tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post3616691449668476267..comments2023-11-05T03:05:16.380-08:00Comments on No Useless Leniency: Labour / TimeBenjaminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-90117961324332245742010-02-22T03:26:55.780-08:002010-02-22T03:26:55.780-08:00Thanks Matt,
I was quite pleased with my spontaneo...Thanks Matt,<br />I was quite pleased with my spontaneous logical 'deduction' of negativity. The book originally started in a more philosophical mode, but actually became more political. I think the next task is connecting those two elements more firmly, and overcoming a certain wariness about 'transhistorical' philosophical claims...Benjaminhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-11159224476125163642010-02-19T06:22:29.346-08:002010-02-19T06:22:29.346-08:00Thanks for the candid reply, and I prefer this hod...Thanks for the candid reply, and I prefer this hodge-podge of abstract negativity to the weak soup of cultural studies empiricism or that universal boullion of living labour as the working class romance of Being. <br /><br />I liked the logical argument behind your er, 'affirmation' of strategic negativity here:<br /><br />'I think instead of figuring free time as positivity we figure it as engagement with negativity; the negativity of our own actions within time, in which we can't choose to do two things at once (or I can't), hence to not engage in value-production for capital involves negating to 'free' our own possibilities for negation.'<br /><br />I wonder how this might tie up with the role of negation with epistemology in general? Something for me to think about. As it is, I see your position as occupying a space between the political affirmation of negativity in terms of a critique of capitalist value-production (in the literal sense of resisting its work demands along with opposing that upbeat 'positive mental attitude' of what K-Punk has termed 'capitalist realism'), and a philosophical understanding of negativity as part of a broader historical epistemology (rather than a straightforwardly postivistic eliminative materialism). On both counts I'm with you, and I look forward to reading your book and gaining a more sophisticated grasp of these problems.Matthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04297793875769892445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-36523435492430420652010-02-19T03:29:42.020-08:002010-02-19T03:29:42.020-08:00Just one more thing, please feel free to post/repl...Just one more thing, please feel free to post/reply your answer, as you can tell I need the help...Benjaminhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-75899502535477092232010-02-19T03:27:44.204-08:002010-02-19T03:27:44.204-08:00Dear Matt,
No, a very good point. I'm probably...Dear Matt,<br />No, a very good point. I'm probably a closet affirmationist (as Peter Hallward joked) on this point... Perhaps the only way to really rescue negativity is that what Marx calls 'free time', which I'm all in favour of, of course (although never seem to take up), is the time of expansive negativity freed from re-employment by capital. Certainly, as has often been done, this can be re-coded as 'positive'. I see it as the oppurtunity to 'organise' a negativity, even in a project (here Sartre would probably be of more use, but I just admit ignorance and shame on not having read the Critique of Dialectical Reason).<br /><br />Certainly I don't see the refusal of work as the 'answer', especially when capital deploys non-reproduction / unemployment as a mechanism of reproduction. Rather I'd argue for a still vague strategic negativity, which expands areas of non-commodified life and also tries, as I suggest above, to form the 'labour of the negative' in better, more equalitarian fashions. After all job security buys one scope for negativity that invocations of precarity as potential 'positive good' seem to me to deny or limit.<br /><br />I'm all for humanist enlightenment teleology in a way, if it works. I think instead of figuring free time as positivity we figure it as engagement with negativity; the negativity of our own actions within time, in which we can't choose to do two things at once (or I can't), hence to not engage in value-production for capital involves negating to 'free' our own possibilities for negation.<br /><br />Finally I see negativity in terms of a relational traversal of real abstractions. Not that beneath the cobblestones the beach, or beneath real abstractions concrete ontological positivity, but, as Marx suggests and I quote in the post on concrete / abstract, the concrete is achieved through abstraction. Through the traversal of abstract labour even to a kind of abstract negativity that rejects employment, although not action, but action freed from the implicit teleologies of value re-production.<br /><br />A bit of a hodge-podge of Sartre/Bataille/Marx/Althusser - still it's my hodge-podge...Benjaminhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18237178500472453910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7038706923946698710.post-23218426785545124372010-02-18T18:02:32.502-08:002010-02-18T18:02:32.502-08:00Another interesting post Ben, and it got me thinki...Another interesting post Ben, and it got me thinking about this abstract concept of 'life-time' which might be opposed to the 'working-time' of capital. On a crude level this could simply be understood to mean that we expend our biological lifespan making profits for capital, rather than having the time to invest in oursevles. Yet as far as I'm aware, for Marx, the value of our free-time resides in two sources: 1) the reduction of necessary labour time in communist societies will allow us to develop our capacities as a species through 'really free labour', which is prefigured in our successes within the arts and sciences (Grundrisse); this would be the reading of Marx which would depend upon a concept of labour as an 'ontological positivity' along with a humanist enlightenment teleology, and 2) there's the idea that political praxis-as 'practical critical activity'- negates the capitalist organisation of time through things like strikes, absenteeism, riots, sabotage, etc. Of the two it's this latter notion I have difficulty in understanding. On the one hand, does this negation not derive its value from creating the possibility for more free time in the future (again, to conduct 'really free labour')? Or is this negation of the utility of 'working-time' valuable only as an intensive state of being brought on by a kind of condensation of time through the practical negation of 'working-time'? In either case, it's hard for me to see where the negation lies exactly. This was also the impression I got from reading Bataille's 'Accursed Share', or even the sober works of Andres Gorz-both of whom explicitly advocate the negation of labour for negation's sake: it appears to me that they can only do so by implying that the mode of being which results from this is somehow superior, more emancipated, etc. It also risks presenting the critique of capitalism as a kind of literal 'refusal of work' strategy-as if the passive refusal to get involved in anything which might be potentiallly utilisible to capital (from active engagement with party politics to placard waving at demonstrations, etc)is sufficient to change things for the better. I wondered what you think about this-and apologies if I've misunderstood your post.Matthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04297793875769892445noreply@blogger.com