Both films are loosely structured on actual events but do not purport to directly represent them. Craig Zobel’s 2012 thriller Compliance is based on events that took place in 2004 when a man posing as a police officer called a McDonald’s in Kentucky and had the manager detain an eighteen-year-old employee (one of a series of such incidents that happened throughout the late nineties). Kitty Greene’s 2019 drama The Assistant is (even more loosely) based on Harvey Weinstein’s role as an abusive producer running a small but influential film production company. What links the films, besides the common denominator of being inspired by true events, is the way that they foreground not only work (and the modern workplace) as the site of power and exploitation but also the way in which work forms and deforms subjectivity.

Compliance is set during a single day at a fictional fast-food franchise called “Chick-wich,” in a nondescript commercial strip in a generic town, on a cold gray day. The film opens as Sandra, a manager, is dealing with a minor crisis that begins her shift: an opened freezer has ruined over a thousand dollars of produce, including an essential ingredient, bacon. The event places the manager as a person situated between her younger employees and upper management, trying to motivate the former while conforming to the dictates of the latter. In the opening minutes of the film, she is yelled at by a delivery driver and mocked by her employees for what they perceive as her general middle-age cluelessness. Sandra reminds all of the employees that a “franchise quality-control person,” otherwise known as a “secret shopper,” could be in at any moment that afternoon to check that cleanliness, portions, and customer service is up to the standards of the corporate franchise. This translates into an increased imperative to be productive, as Sandra tells her employees working the front counter, “If you are not with a customer, I need you to clean, clean.”⁵² The quality-control person never appears; instead, the franchise is called by a man claiming to be a police officer, who states that one of the employees was seen stealing money, describing a young blonde woman as the culprit. He asks the manager to detain the employee until the police can get there. Sandra finds Becky, an employee who matches the description, and brings her into the small office for an interrogation. What follows is an awkward and tense situation as the police officer asks the manager to stripsearch the woman. Over the course of an evening, as the manager balances between the restaurant and the phone call from the police, the situation becomes increasingly harrowing, culminating in sexual assault. It is revealed, albeit too late, that the man on the other end of the phone is an impersonator.

The director, and the reception of the film, generally situate it as a film about authority; indeed, psychologist Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments on authority are often mentioned in reviews and interviews with the director.⁵³ However, unlike Milgram’s controversial experiments, which took place on a college campus under the supervision of doctors in white lab coats, the events depicted in this film take place in the back room of a fast-food franchise that doubles as an office and storage space. The call from the police is only one set of arbitrary demands to which the employees are subject. When the manager first answers the phone, she agrees to the odd requests to subject an employee to a strip search because she is interested in the fastest possible resolution of the issue. There is the promise that a quick resolution could put the employee back on the line quickly and return to making and serving food. The incremental increases of the cop’s demands are, in part, made possible by a day dominated by the imperative to do what one is told in order to be as productive as possible. The restaurant is already understaffed at the opening of the day due to an employee calling in sick, and taking an additional employee off of the line to be held until the police can arrive pushes the tension to its breaking point. This unique situation reflects what is increasingly becoming a reality in the scheduling of work in the service industry: perpetual understaffing for maximum productivity. As journalist Emily Guendelsberger characterizes this logic, “If workers can push themselves to cover the duties of a sick coworker, doesn’t that just mean they’re not giving it 100 percent the rest of the time? Why can’t they work that efficiently every shift?”⁵⁴ The term Guendelsberger (as well as the film) uses to describe this perpetually overstressed and overstaffed working situation is “in the weeds.” To be in the weeds is not only to be in a stressful situation of maximum productivity but also stressed to the point where the only possible concern is not so much work understood as productivity but working to eliminate and reduce the stress. What is striking about the film is not just that nearly everyone goes along with what the “police officer” on the phone tells them to do but, for the most part, that doing otherwise is not even a question. Speed, expediency, and efficiency are the guiding ideals. There is no time and no ability to consider different options.

If the film can be understood as presenting some fundamental conformity or tendency to obey, then it is necessary to confront the fact that that conformity is less a product of a corruption of human nature, or the force of authority, as it is an effect of a work situation in which the demand for productivity not only outweighs other demands but excludes the very possibility of their being articulated. It is a matter of understanding obedience not as some general failure of what we are as human beings but as an effect of a particular character, which is to say of a particular ingenium. As we saw in chapter 2, people so habituated to obedience, to doing what they are told no matter how absurd, begin to accept obedience as freedom. Rituals and religious prescriptions dictating how one should dress, eat, and so on act to cultivate obedience. The modern workplace in fast food goes beyond even this subjection, dictating not only exactly how things are produced, right down to the number and placement of bacon strips, but also how one dresses, including hair, makeup, and tattoos, and when one can take bathroom breaks and how long those breaks can last. The control over daily life that Spinoza recounted under theocratic rule is nothing compared to day-to-day life at a fast-food franchise. From this perspective, the demands made by the man claiming to be a cop on the phone are only one more set of imperatives—one more thing to do, and get over with, before moving to the next thing.

Despite the director’s interest in Milgram’s notion of obedience, the film’s setting in a fast-food restaurant suggests a different causal connection—one rooted less in the politics of authority and conformity that haunted the post–World War II era than in the economics of efficiency and standardization that define contemporary production. This is a fundamental shift in what it means to obey or conform. The rules that one obeys might be inane and pointless, but one obeys not so much by following orders as by going through the motions. It is conformity not produced from above, by a recognized authority, but from below, from the constant fear of losing one’s job.⁵⁵ The workers are less motivated than destabilized, unable to get their bearings by developing either skills or social connections: it is not a matter of being mobilized, but rather of being demobilized from doing anything else.⁵⁶ As I argued in chapter 2, the affective composition of labor dictates and determines the extent to which workers are willing and compliant. An affective composition determined by hope, by the joys of either consumption or identification with one’s work, produces maximum compliance, while an affective composition dominated by fear can produce obedience without enthusiasm. One of the contradictions of contemporary service work is that it increasingly relies on the emotional labor of friendly attitudes and social comportments while being unable to offer the material benefits or the subjective rewards to elicit such attitudes or relations. The crunch of being perpetually in the weeds is not conducive to the friendly smile that is demanded. This contradiction is supplemented by various technologies of surveillance, including the increasing outsourcing of surveillance through secret shoppers and apps that make customers into managers, and by a general ideology of work that is outsourced to culture in general.⁵⁷

Not everything in Compliance can be attributed to the structure of work. The film takes its darkest and most disturbing turn when Sandra asks her boyfriend, Van, who is not an employee of Chick-wich, to watch over Becky, who is still being held in the manager’s office. Van is more than willing to sexually assault and rape Becky at the suggestion of the caller on the phone. These events are in keeping with the actual events on which the film is based, but they strain credibility. On multiple occasions (including during the screening I attended in Portland, Maine, in 2011), the audience became very angry at the director for what they perceived to be an excessively exploitative and prurient turn at the end of the film.⁵⁸ What is interesting is not just that the story’s claim to veracity fails as an alibi, that it seems unbelievable despite being true, but that the inability to accept it hinges on the audience’s belief that they would have acted differently in the same situation. We may be able to understand how the conditions make it so others act in such a way, but we always believe ourselves free from conditions. Althusser’s assertion that “ideology interpellates individuals as subjects” is, in some sense, the modern version of Spinoza’s assertion that we tend to see ourselves as “kingdoms within a kingdom,” underdeter-mined and unaffected by the laws of nature and the customs and conventions of society. We judge the comportment of others from our own, but we do so in such a way that we always see ourselves as untouched and unaffected by the circumstances and conditions that shape and determine actions. It is not too hard to imagine that everyone who watches Compliance believes that they would act differently, see through the ruse of the cop on the phone, just as everyone who learns about the Milgram experiment thinks that they would be the exception to the subjection to authority. Paradoxically, this idea that one would act differently and its corollary, that such things are not possible because no one would act like that, in some sense perpetuates their existence. As Dimitris Vardoulakis argues, following Spinoza, “There is no more effective tool for the implementation of obedience than the illusion of the free will.”⁵⁹ By failing to imagine that such things are possible, we fail even to grasp their existence. As Guendelsberger notes, the conditions of workers in high-stress, low-wage jobs are absent not only from films but from culture and politics in general.⁶⁰ The distance between the audience and the film is also a reflection of this class divide. Audiences, especially at film festivals, do not identify with the actions on the screen, because, for the most part, they do not identify with fast-food workers. Lastly, there is a genre precedent for this kind of lack of identification: horror hinges less on an identificatory metalepsis, in which the protagonist does what we would do or would imagine ourselves to do, than a sort of disidentification founded on the confidence that we would never make the same mistakes as those we see on the screen. The audience of the horror film often finds themselves yelling at the character on the screen not to go into the basement or do something else that puts themselves in harm’s way, deriving satisfaction from the sense that they would not be foolish enough to do such things. In this sense, and not just in terms of its horrors, Compliance is a horror film in that, at least in the screenings, it seems to invite not just disbelief in the fact that what it depicts actually happened, but a “disidentification” as well, that no one would do such things.

A similar sense of horror pervades The Assistant, despite the fact that the film focuses on neither the victim nor the perpetrator of its horrors. Although it is based on Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment and abuse, the producer at the center of the story is never seen, only heard as an angry voice on the phone or gleaned as the author of an email. His victims occasionally enter the frame, but what happens to them is also, for the most part, unseen. The camera instead focuses on Jane, a young assistant to this unnamed producer. The film follows her through one incredibly long working day—a day that has her picked up by a car and arrive at an empty office before dawn. Her morning begins with activities that are both conventional for an office—making coffee and copies—and unconventional, such as stocking shelves with alprostadil (an erectile disfunction drug). Over the course of the day, it is a lack of coherent structure or delineated tasks that defines Jane’s workday. Unlike Compliance, where the working day is determined by an excess of structure, delineating every task right down to the number of pieces of bacon on a sandwich, Jane’s long day in the office in The Assistant is defined by a lack of structure and a heterogeneous assortment of tasks. At one moment she is scheduling her boss’s flights and cars; the next she is cleaning the office. Much of this work involves dealing with the uncertainty and unpredictability of interactions with others, including using translation software to speak with a Hispanic cleaning lady. It is possible to see this as the kind of unpredictable and unscripted action that Paulo Virno identifies with contemporary labor. However, there is an unwritten script of sorts, or at least a recurring theme in her tasks: Jane is often called upon to deal with his boss’s wife and with the producer’s kids when they are brought into the office. There is the underlying assumption that, as the only woman in the office, she is best suited for the care work of dealing with children as well as the work of cleaning. Although this social reproduction is waged—she is paid, after all—it is still naturalized, considered less a set of skills that are acquired than an assumed and natural proclivity.⁶¹ Jane is shown to have an interest in the world of film; she sneaks glimpses of pages of a screenplay that she is copying, later stating that she has a desire to become a producer. In Jane’s case, however, her aspiration to climb up the ladder is further complicated by her gender, which threatens to keep her tied to the tasks of reproductive labor, work it is assumed she can do without skill, training, or any additional compensation.⁶² These tasks require social tact, care, and commitment, but, because these skills are not only gendered, identified with women, but reproduced in and through the home, they are devalued.⁶³ Jane’s status is framed between the flexibility demanded of a modern worker, who can go from making copies one minute to booking and coordinating travel the next, and the entry of the work of social reproduction into the workplace, as caring for kids, dealing with spouses, becomes part of the job. At one point, in a vicious verbal tirade, her boss tells her, “Go back to the one thing that you are good at, ordering salads.”⁶⁴ Her gender is ambiguously situated; it is, at once, identified with the unwaged world of home and care—as when she is given the boss’s kids to watch for part of the day—but, at the same time, it also defines her professionalism, her ability to deal with any situation, to adapt and communicate.⁶⁵

Jane’s status as the lone female assistant sets up the major conflict of the film. Throughout the day, there are hints of sexual impropriety and abuse in the office. Jane finds an earring on the carpet while cleaning, a group of young producers make a joke about not sitting on the couch in the producer’s office, and there is the matter of an office stocked with erectile disfunction drugs. These clues culminate with the hiring of another assistant. The new assistant is an attractive young woman who was working as a waitress in Boise, Idaho, when she met the unnamed producer, who offered her a job and flew her to New York, putting her up in a hotel. The producer spends most of the day at the hotel with her in what is referred to as “a personal,” during which Jane screens a call from his wife, feigning ignorance as to his whereabouts. Jane becomes concerned about the safety of this young woman and meets with the office’s human resources director, Wilcock. He presents himself first as very sympathetic when Jane states, “I did not know who to come to.” His response is, “In that case, you came to the correct place.” As Jane tells her story, relaying the oddity of a young, attractive woman with no experience being hired, and the time at the hotel, the human resource director listens to her story, asking “And?” with every detail. Jane waits for him to connect the dots, to understand the situation, asking finally, “What can we do?” Wilcock responds by relaying Jane’s story back to her, stressing the flimsy nature of her evidence and insinuating that it is perhaps jealousy that is driving her to make such a complaint. He then asks her if he should file the complaint. When she says no, he states, “I don’t think that you have anything to worry about; you are not his type”—an assertion that simultaneously recognizes the reality of her fears, while undermining her reason for making the complaint. She is there to protect not herself but the other assistant, in an act of solidarity. As Jane says to the human resources director, emphatically, “She is very young.” Wilcock misrepresents Jane’s complaint, questioning her evidence while, at the same time, underscoring her hopes, her aspiration to become a producer, and her fears, that she could easily be replaced. This rearticulation of the affective composition of labor, positioned between hopes and fears, effectively undermines any solidarity.

With Jane’s attempt to address the proper channels rebuffed, the rest of the film lingers on her realization of the kind of person she works for and the kind of place she works at. In the final scene of the film, after the producer is left in the office late at night with another young actress, Jane walks to a bodega, calls her father to wish him a happy birthday—something she forgot to do the day before because she was so busy—and then walks off into the night. She says nothing about the harrowing ordeal she has undergone over the course of the day. Nor does she say anything about what she will do next. Will she return to work the next day with the knowledge that working in that office, for that producer, will be contingent upon her ignoring and enabling the abuse that goes on in that office? Or will she walk away, as she appears to walk off into the night at the end? This question is not really asked, and, in some sense, it is already answered, at least in the minds of the audience. She will come back to work, because she has to. What else could she do?

Compliance and The Assistant can be differentiated not just in terms of the kind of work they depict, the roles that they dramatize, but also in how well they elicit identification and disidentification. While the first film invites scorn and a refusal to believe and identify with the choices on the screen, the second is perhaps more successful. It is horrifying because we know that Jane will return to work, and that the need to keep working will keep the same power dynamic in place.

Both Compliance and The Assistant deal in different ways with the way in which people do something that they know is wrong in order to keep working, keep living. They are, in some sense, different versions of what Spinoza referred to as “seeing the better and doing the worse.” For Spinoza, “seeing the better and doing the worse” is the general tendency of human behavior, as we are often aware of what we should do, of what is rational and useful, but are compelled by the affects and the imagination to do otherwise. In this case, the worse is driven not by the way in which the imagination and the affects short-circuit thought and reason, but by the way in which social and economic imperatives demand that people act against their reasons or interests. In other words, people go against their best interests in order to keep a job. In this way, the situation is closer to a formulation put forward by Marx, who argued that the capitalist subject is essentially split, divided between ethical and economic considerations. As Marx writes in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,

Am I obeying economic laws if I make money by prostituting my body to the lust of another (in France the factory workers call the prostitution of their wives and daughters the nth working hour, which is literally true), or if I sell my friend to the Moroccans (and the direct sale of men in the form of trade in conscripts, etc., occurs in all civilized countries)? His answer will be: your acts do not contravene my laws, but you should find out what Cousin Morality and Cousin Religion have to say about it; the morality and religion of my political economy have no objection to make, but . . . who should I believe, then? Political economy or morality? The morality of political economy is gain, labour and thrift, sobriety—and yet political economy promises to satisfy my needs. The political economy of morality is the wealth of a good conscience, of virtue, etc. But how can I be virtuous if I do not exist? And how can I have a good conscience if I am not conscious of anything? It is inherent in the very nature of estrangement that each sphere imposes upon me a different and contrary standard: one standard for morality, one for political economy and so on. This is because each of them is a particular estrangement of man and each is centered upon one particular area of estranged essential activity; each is related in an estranged way to the other.⁶⁶

Marx’s different yardsticks could be understood as another version of seeing the better and doing the worse, especially as it is the economic yardstick that dictates the course of action, violating ethics and friendship. It is possible to argue that this division has only increased with the development of contemporary consumer culture, which has made the opulence of a good conscience available in the form of goods that make promises to express a virtuous life, to be sweatshop-free, cruelty-free, ecological, and so on. There is no ethical concern that cannot be commodified. A good conscience is available for those who have enough funds. Less extensively and ever dwindling, there is also the promise of a job that is in line with one’s ethical and moral ideals, a good job that would be doing the right thing. These are increasingly only available to those who would accept a lifetime of poverty, as in the case of public school teachers, or, more often, are available only to those who can afford to initially work as an unpaid intern in order even to have access to such jobs.⁶⁷ What Marx grasped as the relation between capital and its outside, between the world of work and trade and an external world of ethics and values, has become internal to the development of capital itself, as a good conscience becomes a life marketed to the elite, while the remainder of society is forced into “bullshit jobs” and buying the worse because it is all they could afford.

As much as they overlap in a description of a life torn between ethical ideals and actual actions, Spinoza’s formulation of “seeing the better and doing the worse” and Marx’s division between the “ethics of political economy” and the “political economy of ethics” are not exactly two different formulations of the same problem, or relation. Marx suggests that this division is lived as an alienation, in which the failure to conform to the two different standards, the two different measures, is actively experienced as a kind of persecution or angst—as we see in Compliance, in which the tendency to follow orders (from the boss, from the person posing as a cop, and so on) is actively experienced, at least on the part of the audience, as the worse. As much as Spinoza describes the tendency to see the better and do the worse as the general formula for moral failing, there is also a sense in which, for Spinoza, there is a tendency to eventually habituate oneself to the worst. As I argued in chapter 2, according to Spinoza, we have a tendency to continue to imagine those things that increase our capacity to act, our joy, and are discouraged from imagining those things that increase our sadness.⁶⁸ This formulation is fundamentally ambivalent as, on the one hand, it gives the impetus and the basis for struggling to change or challenge our conditions, to create conditions more conducive to acting; but, on the other, given that it stems from the imagination, it also explains how we sometimes imagine what we need to imagine in order to maintain our happiness with our existing conditions. Seeing the better and doing the worse is, in some sense, an untenable situation, fraught with alienation, conflict, and tension. However, there are two ways it can be resolved: one can strive to do the better, to act in accordance with what one understands as right and rational, or one can continue to imagine that the worse is the best one can do, eventually, through rationalization, no longer seeing it as the worse. The ambiguity of the ending of The Assistant attests to this ability to adapt to the worse, to see it as necessary, to put up with something objectionable or even monstrous precisely because one has to, because it is the only way one can imagine realizing not just their aspirations but their very existence. Between the two tendencies, seeing the worse as worse and adapting to it, there is no automatic telos or direction; they are two different strategies for resolving the same tension between what one knows or thinks and what one does. These strategies are at once determined by society—shaped by the intersection of production and action—and are the basis for particular strategies, for particular ways of conducting oneself.

Negative Solidarity

Seeing the better and doing the worse often collapses into a revalorization of the worse as the only possible outcome. This is a fundamental orientation of individual striving and strategy—one that accepts limited possibilities as the only possibilities, adapting itself to existing conditions rather than striving to change them. This strategy of adaptation to what already exists is underwritten and reinforced by the fetishization of the existing order, of the existing economy, and its demands as something that is not a historical creation of people and social relations but is driven by its own laws independent of collective and individual desires. The corollary of this fetishization is the belief in the individual as free and undetermined, even if this freedom takes the form of an increasing ability to adapt and conform. The paradox of contemporary capitalism is that it is predicated on an individual who expresses their individuality and independence not by rebelling from the conditions and demands of selling their labor, but by demonstrating an ability to conform to these conditions, often even anticipating and going beyond what is demanded.

At this point, we can return to the figures of the affective composition of labor outlined in chapter 2. Frédéric Lordon’s schematic history of this composition ended with the neoliberal subject, with a subject that engages with labor not as a means to survival, or even as a means to consumption, but almost as an end in itself. Labor, work, becomes the terrain of self-realization. The labor that becomes the terrain of self-realization is not the specific work or ethic of a task or trade but, in some sense, an identification with abstract labor itself, with the generic demands to be employed, to be a worker. These demands often take the form of a professionalism that is less a set of skills or specialized knowledge than a general attitude. The idea of meaningful work, of finding meaning in work, has only increased as material benefits erode.⁶⁹ Moreover, as stability and security through work are undermined, the emphasis on finding meaning in work is situated less and less in a particular concrete labor, a particular ethic of a particular trade, than in abstract labor, in a generic willingness to work, to hustle, that transcends any specific kinds of labor. Thus, in some sense, the identification with flexibility and engagement has as its corollary the promise that this adaptability ultimately translates into advancement and success. Which is also to argue that this identification with the abstract demand of labor is not without its material and institutional conditions. In some sense, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul provided an illustration of what a commitment to work looks like as the material and institutional conditions that secure it begin to fall apart. They are about a commitment to work, to the ideal of being a hard worker, even as the material effects of that commitment can no longer offer health care or even steady employment. It is possible to ask, What remains of the identification with wage labor as a strategy when wage labor is disconnected from any linear progression, recast as a series of precarious forms of employment, only engaged with intermittently, or no longer available?

Sociologist Jennifer Silva, in Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty, maps out some directions of the affective economy in what could be called late neoliberalism. Silva sets out to examine precisely what happens to lives in the US affected by the post-2008 recession. These are the lives of primarily working-class people burdened with debt, faced with dwindling job prospects, and often living with their parents. They have been denied the promised life of careers, families, and homes of their own—mourning the slow decline of the Fordist dream. What Silva finds striking is the lack of any anger or political mobilization on the part of those who are left out of the American dream. According to her, being excluded from the prospect of a steady job and linear career development does not entirely exclude one from the mythology, from the ideal of work and discipline. As she describes her general findings:

At its core, this emerging working-class adult self is characterized by low expectations of work, wariness toward romantic commitment, widespread distrust of social institutions, profound isolation from others, and an overriding focus on their emotions and psychic health. Rather than turn to politics to address the obstacles standing in the way of a secure adult life, the majority of the men and women I interview crafted deeply personal coming of age stories, grounding their adult identities in recovering from their painful pasts—whether addiction, childhood abuse, family trauma, or abandonment and forging an emancipated, transformed and adult self.⁷⁰

What Silva describes through her ethnographic interviews and discussions is similar to and, in some sense, mirrors the narratives of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, perhaps, in part, explaining their popularity. First, it underscores that the ideal of individual success through work was always itself socially produced. Work can only become a condition of individual advancement through institutional supports that reinforce the accumulation of wealth and status, while protecting from contingencies such as injury or illness, what sociologist Robert Castel calls the social wage.⁷¹ However, the dismantling of these institutions does not lead to the dismantling of the work ethic, in part because the ideology of the work ethic never recognized its own social conditions or social framework. The ideal of the work ethic outlasts the social and material conditions that connected this work to security and stability, because the work ethic, as an ethos, a way of conducting individual life, never really recognized that its viability as a strategy was dependent upon social and economic institutions. The demand to find meaning or purpose in work thus becomes even stronger as the material reward declines. As Silva argues, what remains is the ideal of work: work unmoored from material rewards to become its own reward and justification. The subjects she interviews turn work inward, reframing the narratives of their lives in terms of past traumas and obstacles. They work, but only on themselves; the rewards for this work are found not in economic status but what Silva refers to as their place in the “mood economy.”⁷² The fundamental currency of this mood economy is a prevailing attitude of self-reliance and independence, as the failure of social institutions, such as schools, unions, or an inability to navigate them, is revalorized into an ideal of self-reliance and independence. The destruction of the conditions of individual success, what Castel calls “negative individuality,” becomes a kind of individualism as failures to finish school, to successfully navigate the meager social safety net that is available, are transvalued into an ethic of independence.⁷³ What matters more than material success, or even a career, is an ability to claim one’s supposed independence and discipline through work; work becomes its own end, rather than the means to something.

To describe this shift along the lines outlined by Lordon, we can see a new affective orientation, one sustained neither by consumption—which is increasingly too limited, reduced to basic necessities in an age of declining spending power, to capture desire—nor even production, as work becomes stripped of not only any joys but any fantasy of mobility and accumulation. The failures of consumption or wage labor to offer any joy does not lead to their rejection. What emerges instead is an ideal of work, as discipline and self-transformation become the source of validation. Work is unmoored from institutional conditions to become an infinite task of self-transformation. Personal worth is found not through what one can buy, or even what one can sell of oneself, but in the sense of responsibility for one’s own condition. It is the responsibility that matters, not the results or outcome. The focus on self-responsibility, of taking responsibility for overcoming all of one’s hardships and traumas, entails a massive distrust of any collective or institutional solution, and a corresponding suspicion for those who engage in them. Pride in taking responsibility in one’s own fate is an attempt to construct a joy, a positive condition, out of a negative sad affect. It is an attempt to make the difficulty of changing or altering one’s condition into a source of pride or joy.

A similar affective composition of labor can be found in David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. While Graeber spends much of the book documenting and detailing the prevailing alienation with the pointlessness of the tasks named by its title, he also offers an explanation as to why these jobs do not produce universal disdain or even rebellion. As Graeber writes, “Workers, in other words, gain feelings of dignity and self-worth because they hate their jobs.”⁷⁴ Graeber’s formulation inverts the classic definition of alienation in which negative effects—loss of self, purpose, and activity—lead to a critical or negative relation to work. Rather, it is because one finds work to be painful, demeaning, or difficult that one is attached to it, finding its justification in and through its difficulty. The difficulty of work becomes, in part, an attachment to that arduous, demeaning, or taxing dimension as a point of pride. It is an inversion of the basic Spinozist principle that one endeavors to imagine things that increase one’s joy and capacity; or, more precisely, it is an attempt to imagine one’s suffering and incapacity to transform it as a point of pride, converting it to pleasure. Such a transformation of sadness into joy, passivity into activity, has as its necessary condition the sense of being completely overpowered and overwhelmed by one’s situation in life. This sense of being incapable of changing one’s situation can be real or imagined because, as Spinoza argues, the imagination of being powerless is the same as being actually powerless, for “whatever man imagines he cannot do, he necessarily imagines; and he is so disposed by this imagination that he really cannot do what he imagines he cannot do.”⁷⁵ Such an imagination has very real effects, not only in terms of how individuals conduct their own life but in how they imagine the conduct of others. As Graeber argues, those who take pride in their work because it is difficult are necessarily angry, not only at those who are believed not to work but also at those whose work is not sufficiently difficult or demanding. In recent years in US politics, teachers and teachers unions have been held as particular targets of contempt for their job protections (as a unionized workforce), the supposed ease of their job (summers off), and the fact that their job is perceived to be rewarding. This was summed up in the attempt on the part of the right to identify teachers and other public service workers with the figure of the “welfare queen.”⁷⁶ Joy, or the imagined joy, of others becomes the source of resentment. The pride that one takes in one’s work is inseparable from the anger and jealousy that one has toward others, toward what one imagines as their imagined life of pleasure or ease. The attachments to responsibility, to a sense of worth found in work, are strategies for coping with both declining prospects for improved material conditions, the careers that work made possible, and with the increasingly inaccessible pleasures of consumer society. They are remnants, often images of bygone conditions and decaying dreams. They are what remains of the work ethic when it is stripped not only of its religious sense but of its connection to even the worldly rewards of consumption and security. What we increasingly see in the epoch of austerity is a revival of the oldest myths and legends of capital, and capitalist accumulation, against its material reality. As we saw in chapter 1, “work” is used in many senses; the term is deployed to refer to the exchange of labor for a wage, but it is also used to refer to any activity that requires effort and focus, waged or unwaged, such as housework or homework; it is also often used to valorize any effort in any activity, as in the oft-repeated saying “Relationships are work.” These different senses coexist, compete, and contradict in the conflict between meanings and uses of the term. Within this conflict, it is possible to say that there is a dominant sense or sensibility of work. This dominant sense of work is not just the valorization of wage work over and against the unwaged work that cares for and reproduces social relations, but also work understood in terms of an ethical value that is informed by its difficulty and the way that difficulty is endured. Work, especially work that is understood as “a real job”—which is to say coded as productivist, masculine, and often white—is understood to be the source of at least symbolic value, even as its market value declines. This symbolic value intersects with other symbols of hierarchy and exclusions. As social scientists Daniel HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes argue, “producerism,” the valorization of supposed real workers, does not correspond to any actual division of the economy, or to any specific job. It does not just exclude those who work in the public sector, or even services, but also industries such as textiles, meat processing, or electronics assembly, which tend to be dominated by women and people of color. Not only is producerism coded as specifically male, and white, but this sense of masculinity and whiteness is defined, in part, through particular laboring conditions that make difficulty into a point of pride. As HoSang and Lowndes write,

Within a cultural discourse and policy framework that fetishizes and naturalizes market forces, anyone perceived to have job security, wages or benefits, or even the most basic forms of autonomy and authority at work can stand accused of violating the ethical norms of producerism. And as the sectors of the economy long associated with producerism continue to shrink, the protections of claims to a producerist identity will also wither.⁷⁷

Producerism, the particular work ethic that turns difficulty into a virtue, can thus be understood as not only a particular affective composition of labor—one that makes its difficulty into a point of pride, turning sadness into joy—but also as a particular, inadequate idea, or universal, in Spinoza’s sense—one that takes particular aspects of labor, particular experiences, and constructs an imaginary universal. This universal is constructed from multiple and shifting senses and sensibilities of work—economic, cultural, and political. As tenuous as this image of the real worker is, its hegemony is reflected and reinforced every time the image of men wearing hardhats is used to stand in for real workers and the production of things is taken as synonymous with work itself.

In a post on the blog Splintering Bone Ashes, political theorist Alex Williams has dubbed this particular hostility toward workers who are imagined to be better off materially or even affectively “negative solidarity.” Negative solidarity is defined as “an aggressively enraged sense of injustice, committed to the idea that, because I must endure increasingly austere working conditions (wage freezes, loss of benefits, declining pension funds, erasure of job security and increasing precarity) then everyone else must too.”⁷⁸ This shift is as much a shift of the representation or image of capital as it is a shift of the affective and imaginative composition of labor—a shift that affects both sides of the class division, attenuating the fundamental antagonism of class conflict.⁷⁹ Citton’s term “attenuation” is useful here because, as the word suggests, it is not that class struggle has disappeared—the conflict over exploitation remains, as what Marx and Engels referred to that “now hidden, now open fight”—but that it has been diluted as the institutional articulation, the forces and languages to express it, have been effectively undermined and weakened.⁸⁰ This attenuation is a transformation of both institutions and bodies as well as imaginations and concepts, of the order and connection of both, as practices and representations intersect and transform each other.⁸¹ The individuation and isolation of the worker not only undermines the collective character of class struggle but fundamentally alters what it means to be a worker. Gone is the opposition and antagonism that has been attached to the figure of the worker throughout the Marxist tradition, in which the worker was part of class struggle. The worker no longer struggles collectively but adapts individually, seeking to make their relative powerlessness as a seller of commodity into a source of power and pride. Flexibility, independence, and self-reliance become the defining characteristics of the worker, defining a new ethic and ideal of work. The transformation of the status of the worker does not leave the capitalist unaffected. As work loses its antagonistic sensibility, it becomes reappropriated by the capitalist as an ethical norm. The capitalist increasingly presents themselves as a worker—as one’s whose activity, management, is the true source of corporate wealth and accumulation.⁸²

This transformation has its structural and symbolic conditions. Structurally, it is related to the general condition of capital, in which even the boss is subordinated to the demands of capitalist accumulation, in some sense becoming the bearer of this abstract formulation; but, more specifically, it refers to contemporary transformations that focus on brief fluctuations in stock prices over long-term profitability.⁸³ These structural conditions are matched by a general transformation of the image and idea of the capitalist; the capitalist is increasingly seen not as opposed to the worker but, on the contrary, as the shrewdest and most dedicated worker. This transformation comes with an entire aesthetic as hoodies replace suits and pickup trucks replace town cars. As Étienne Balibar sums up both sides of this transformation, “The capitalist is defined as a worker, as an ‘entrepreneur’; the worker, as the bearer of a capacity, of a ‘human capital.’ ”⁸⁴ This inverted world, like Marx’s famous reference to the camera obscura, is itself a product of material and ideological conditions. The individuation and isolation of work makes advancement and success less a collective or political goal than an individual investment in human capital; while, on the other side, the fetishization of capitalism, the effacement of the institution and political conditions of capitalist accumulation, leads to the image of the capitalist as one who acquires wealth by working harder or smarter.

The attenuation of the conflict does not dissipate the conflict itself. Indeed, conflict still structures the fundamental economic relation. This relation is, in part, determined by the nature of labor power as a unique commodity: as with any other commodity, the buyer wants to get as much work as possible for as little money as possible, and the seller wants to get as much money as possible for as little work as possible. As we saw in chapter 1, this commodity, labor power, is unlike any other commodity in that it is inseparable from the body and mind of the worker selling it. It is for this reason that, as much as class struggle can be attenuated, can be diffused by institutions that treat workers as entrepreneurs developing their human capital, and by representations of capitalists as true man of the people, it cannot be destroyed. The conflict over time and the body cannot be completely obscured; its fundamental corporeal and affective basis, a combination of exhaustion, pride, anger, and frustration, cannot be eliminated. However, it can be reoriented, focused on different objects and relations. The attenuation of class struggle, its dissipation into a conflict in which there are no classes and no structural conditions but only individuals engaged in competition and investment in human capital, does not dispense with these affects. Instead, it makes it possible for them to take on different topics and different objects. As Citton writes,

The fear of falling down the social ladder that feeds into much of the success of xenophobic parties is undoubtedly fostered by political rhetoric and media agendas that win over their audiences by playing on their fears, either cynically or naively. But, however misleading it may be to see the danger as arising from the figure of the stranger, the feeling of insecurity which explains the anxieties of social decline stems as much from concrete realities (increasing inequalities, geo-economic adjustments, ecological unsustainability) as from media bogymen (the flood of migrants, a resurgent Islam).⁸⁵

As Spinoza argues, inadequate ideas follow the same necessity as adequate ideas; the distortions and deviations that turn worker against worker, along the lines of race and nation, are themselves the product of material and affective conditions generated through the economy while not being reducible to them. These affects could be organized in different directions, become part of different myths, such as that of class struggle, but they are irreducible and cannot simply dispensed with or annulled.⁸⁶ This is why an attenuation of class struggle, especially in an era of increased insecurity and job pressures, must necessarily involve the displacement onto other sites of conflict.

Negative solidarity is what remains of class conflict after class conflict has been attenuated. Negative solidarity is a particular sense of indignation, aimed not at capitalists for living of off the exploitation of labor, but at those who either are seen not to work or whose labor fails to live up to the norms and demands of “truly productive work.” Alexandre Matheron argues that indignation has particular importance in Spinoza’s understanding of the political life of the affects.⁸⁷ As Spinoza argues in the Political Treatise, affects are central to the organization of political life; a people, a collective, is constituted less by a common idea or a common action than by a common affect or sensibility. Matheron argues that the affect that shapes political life is indignation, which Spinoza defines as “the hate we feel for those who do evil to a being that resembles us.”⁸⁸ This affect is immediately social, or doubly social, because, even before it is a shared affect, defining a particular collectivity, it is social in its very genesis since it involves not only others (the one who does evil and the one who to whom it is done) but also an imagination of others and their resemblance to us. It also relates to a fundamental ambiguity at the heart of social life: the intersection of imagination and reason. Indignation is a foundation of politics not just because it involves a relation with others but because it attests to the need for a common rule or standard for collective life. Indignation is one of the corollaries of the fundamental proposition regarding the imitation of affects, a proposition that shapes collective life as much as individual life. Just as our affects are always already social, collective life is founded on the affects as much as on reason. As much as indignation attests to and even prefigures our shared social life, and the need for rules of common existence, it does so not only through an affect that is fundamentally unstable—indignation could easily turn to envy—but also through the imagination. Spinoza’s development of the social nature of the imitation of the affects proceeds from a specific social relation, a specific person who is harmed or aided by others, to a general idea of a norm for humanity. As Spinoza argues, “We strive to do whatever we imagine men to look on with joy . . . and we are averse to doing what men are averse to.”⁸⁹ As our affects and conduct are shaped by the affects and conduct of others, the image we form is less an image of a specific person who has been aided or harmed than a universal idea of human beings in general.⁹⁰ We act in accordance with what we think others would want or desire, basing our actions on a general or universal idea of humanity. These two aspects—actual utility, the need for common rules and standards, and imaginary resemblance, the sense that another is like us or resembles us—can coincide in a shared sentiment and understanding of justice as our rational understanding of the utility of society and our imagination of the other coincide. They can also come into contradiction, as our sense of indignation is limited to those whom we perceive to resemble us. As Balibar writes, “Sociability is therefore the unity of real agreement and an imaginary ambivalence, both of which have real effects.”⁹¹ Accordingly, he argues, real agreement is predicated on difference; we are useful to each other insofar as we are different, while imaginary ambivalence is predicated on an imagined identity that shapes ambition, sympathy, and indignation.

The ambiguity at the center of social life is split between reason and imagination, idea and affect, but also difference and identity. As Spinoza argues, nothing is more useful to man than man, but this use is predicated on difference, on different strivings and different characters (or ingenium). The rational foundation of society recognizes the utility of difference. A city of sages, philosophers, artists, or plumbers would collapse, unable to meet the myriad and different needs of human beings. This idea of a society defined by useful difference comes into conflict with another ideal, another foundation of society: that of a fundamental equality, or universality of a common humanity. The affects that shape our political life—indignation, emulation, and ambition—are shaped by the particular images we have of humanity, split between difference and universality. Political conflict is often between different particulars that shape the universal. It is possible to argue that rational utility is found at the level of the economy while imaginary identification is found at the level of politics, as Balibar does. He writes,

It would be easy to conclude that Marx is basically unaware of the “other scene” of politics, the scene of communitarian affiliation, and therefore unaware of symbolic violence as well (although he names it or has bequeathed us with the word ideology, one of the aptest names for it); and to conclude that Spinoza, for his part, basically ignores the irreducible level of economic antagonism (doubtless because, at the economic level, where conatus can perhaps be conceived of as a “productive force,” Spinoza is basically an optimist and a utilitarian).⁹²

As much as it would be possible to argue that the economy is the realm of utility and politics that of symbolic identification (and violence), such a division fails to account for not only the thought of Marx and Spinoza but, more importantly, the actual relations of each. As I argued in chapter 1, the immediate relation between work and politics entails a division internal to the wage relation. The imaginary of concrete and abstract labor is also split between particularity and universality, hierarchy and equality. The image of the economic collective is defined by both difference—by the fact that others must be doing different things from me in order for society to function—and identity—that, in some sense, these different things must all be understood as work, have something in common as a shared task or endeavor despite their necessary differences. This spontaneous image of a collective of workers is subject to its own divisions and exclusions. These divisions take on increasing importance as the conflict between worker and capitalist are increasingly attenuated by the generalized imperative to work. Work becomes the terrain of conflicts, conflicts shaped by the imagination of what is considered to be real work, defined in terms of its perceived difficulty and imagined individuality. The new exclusions pass between those who are perceived to work and those who perceived as not working, even if the perception in question is more of a matter of the imagination, a myth, than a reflection of reality. The most immediate image of the latter in the dominant mythocracy of work is of course the “welfare queen,” the person who relies on benefits, but lately it has come to include the teacher, the government employee, or even the union worker. As such, work itself is a site of symbolic inclusion and exclusion.⁹³

Negative solidarity can be understood as a particular affect, indignation at those who are perceived to not work hard enough, to be not engaged in real work, or who rely on political power or corruption (two things seen as more or less synonymous in the particular mythocracy being described here) to keep their jobs. This affect, this anger, aimed at everyone from those who benefit from the last remnants of social protection (in terms of unemployment payments) to those public employees who still have union protections, has to be seen as both an exclusion and an inclusion. As much as it excludes those who do not work or who are not perceived as working, it does so in the name of a loose collectivity. A popular bumper sticker in the US reads, “Keep Working: Millions on Welfare Depend on You,” defining a particular kind of indignation. The person affixing such a bumper sticker to their car is not just angry at the person who is supposedly living off of their labor but, as it addresses (or interpellates) its imagined audience, it draws them together in shared indignation. There is a sense of a “we,” a collectivity of “real” workers, “real Americans,” an imagined universality, albeit a weak one, structured by both work and its ethical norm, that is being harmed. This is what puts the “solidarity” in “negative solidarity.” There is thus a unity, a community, defined by the shared affect of enduring work and the indignation aimed at those who do not work—work that is defined through its physical difficulty (or at least the stoic fortitude it takes to endure it), its economic centrality (or perceived economic centrality), and an ethic of individual commitment rather than collective protections. The solidarity is negative in the sense that it both eschews any collectivity—unions are seen as the deviation rather than the expression of this collectivity precisely because they undermine the shared commitment to work that defines it—and in the way that it functions as a strategy. Negative solidarity can only see any improvement—collective bargaining, protection of employment, and so on—not only as partial, and thus in some sense corrupt, but also as a deviation of the fundamental ethical basis of work itself, which demands individual strength and fortitude. As much as negative solidarity is aimed at others, at those who are perceived not to work, seeking to discipline those who rely on state spending or those who are protected by union agreements, it ultimately furthers the attenuation of class struggle, obscuring actual divisions—the divisions of class struggle—with imagined divisions framed around the ethical value of work. The attachment to work and independence ultimately undermines its own status in the world, as individual workers are left to fend for themselves.⁹⁴

Losing Strategy

Negative solidarity can be understood not just as a particular affect or a particular imagination (although it is in some sense both) but also as a particular strategic orientation. It is determined by the organization of production and action, by the economic and political restructuring of work that has attenuated class conflict and undermined workers; and, more precisely, it is structured by the way that these changes are both understood and imagined. To return to the bumper sticker referenced above, which alludes to millions on welfare, there is no understanding of the massive reduction of welfare (especially since the reforms passed by President Bill Clinton) or of how social welfare programs make up a small part of state and federal budgets. In its place there is a sense that if I am not benefiting from my work, if I continually see my wages decrease while working harder, then someone else must be benefiting. It is this imagined gap between an individual’s effort and their return that the figure of the welfare queen, the immigrant, or even the teachers union, fills.

To some extent, negative solidarity offers a kind of bizarro-world version of the standard Marxist criticism of capital, an inversion: instead of recognizing the capitalist as the source of exploitation, and seeing the immense accumulation of money by the wealthiest as the answer to the discrepancy between work and wages, the declining economic status of work, it frames this question in terms of an insufficient dedication to work on the part of the immigrant, teacher, or public worker protected by a union. The ideological function of such an inverted world is clear; what is less immediately clear, however, are its causal conditions. Why is indignation not aimed at the capitalist, the CEO, or the boss? A response to this returns to the intersection of Spinoza’s and Marx’s critiques of the individual and the subject. Previously, we grasped this criticism in terms of its representation of freedom and necessity, where the individual subject is seen to be free while the economy is perceived as ruled by law-like necessity. Actions attributed to the economy, including such things as layoffs, reduced hours, and other negative effects, are not presented as actions that are freely undertaken; they are no one’s choice but an effect of economic necessity. They are not actions but effects of unchanging laws, understood as the necessary conditions of competitiveness, profitability, or just simply necessity itself.

This representation of necessity has an affective dimension as well. First, as Spinoza argues: “Love toward a thing will be greater if we imagine it to be free than if we imagine it to be necessary. And similarly for hate.”⁹⁵ We largely consider the human world, the world of other people and their actions, to be more worthy of anger and love than the natural world because the former is seen to be free while the latter is understood to be determined by necessary laws. It is foolish to get angry at the weather. To which we could add the following assertion from Marx: that the more the economy is perceived as itself a kind of nature, or second nature, obeying its laws which are outside of human action or intervention, the less it is subject to the same affects, the same love or hatred that are reserved for politics. This is, in part, what it means to see the requirements of capitalism as self-evident natural laws. Such a perception does not just efface history and change, as Marx stressed, but also, as Spinoza would perhaps emphasize, includes an affective dimension, shaping our hopes and fears, indignation, and acceptance. The more the capitalist mode of production is seen as necessary, as functioning according to laws, the less it makes sense to become angry or indignant at its actions. There is a second dimension, a second intersection of affect and modality. As Spinoza writes, “An affect toward a thing we imagine as necessary is more intense, other things being equal, than one toward a thing we imagine as possible or contingent, or not necessary.”⁹⁶ The contradiction here is only apparent: anger and joy are stronger, given the idea of freedom, the idea that things could be done otherwise; but, overall, the more necessary something is seen, the stronger the affect will be because it is seen as unavoidable. Those things that are perceived as immanent and unavoidable generate more fear than anything perceived to be contingent or possible. The perception, or imagination, of necessity or freedom each have their different affective dimensions; the former are more intense because they are seen as certain, while the contingency of the latter elicits more love or anger because it could have been otherwise.

On this reading, it is possible to comprehend a division between economics and politics predicated on affect. The reason why politicians invite such indignation, such anger, is precisely because they are perceived to be free; they could have acted otherwise, could have enacted different policies. The same is not true of economic actions, the actions of the market or even its representatives in the form of heads of corporations, which are seen to be conforming to necessity. One could even argue that, in capitalist countries today, one of the primary functions of politicians is often to act as scapegoats for economic processes. Politicians promise to create jobs, to improve economic conditions—something that they can only act on in limited or indirect ways—but their main function is not so much to effect these changes but to be the rotating figures of hopes, fear, and eventually indignation. As Lordon writes,

What makes the constructivist agency a focal point for very intense affects of hate is the possibility of ascribing the conditioning to a local, identifiable cause, one that is thought to be free (the party, the State, the Central Planning Committee), and to which a contingent intentionality can be imputed. In contrast, capitalism’s market forces, despite grinding people down no less violently, appear as a “systemic effect,” thus unassignable, without a centre and without deliberate design behind them; they therefore seem almost like a necessity, which for Marx was the essence of commodity fetishism, and which is therefore conducive to all the rhetorical strategies of depolitization through “naturalization.”⁹⁷

Thus, it could be possible to argue for an affective division between the economy and politics, in which the displacement to the other scene is less a matter of base and superstructure than of a perceived necessity and contingency.⁹⁸ Such a theory would explain why some of the same actions—invasive surveillance, curtailment of basic rights of speech and assembly—elicit anger, hatred, and indignation when undertaken by states and governments but are often met with shrugs of indifference when undertaken by corporations.⁹⁹ Economic necessity appears simply as the way of the world, while political actions are those that appear to be free. Of course, it is worth pointing out that, for Spinoza, there is no real contingency; rather, everything is determined, but because we do not, and cannot, grasp all of the myriad causal conditions that determine a thing, we often imagine things to be contingent. The economic and political imagination are thus two sides of the same imagination, the same representation of necessity and contingency. The naturalization of capitalism, its appearance as simply the way of the world, makes politics a vacillating field of hopes and fears.

While this affective division may, in part, define shifting attitudes toward politicians and business leaders, politics and the economy, it also forms the basis of negative solidarity as a kind of strategy. It does so first in that such a strategy is doubly determined by both politics and economics, but politics and economics in terms of the way that they are imagined and perceived as much as known or understood. The indignation aimed toward politics—one that perceives politicians as inherently dishonest and unreliable, but freely so—fails to see the necessity underlying these failures. Which is to say that it fails to see the way in which politicians fail to deliver on their promises because they function within the dictates and demands of capital, both specifically, in terms of being beholden to donors and other business interests, but also more generally, in that they function within the field of what capital determines to be possible. Conversely, it fails to see the contingency in the necessity of capital—that what is presented as a necessary condition, from demands of profitability down to the more general imperative to work, to sell one’s labor power in order to survive, is in some sense contingent upon capitalism as the prevailing economic system. There is a double determination of action by production and production by action, but both are shaped by how production and action appear, by the imagination and affects. This determination dictates without appearing to be a strategy, a course of action; one avoids politics as a solution, finding it to be nothing other than an unstable source of indignation. The economy, which is to say capital, appears more reliable, but not as something that can be changed or acted upon. It can only be adapted to, and the primary form of adaptation is to work, and prove oneself through work. Work becomes the solution to individual problems; one needs only to work harder or smarter, just as work, or the economy in general, become the solution to collective problems.

Negative solidarity is an affect, a particular sense of indignation, and an imagination, a specific way of representing both the limits and possibilities of the economy and politics, as well as the place of the individual in each; simultaneously, it is a strategy, what could be considered a losing strategy, a strategy that reflects defeat in politics and in social life, and that perpetuates that defeat through an attachment to work. It is the foundational “cruel optimism,” to use Lauren Berlant’s term. It is a strategy that embraces neither politics, especially as electoral politics has been a source of only disappointment and indignation, nor collective action with respect to the economy; there is nothing to be done against the natural economic order. Acting in terms of the economy not only comes up against unchangeable laws but risks negative effects, as in the oft-heard belief that increased wages will only lead to automation or outsourcing. Such a strategy acts on itself, seeking only to work harder, to adapt, and hopefully to anticipate the fluctuating demands of capital. It is a strategy shaped by loss, by the attenuation of class struggle, and, furthermore, one that can only lose, replacing collective struggle with individual adaptation to conditions that can only further undermine the status of workers.

Conclusion

The picture of “negative solidarity” offered in the last chapter can be considered not so much as a culmination of the argument pursued in the previous two chapters, but rather as the current articulation of the different double shifts traced over the course of the entire investigation—a particular intersection of politics and economics, material conditions and their representation, and of acting and doing. What follows constitutes a conclusion not in that it is the culmination or the last word but, rather, in that it is the latest articulation of the different material relations, affective compositions, and imagination. It is the general theoretical and political problems turned toward the specific politics of the present—a conjuncture and not a telos.

With respect to the politics of the labor relation developed in chapter 1, negative solidarity is an articulation of concrete and abstract labor. It could be considered an alienation of concrete labor, as the specifics of one’s job are, more often than not, a sense of frustration, pointlessness, or even bullshit. The alienation of concrete labor has as its corollary the emergence of a kind of ethic of abstract labor, and an increasing identification not with the specifics of a given job or trade but with work itself. This abstraction takes on two forms: there is, for some, an increased identification with the flexibility and indifference of labor to its concrete conditions or parameters. This is, in some ways, the character of the contemporary professional, entrepreneur, or, more critically, what Virno calls an opportunist. It is a remaking of subjectivity as abstract labor that identifies with the demands of productivity and flexibility. As art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary describes this situation:

Now there are numerous pressures for individuals to reimagine and refigure themselves as being of the same consistency and values as the dematerialized commodities and social connections in which they are immersed so extensively. Reification has proceeded to the point where the individual has to invent a self-understanding that optimizes or facilitates their participation in digital milieus and speeds.¹

This could be called the elite version of the ethic of abstract labor, an identification with the positive sides of abstract labor, its flexibility and indifference not only to specific tasks but to work as perpetual plasticity and readaptation. It can be contrasted with what could be called a subjugated form of the same ethic. In this latter version, it is not the flexibility of abstract labor that is valorized but its formative discipline. It is an ethic attached to the very idea of having a job, and the recognition of work. The operative word or concept is work—understood as wage labor—but this formal abstraction is supplemented by different senses and particular sensibilities of work. Most important is the way in which difficulty, hardship, and a stoic attitude toward these travails shapes and colors this general recognition of work. (As we have seen, when needed, the stoic ethic of overcoming adversity can outlive and exceed wage labor, becoming a personal narrative of individual struggle.) The subjugated ethic of abstract labor is attached to work, to difficulty and discipline, as the conditions for recognition and ethical standing.

Following the double determination of the mental and the material, each of these ethics and alienations carries with it a particular imagination and mythology of work. The first converts formal equality and indifference into a kind of meritocracy. While Marx, in the nineteenth century, associated this abstract indifference with Christianity in general, and deism specifically, its contemporary manifestation is a kind of “meritocratic neoliberalism,” in which the indifference of the market toward differences of race, gender, and religion legitimates both the market and the existing division and order of hierarchies. Flexibility and adaptation are the double-edged watchwords of this imaginary; the market can adapt to everything, provided that we adapt to it.² This is the imaginary of global elites.³ Its corollary among the less well off is an attachment to work as an abstract ethical imperative: work continues to have ethical value and symbolic value, even as its economic value declines. The focus on work understood as a marker of ethical difference, separating those who are worth consideration, can be compared to primitive accumulation, not in the sense of the fear and privation that compelled the early workers to sell their labor power but in the sense of the narrative of so-called primitive accumulation—the story of the frugal capitalist and lazy worker that provides a moral veneer to the capitalist relation. As Marx describes this tale,

This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past. Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one the diligent, intelligent, and above all frugal elite; the other lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread by the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins.⁴

Primitive accumulation persists not as a myth about the origins of capital but as a lingering morality play about the present. The narrative at the heart of primitive accumulation was always defined by temporal displacement; it was an idealized version of the present, the hard worker who saves enough to become a capitalist, projected onto the past, onto capital’s origins. It argues that capitalism was made possible not by the expropriation of the peasantry to become workers but by the thrift and good sense of the capitalist. This idealized version of origins is projected into the future. What connects the past and the present is the morality of work. The original accumulation of the capitalist, thrift, and the morality of work are unified in terms of that to which they are opposed: the laziness of those who neither toil nor save, who waste their lives in riotous living. This story about the moral value of work is all that remains as work is increasingly subject to the logics of casualization and precarity.

These different ethics and mythologies converge at the point where production determines action and action determines production, which is to say, where that they overlap as a strategy. As a strategy, negative solidarity understands individual labor to be the only possible path toward individual success. Anything else—any other organization, any actual solidarity—is always already suspicious, understood as the source of betrayal or corruption. Negative solidarity is an imaginary, a strategy, and an affective composition. It is an effect of the existing organization of production and of the imaginary, but an examination of its composition suggests that these same aspects that constitute its overdetermination can be determined differently.

Work as the Religion of Daily Life

As an affective-imaginary complex, negative solidarity is self-perpetuating. It is sustained by two dynamics. First, there is a tendency to resist the cognitive and affective dissonance of “seeing the better and doing the worse,” to resolve this contradiction by dismissing the possibility of the better. This affirmation of the worse as the only possible option is, in some sense, an affective transvaluation—an attempt to turn powerlessness into pride, suffering into merit. As work is stripped of its capacity to deliver pride and satisfaction of the job itself, or the capability to deliver the promised goods and life of consumer society, the only thing that remains is work itself as an ethical value. Having a job, working hard, becomes the point of pride and identification. This point of pride is often maintained against others who are seen as nonworkers, even if they are imagined. The desire to maintain joy, a sense of one’s capability and agency, even as a fiction, is a particular strategy for thinking and acting. Second, once this imaginary is accepted, it becomes self-reinforcing as a limitation of imagination and action. We only do what we are capable of imagining. Practices and actions shape the imagination, and the imagination in turn shapes what actions are deemed desirable or even possible. Together, these two aspects constitute a kind of symbolic violence done to the imagination. As Lordon argues, symbolic violence is “the imaginary of fulfilment, which makes the humble joys to which the dominated are assigned appear sufficient, and the imaginary of powerlessness, which convinces them to renounce any greater ones to which they might aspire.”⁵ Not only does this symbolic violence delineate the bounds of what is possible and desirable; it also does so in a way that is self-reinforcing, as actions shape ideas and ideas shape actions. Work dominates the imagination because it prevails over material life.

The assertion of a symbolic dimension to work would seem to challenge a fundamental assertion of Marx’s regarding capitalism. As Marx and Engels famously write in the Communist Manifesto,

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.⁶

This assertion has led many to identify capitalism with a kind of disenchantment of the world, dispelling old prejudices and ideologies, replacing them with the icy cage of bourgeois calculation. Capitalism has transformed the various symbols, traditions, and beliefs of preexisting cultures and societies, replacing them with pure quantitative value. As philosopher Alain Badiou puts it, capital constitutes a desacralization of the social bond.⁷ Such a thesis is confirmed on a daily basis by walking through a shopping mall, or scrolling through screens online shopping, in which objects and items from different traditions and nations, from religious artifacts to ethnic symbols of belonging, are sold at comparable prices. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have countered this thesis of modernization by examining the extent to which capitalist societies constantly revive and recycle the various mythologies and traditions that are decoded (the central cultural argument of their two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia). As Deleuze and Guattari write,

Civilized modern societies are defined by processes of decoding and deterritorialization. But what they deterritorialize with one hand, they reterritorialize with the other. These neoterritorialities are often artificial, residual, archaic; but they are archaisms having a perfectly current function, our modern way of “imbricating,” of sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments, resuscitating old codes, inventing pseudo codes or jargons . . . These modern archaisms are extremely complex and varied. Some are mainly folkloric, but they nonetheless represent social and potentially political forces . . . Others are enclaves whose archaism is just as capable of nourishing a modern fascism as of freeing a revolutionary charge . . . Some of these archaisms take form as if spontaneously in the current of the movement of deterritorialization . . . Others are organized and promoted by the state, even though they might turn against the state and cause it serious problems (regionalism, nationalism).⁸

For Deleuze and Guattari, the relentless modernization of capitalism has to be understood in relation to a countertendency, a tendency to revive and resuscitate old traditions and norms. The modern age cannot be separated from its archaisms. However, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, these archaisms are primarily private, which is to say that they are removed from being a public spectacle or tradition to the private space of the home. To the extent that they are public, they are necessarily extra-economic and thus political. These archaisms reflect traditions of belonging and exclusion that are articulated at the level of the state, often as a response to the indifference and abstraction of capital. The state and the family thus take on added symbolic importance in the face of the abstract indifference of capital.

Thinking through the affective, imaginative, and strategic dimensions of work suggests another way of thinking the role of symbolization, belief, and meaning in contemporary capitalism—one that is neither the profanation of the holy, or even the revival of the holy family within the family itself, but the way in which the economy itself, most notably work and money, take on symbolic as well as material significance. Work is not just a way to make a living, to procure the basis of one’s material existence, but also the basis for recognition and self-respect. Money is not just a means for payment, or the conditions of investment, by a symbolism of power and prestige. This symbolization is, in some sense, incomplete and partial.⁹ Work is too inchoate an image or a symbol, vacillating from institutional formality, in which anything counts as work so long as you are paid for it, to more substantial ethical and physical definitions, in which work is supposed to have meaning and purpose that extend beyond a wage. The failure of work or money to constitute a meaningful symbolic life—what Marx refers to as the religion of everyday life under capitalism—can also be understood as a kind of excess. As much as work has ideological dimensions, attaching alternately to both ideas of equality and difference, individual purpose and social belonging, it does not, and need not, articulate these ideas in anything like an ideology (in the strong sense of the term), a coherent narrative. There is no overarching ideology of work, but, for that reason, work functions as a more effective infra-ideology, to use Pierre Macherey’s term.¹⁰ An infra-ideology is less a matter of some overarching narrative that would attempt to ascribe meaning to every activity than a way of thinking and acting that is more closely aligned to practical life. Work is in an infra-ideology because its attendant ideas and concepts, such as productivity and flexibility, are less ideals thematized according to an explicit narrative, or mythology, than realities that are practically imposed. The norms of work, of being productive, to defer gratification and endure hardship are almost second nature, capable of being attached to so many different activities, diffused throughout society, because they seems less like an ideology as a set of ideas, or a doctrine, than a simple reflection of a physical, natural, and anthropological reality.

Imagining, Thinking, and Acting Differently

The mutual reinforcement of imagination and practice, ideas and material conditions, sets up a particular vicious circle in which it is difficult to live differently because it is difficult to think differently, and difficult to think differently because it is difficult to live differently. The question is, how to break this cycle? The starting point for such a transformation is the imagination, not just because the imagining of a different world is a necessary precursor to acting differently, but also because the imagination is the intersection of habits and actions. Following Spinoza on this point, the imagination is both an effect on the body and an association of ideas in the mind.¹¹ Hoofprints in the sand leave an impression on the body, but to think of war or farming after seeing such prints is to experience the effects of previous associations and connections. The imagination is doubly determined by the connection of bodies and the association of ideas, but it does not express or comprehend those causes. The imagination misunderstands its own conditions, presenting its associations and connections not as the effects of relations but as qualities of things. The true positive force of the imagination is in its capacity to relate and compare multiple different things, to make connections. These connections have the possibility to overcome the limitation of knowledge itself. The imagination is the precondition of the capacity to construct concepts and ideas.¹²

On this point, Boots Riley’s film Sorry to Bother You is illustrative. The film is set in an alternate-reality Oakland that could be understood as a projection of the present. It is a Bay Area in which many people are unemployed, including the film’s main character, Cassius Green. The film opens with Cash, as his friends call him, in the middle of a job interview with RegalView, a telemarketing firm. Cash has understood more than anyone the fact that an interview is first and foremost a performance—a fact that is underscored by the fact that he brings with him an employee-of-the-month plaque from the Bank of Oakland and his high school debate trophy. These are fabrications—something that the man interviewing him knows all too well because he was the manager at the Bank of Oakland. Being caught in a lie does not undermine his interview, however; in fact it shows initiative. The opening scene of Sorry to Bother You underscores a point made by earlier films satirizing work (as well as theorists of work): that the interview is a performance disconnected from the reality of work. The ruse, the fabricated credentials, is truer than reality. It also opens a film that uses various fabrications, from surrealism to science fiction, to produce a different truth about work and our relationship to it. The opening scene not only opens on the film’s setting—the world of work—but also its method, fabrications, that not only show initiative but also illustrate the truth of the matter.

The most famous of these fabrications is the “white voice.” Initially, Cash has little luck at making sales over the phone. A coworker tells him to use his white voice—the voice he would use when talking to the police. As his coworker explains, the voice is not just a matter of sounding white, of being nasally, but of sounding like “all your bills are paid,” clarifying that there is no real white voice, but it is “how they wish they sound like . . . It is what they think that they are supposed to sound like.”¹³ The white voice is passing in terms of class as much as race; it is mimicking the voice of affluence and security that we are sold as an ideal of successful life in order to better sell to others. Cash proves himself quite adept at this voice—so much so that he quickly climbs the corporate ladder and is promoted to what is called a power caller, a high-end telemarketer. His success does not come without a cost: he is increasingly alienated from his friends who are involved in a union organizing campaign at RegalView. This conflict between individual success, or “getting paid” as Cash puts it, and collective success, seeing that everyone gets paid, is underscored by the fact that Cash finds himself slipping into the “white voice” in casual conversation. Cash is effectively alienated from his own capacity to speak and communicate. As Paolo Virno argues, updating the definition of alienation for contemporary service work, “Nobody is as poor as those who see their own relation to the presence of others, that is to say, their own communicative faculty, their own possession of a language, reduced to wage labour.”¹⁴ Cash loses his girlfriend, Detroit, and his friends because he pursues his own individual success, but he is able to get a new car, a new apartment, and pay off his family’s bills. Material success comes at a social cost.

Sorry to Bother You effectively stages the same story, a variant of a Horatio Alger myth, twice. In the first version, we see Cash climb the ranks at RegalView thanks to his ability to embody the white voice, to effectively occupy the place of no one, of the norm of success and stability. This version, while surreal in its framing, is more or less realistic in its narrative. It takes place in a recognizable world of dingy call centers, motivational pizza meetings, and nights out drinking with coworkers. This world even has its own myth, its own mythocracy: telemarketers aspire to become “power callers,” rising via a private elevator to money and success. While the first half is not without its surreal details—every time Cash makes a call, he and his desk are physically transported to the dinner or sex his call is interrupting—the only diegetic element that does not seem to belong to our world, the live/work company known as WorryFree, is only glimpsed indirectly: in passing, we see TV coverage of the protests against it, or newspaper headlines of the debates about its legal status. WorryFree, as the name suggests, offers relief from unemployment, precarity, and food insecurity, a guaranteed job, house, and meals, but at the cost of becoming a slave, or at least an indentured servant, with no freedom or autonomy.

The second version of the Horatio Alger myth takes us into this dark science fiction world. After Cash’s success as a telemarketer makes him a power caller, he shifts from selling guides to birdwatching and other videos to selling drones, and even the enslaved workers of WorryFree. It is in this second rags-to-riches story, when he is offered a job being their leader, or manager, that Cash learns about “equisapiens”—genetically altered half horse, half humans that are marketed as the ideal workers, physically stronger and supposedly more docile. The idea is that he would present himself as their leader, a kind of Martin Luther King figure that would appear to advocate for the half-horse creatures but who would actually work for their WorryFree managers. The jarring genre shift, the introduction of these monsters, is coupled with a shift in Cash’s reaction. Where he willingly embraced his career as a telemarketer, even going along with selling the indentured workers of WorryFree, he recoils in horror at the idea of marketing monsters, joining the collective action against the company, rejoining his friends in their organization against the working conditions at RegalView and their resistance to WorryFree. Cash’s rise to success is more or less told twice. The first time, as he climbs the ranks at RegalView, he pursues individual success to the point of alienating his friends; in the second version, with WorryFree, he flees the corporate world in horror to join in collective sabotage against the company.

Why does Sorry to Bother You tell this story twice, once as a surrealist satire and a second time as a science fiction tale complete with corporate conspiracies and genetic manipulation? The answer to this question can in part be found in the limitations of realism and science fiction. In the first and more realistic version, Cash greets his rise to success with joy; he is happy to find something that he is good at, to be doing something with his life. Not to say that this story is without its horrors; at one point, Cash tries to “stick to the script,” even when the person he is speaking to tells him that she has no money because her husband is in hospital with stage-four cancer. We see her disgust when Cash tries to turn that datum into a sale, following the script’s advice to turn every bit of information into a potential marketing opportunity. Cash sees it too. He later tells his friend that he feels like an asshole doing his job. The film acknowledges that telemarketing is a kind of bullshit job, often viewed with contempt not just by society at large but even by the people who do it.¹⁵ The idea that one has to accept whatever working conditions are available, no matter how terrible, because they are the only way to make a living, is constant throughout the film. Even WorryFree, the company that offers lifetime accommodations in exchange for lifetime work, looks appealing to someone facing eviction and unemployment. While WorryFree itself has not become a reality, shared-dorm working spaces are quickly emerging as a solution to increasing rents and dwindling wages.¹⁶ That people accept these reductions in living conditions without protest or opposition attests to the film’s viewpoint that, when it comes to capital, we are all the proverbial frogs in boiling water, reassuring ourselves that we can make it through the difficult conditions and hoping that we might even become a power caller.

The film includes its own articulation of negative solidarity. When Cash and Detroit are arguing about him continuing to work as a power caller, crossing a picket line, Detroit points out that he is “selling slave labor.” To which Cash responds, “What the fuck isn’t slave labor?” and asks what the union could even do about slave labor. The existence of injustice anywhere becomes an excuse for adjusting to it everywhere. A cynical resignation to the existing conditions of the world permeates the film. Even Detroit, who calls Cash a scab for crossing the picket line, is seen adopting her own white voice when she shows her art to a wealthy audience. This contrasts with everything we have seen about her up until then; her art is about the exploitation of Africa for its resources, and she is a member of a guerilla art group trying to raise awareness about WorryFree’s slave-labor conditions. Capital forces us all to sell ourselves to survive, to adapt to its dictates.

It is from this perspective that we can perhaps understand the film’s use of science fiction and surrealism. First, the equisapiens are necessary in order to illustrate the reality of exploitation. We have grown too accustomed to exploitation, to a cynical resignation to the fact that work sucks but there is little one can do. The shocking image of the equisapiens, of a half-horse, half-human creature, illustrates the exploitation that we either accept as given, as the way of the world, or ignore. With respect to the latter, it is worth noting that the brute physical exploitation of the equisapiens, framed against the backdrop of cubicle workers and artists, perhaps makes them an allegory not for exploitation in general but for forms of exploitation that have been outsourced to other parts of the world. The film’s shocking realization that the exploitative world of telemarketers relies on even harsher conditions for the unseen equisapiens is similar to the way in which news of the Foxconn factory or Amazon fulfilment stories made it into the mainstream press in the US in 2010.¹⁷ The images and tales seemed like something that had come not just from a different place but from a different world. The equisapiens provoke the audience into recognizing the truth of exploitation. However, at the same time, the film illustrates the limits of truth. In a moment reminiscent of such science fiction classics as Soylent Green and They Live, Cash uses his viral fame to tell the world the truth about WorryFree’s plans to create genetically altered mutants. Not only does this revelation have no revolutionary effect, but WorryFree’s stock price goes up on the news of its new cheaper and more efficient labor force. The union organizer Squeeze explains the lack of outrage: “If you get shown a problem but have no idea how to control it, then you just decide to get used to the problem.”¹⁸

Sorry to Bother You does not just combine the science fiction of genetic manipulation with the grim reality of working in a call center, for it offers something like a dialectic of the imagination. First, the imagination is necessary to even see the world we live in as it is: we have grown too accustomed not only to grueling jobs such as telemarketing but to the everyday cruelty of reality television, and the absurdity of viral fame. In order to see these things, we need to imagine them differently. However, merely seeing them, simply understanding our situation, is not enough. There is, as Spinoza writes, a “limited efficacy of the true insofar as it is true.”¹⁹ The truth does not have any political effects by itself; in fact, it can lead to even more resignation to the way of the world.²⁰ In order for the truth to have any effect, to act on the world—to become a “material force,” as Marx wrote—it must seize the imagination, become connected to things people think that they can do. The equisapiens are not the only fantastic element in the film: one could argue that its portrayal of a union-organizing effort is just as fantastic, given the general status of organized labor and the particular situation of organizing call centers. The solidarity and commitment of the workers is a utopian fantasy element in an age of negative solidarity. Sorry to Bother You is, in some sense, realistic when it appears to be fantastic—the equisapiens reveal more about the truth of not only global working conditions but also our existence as labor power—and fantastic when it appears to be realistic—the mass solidarity of the strike is, unfortunately, a fantasy in the current atmosphere of negative solidarity. This dialectic, of a sort, is sustained by the affective dimension; the shock and horror of discovering the exploitation that sustains our lives, and, more importantly, the joy of refusal and power, are very real. The union might be a fantasy, but “Fuck you, pay me” is a very real sentiment, rebellion’s indignation becoming a contagious joy. Unlike the fantasy joys offered by other films, this sentiment is connected not only to real frustrations and anxieties but also to real possibilities and actions. The film can be understood as a myth, or, more to the point, a transformation of the existing mythocracy—not just because of its anti-capitalist message but because, in the end, it is a film about solidarity, about what can be done collectively that cannot be accomplished individually. The important transformation of the film is Cash’s recognition of the error of choosing his individual success at the expense of his friends. Solidarity is both intimate and political, a solution to Cash’s economic problems and his existential malaise. He now has a purpose that is individually rewarding because it is not just about him.

As much as Sorry to Bother you offers a transformation of the imagination, subverting the myth of individual success with a tale of collective action, myth—the imagination—is not sufficient to transform the world. Both Spinoza and Marx recognized the power of imagination to shift perspective and overcome illusions. The imagination is the necessary precondition for, and handmaiden to, knowledge. The limited efficacy of the true as true means that sometimes only an imagination can dispense with another imagination. This thesis is central to Spinoza’s thought. In its own way, it is also operative in Marx, who recognized that theory must become a material force, and that it does so not so much by the power of pure critique, by dispelling illusions, but by invoking desires and fears—in other words, affects. Marx’s writings are populated by specters, vampires, and werewolves, and these fictions invoke and sustain the passions and sentiments. Only imagination can break the hold of the imagination, but only concepts can sustain the break. As I have tried to demonstrate, many of the popular sentiments of anti-work to be found in popular culture and theory often lapse into criticism of only one aspect of work under capitalism, glorifying bygone aspects of work and fantasies of return. Too many criticisms of work simply juxtapose this or that concrete labor, this or that job, against another concrete labor, another job, misrecognizing a particular job as an embodiment of abstract labor. Too many fantasies of transformation remain tied to the strategy of wage labor as a means for economic success and ethical well-being. Our imagination confines our practices, which in turn limit the imagination.

The particular double shift of Spinoza and Marx reveals to what extent the mode of production becomes a mode of striving, intimately lived in imagination and desires. This is how we come to struggle for servitude as if it was salvation, as Spinoza argues. This, in some sense, seems to be a circle in which practices shape the imagination, which in turn reproduces the same practices. However, the intimate reproduction of the mode of production is the basis for revolution as much as for its continuation. The very desires and imaginations that sustain the existing order are also conditions of its transformation. Work is the linchpin of the existing order, the thing that ties together worker and capitalist, but it also the lever of their unraveling, especially as the economic and ethical demands of work are increasingly at odds, leaving in their place a norm that is all the more pervasive as its demands become increasingly impossible. Work, and attachment to work, is both what holds current capitalism together at the level of the imagination and ideology, and what perpetually risks unraveling it at the level of affects and reality. Work is always pulling a double, always functioning both politically and economically, as the basis of our ideas and our practices; and often, that double shift is also a point of extreme tension and exhaustion. The critique of work is the precondition not just for economic transformation but for political transformation. It is possible for work to pull a double not just in our subjection, tying together our imagination and practices to the same ideal of wage labor, but in our liberation, creating new solidarities and new ways to imagine and live.

Notes

Introduction

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx/Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker, Norton, 1978, 475.

2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. and trans. C. J. Arthur, International, 1970, 47.

3. Franck Fischbach, Marx with Spinoza: Production, Alienation, History, trans. Jason Read, Edinburgh University Press, 2023, 72.

4. Étienne Balibar, On Universals: Constructing and Deconstructing Community, trans. Joshua David Jordan, Fordham University Press, 2020, 29.

5. Frédéric Lordon, La société des affects: Pour un structuralisme des passions, Seuil, 2013, 14.

6. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach, Penguin, 1978, 927.

7. Yves Citton, Mythocratie: Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche, Éditions Amsterdam, 2010, 16.

8. Alex Williams, “On Negative Solidarity and Post-Fordist Plasticity,” Splintering Bone Ashes (blog), January 31, 2010, splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com.

1. Pulling a Double, Part 1: The Work of the Economic in the Political

1. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach, Penguin, 1978, 927.

2. Étienne Balibar, “The Notion of Class Politics in Marx,” trans. Dominique Parent Ruccio and Frank R. Annunziato, Rethinking Marxism 1, no. 3, 1988, 34.

3. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin, 1977, 344.

4. Pierre Macherey, Le sujet productif, Éditions Amsterdam, 2014, 159, my translation.

5. Kojin Karatani, Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility, trans. Gavin Walker, Verso, 2020, 5.

6. Pierre Macherey, “The Productive Subject,” trans. Tijana Okić, Patrick King, and Cory Knudson, Viewpoint, October 31, 2015, 175.

7. Isabelle Garo, Communism and Strategy: Rethinking Political Mediations, trans. Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2023, 182.

8. Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Duke University Press, 2012, 51.

9. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, Cambridge University Press, 1993, 161.

10. Étienne Balibar, “On the Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism,” in Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach, Verso, 2015, 383.

11. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 680.

12. Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, trans. Joshua David Jordan, Semiotext(e), 2014, 45.

13. Pierre Macherey, “Althusser and the Concept of the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists,” trans. Robin Mackay, Parrhesia, no. 6, 2009, 16.

14. Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry Cleaver et al., Autonomedia, 1991, 131.

15. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, ed. S. W. Ryanzkaya, trans. I. Lasker, Progress, 1955, 186.

16. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 134.

17. Ibid., 138.

18. Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, vol. 2, trans. David Fernbach, Merlin, 1978, 40.

19. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. and trans. C. J. Arthur, International, 1970, 122.

20. Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner and Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2017, 153.

21. Pierre Bourdieu, “La double vérité du travail,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 114, September 1996, 90.

22. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology, Humanities Press, 1978, 30.

23. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 479.

24. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 172.

25. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 476.

26. Ibid., 475.

27. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, Women and the Subversion of Community, Pétroluise, 1971, 2.

28. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Common Notions, 2012, 16.

29. Jason Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation, Reaktion Books, 2020, 125.

30. André Tosel, Du retour du religieux: Scénarios de la mondialisation culturelle, vol. 1, Éditions Kimé, 2011, 141.

31. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, 1991, 232.

32. Axel Honneth, “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition,” in The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Lexington, 2010, 231.

33. Paolo Virno, Déjà Vu and the End of History, trans. David Broder, Verso, 2015, 162.

34. Productivity functions as an infra-ideology, an ideology that is oriented by and through productive activity rather than imposed on it through politics. Pierre Macherey, Le sujet des normes, Éditions Amsterdam, 2014, 339.

35. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin, 1973, 396.

36. Franck Fischbach, Après la production: Travail, nature, et capital, Vrin, 2019, 134.

37. André Tosel, Émancipations aujourd’hui: Pour une reprise critique, Éditions du Croquant, 2016, 86.

38. As Jonathan Crary defines this demand for 24/7 work, “24/7 is a time of indifference, against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate and within which sleep has no necessity or inevitability. In relation to labor, it renders plausible, even normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits. It is aligned with what is inanimate.inert, or unageing.” Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Verso, 2013, 9.

39. Brian X. Chen, “In Busy Silicon Valley Protein Powder Is in Demand,” New York Times, May 4, 2015.

40. Nicholas Smith, “Three Normative Models of Work,” New Philosophies of Labour, Brill, 2012, 202.

41. Pierre Macherey, Petits riens: Ornières et derives du quotidien, Le Bord de L’Eau, 2014, 54.

42. G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets et al., Hackett, 1991, 284.

43. Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, vol. 1, trans. David Fernbach, Merlin, 1978, 53.

44. Macherey, Petit riens, 63.

45. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, Penguin, 1975, 386.

46. Spinoza, Ethics, EID7.

47. Pierre Macherey, Avec Spinoza: Études sur la doctrine et l’histoire du spinozisme, PUF, 1992, 86.

48. André Tosel, Spinoza ou l’autre (in)finitude, L’Harmattan, 2008, 165.

49. André Tosel, Du materialisme de Spinoza, Éditions Kimé, 1994, 25.

50. Spinoza, Ethics, EIP36

51. Franck Fischbach, Marx with Spinoza: Production, Alienation, History, trans. Jason Read, Edinburgh University Press, 2023, 23.

52. Spinoza, Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley, Hackett, 2000, 43.

53. Tosel, Du materialisme de Spinoza, 26, my translation.

54. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIP18S.

55. Lorenzo Vinciguerra, Spinoza et le signe: La genèse de l’imagination, Vrin, 2005, 201.

56. Spinoza, Ethics, EIApp.

57. Spinoza, Ethics, EIVPref.

58. Frédéric Lordon, La condition anarchique, Seuil, 2018, 228.

59. As Marx writes, “A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally.” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 284.

60. Paolo Virno has stressed this understanding of figures of speech according to the division of labor. As Virno writes, “Special places are ways of thinking/saying something which end up being appropriate at a local political party headquarters, or in a church, or in a university classroom, or among sport fans of a certain team.” For Virno, the rise of commonplaces in speech stems from the increasingly undetermined and abstract nature of labor. Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson, Semiotext(e), 2004, 36–7.

61. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIP40S.

62. For a discussion of the different senses of work within the history of philosophy, see Alexis Cukier, Qu’est-ce que le travail?, Vrin, 2018.

63. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIP40S.

64. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 267.

65. For a discussion of this unresolved problem, see Frank Ruda’s Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Bloomsbury, 2011.

66. Spinoza, Ethics, EIVAppXXVIII.

67. On this point, it is useful to contrast Spinoza with Marx’s essay “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society,” in which money is not just a universal object of desire because of the objects it can purchase but is “the alienated ability of mankind” because of its ability to purchase human capacities. For more on this see Jason Read, The Politics of Transindividuality, Haymarket, 2017.

68. Frédéric Lordon, Vivre sans? Institutions, police, travail, argent, La Fabrique Éditions, 2019, 224.

69. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 441.

70. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, Harper, 1911, 6.

71. As Michel Foucault writes, “If economic exploitation separates the force and the product of labor, let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, Vintage, 1977, 138. See also Stéphane Legrand, “Le Marxisme oublié de Foucault,” Actuel Marx, no. 36, 2002, 27–43.

72. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 457.

73. Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor, 176.

74. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 458.

75. Fishbach, Après la production, 79.

76. Marx, Grundrisse, 273.

77. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 450.

78. Étienne Balibar, “Class Racism,” trans. Chris Turner, in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Verso, 1991, 211.

79. Plato, The Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve, Hackett, 2004, 48.

80. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Hackett, 1993, 12.

81. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 84.

82. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, International, 1963, 136. On the history of the notion of the division of labor in Marx, see Ali Rattansi, Marx and the Division of Labour, Macmillian, 1982.

83. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 477.

84. André Tosel, “Les deux voies de l’imaginaire neoliberal et leur tension,” Noeisis, no. 20, 2012, 202.

85. Arlie Russel Hochschild, in her examination of the emotional labor of flight attendants, argues that as the airline industry was deregulated and sought more profits in larger planes and longer trips, the flight attendants felt it was impossible for them to provide the sort of services in which they prided themselves. Arlie Russell Hochshild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, University of California Press, 1983, 122.

86. Weeks, The Problem with Work, 68.

87. As Pierre Macherey argues, productivity, the demand to be productive, functions as what he calls an infra-ideology: unlike a more explicit ideology, there is no attempt to create an overarching narrative to explain the value of productivity; productivity is its own value and is all the more ubiquitous for being self-grounding.

88. Frédéric Lordon, Figures du communisme, La Fabrique Éditions, 2021, 230.

89. Immanuel Wallerstein, “Ideological Tensions of Capitalism,” in Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class.

90. Elizabeth D. Esch, The Color Line and the Assembly Line: Managing Race in the Ford Empire, University of California Press, 2018, 10.

91. As the tasks of housework such as cleaning, food preparation, and care for children and the elderly become waged concrete labor, these two different forms of hierarchy intersect in the gender and racial division of labor defining care work. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs 18, no. 1, Autumn 1992, 1–43.

92. André Tosel, Essai pour une culture du futur, Éditions du Croquant, 2014, 66.

93. Yves Schwartz, Experience et connaissance du travail, Éditions Sociales, 1988, 685.

94. Lucien Sève has argued that a Marxist theory of personality would necessarily begin with the contradiction between concrete and abstract labor. Lucien Sève, Marxisme et théorie de la personnalité, Éditions Sociales, 1969, 384, my translation.

95. Franck Fischbach, La critique sociale au cinema, Vrin, 2012, 11.

96. Anna Kornbluh, Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club, Bloomsbury, 2019, 109.

97. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture, Verso, 1980, 41.

98. Ivor Southwood, Non-stop Inertia, Zero Books, 2010, 27.

99. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, Zero Books, 2009, 40.

100. Hochschild, Managed Heart, 19.

101. Sheila Liming, Office, Bloomsbury, 2020, 46.

102. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 39.

103. Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and the Commodity Form, Harvard University Press, 2020, 181.

104. Office Space, written and dir. Mike Judge, Twentieth Century Fox, 1999.

105. Melissa Gregg, Work’s Intimacies, Polity, 2011, 16.

106. Judge, Office Space.

107. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols, Cornell, 1969, 27.

108. Mark Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, Penguin, 2009, 15.

109. The narrator’s name is never given in the film. He sometimes refers to himself as “Jack,” a name he borrows from a magazine article.

110. Fight Club, dir. David Fincher, written by Jim Uhls from the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, Fox 2000 Pictures, 1999.

111. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, MIT Press, 1972, 100.

112. Fincher, Fight Club.

113. David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, Penguin, 2018, 10.

114. Ibid., xvii.

115. Fincher, Fight Club.

116. Ibid.

117. Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, trans. David Barison, Daniel Ross, and Patrick Crogan, Stanford University Press, 2009, 48.

118. Kornbluh, Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club, 143.

119. Mathias Nilges, “The Anti-Anti-Oedipus: Representing Post-Fordist Subjectivity,” Mediations 23, no. 2, 2008, 56.

120. Fincher, Fight Club.

121. Ibid.

122. The state of Oregon—where Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, lives—is one of the few states in which self-service gas stations are illegal and thus one of two states where you can still pump gas as a job.

123. Henry Giroux and Imre Szeman, “Ikea Boy Fights Back: Fight Club, Consumerism, and the Political Limits of Nineties Cinema,” in The End of Cinema as We Know It, New York University Press, 2001, 100.

124. Fincher, Fight Club.

125. The television show primarily takes place in a house in Silicon Valley that is also an “incubator,” a workspace devoted to the development of new technology. Spatially and temporally, there is no division between working time and any other time. As Sarah Jaffe argues, this is integral to the business model of corporations like Google and Facebook, which often include cafeterias, fitness centers, and games within the workspace. Sarah Jaffe, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, Bold Type Books, 2021, 275. We will return to this in chapter 2.

2. Pulling a Double, Part 2: The Work of the Material in the Mental

1. Franck Fischbach, Philosophies de Marx, Vrin, 2015, 59.

2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. and trans. C. J. Arthur, International, 1970, 51.

3. Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, trans. G. M. Goshgarin, Verso, 2014, 42.

4. As Jamie K. McCallum argues, welfare reform programs meant to instruct individuals in the value of a job, such as the Work Experience Program, are often seen by their beneficiaries as the opposite. Rather than resulting in recognition and pride, the effects of their restrictions on time and even bathroom breaks are experienced as a form of discipline. Jamie K. McCallum, Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream, Basic Books, 2020, 170.

5. Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Marx and Spinoza on Desire, Verso, 2010, x.

6. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin, 1977, 718.

7. Ibid., 719.

8. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIDef.Affs.1.

9. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIP26.

10. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, Penguin, 1975, 377.

11. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIP54.

12. Jamie Woodcock’s study of work at a call center in the UK offers an interesting point of contrast between the games and pleasures imposed by the corporation. As Woodcock writes, “These collective acts of workers were separated from the attempted gamification of work that supervisors pushed during buzz sessions and throughout the shift.” Jamie Woodcock, Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres, Pluto, 2017, 44.

13. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, University of Minnesota Press, 1983, 351.

14. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Hackett, 1994, 177.

15. Lisa Eadicco, “Apple Stores Make an Insane Amount of Money,” Time, May 18, 2016.

16. Jonny Bonning, “Claps and Cheers: Apple Stores Carefully Managed Drama,” Guardian, December 4, 2018.

17. David Segal, “Apple’s Retail Army: Long on Loyalty, Short on Pay,” New York Times, June 23, 2012.

18. Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital, 84.

19. Peter Fleming, The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists despite Itself, Pluto, 2015, 84.

20. Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital, 37.

21. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIP17S.

22. Jacques-Louis Lantoine, L’Intelligence de la pratique: Le concept de disposition chez Spinoza, ENS, 2019, 57.

23. Christophe Dejours, Travail vivant, vol. 1, Payot, 2013, 26.

24. Ibid., 28.

25. Christophe Dejours, Travail: Usure mentale, Bayard, 2015, 136.

26. Ivor Southwood, Non-stop Inertia, Zero Books, 2010, 27.

27. Trebor Sholz, Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy, Polity, 2017, 69.

28. Jason Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation, Reaktion Books, 2020, 110.

29. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford, 1977, 132.

30. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIP51.

31. Frédéric Lordon, La société des affects, Seuil, 2013, 94.

32. C. Wright Mills, White Collar, Oxford, 1951, 229. This passage is the epigraph to Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work, where it is situated alongside a passage from John Stuart Mills’s The Subjection of Women, in which he writes that women complain about their husband but not the general conditions of marriage. In each case, focus on the particular situation and the differences between specific situations obscures the structural condition.

33. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Duke, 2011, 1.

34. Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital, 76.

35. Spinoza, Ethics, EIVP1.

36. Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner and Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2017, 47.

37. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIP36.

38. Michèle Bertrand, Spinoza et l’imaginaire, PUF, 1983, 17.

39. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIP18S.

40. Lorenzo Vinciguerra, Spinoza et le signe: La genèse de l’imagination, Vrin, 2005, 114.

41. Ibid., 206.

42. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley, Hackett, 1991, 3.

43. Ibid., 222.

44. Ibid., 185.

45. Ibid., 178.

46. Ibid., 186.

47. Frédéric Lordon, Imperium: Structures and Affects of Political Bodies, trans. Andy Bliss, Verso, 2020, 160.

48. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 185.

49. Pierre Macherey, Sagesse ou ignorance? La question de Spinoza, Éditions Amsterdam, 2019, 160.

50. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, Vintage, 1977, 30.

51. Macherey, Sagesse ou ignorance, 211.

52. Ibid., 211.

53. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 199.

54. Maurizio Lazzarato, Les révolutions du capitalisme, Les Empéchers de Penser en Rond, 2004, 85.

55. Yves Citton, Mythocratie: Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche, Éditions Amsterdam, 2010, 28.

56. Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, trans. Daniel Ross, Polity, 2010, 35.

57. Bernard Stiegler, De la misère symbolique, vol. 1, Galilée, 2004, 33.

58. Citton, Mythocratie, 62.

59. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIDXXVIII.

60. Yves Citton, “Reading Literature and the Political Ecology of Gestures in the Age of Semiocapitalism,” New Literary History 44, 2013, 287.

61. Citton, Mythocratie, 31.

62. As Richard Sennett argues in The Corrosion of Character, there is a tendency in the US to reframe layoffs, downsizing, and other systemic shifts in employment as matters of individual responsibility and agency. As Sennett writes, describing one of his interlocutors, “Though many of these moves have not been of his own desiring he seldom used the passive voice in recounting the events. For instance, he dislikes the locution ‘I was downsized’; instead, when this event broke up his life in the Missouri office park he declared, ‘I faced a crisis and I had a decision to make.’ About this crisis he said, ‘I make my own choices, I take full responsibility for moving around so much.’ ” Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, Norton, 1998, 29. As Sennett goes on to write, the missing word in much discussion of contemporary work and working conditions is “we,” any sense of collectivity.

63. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIP9S.

64. Citton, Mythocratie, 68, my translation.

65. Yves Citton, Mediarchy, trans. Andrew Brown, Polity, 2019, 98.

66. Citton, Mythocratie, 75, my translation.

67. Yves Citton, Lire, interpréter, actualiser: Pourquoi les études littéraires, Éditions Amsterdam, 2017, 287.

68. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. D. Wootton, Hackett, 1991, 55.

69. Étienne Balibar, On Universals: Constructing and Deconstructing Community, trans. Joshua David Jordan, Fordham University Press, 2020, 31.

70. Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, trans. Gregory Elliott, Verso, 1999, 99.

71. Yves Citton, Mythocratie, 58.

72. Yves Citton and Frédéric Lordon, “Un devenir spinoziste des sciences sociales,” in Spinoza et les sciences sociales: De la puissance de a multitude à l’économie des affects, Éditions Amsterdam, 2008, 33.

73. Frédéric Lordon and André Orléan, “Genèse de l’État et genèse de la monnaie,” in Citton and Lordon, Spinoza et les sciences sociales, 209.

74. Ibid., 234.

75. Spinoza, Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley, Hackett, 2000, 64.

76. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach, Penguin, 1978, 969.

77. Alexandre Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969, 112, my translation.

78. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIP40S.

79. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIDVI.

80. Chantal Jaquet, Affects, Actions, and Passions in Spinoza: The Unity of Body and Mind, trans. Tatiana Reznichenko, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, 147.

81. Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Anti-work Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Duke University Press, 2012, 53.

82. Citton, Mythocratie, 84.

83. “I think it was [the] kind of situation where he didn’t realize the girl he was about to marry was so very wealthy and came from such a prominent family, and it kind of blew his mind and made him feel inferior and he overreacted. He just kind of checked out. I think there is that whole other side to the story, and it can be gleaned. This isn’t really the CliffsNotes version so much. These facts can be gleaned if you watch some of these scenes really closely enough, and you watch them without too much of an overriding bias toward Walt and against Gretchen and Elliott.” Vince Gilligan, quoted in Bill Bradley, “Vince Gilligan Finally Reveals Why Walter White Left Gray Matter,” Huffington Post, March 17, 2016.

84. Citton, Mythocratie, 101.

85. Chantal Jaquet, “Thinking Social Mobility with Spinoza”, Crisis and Critique 8, no. 1, 2021, 128.

86. Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 155.

87. Chantal Jaquet, Transclassses: A Theory of Social Non-reproduction, trans. Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2023, 24.

88. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, University of Minnesota Press, 1986, 15.

89. Ibid., 30.

90. Sennett, Corrosion of Character, 42.

91. André Tosel, Essai pour une culture de future, Éditions du Croquant, 2014, 75.

92. If one wanted to use a third term from Deleuze, one could say that both shows resort to the mental image, as the process of thought and calculation becomes internal to the image. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 198.

93. In 2017, one-third of all of the money raised on the website GoFundMe was for health care costs. Nathan Heller, “The Hidden Costs of GoFundMe Healthcare,” New Yorker, June 24, 2019.

94. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal, Mariner Books, 2012, 70.

95. Marx, Grundrisse, 693.

96. “Hazard Pay,” Breaking Bad, written by Peter Gould, dir. Adam Bernstein, AMC, July 29, 2012.

97. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 742.

98. “Kafkaesque,” Breaking Bad, written by Peter Gould and George Mastras, dir. Michael Slovis, AMC, May 16, 2010.

99. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson, Semiotext(e), 2004, 88.

100. Ibid., 61.

101. Ibid., 57

102. Ibid., 68.

103. As Marx writes, “The antagonism between the power of landed property, based on personal relations of domination and servitude, and the power of money, which is impersonal, is clearly expressed by the two French proverbs, ‘Nulle terre sans seigneur’ and ‘L’argent n’a pas de maitre.’ (‘No land without its lord’ and ‘Money has no master.’)” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 247.

104. Ibid., 1048.

105. Citton, Mythocratie, 113.

3. Pulling a Double, Part 3: The Work of Action in Production (and Vice Versa)

1. Jamie McCallum, Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream, Basic Books, 2020, 7.

2. Paolo Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus,” trans. Ed Emery, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 189.

3. Aristotle, Politics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, Random House, 1941, 1131. As Aaron Benanav writes, “Aristotle was himself a reverse automation theorist, justifying slavery by reference to the absence of self-moving machines.” Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work, Verso, 2020, 83.

4. John Locke, The Second Treatise on Government, Hackett, 1980, 19.

5. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, 1958, 157.

6. Hannah Arendt, “Labor, Work, Action,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, Penguin, 2000, 187.

7. Ibid., 180.

8. Ibid., 173.

9. Arendt, Human Condition, 108.

10. André Tosel, “Champ et dialectique des logiques de l’agi: Hannah Arendt et le paradis perdu de action,” Les logique de l’agir dans la modernité, Diffusion Les Belles Lettres, 1992, 37.

11. Arendt, Human Condition, 161.

12. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, 1973, 457. Arendt’s concern is not with the role of authoritarian power in the workplace, but what happens when the same logic of privation is extended into the public sphere.

13. Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, 51.

14. Paolo Virno, Déjà Vu and the End of History, trans. David Broder, Verso, 2015, 170.

15. Paolo Virno, “Reading Gilbert Simondon: Transindividuality, Technical Activity, and Reification,” Radical Philosophy, no. 136, March/April 2006, 38.

16. André Tosel, “Vers un théorie neo-marxienne de l’action,” Actuel Marx, 1996, 136.

17. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx/Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker, Norton, 1978, 481.

18. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin, 1977, 416.

19. Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present, SUNY, 2003, 93.

20. André Tosel, Études sur Marx (et Engels), Éditions Kimé, 1996, 31.

21. The reference here is to the phrase from Engels, “State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production.” Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, available at marxists.org.

22. Weeks, The Problem with Work, 84.

23. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, “#Accelerate Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Critical Legal Thinking (blog), May 14, 2013, criticallegalthinking.com.

24. Tosel, Études sur Marx, 45.

25. Spinoza, Ethics, EID7.

26. Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner and Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2017, 41.

27. André Tosel, Du matérialisme de Spinoza, Éditions Kimé, 1994, 25, my translation.

28. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. and trans. C. J. Arthur, International, 1970, 154.

29. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIAx2.

30. Jason Read, The Politics of Transindividuality, Brill, 2016, 32.

31. Franck Fishbach, Marx with Spinoza: Production, Alienation, History, trans. Jason Read, Edinburgh University Press, 2023, 70.

32. Louis Althusser, “The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza,” trans. Ted Stolze, in The New Spinoza, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 6.

33. Alexandre Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969, 90.

34. Spinoza, Ethics, EIApp.

35. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 163.

36. André Tosel, Spinoza; ou la crepuscule de la servitude: Essai sur le Traité Théologico-Politique, Aubier, 1984, 33, my translation.

37. André Tosel, Du retour du religieux: Scénarios de la mondialisation culturelle, vol. 1, Éditions Kime, 2011, 141.

38. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIP49.

39. Balibar, Philosophy of Marx, 67.

40. Étienne Balibar, Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, trans. Steven Miller, Fordham University Press, 2017, 199.

41. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, MIT Press, 1972, 87.

42. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 799.

43. Franco Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia, Semiotext(e), 2009, 35.

44. Frédéric Lordon argues that alienation must be understood as universal in the sense that everyone’s affects are determined by their encounters and relations, but that does not prevent people making a distinction between being motivated by sadness or desire. Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Marx and Spinoza on Desire, Verso, 2010, 58.

45. Berardi, The Soul at Work, 84.

46. Gerad Hanlon, The Dark Side of Management: A Secret History of Management Theory, Routledge, 2016, 152.

47. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIDI.

48. Jacques-Louis Lantoine, L’Intelligence de la pratique: Le concept de disposition chez Spinoza, ENS, 2019, 162, my translation.

49. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIP2S.

50. Barbara Stiegler, Il faut s’adapter: Sur un nouvel impératif politique, Gallimard, 2019, 284.

51. Grégorie Chamayou, The Ungovernable Society: A Genealogy of Authoritarian Liberalism, trans. Andrew Brown, Polity, 2021, 182.

52. Compliance, written and dir. Craig Zobel, Bad Cop Bad Cop Productions, 2010.

53. Dennis Lim, “Oh, I Wouldn’t Do That, Would I?,” New York Times, August 10, 2012. It is worth noting that the Milgram experiment functions less as a specific study than as a general point of reference for the willingness of people to submit to authority. What matters less is the specifics of the study than the general way it has infused culture, often paired with Arendt’s study on the banality of evil, to become shorthand for obedience in general. Stephen Reicher et al., “What Makes a Person a Perpetrator? The Intellectual, Moral, and Methodological Arguments for Revisiting Milgram’s Research on the Influence of Authority,” Journal of Social Issues 70, no. 3, 2014, 397.

54. Emily Guendelsberger, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, Little, Brown & Company, 2019, 9.

55. Ibid., 278.

56. Peter Fleming, The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists despite Itself, Pluto, 2015, 86.

57. Jason E. Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation, Reaktion Books, 2020, 113.

58. Aisha Harris, “How Many People Will Walk Out of Compliance,” Slate, August 7, 2012.

59. Dimitris Vardoulakis, Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism, Edinburgh University Press, 2020, 275.

60. Guendelsberger, On the Clock, 309.

61. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, PM Press, 2012, 16.

62. The tasks of Jane’s day at work, and the attitude her boss and coworkers display toward them, fit the asymmetrical moral universe of misogyny, in which women are expected to demonstrate more care and concern for men than they receive, as Kate Manne presents it. The only difference is that this asymmetrical moral economy is part of the wage economy, becoming a kind of care labor. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Oxford University Press, 2019, 49.

63. Smith, Smart Machines, 125.

64. The Assistant, written and dir. Kitty Green, 3311 Productions, 2019.

65. “One does not need to be an essentialist about traditionally ‘female’ traits (for example, loquacity, caring, relationality, empathy) to think that there is something notable going on here: women are encouraged to think of themselves as good communicators, the kind of person who’d be ‘ideal’ for agency or call centre work. The professional woman needs no specific skills as she is simply professional, that is to say, perfect for the kind of work that deals with communication in its purest sense.” Nina Power, One-Dimensional Woman, Zero Books, 2009, 18.

66. Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, Penguin, 1975, 362.

67. As David Graeber argues, the unpaid internship as a gateway to the culture industries and nonprofits effectively excludes anyone without a trust fund from such jobs. “In the US, it’s easier for a working-class kid to enter business or the military than to penetrate the cultural elite, heavily concentrated in the ‘internship-crazy’ professions, the anthropologist David Graeber observes. ‘A mechanic from Nebraska knows it is highly unlikely that his son or daughter will ever become an Enron executive, but it is possible,’ Graeber writes. ‘But there is virtually no chance that his child, no matter how talented, will ever become a human rights lawyer or a drama critic for the New York Times.’ Amalia Illgner, “Why I Am Suing over My Dream Internship,” Guardian, March 27, 2018.

68. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIP12.

69. Jamie McCallum has argued that the increase of emphasis on meaningful work correlates with the decline of wages and control over working conditions. As McCallum writes, “The concept of meaningful work has served as a kind of cultural scaffolding, what social scientists call a superstructure, for the building of the long-hours economy. It is not that beliefs about meaningfulness have forced us to work longer. Rather, those beliefs prompt us to look for individual value in a job rather than to transform our economy so that it works for everyone. Because of this popular ideology, the demands of the modern workplace seem like less of an imposition and more of a pathway to fulfillment.” McCallum, Worked Over, 27.

70. Jennifer Silva, Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty, Oxford University Press, 2015, 11.

71. Robert Castel, La montée des incertitudes: Travail, protections, statut de l’individu, Seuil, 2009, 416.

72. Silva, Coming Up Short, 115; Castel, La montée des incertitudes, 436.

73. Silva, Coming Up Short, 109.

74. David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, Penguin, 2018, 242.

75. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIDXXVIII.

76. Daniel HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity, University of Minnesota Press, 2019, 19.

77. Ibid., 43.

78. “On Negative Solidarity and Post-Fordist Plasticity,” Splintering Bone Ashes (blog), January 31, 2010, splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com.

79. Yves Citton, Renverser l’insoutenable, Seuil, 2012, 68.

80. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 474.

81. Ibid., 71.

82. As Peter Fleming argues, “managerialism” redefines management as the central skill defining and determining the fate of corporations and other institutions. It is defined as not only fundamental, but fundamentally transferable and thus able to operate in a variety of institutions (Fleming, The Mythology of Work, 91). To refer back to the terms of chapter 1, it is related to abstract labor, never concrete labor.

83. Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital, 38.

84. Étienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas, trans. James Swenson, Routledge, 1994, 52.

85. Yves Citton, Mediarchy, trans. Andrew Brown, Polity, 2019, 99.

86. Yves Citton, “Populism and the Empowering Circulation of Myths,” Open!, 2010, 177.

87. Alexandre Matheron, Politics, Ontology, and Knowledge in Spinoza, Edinburgh University Press, 2020, 127.

88. Indignation is defined by Spinoza in EIIIP22S as “hatred toward him who has done evil to another,” but, as Matheron argues, this definition is expanded upon in the discussion of the imitation of affects in the demonstration of Proposition 27. The definition is restated in the corollary of that proposition. Spinoza gives a final formulation of indignation in his “Definitions of the Affects” at the end of part 3: “Indignation is a hate towards someone who has done evil to another” (EIIIDefXX).

89. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIP29.

90. Pierre Macherey, Introduction à l’ethique de Spinoza: La troisième partie, la vie affective, PUF, 1995, 233.

91. Étienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. James Swenson, Verso, 1998, 88.

92. Étienne Balibar, Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy, trans. G. M. Goshgarian, Columbia University Press, 2015, 12.

93. Weeks, The Problem with Work, 65.

94. HoSang and Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, Patriots, 56.

95. Spinoza, Ethics, EIIIP49.

96. Spinoza, Ethics, EIVP11.

97. Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital, 95, translation modified.

98. Frédéric Lordon, Les affects de la politique, Seuil, 2016, 130.

99. This, in some sense, is the question underlying Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives. Why do people in the US put up with things from their employers, such as massive restrictions of rights, that they would never tolerate from government? Anderson’s answer has to do with a lingering and misplaced belief in the idea of the free market as a force of liberation, an idea that is a remnant from capitalism at its formation and is increasingly out of pace with large-scale industry. Reading Marx and Spinoza, it is possible to argue that this has less to do some remnant of older ideals than the current function of the imagination and affects.

Conclusion

1. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Verso, 2013, 100.

2. John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, Haymarket, 2018, 94.

3. André Tosel, Essai pour une culture du futur, Éditions du Croquant, 2014, 27.

4. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin, 1977, 873.

5. Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Marx and Spinoza on Desire, Verso, 2014, 109–10.

6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx/Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker, Norton, 1978, 476.

7. Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Normal Madarasz, State University of New York Press, 1999, 56.

8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al., University of Minnesota Press, 1983, 258.

9. As André Tosel argues, utilizing the Lacanian language of the Imaginary and Symbolic, money and work are never entirely imaginary, exceeding and falling short of identification, and never quite symbolic, lacking stable differences. André Tosel, Du retour du religieux: Scénarios de la mondialisation culturelle, vol. 1, Éditions Kime, 2011, 137.

10. Pierre Macherey, Les sujet des normes, Éditions Amsterdam, 2014, 339.

11. Michèle Bertrand, Spinoza et l’imaginaire, PUF, 1983, 19.

12. Yves Citton, Mythocratie: Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche, Éditions Amsterdam, 2010, 75.

13. Sorry to Bother You, written and dir. Boots Riley, Cinereach, 2018.

14. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson, Semiotext(e), 2004, 63.

15. Jamie Woodcock, Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres, Pluto, 2017, 115. As Woodcock argues, the sense that telemarketing is a “bullshit job” often undermines the ability to organize the work.

16. Rani Molla, “Co-Living Is the New Having Roomates—With an App,” Vox, April 29, 2019.

17. Wu Ming, “Fetishism of Digital Commodities: The Case of Amazon and Apple,” Mute, October 11, 2011, metamute.org.

18. Riley, Sorry to Bother You.

19. Spinoza, Ethics, EIVP1.

20. Bryant Sculos, “Sorry to Bother You with Twelve Theses on Sorry to Bother You,” Class, Race, and Corporate Power 7, no. 6, 2019.

Index

n denotes footnote

A

abstract labor, 20–5, 28–31, 33, 39, 47, 50, 51–6, 57, 62, 72, 74, 84, 111, 141–2, 181, 189, 190

action

as determining production, 192

nature of, 136–8

work of in production, 135–88

affective dimension, bringing of into realm of labor relation, 86

affects. See also labor, affective composition of

according to Spinoza, 5, 36, 42, 87, 91, 112, 179, 180–1

binary logic of, 101

hope and fear as, 86

love and hate as, 107

negative solidarity as. See negative solidarity

Alger, Horatio, 94, 116, 198

alienation, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 29, 30, 31, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 54, 55, 57, 62, 63, 64, 67, 69, 72, 73, 74, 75, 101, 110, 142, 153–4, 154, 168, 169, 173, 189, 190, 198

All That Jazz (film), 122

alternation, logic of, 112, 113, 133, 156

Althusser, Louis, 78, 106, 117, 148

Anderson, Elizabeth, 186n99

Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 83

anti-work, 56, 157, 203

Apple

on aligning profit with square footage, 84

as transforming labor relation by bringing consumption into retail, 85

Arendt, Hannah, 137, 138–41, 142

Aristotle, 136–7, 140, 145, 146

The Assistant (film), 9, 157, 163–6, 169

attenuation, 176, 178, 179, 183, 188

automation, 44, 155, 188

B

Badiou, Alain, 193–4

Balibar, Étienne, 46, 94, 177, 181

Becky (fictional character in Compliance), 161

Berlant, Lauren, 187

Better Call Saul (TV show), 9, 114, 115–16, 118, 119–25, 129–33, 135, 170, 171

body men, 46, 47, 77

Bourdieu, Pierre, 23, 117

Breaking Bad (TV show), 9, 114–15, 116, 118, 119–29, 132–3, 135, 170, 171

bullshit job, origin of term, 64

Bullshit Jobs (Graeber), 64, 173

C

Capital (Marx), 6–7, 12, 15, 19, 21, 24, 43, 49, 144, 148–51

capitalism

according to Marx, 13–14

as founded on way in which self-interest/desire has been affected or modified by social relations, 82–3

history of, 52, 93

Marx on appearance of, 19

modernization of, 194–5

social domination in, 17

spontaneous ideology of. See spontaneous ideology

and surplus value. See surplus value, 18

Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari), 194

capitalist exploitation, regimes of according to Lordon, 83–7

Cassius “Cash” Green (fictional character in Sorry to Bother You), 197–201, 202

Castel, Robert, 172

Chamayou, Grégoire, 156

Charles “Chuck” McGill (fictional character on Better Call Saul), 116–17, 118, 131

Citton, Yves, 10, 93–4, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105–6, 109–10, 111, 113, 114, 155, 176, 178

Clinton, Bill, 183

collective worker, according to Marx, 44

Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (Silva), 171

commodity

according to Marx, 150–1

labor power as, 13–16, 19

commodity fetishism, 148, 149, 151–2, 153, 156, 157, 186

The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engel), 25, 143, 193. See also Manifesto (Marx and Engels)

Compliance (film), 9, 157–63, 166, 168

concrete labor, 20–1, 23, 31, 39, 46, 47, 50–6, 57, 62, 63, 72, 73, 84, 111, 121, 181, 189

Crary, Jonathan, 189–90

Crawford, Matthew, 61–2

cruel optimism, 187

D

Dejours, Christoph, 88–9, 123

Deleuze, Gilles, 83, 120, 121, 194–5

desire

according to Spinoza, 80–1, 82, 103–4, 107–8, 154–5

capitalism as integral to, 81

intransitive nature of, 81–2

determination, as becoming desire, 155–6

Detroit (fictional character in Sorry to Bother You), 198, 200

double determination

of action and production, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 187

of ideas and images of work, 103, 115

of making a living to finding meaning, 156

of the mental and the material, 190

between politics and work, 133

double shifts

of the economic and the political, 6–8, 12–75

of the material and the mental, 8, 76–134

of production and action, 8–9, 135–88

E

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx), 30, 166–7

eggheads, 47, 77

Eisenstein, Sergei, 121

emancipation, 16, 17, 19, 20, 105

emotional labor, 9, 56, 58, 62, 72, 73, 90, 91, 161

empty aestheticism, 120

The Encyclopaedia Logic (Hegel), 32

Engels, Friedrich, 24, 143, 176, 193

ethics. See also abstract labor; concrete labor

of labor, 50, 123

of political economy, 168

political economy of, 168

use of term, 54

of work, 57, 62, 72, 88

Ethics (Spinoza), 37, 42, 94, 105, 148–51, 156

exploitation, 15, 18–19, 53, 65, 77–8, 79, 83, 145, 158, 176, 179, 184, 200–1, 202

F

Federici, Silvia, 26

fetishism of the commodity, 148, 149, 151–2, 153, 156, 157, 186

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 95

Fight Club (film), 9, 56, 63–74

film, representation of work in, 56. See also specific films

Fischbach, Franck, 56

Fisher, Mark, 58–9

flair (in work), 58, 59, 61, 62, 68, 90

Fleming, Peter, 85, 86, 177n82

Fordism, 83, 86, 87, 89, 93, 109, 154, 171

formal subsumption, 43, 46, 83, 126

Foucault, Michel, 44n71, 99

Freud, Sigmund, 88

G

Garo, Isabelle, 16, 17, 19

German Idealists, 2

The German Ideology (Marx), 2, 5, 45–6, 76, 94–5

Gilligan, Vince, 117

Graeber, David, 64–5, 168n67, 173, 174

Greene, Kitty, 157–8

Gretchen (fictional character on Breaking Bad), 117

Griffith, D. W., 121

Grundrisse (Marx), 29

Guattari, Félix, 83, 194–5

Guendelsberger, Emily, 159, 162

Gustavo “Gus” Fring (fictional character on Breaking Bad), 125–6, 127

H

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 40, 41, 62, 88

Hobbes, Thomas, 35, 83, 98

Hochschild, Arlie Russel, 51n85, 91

Honneth, Axel, 28

HoSang, Daniel, 175

Howard Hamlin (fictional character on Better Call Saul), 116–17

I

ideas

according to Jaquet, 112

according to Marx, 95

according to Spinoza, 95, 178–9

ruling ideas, 3, 10, 76, 94, 101, 105, 106

ideology

according to Citton, 109–10, 111

according to Lordon, 109, 111

conception of, 1–2

extra-economic nature of, 2

Marx’s definition of, 3

Marx’s initial formulation of, 76–7

as original form of consciousness, 5

spontaneous ideology. See spontaneous ideology

structure of, 94–5

of work, 78–9

work as powerful linchpin of, 3

imagination

according to Citton, 104–5

according to Marx, 202–3

according to Spinoza, 95–6, 99, 101–2, 202

as intersection of habits and actions, 196

immanence

of economic to politics (and politics to economics), 6

of ideology to bodies (and bodies to ideology), 6

of praxis to poiesis (and poiesis to praxis), 6

indignation, according to Spinoza, 179n88

individual expression, 31–2

infra-ideology, 195–6

ingenium (character), 36, 99, 100, 108, 160, 180

intersections

of action and production, 8, 143, 144, 146–7, 169

of affect and modality, 185

of concrete and abstract labor, 24, 50

of economy and politics, 7, 143, 189

of habits and actions, 196

of ideas and ideology, 8

of imagination and reason, 179

of labor and consumption, 81

between Marx and Spinoza, 4–6, 8, 33, 156, 184

of mind and body, 80

of passivity and activity, 101

between work, ideology, and politics, 5

of work and gender, 69

between work and subjectivity, 43

J

James “Jimmy” McGill (fictional character on Better Call Saul), 115, 116, 117, 122, 123, 124, 129–30, 131, 132

Jane (fictional character in The Assistant), 163–6

Jaquet, Chantal, 88, 112–13, 117, 118–19

Jesse (fictional character on Breaking Bad), 125

Joanna (fictional character in Office Space), 58

joy, according to Spinoza, 83

Judge, Mike, 57

K

knowledge, according to Spinoza, 96

Kojève, Alexandre, 62

Kornbluh, Anna, 66

L

labor

abstract labor. See abstract labor

according to Hegel, 27

affective composition of, 88, 89–93, 109, 134, 153, 161, 165, 170–3, 175

capital as failing to eliminate gendered division of, 26

concrete labor. See concrete labor

distinction between labor and work, 138

division of, 45–50, 53, 78

emotional labor. See emotional labor

as expression and discipline, 32

as form of social cohesion, 27

gendered divisions of, 25–6, 53, 73

living labor, 20, 55, 62, 134

manual labor. See manual labor

Marx on division of, 44, 45–6

mental labor, 33, 77

as model for thought, 33

mythic composition of, 92–113

as source of value, 20

Spinoza on ontology and anthropology of, 42

as terrain of self-realization, 170

wage labor. See wage labor

labor power

according to Marx, 139

as commodity, 13–16, 19

selling of, 17

labor process, according to Marx, 43

labor relation

according to Lordon, 82

Apple as transforming of by bringing consumption into retail, 85

as determining political relation, 74

Lordon as bringing affective dimension into realm of, 86

as producing its own spontaneous ideology, 74

language, general associations of, 39–40

Lawrence (fictional character in Office Space), 60, 61

Lazzarato, Maurizio, 100

living labor, 20, 55, 62, 134

Locke, John, 35, 137

Lordon, Frédéric, 79–89, 92–3, 94, 109, 110, 111, 113, 155, 170, 172, 185–6, 193

Lowndes, Joseph E., 175

loyalty, Apple as brand with high degree of, 85

Lukács, Georg, 21–2, 64, 152

M

Macherey, Pierre, 14, 15–16, 34, 195

Machiavelli, 3, 106

management, central goal of contemporary management, 86

Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 25

manual labor, 24, 57, 62, 67, 72, 73, 76, 77

Marla (fictional character in Fight Club), 69–70

Marx, Karl. See also Capital (Marx); The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engel); Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx); The German Ideology (Marx); Grundrisse (Marx); The Poverty of Philosophy (Marx); “Theses on Feuerbach” (Marx)

on abstract labor, 21–2, 24–5, 28–9, 33

on camera obscura, 177

in Capital, 6–7

on capitalism, 13–15

on capitalist subject as split, 166–7

on determination, 36

on division between the ethics of political economy and the political economy of ethics, 168

on division of labor, 44, 45–6, 49

on double determination, 143

figure of base and superstructure, 1–2

on formal subsumption, 83

on free association of producers, 145

on humans as conditioned beings, 35

on ideas, 95

on identity of consciousness and life, 94

on ideology, 2, 3

ideology as woefully underdeveloped concept in, 5

on imagination, 202–3

intersection of with Spinoza, 4–6, 8, 33, 156, 184

on labor as form of social cohesion, 27

on labor power, 139

on living labor, 55

on mental component of work/production, 38

on mental dimension of human labor, 77

on money as alienated capacity of mankind, 81

on “now hidden, now open fight,” 176

on organization of production, 144

on primitive accumulation, 191

on relation between capital and its outside, 168

on relation of politics and work, 12–13

on relation of wage labor to exploitation, 18–19

on religion of everyday life under capitalism, 195

on ruling ideas as idea of ruling class, 3, 10, 76, 94, 101, 105, 106

on selling of labor power, 17

strategy of, 148–50

on subjectification, 153

on survival as mediated by social relations and their representations, 79–80

on symbolic dimension to work, 193

on thinking, 147

on truth, 201–2

Matheron, Alexandre, 110, 179

McCallum, Jamie K., 78n4, 170n69

mental labor, 33, 77

meritocratic neoliberalism, 190

meta-conduct of conducts, 102

meta-scenes, 102–3

Michael (fictional character in Office Space), 60

Milgram, Stanley, 159, 160, 162

Mills, C. Wright, 92

money

according to Spinoza, 42, 108–9

work as represented as condition of, 109

montage, 120–1, 122

Mrs. Landry (fictional character on Better Call Saul), 123

mythocracy, 10, 93, 103, 105, 106, 111, 114, 125, 182, 198, 202

Mythocratie: Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche (Mythocracy: storytelling and the imaginary of the left) (Citton), 93–4

N

negative solidarity, 10, 11, 176, 179, 182–3, 184, 186, 187, 189, 192, 200, 202

neoliberalism, 83, 86, 89, 93, 109, 171, 190

Ngai, Sianne, 59

nonreproduction, 88, 117, 118–19

noopolitics, 100

O

obedience, according to Spinoza, 97–9

Office Space (film), 9, 56, 57–61, 63, 65, 67, 71, 72–4, 86, 90

office work, as dominant type of work, 57

The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 140

P

Peter (fictional character in Office Space), 57, 59–60, 61

Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 31

Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 27, 31, 41

Plato, 47, 48, 49

Political Treatise (Spinoza), 179

politics, relation of work to, 12–13

Postone, Moishe, 17

The Poverty of Philosophy (Marx), 49

primitive accumulation, 83, 86, 191–2

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (Anderson), 186n99

producerism, 175–6

production

as determining action, 192

Marx on mental component of, 38

reproduction of relations of, 80

as separate from social reproduction, 26

Spinoza on mental component of, 38

work of action in production, 135–88

work of in action, 135–88

productive worker, according to Marx, 45

proletarianization, 100

Prometheus, 3–4

R

rabble, according to Hegel, 41

Raymond K. Hessel (fictional character in Fight Club), 70

real subsumption, 43, 44–5, 46

Republic (Plato), 47, 48

Ricardo, David, 20

Riley, Boots, 197

ruling ideas. See ideas

S

sadness, according to Spinoza, 83

Sandra (fictional character in Compliance), 158, 161

Saul Goodman (fictional character on Breaking Bad), 115, 125, 129, 132

Scheider, Roy, 122

seeing the better and doing the worse, 168–9

self-made men, 114–33

Sennett, Richard, 103n62, 121, 123

services

as emergent type of work, 57

Fight Club’s critical stance toward, 68–9

Sève, Lucien, 54–5

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Crawford), 61

Silicon Valley (TV show), 73

Silva, Jennifer, 171, 172

skilled manual labor, as residual type of work, 57

Skylar White (fictional character on Breaking Bad), 122, 128

Smith, Adam, 20, 48–9

social recognition, 27, 28, 31–2

social reproduction, 26, 117, 163–4

social wage, 172

Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 24, 44

Sorry to Bother You (film), 11, 197–202

Southwood, Ivor, 90

Spinoza, Baruch, 33. See also Political Treatise (Spinoza); Theological-Political Treatise (Spinoza)

on affective composition of labor, 91

on affects, 5, 36, 42, 87, 91, 112, 179, 180–1

on appetite plus consciousness, 80

on desire, 80–1, 82, 103–4, 107–8, 154–5

on determination, 34–7

on excessive pride, 101

on general associations of language, 39–40

on how we make sense of the world, 37–8

on humans as conditioned beings, 35

on ideas, 95, 178–9

on ideology, 5

on imagination, 95–6, 99, 101–2, 202

on indignation, 179n88

on ingenium. See ingenium (character)

intersection of with Marx, 4–6, 8, 33, 156, 184

on intersections of affect and modality, 185

on joy, 83

on knowledge, 96

on mental component of work/production, 38

on money, 108–9

money according to, 42

on obedience, 97–9

on ontology and anthropology of labor, 42

on the order and connection of ideas, 94

on power of the intellect, 105

on sadness, 83

on seeing the better and doing the worse, 168–9

semiotics of, 96–7

strategy of, 148–50

on thinking, 147

on truth, 201

understanding of nascent capitalism by, 42

on universals, 40

on workers working for their own exploitation rather than revolution, 79

Splintering Bone Ashes (blog), 176

spontaneous ideology, 10, 20, 49, 74, 77–9, 111, 115–16, 149, 156

spontaneous illusion, 150

spontaneous philosophy, 149, 150

Stiegler, Bernard, 100–1

Stirner, Max, 95

storytelling, Citton’s emphasis on, 105–6

strategy

losing strategy, 183–8

of Marx, 148–50

of Spinoza, 148–50

Strike! (magazine), 64

subjectification, according to Marx, 153

surplus value, 7, 16, 18, 144

symbolic violence, 193

T

Taylor Frederick, 43–4

television, representation of work in, 56. See also specific TV shows

Theological-Political Treatise (Spinoza), 4, 97

“Theses on Feuerbach” (Marx), 22–3

Tosel, André, 30, 35, 143, 144, 145, 146, 151, 195n9

transclass, 117, 118, 119

triple determination, 146–7

truth

according to Marx, 201–2

according to Spinoza, 201

Tyler Durden (fictional character in Fight Club), 66, 68, 69, 70, 71

U

unwaged work, 26, 175

use value, 20, 21, 27, 46, 52, 71, 72, 151

V

Van (fictional character in Compliance), 161

Vardoulakis, Dimitris, 162

Virno, Paolo, 130–1, 136, 141, 142–3, 163, 189, 197

W

wage labor

absence of any alternative to, 83

as better way to secure happiness and success than political action or involvement, 135

described, 109, 123, 190

as only way to make a living, 155

relation of to exploitation, 18–19

understanding of, 9

Walter White (fictional character on Breaking Bad), 114–15, 118, 122–9, 132

Walter White Jr. (fictional character on Breaking Bad), 124–5

Weeks, Kathi, 17

Weinstein, Harvey, 158, 163

Wilcock (fictional character in The Assistant), 165

Williams, Alex, 10, 176

Women’s work, view of, 26

Woodcock, Jamie, 82n12

work

according to Dejours, 88

according to Hegel, 28

as answer to every problem, 4

as basis of human existence and consciousness, 5

as both production and action, 156

distinction between labor and work, 138

as entailing its own ideology, 2, 3

flair in. See flair (in work)

joys and sorrows of, 89

as lived on level that is affective as much as intellectual, 3

Marx on mental component of, 38

as means to something else, 138

as model of all activity, 135–6

mythic transformation of, 114

as physics of determination and causation, 33

relation of to politics, 12–13

as religion of daily life, 27, 108, 151–2, 192–6

representation of in film and television, 56

as represented as condition of money, 109

Spinoza on mental component of, 38

as terrain of self-realization, 170

types of (dominant, residual, and emergent), 57

unwaged work, 26, 175

women’s work, 26

Z

Zobel, Craig, 157