Opening the Rift: functional integration *as* the divorce between working and living
toward involutions and ironies of functional and market-based attempts at integration
This week I’ll continue closely reading through and extrapolating from Gorz’ CER. If you want to catch up, read here, then here, here, then forward to here.
The task today is to reach out and touch the tip of how collective action struggles to re-integrate fragmented lives and schizoid subjects, how markets fail to produce individual meaning (but ‘succeed’ in producing coerced compliance and rampant alienation), and how this co-contributes to the entrenchment of heteronomy.
We end up living a rift.
Functional integration leads to a divorce between working and living.
I’ll spend some time reflecting on these schizoid lives we’re living in the next post (and where this might lead, socially, ethically, and politically). For today’s work, I’m trying bring us to the edge of the canyon at dusk, where we can peer down into the rift as it settles into the gloaming1 – as a way of continuing to think about the involutions and excrescences of Anglocapitalist society now.
Explicating the reason (and unreason) of the rift will (hopefully!) also allow me to reach a provisional response that can add some clarity to the epistemological quandaries I raised by pointing my torch into the shadowy corners of Smil, Bridle and Gibson. Again here, the darkness is a matter of unknowing, our darkness is our unknowing. Phrased as a question: how is it we seem to know less than we used to, seem to lack agency, seem lost in the woods at night (a point raised by Dante and Auden, but that even Frozen II managed to convey back to the culture)?
Here, as the above italics indicate, what I’m truly interested in is our dark cloud of unknowing, because I think there’s some troubling misdirection in the Anglophone commentary on neijuan I’ve read. Little Red Podcast aside, I keep listening to American stuff on China that is really *about* America and its anxieties and obsessions (plus ca change… ), and the way that any other country gets effortlessly turned into a case that ‘serves’ understanding us/US2.
With unknowing and the terminal rolling curling inward of neijuan in mind, I think it’s too easy for people in the Anglocapitalist world to say – with too much clarity and confidence – how and why a deep, complex political formation like Xina3 produces mighty constraints on what people can know and do. Yes, the limits to the ‘truth one can say’ out loud and in public in Xina are not subtle right now, and we can see the hurt and despair they’re generating for those who know how trapped they are in it. But then: it’ also a too easy step to Other the experience of contemporary China and the struggles and strivings of its people, then surmise (but that’s okay because?) ‘it can’t happen here’.
And in all this, what tends to be less clear to ‘us’ is how we, with ‘our’ ‘meritocracy’, ‘our’ magical search engines, ‘our’ AIs, ‘our’ networked digital archives, and ‘democratic’ or ‘free’ informational ecologies, might also be living our very own civilisational involution, including a drastically diminished ability to know and do anything – in the face of supposed information-access-freedom, and in a time in which ‘decisive action’ after ‘careful deliberation over the evidence, using reason’ is urgently necessary to address eco/logical and geo/political problems we face in our debounded community of fate.
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I see the clouds that move across the sky I see the wind that moves the clouds away It moves the clouds over by the building I pick the building that I want to live in I smell the pine trees and the peaches in the woods I see the pine cones that fall by the highway That's the highway that goes to the building I pick the building that I want to live in
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In the previous post, I followed Gorz in tracing out the great tragic irony of economic reason: how the search for efficiency, via calculability, produced a condition of heteronomy. I’ve never block quoted myself, but here goes:
Let’s notice this great tragic irony of classical sociology: the rationalisation of the problem (of reproducing integration by compelling task completion in an evermore differentiating division of labour) does not solve the problem, or produce efficiency, productivity and happiness – it produces heteronomy, involuting toward paralysis and bloat.
Curiously, since the time of IBM’s ‘solution’ to The Paperwork Explosion (‘67), ICT has been brought in as a way of squaring the circle here – yet, again, it does not solve its own problems, and produces new ones, alongside the net effect of a heteronomised society of hapless specialists who are evermore dependent on evermore incoherent bureaucracies (and now also dealing with the Anthropocene and the New Dark Age).
Adam Curtis is right to notice that these systems are cybernetic insofar as they’re always trying to keep the now ‘stable’, trying to integrate, seeking homeostatic equilibrium and control through calculability, compelling compliance by producing and proceduralising functions we have to comply with, then choking on its own overexplicated excrescences as it nullifies us to death with the meaninglessness and disenchantment – and sometimes, faulty arithmetic – of its regulations. Fun times.
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At this point in the chapter I’m reading along with, Gorz suddenly shifts analytic attention ‘outside’ the system, producing the following contrasting attempts to re-integrate.
Where bureaucracy tries to re-integrate by rendering calculable through explicated procedures*, ‘we’ also steer our lives and one another through other ‘steering media’4: collective action, and markets.
Outside the system, there is social integration, and there are markets. I’ll deal with social integration through collective action first.
As for social integration, Gorz notices how, having been dis-integrated by bureaucracy – smashed by paperwork then email-sized bits by bureaucratised work functions, living as fragments and figments of our former whole selves – we then try to put ourselves and one another back together again via social integration.
As groups, we get involved in various kinds of collaborative, collective action; we do politics5. As this post gets darker by following its analysis, hold on to politics – cos that’s where Gorz sees hope.
In this passage at least, Gorz doesn’t dwell on collective action, but he does return to it – indeed, the appendix of CER contains a set of normative propositions, which are nothing if not applicable to Mitterand’s France.
For me, it’s interesting to notice how French society still has a capacity for collective action: French people still have a potenza, a capacity-to-say-no (potenza di no) that, as Mark Fisher noticed (see his stuff on reflexive impotence), seems lacking or wanting in contemporary Anglocapitalist society. On first glance, it therefore seems to me that we also need to really countenance cultural patterns and regional-local reactive learning processes in the face of these (nonetheless operational) systemic dynamics. In short, neoliberalisation clearly hasn’t helped the Anglocapitalist countries develop group agency and ‘push back’... against neoliberalisation; Wendy Brown is right to call it an undoing of the demos. At the same time, the resonance of Boltanski and Chiapello’s critique, alongside Stiegler’s voluminous miserabilism (bless ‘im) and mass-based protest actions such as those of the gilet jaunes, show us that it’s not like France has been free from ‘any and all of this’. After all, Sarkozy and Macron, they are (respectively) populist and technocratic neoliberals ‘with French characteristics’, non?
At the same time, the people of Paris can exercise their collective will and just fucking ban surveillance capitalist e scooters – wow, fuck yes.
~
It's over there, it's over there My building has every convenience It's gonna make life easy for me It's gonna be easy to get things done I will relax alone with my loved ones Loved ones, loved ones visit the building, Take the highway, park and come up and see me I'll be working, working but if you come visit I'll put down what I'm doing, my friends are important Don't you worry 'bout me I wouldn't worry about me Don't you worry 'bout me Don't you worry 'bout me
~
Alongside systemic itegration through regulation (bureaucracy [it’s darkness!]) and social integration (collective action [it’s hope!]), Gorz also notices the “a-centred, spontaneous hetero-regulation” otherwise known as markets. Unlike ethics, politics and justice, markets are calculable (see footnote on Stiegler), and to that extent can be enmeshed with bureaucracy: say hello the managerial hellscapes of neoliberalised institutions, that won’t afford to pay for sessionals to do marking, but that will afford seed funding for start ups, and whatever for consultancies and executive salaries.
Moreover, markets do govern the conduct of a large urban society in this division of labour, dynamising society (as a society of competitive individuals [and see Dardot and Laval’s development of Foucault here]) by imposing “its laws from without on individuals who are then ruled by them and are forced to adapt and to modify their conduct and projects according to an external, statistical and totally involuntary balance of forces” (CER, 34). Without moving in the direction of a huge archive of Marxian analyses of political economy and its society that jump off from and/or circle back to here, and staying with Gorz’ move from 1900s Weber to 80s Habermas, markets are calculable (unlike justice or politics or ethics or spirit, for Stiegler), but they have no meaning to individuals, either in the pursuit of our own goals, and as we’re oblivious to one another.
So then: what happens when we try to derive meaning from marketised work?
The avatars of the ‘Adam Smith handjob’ of liberal economics then go on to ‘argue’ that the situation summarised in the above paragraph produces beneficence at the level of the social: I do my specialist thing (selfishly, as well as I can), you do yours, and if we all do our best, this will produce the aggregate optimum for all of us. If you then enrol and study economics in a neoliberalised university anywhere in the Anglosphere, you will still get taught this ideological narrative as if it is an objective science. As if. 15 years after its mathematical invalidation by the Global Financial Crisis.
Typically, people who ‘go there’ witth this style of thinking then induce arguments from ‘Nature’ (Hobbes, Spencer) to explain away the contradictions and pathologies this generates (after aggregating the social from individuals and transactions), or double down with normative arguments, eg by saying that hierarchy and inequality is good for us (as well as natural thus unavoidable), because it teaches us to strive and punishes malingerers and the feckless, undeserving poor. I think we need only look at Actually Existing Neoliberalism to ascertain the precise extent to which this tends to be true. In fact, to the extent that any society has pursued this ideology, we see commensurate levels of needless cruelty and wasted productivity, as inequality gallops away, and we end up in varying styles of salvational populism, autocratic domination promisers, and ineffectual gliberalism. Nighty night freedom and democracy.
In fact, we could even say: the effects of functional heteronomy-incoherence and the diremption of imperative work tasks from individual meaning could *already* produce terminal involutions, ‘before’ any of the factors Bridle, Gibson, and Smil point to. In a sense, this was where Marcuse went with one dimensionality: alienation and instrumental rationality + postwar US consumerism ‘delivering the goods’ = 1D
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I see the states, across this big nation I see the laws made in Washington, D.C. I think of the ones I consider my favorites I think of the people that are working for me Some civil servants are just like my loved ones They work so hard and they try to be strong I'm a lucky guy to live in my building They own the buildings to help them along
~
Where functions are concerned, Gorz followed Weber in insisting that bureaucracy produces heteronomy for individuals and incoherence at the level of organisations, alongside evermore alien and invasive attempts to coax compliance with increasingly crazy and surreal regulations.
In contrast to this, Gorz concedes that markets do have a certain coherence as an emergent effect at systemic level. But for its humans, this is no less problematic, as this “coherence is a product of chance: like thermodynamics, it is of the order of statistical laws and thus has neither meaning nor ultimate goal”(34). So: unlike the social integration produced by (say) those forms of collective action known as politics, (or the meanings and purposes we can find by caring as ethics or love), markets cannot provide the individual coherence – we crave – in our everyday existences, because it can only integrate us as transactors engaged in exchange relations. Yet even if transactionality works as far as it goes (and if you buy and sell stuff online, you know it kinda does work, often amazingly well) this is hardly societally integrating. Rather, it is all-the-more deeply alienating. In fact, (and following Sartre, his early mentor), Gorz contends a tragic irony
What is integrated is alienation, because
“the external materiality of actions... is beyond the grasp of the action and, far from corresponding to individuals’ own intentions, it designates these individuals as others” (CER, 34).
In other words, attempting to integrate society by way of markets produces alienated actions imposed on individuals for whom the ‘orders’ we receive have no individual meaning or coherence. Consider the Deliveroo picking up an order as a literalised instantiation of this kind of transaction; notice yourself with any kind of printed docket or Q code in your hand (this also as one point where markets and bureaucracy cross over).
This integration of alienation redounds to functionalisation again, because
“[t]hese alienated actions are not functional to anything. One could only speak of functionality if their resultant were someone’s goal6” (CER, 34).
The pervasion of markets would, then, be the pervasion of the integration of alienated actions, imposed back on alienated individuals – as instructions, via interfaces, as per the contractor platforms of the gig economy – for whom ‘their own’ actions were not ‘their own’.
Once this has been algorithimicised – and it has – we end up in a world where we are directed almost entirely by hetero-programmed actions. We live in a society in which we are literally being told what to do by a black box owned by a corporation, accessed by the corporation we’re dealing with as some kind of precarious contractor, under time pressure.
Moving toward Stiegler’s arguments about proletarianisation and symbolic misery, and/or harking back to the example of the new bakery oven in Sennett’s Corrosion of Character I discussed, work here can never be about developing know-how and skills (which a worker than then ‘transfer’, having acquired them), it’s just responding to directions, being told what to do by a screen interface. We end up just getting told where to put the cucumbers on which shelf, move box X down to storeroom Y.
If you’ve ever worked in a call centre or a fulfilment centre, a contemporary factory, or watched a check out operator stand by and monitor customers using the automated check out section, this kind of radically atomised, atomising routine pattern of tasks comprises an increasing portion of how jobs are, what work is, for us. Increasingly. If we have bullshit jobs, then alongside bureaucracy, the imposition of markets has been key among the active, transitive agents of bullshitification.
This is one of the things Allan Sekula notices about contemporary shipping in its evolution from multi-modal after containerisation, toward end-to-end automated global logistics: it is drudgery, raised to the level of a planetary imperative that must be kept circulating at all costs – as it continues to expand (which, in the absence of collective action, it will).
~
It's over there, it's over there My building has every convenience It's gonna make life easy for me It's gonna be easy to get things done I will relax along with my loved ones Loved ones, loved ones visit the building Take the highway, park and come up and see me I'll be working, working but if you come visit I'll put down what I'm doing, my friends are important I wouldn't worry 'bout I wouldn't worry about me Don't you worry 'bout me Don't you worry 'bout me...
~
This is producing a deep division in the social system. This is the rift I promised you, 1800 or so words ago. Block quote:
“The expansion of the larger apparatuses functioning by programmed hetero-regulation will produce an increasingly deep division within the social system. On the one hand, the mass of the population, doing increasingly specialized and predetermined work, are motivated by incentive goals that have no coherence whatever with the ultimate objectives of the organizations into which they are functionally integrated*. On the other hand, a small elite of organizers attempt to ensure the co-ordination, the operating conditions and the overall regulation of organizations, determine the final objectives and structures (the organigramme) of the corresponding administrations, and define the most functional regulatory mechanisms – both incentive and prescriptive*. There is therefore a split between an increasingly functionalized and manipulated society and a public and private administration that is increasingly invasive; there is a rift between an ever-smaller self- regulated civil sphere and a state equipped with increasingly extensive powers of hetero-regulation as required both by the operation of the great industrial machines and the administrative and public service machines which belong to the state itself” (CER, 35-6).
So then, this is what Gorz saw by ’88, in Mitterand’s France:
a functionalized and manipulated society doing increasingly specialized and predetermined work, are motivated by incentive goals that have no coherence whatever, involving
invasive administration by hetero-regulation, imposed by small elite of organisers.
These two effects give some more ‘teeth’ to my earlier characterisations of the servile service economy of Deliveroo and Deliveree, while also saying more clearly how the bourgeois professions end up on one side or the other.
We should add: this is before we really unleash the galloping inequality characterising the political economy of asset ownership in gentrifying global cities.
And, finally, we should note the big lol in the anachronistic characterisation of “administrative and public service machines” as belonging to the state itself. For in a neoliberalised managerial world of consultancies, decisions are usually (only) made if Deloitte and co say it’s a good idea. And in public sector work spaces where nearly every piece of software goes by way of corporate-owned platforms, we have to add in a level of domination by the Tech Giants that where simply unthinkable in 80s France.
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So then: our rift, our darkness, the canyon at dusk.
Bridle insists that the new dark age is caused by (ICT-mediated, ICT-generated, ICT-entrenching) complexity: as pervasive networked computing and its informational ecologies and stack become evermore complex, we understand less and less of it.
Gibson takes us back to the dissonant polyphony produced by value plurality in a society dealing with information: we get instant search results, and we also get the ‘dark side’ of transparency, by way of rampant conspiracy theories. Compressing his argumentative moves a tad, in the shadow of WikiPedia, Qanon – via the narrative practices of group identities forming and evolving, first with edgy posting on message boards (2015), then on normie-corporate social media platforms (2019-20), then – January 6, 2021.
Smil tries to pull our attention away from our phones and our obsession with the manipulation of dematerialised symbols: not only to show us the energy densities of the materialities that we live (and die) by, and their incredible momentum and path dependence, but also to show us back to our ‘seats’ as service workers in global cities, occupying tiny niches in a mindbending division of labour, which only functions because of a set of industrial-scale, engineered process of which 98% of us know fuck all.
For Gorz, the problem – from 1900s Weber to 1980s Habermas – is both more durably modern and also more inherent to the fundamental and unavoidable ways in which humans have tried to keep the modern world workable and then struggled – with varying degrees of success – to steer the emergent effects. Beyond a certain point7, this has produced a fundamental rift in society, one that is no longer quite that of Marx’ dialectic between capital and labour, yet that produces heteronomy and alienation (as well as exploitation) that splits ‘us’ in two: interpersonally and intrasubjectively.
Moreover, this was all apparent to Gorz before we got smashed by neoliberalisations and surveillance capitalism, before the constraints on knowing induced by Bridle’s complexity, Gibson’s dissonant plurality, and the black boxes and heavy materalities of planetary indisutrial processes.
The net effect of this – by the 80s – was the tragic irony whereby the ‘calculable programming’ of efficiency has produced the diremptions of society riven by a series of rifts – for there are others, I’ll come back to them – which no ‘one’ has any agency or control, and all of us find ourselves enmeshed in functional and market relations that are not only (organisationally) incoherent and (individually) alienating, but also increasingly invasive and expansive.
...for Gorz, to return to hope, only collective action, and free time to think about it and do it together, can sort this out.
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Next up: how the ‘splitting of the social system... produces a split within the lives of individuals themselves’, how this feels, and what it might ‘do’ – socially, ethically, politically.
Of course, if we’re living in the rift already, then the metaphoric is more like ‘drone footage of our lives, seen from above the rift’… which, as a riff, would also make a strange basketball film title.
There’s a whole China Bro-o-sphere that does this now… Ezra Klein’s recent guests have swung and missed here, led mostly by Klein’s insistence (is he being told this by NY Times, or does he just intuit the line as ideology speaking?). In contrast, I always find so much in Peter Hessler’s reporting for the New Yorker here.
Party state Surveillance Capitalist/Leninist Confucio-Taoist cultural-civilisational… I mean, it’s a lot, no?
If we really want to get to grips with Gorz is heading here, we need to go down the rabbit hole of Parsons, Habermas and Luhmann, and their voluminous explications of their respective systems theories – but let’s not and say we did, hey?
Very interestingly – and this is something Stiegler notices, but not Gorz here – those forms of collective action we call justice, and politics, and ethics, are incalculable, and also require belief and spirit, thus the presence of things that, stricto sensu, do not (yet) exist, yet (via our demands for justice &c) must be imagined and organised into existence – precisely in the face of forces like bureaucracy, nationalism, militarism, and capitalism, that are arrayed against them, and want above all to enforce their interests in order to keep their status quo circulating. In fact, one of Stiegler’s key moral-normative points (from Valery and Simondon) across many of his works from the 2000s is to say that we must fight for the incalculable, meaning that politics is always the struggle for that which does not (yet) exist, over and against the all-too-imposed reality of industrial bureaucracy, which (he relentlessly contends) destroys spirit and creates symbolic and spiritual misery. There’s a lot to unpack in a comparison between Gorz and Stiegler, but for this post, I just notice it and move on.
Okay, but like, André: what of owners and those who profit from operations, any kind of stake or shareholders? Surely it’s functional for them?