Involutions, excrescences, systemic dynamics
'ineluctable macroprocesses' in Weber, and Gorz' shift from labour in Marx and Arendt, to the emergence of work as function
This post is one of those ones where I am posting this to push things along, give myself a toe hold on a number of bits and pieces I’ve already covered, and express my commitment to thinking by writing (forwards ever, backwards never) at speed.
So what you will read here is effectively my preliminary ‘calculations’, as I try to work this stuff through, in the course of one short writing session.
So this post is a work in progress, and it’s about getting back to Gorz’ Critique of Economic Reason, which I want to resume reading closely, as well as bridging from some of the earlier workings out I did in December, where I tried to set up the following distinctions:
Defining 'job', 'labour', 'work': 'job', 'bullshit job', 'shit job'
Defining 'job', 'labour', 'work': what then is labour, how is it distinct from 'job' and 'work'?
Defining 'job', 'labour', 'work': the meaning of work (where we also derive meaning)
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Well then, as Montaigne entitled one of his essays: “by diverse means we arrive at the same end”.
I had no direct intention of boomeranging back to Gorz’ Critique of Economic Reason (CER) via involutions and excrescences.
But I’ve been thinking about involutions as transhuman, systemic dynamics – and this arc-ed me back to Gorz’ syntheses and their entailments. CER is like that: it is full of these seemingly inexhaustible insights that seem to have been ‘already clearly laid out’ in their schematic logic, 2-4 decades before they really started to bite across the Anglosphere, from 2008.
Systemic dynamics can often defy or transcend human agency. This means they often ‘resist resistance’ or political struggle (or prove more powerful when resistance and struggle happen, which they always do). This means systemic dynamics can be confronting to acknowledge: we1 like to think of ourselves as having some counter-power, of our anger or objection making some potential difference (if it could be assembled in some efficacious way). You could write a letter; there could be a Royal Commission; you could sue the government (and win2).
We can think of systemic dynamics in the inelegant phrasing of sociology as ‘ineluctable macroprocesses’, the 'big unstoppable interacting things that happen over long stretches of time'.
The chancey emergence of agriculture eleven or so thousand years ago, after hundreds of thousands of years in which grain-based sedentarism and the discontents of the Domus Complex3 never really took hold and took off, is one of these.
The Axial Age, and its ‘striking parallel developments’, is another.
The the shift out of feudalism via the thousand-year emergence of capitalism is yet another: no one intended it, no groups sat down and planned it (unless… ), yet, curiously, it emerged in different ways and places, across different cultures, from roughly the same time, and as it did, gradually and eventually, and in spite of huge resistance and incredible obstacles, subjected the whole planet to its dynamics (hello Anthropocene).
The fossil-fuelled modernity of industrial societies is another (hello Anthropocene, hello). In fact – and this is a reading I also take from There Will Be Blood – in the case of oil from roughly the turn of the century, it is as if the devil (but perhaps not God) does indeed exist. A generation or two after capitalism had really taken off*, at the precise moment it needed its infernal fuel for further expansion and mechanised warfare, an evil, viscose liquid was bubbling out of the ground, waiting for us to set it on fire and smother the world in its smoke.
Read in one way, Max Weber is the great sociologist of systemic dynamics that can be observed in ‘ineluctable macroprocesses’. As in this very famous passage from Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:
“The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment’. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of religious asceticism – whether finally, who knows? – has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfilment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the fast stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved’” (Parsons translation, pp123-4 in the nice old Routledge edition).
(Well… wow, what an amazing passage. Thunderous bleakness, Prussian gloom).
As for systemic dynamics, Weber points us to how
“the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order… is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism… with irresistible force … and will do so… until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt…”
– the technical and economic conditions of machine production (will) determine our lives until the fossil fuels are exhausted
And he also emphasises that, within this world determined by machine production,
“material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history”
Producing an unavoidable, inescapable world of the ‘iron cage’, in which the pursuit of wealth
“tends to become associated with purely mundane passion… like sport”
while we live, as we have to, in this iron cage, working in our calling
because we are forced to do so, with “the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs”,
or trying to justify what we do
with recourse to cultural values,
or “simply as economic compulsion,
– or: we “abandon the attempt to justify it at all”4.
(can I just say: re-reading this famous passage, and really trying to drill down on the phrasing, it is a more bleak set of conclusions than I’d even realised in the past, especially given it was written in 1905, especially in light of the 20C and its wars, bureaucracy, totalitarianism, and global capitalism).
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What then happens to Weber’s picture when the ‘calling’ evaporates5, but labour remains necessary, and jobs continue, regardless of how bullshit and/or shit they’ve become?
This is what Gorz is wondering.
If the industrial utopia of modernity has evaporated, what could work possibly mean?
Thinking through this, sitting with this, Gorz turns from Marx and Arendt (the focus in the first couple of chapters6, which, in my interpretation, focus on the emergence and transformations of labour throughout industrial modernity) toward Weber, and 80s Habermas.
What’s at stake here is less about labour, and really about the emergence of work as a function, in the context of the ‘involuting of everything’ via systemic dynamics: here, rationalisation’s dependence on calculability, and the subdivision of labour into overspecialisation and organisational incoherence.
In other words, Weber’s conclusions – how rationalisation, which carried the hope of modernity, mastery, Enlightenment, takes us into the trap of the iron cage – provides Gorz with a way of thinking (beyond Marx and Arendt) about what work has become, its crises of meaning and purpose in the evaporated utopia of industrial modernity, and above all, the systemic dynamics that are the heart of all this.
I guess this gets back to Streeck’s great point. If capitalism is an historical system which emerged, although no one intended or controlled that emergence (as seems to be the case), this also means it could decline and disintegrate – no matter what we do, in ways beyond all control, with nothing to replace it.
This sets up the next post, where I’ll closely read through Chapter Three,
‘Functional Integration as the Divorce between Working and Living, or; the emergence of work as function’.
My hope is that, by doing this, I can move beyond an intuition toward the elements of an analytics of involutions and excrescences.
See you next Tuesday.
Who’s ‘we’? Do I mean ‘we Westerners’ or ‘we’ privileged enough to think we have agency to change things? We the people? Are you part of this ‘we’ I am invoking, or no; if so, why no?
In fact, postwar US culture has effectively sold a seductive fantasy whereby the spontaneous freedom of the heroic individual’s genius beats the system, gets rich, and we ‘have a nice day’. Ayn Rand wrote her self-serving fantasies in the 1940s and 50s, and they’re still bestsellers powering the libertarian fantasies of Silicon Valley start-ups, business oligarchs, and coked up failsons ranting at their butlers on private jets. Then again, Norman Vincent Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952, and it was Trump’s Book of Books. There’s something about the 50s, hey; especially for any kind of white reactionary with a believer in their own entitlement-to-glory.
And see James C Scott’s amazing Against the Grain, the only ‘history of everything’ via agriculture book that is unequivocally worth the candle. All the others kinda suck, for a cull century, from Decline of the West to Dawn of Everything.
Which: neijuan…
Here’s my re-worded chapter list (and the post where I explain why I think these should be the preferred terms)
The Invention of
WorkLabourThe Utopia of
WorkLabour in MarxFunctional Integration as the Divorce between Working and Living, or; the emergence of work as function
From Functional Integration to Social Disintegration
The End of Working-Class Humanism
The Ultimate Ideology of Work
The Latest Forms of Work Search for Meaning (1)
The Condition of Post-Marxist Man Search for Meaning (2)