The Immaterial, aka "the order was delivere4d"
on trying to get hard copies of André Gorz, in the involutions and excrescences of the technical systems that, at certain moments, *are* society now
This morning I foolishly checked my email before opening Word, disobeying ‘the tyranny of my should’1. I’m working on a discipline of focusing on my own written work, before inspecting the inscriptions of others. This turns out to be important because, as we all know, most people’s inscriptions are a ‘summons’ of a sort, the bearer of a demand that is usually some kind of work request or obstacle between us and our preferred productive work. This is a mundane frustration of our first world life, if it is.
But although I shouldn’t have opened my email before Word (first pants, then shoes) I was looking for and looking forward to this reply, because in late November, more than three months ago, I ordered the (then) new intellectual biography of André Gorz. I paid a bit more in ordering it directly from the publisher in the US, because I wanted it sooner.
It’s very difficult to tell, these days, if the respondent to one’s email is a bot or a human of the meatspace, but one way you can usually tell is: humans are the ones who include typos.
Thus I believe that this email reply was sent to me by a human (and also because bots aren’t usually called Sylvia2)
Hello,
According to the tracking information the order was delivere4d on 11-30-2022.
Silvia
Customer Service
We’re already in a Kafkalite world of email ping pong no doubt grimly familiar to you all. Af course, I’m contacting the publisher as sender *because* my parcel has not yet been delivered, because it is probably lost somewhere, because (it seems), delivery was attempted during Christmas, which is a fucking logistical nightmare. As an unspoken but mostly observed rule of this ping pong game, none of this real context, the materiality of the immaterialisation of my book, tends to ever be mentioned.
Luckily, Silvia also sent me the US-side logistics company’s tracking number, so I was able to log in to their systems. When I did, their system told me – very many things. In my reply , I summarised these things back to Silvia as follows:
Hello Silvia
thanks for this.
The order was not delivered in November, I assure you. If you look a little closer on the link you sent me (and thank you for this), you can see three contradictory pieces of information:
1 Allegedly delivered November 30th...
2 ....but then returned to shipper on December 29th...
3 then allegedly delivered on January 6th.
As I'm making contact because it was not delivered, this third date is also highly doubtful.
I'll search for a remedy by chasing it this end, as I have a tracking number, however, it doesn't show up in Australia Post’s systems.
Yes, this is the kicker. The above data did also show up a tracking number at the local end, with Star Track operating as the contractor of (also owned by but distinct from) Australia Post3.
This particular number showed up a kind of dual status. On the one hand, the number indicated that the parcel had ‘not yet’ entered the system. But the asterisk at the end of this explanation also told me that this status could also emerge where a parcel had already been handled, and moreover, some time ago, thus was no longer active in the system, and/or ‘had been archived’.
There’s a gorgeous tragicomic irony to all this, given that it’s an intellectual biography of the person who wrote Critique of Economic Reason.
Those of you with sharp memories of a few months ago
~
Do you remember?
– President Nixon
Do you remember?
…the bills you have to pay,
or, even; yesterday?
~
Those of you with sharp memories of a few months ago might remember how I summarised the emergence of (what I call) Gorzworld4 from the demise of the utopia of industrial modernity, starting with this post. Gorz, in ’88, wrote
“The industrialist utopia promised us that the development of the forces of production and the expansion of the economic sphere would liberate humanity from scarcity, injustice and misery; that these developments would bestow on humanity the sovereign power to dominate Nature, and with this the sovereign power of auto-determination; and that they would turn work into a demiurgic and auto-poetic activity in which the incomparably individual fulfilment of each was recognised – as both right and duty – as serving the emancipation of all” (8).
For Gorz, nothing remains of this utopia, and, “[w]hen a utopia collapses in this way, it indicates that the entire circulation of values which regulates the social dynamic and the meaning of our activities is in crisis”. In blank verse:
When a utopia collapses
(in this way)
the entire circulation of values
(which)
regulates the social dynamic
and the meaning of our activities
– is in crisis
Gorz’ theorisation resonates with me as a plangent intuition worth striking (to hear how it rings) against some ways in which we’re struggling to live together now, somehow. When I looked at ‘The Australian Dream’ in terms of housing, wages, and work, I found it rings quite true, while keeping an open tone of thinking.
The notion of a circulation of values regulating social dynamics – and the meaning of activities – also folds back to Hermann Broch’s work on the disintegration of values (please read The Sleepwalkers, amazing), a connection Gorz never explicitly makes5. Collapse and disintegration of values, and ensuing psychic and social dysregulation, also bends ‘forward’ toward Bernard Stiegler’s works, especially his ‘Disbelief and Discredit’ trilogy6: above all, the failure of individuation, the liquidation of bonds, and the ensuing proletarianization and spiritual immiseration of people it creates. Again, interestingly to me (given their ostensible parallels), Stiegler does not read or engage with Gorz' work. If I'd read Gorz' intellectual biography, I might be able to tell you why that is.
~
Things fall apart,
the centre does not appear to hold my parcel…
~
Where then, do we find ourselves?
What happens when the values in circulation get lost in the mail somewhere, known only by a tracking number that is unknown, on one system, that points toward three contradictory pieces of information, on another?
On an individual level, it means I, the customer, have to hustle to be serviced: as Travis K said, summing up the disruption decade, “always be hustlin’”.
Then, to the extent that logistical systems really break down, or are dysfunctional, and the lost object really is lost, even if we hustle, we end up in email ping pong, or, worse: on hold to a call centre, or attending some forsaken office (during our own scarce work hours, during 20C ‘business hours’). For me with my class privilege in this platform-mediated interaction, (and I’ll come back to this), it just means a lost book, one that may yet be found. A trifle, with redress; nothing. If you are person who is genuinely in need and are relying on money from the government, dealing with these systems can be existentially stressful. In the case of RoboDebt, evidence suggests it perhaps drove 2000 people to suicide.
On a systemic level, do we not also see the involutions of a system at breaking point, in the bareness of interpersonal communication through platforms? To what extent has such ‘bare comms’ become the very stuff of society? If we are ‘having relations’ with one another, especially relations in public (or in privatised public spaces like post offices, airports, &c), especially relations between work-service providers and work-service receivers (with distro as the structural centre) they tend, increasingly, to be sets of claims necessarily mediated by the only language global logistics speaks, the world’s real Esperanto, that lingua franca of Q Codes and tracking numbers, wherein claims made between a customer, or the agent or proxy of one, are compatibly legible to some kind of contractor, who, if they’re presented a valid code or number, are still obliged to get back to you with a reply, yet, if they are too busy or can’t be fucked to check properly, can just write back: “the order was delivere4d”.
~
I feel the lived experience of such situations are well expressed in some of the short works of American lit from the 2010s, all of which are (to me) artistic peaks of each author: Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prairie Wife, George Saunders’ Semplica Girl Diaries, and (above all) Ben Marcus’ Rollingwood. In each case, protagonists struggle feebly to love and care for their families, beset not only by the tyranny of the should, but by the vey many obstacles to love and needs satisfaction, some nearly insurmountable, most sociotechnical-systemic and with the signature bareness of logistics and platforms, with the mundane cruelty and ambient bleakness of life just there, in the foreground background, a constant risk or trap or uneventful happening, a tearful shower wank or bleak commute to a call centre, or a set of girls set swinging on strings in the front yard to please your daughter. That is: perhaps, at its best, fiction can communicate these worlds we’re in, these relations we’re entangled in. Maybe social and critical theory doesn’t work anymore. Maybe it never did. Maybe it’s a waste of time7. I pose these questions to myself constantly, in the post office queue, when replying to email.
Then I open Word, because I know I should.
~
In Gorzworld, as I explored it, the disintegration of the industrial utopia leads to something more like actually existing 2010s disruption: a world of runaway inequality where technical platforms enmesh the small minority who benefit and gain from the system (while being insulated from its slings and arrows), and an increasingly large number of service-delivering contractors, ‘rabbiting’ away at tasks for those who can afford to have them.
At a systemic level, this entrenches a pathological division of labour characterised by the increasing demand for set of niche services of dubious-to-nil value, based on the whims of those left with purchasing power, and the precarity of those who need to eat and make rent. Thus we end up with chimp shampooing, monkey tennis, and bespoke rescue services for seasick lap dogs aboard mega yachts. As well as RoboDebt.
In Gorzworld, we come to live in the excrescences of a servile service economy. If we are the lucky ones, these excrescences are delivered to us. Here, we are either ‘on track to success and gain’ but so time poor that one needs one’s food delivered (the deliveree); or we are ‘on track to deliver’ the food parcel to the poor sad burnt out rich person who you hand the bags to at their door, after getting buzzed in (the Deliveroo).
At the ‘ends’ of Gorzworld, the insulation of social distance tends to produce a set of hierarchical class-and-age-based social relations: the older generation upholds the ideal of meritocracy (where success is the other side of the ledger ‘gained’ when talent applies itself with total diligence) while using or abusing positions of authority in order to keep ‘having made it’ as a horizon, in order to maintain both a minion and compliant control over them8.
From a certain angle in a certain light, Tàr is a film about the cold sociotechnics of this fundamentally hierarchical society, as well as how those at the pinnacle do not see how they are served, why everyone is so compliant and polite to them, who do not need to notice how it feels to be trapped in servile dependency to the fickle demands of an imperious petty sovereign – who, above all, just cannot see what a self-absorbed dick they’re being (because they don’t have to care, and because certain parts of them enjoy how it feels to be, to say ‘make it so’). In Tàr’s narrative, the devil in question eventually wears (her) karma, the villain is transformed by their journey, vomiting up where they’ve been. But nearly everyone I know deals with some person in a position of high institutional authority who has not yet been held accountable in any way, yet who commands hoarded resources and makes ‘Simon says…’ decisions without regard for the dignity and respect for other people (which they demandingly command for themselves).
Gorzworld not only produces the excrescences of a servile service economy, it produces nonrelationality as the social relation linking the tenured winners (so cold and lonely up there), to the precarious strivers who have no choice but to appear to be so happy to serve them.
~
Back in my own position of class privilege, as someone being served… As the would-be recipient of a longed-for package, I am still entitled to those types of redress that go by way of platform-mediated ‘customer service’. I emailed the sender; I took the data and pushed it to Australia Post (or was it StarTrack… and is StarTrack Australia Post???), where I logged a ‘lost parcel complaint’.
This morning, a seemingly more senior agent than Sylvia sent me a polite and well-worded follow up assuring me of a replacement at no cost, if my copy can’t be found. As a customer, I will be serviced. One day, perhaps soon, the readers of this blog will read the mixed blessing of what I make of Gorz’ work in light of his life and its meanings.
The customer, insofar as they remain a customer, is still serviced: consumption remains a site where contract enforces a kind of calculated civility inside the boundaries of the transaction.
~
Gorz’ last major work was The Immaterial.
I’m still waiting.
Curiously, another online platform I tried to order it from was unable to supply it.
Poetic (in)justice, ‘spooky action at a distance’, or just coincidence and bad luck?
The centre cannot say.
But it is obliged to reply to my summons.
June 2022
Hi,
Many thanks for your order. I am emailing let you know that our supplier is currently out of stock of The Immaterial and it would take about 6-10 weeks for stock to arrive.
Would you like to proceed with the order?
Regards,
M
Yes please! Happy to wait.
September 2022
Dear P
Just an update for the remaining item in your order:
The Immaterial
The local supplier has notified us that their stock is due to arrive early in December and we should receive within the following two weeks if all goes to plan. Apologies for the delay - overseas sea shipments are still being considerably disrupted. We'll send to you as soon as possible, but if you would prefer to cancel, just let us know.
Kind regards
L
that sounds great, and the timing is fine.
It's also fascinating given the topic that Gorz is talking about...!
Materiality still matters... (see blurb of book)9
"In this, the last full-length theoretical work Gorz completed before his death, he argues instead for the creation of a true knowledge economy. This economy would be based on zero-cost exchange and pooled resources, and knowledge would be treated as humanity’s common property. Currently, in order to exploit knowledge and turn it into capital, the capitalist enterprise privatizes specialized knowledge and claims ownership through private licenses and copyright. But as Gorz shows, the traditional foundations of such capitalist economics have begun to crumble because of the immaterial nature of this new form of product, which makes it almost impossible to measure in monetary terms. The knowledge economy, Gorz declares, is the crisis of capitalism".
December 2022
Dear P
Just an update for your order of:
The Immaterial
Although the local supplier had advised us earlier that they were expecting stock this month, they now advise that this has been delayed and they currently have no shipping date. As we have changed over our online ordering system software recently, we are now unable to keep items on backorder for our customers under this old system. We have therefore cancelled your order and you have not, of course, been charged. If you would like to enquire again in a couple of months, we would be happy to find out when the title will be available again.
Alternatively, you might like to check biblio.com for a secondhand copy - https://www.biblio.com/9781906497613
Apologies we couldn't help you further at this time.
Kind regards
L
Horney: “He should be the utmost of honesty, generosity, considerateness, justice, dignity, courage, unselfishness. He should be the perfect lover, husband, teacher. He should be able to endure everything, should like everybody, should love his parents, his wife, his country; or, he should not be attached to anything or anybody, nothing should matter to him, he should never feel hurt, and he should always be serene and unruffled. He should always enjoy life; or, he should be above pleasure and enjoyment. He should be spontaneous; he should always control his feelings. He should know, understand, and foresee everything. He should be able to solve every problem of his own, or of others, in no time. He should be able to overcome every difficulty of his as soon as he sees it. He should never be tired or fall ill. He should always be able to find a job. He should be able to do things in one hour which can only be done in two to three hours” (amazing essay from Neurosis and Human Growth, link).
Not actually ‘Sylvia’, but names changed here to protect their real name, which is similar but different.
There’s a whole Facebook site here where people are trying both to ascertain the many paradoxical senses in which StarTrack is-and-is-not Australia Post, as well as discern why their packages are so late or have not arrived. If I can distill it, it seems like janky systems and harried, under-the-pump employees.
Another unspoken rule of the game: I would call it that here with a kind of lazy playfulness, but never in an actual book I would write about Gorz as a bound object, that I would hope would arrive, wherever it was sent, whether by StarTrack or Australia Post, to you, with love.
This is quite interesting, insofar as Gorz was, in a sense, ‘the last’ Austro-Hungarian, or; born Gerhard Hirsch in 1923, thus just after the last, was an interwar Viennese from a Jewish-Catholic family, who fled to Switzerland in 1939. Like Joyce and Beckett (though for different reasons), Gorz abandoned Austria and the Germanophone world for the Francophone world of postwar existentialism and the Anglophone world of his profound romantic love for his partner, Dorine.
Decadence of Industrial Democracies, Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals, and Lost Spirit of Capitalism. Of course, Stiegler always writes in ellipses made from endlessly rolling circles, and everything circles back to Simondon, whose theory of individuation and technics really does so much of the heavy lifting.
It’s interesting that these scruples dominated and in some senses ruined Hermann Broch’s headspace: we are very lucky that he managed The Sleepwalkers, Death of Virgil, and his essays on kitsch, the vacuum of Wagner and the ringstrasse (which was young Hitler’s vacuum… decades before Eichmann was a vacuum cleaner salesman in Buenos Aires), the ‘gay apocalypse’ of fin-de-siècle Vienna, zeitgeist, and everything else. Ironically, I do know more about this after receiving a hard copy of a very hard-to-obtain intellectual biography of Broch.
I take it that this is a rhetorical-polemic appeal of the techno-feudal thesis, whether in Varoufakis’ metaphorical iteration of it as a provocation for trade audiences here, or in Morozov, who seems more committed to grinding out his insistence on it at some length while insisting (contra V, that it’s *still* capitalism), for the NLR crowd (here), and/or so Aufhebunga can disagree and split the left (splitter!).
This is a really annoyingly ‘me’ thing to do: as if the service person gives a fuck, or should have to…