Another guest post from my friend Jeremy, in
response to a
previous post here, on Simone Weil...I was a bit perplexed by
the original
post in that you argued, understandably, that Weil was attempting to
hegemonize the power relations within the factory, by making the workers give
their reasoned consent to the production process, through greater knowledge of
its overall purpose and greater involvement in decision-making as a result. At
the same time, however, you see in Weil a precursor of today's "take your kid to
work" day, complete subsumption, affective labour etc., which, if I've
understood you, you take to be characteristic of posthegemony, of the end of any
hegemonic relation. So by instituting hegemonic relations Weil brings them to an
end and heralds posthegemony. . . I don't quite get this.
For me, a
possible answer to this apparent contradiction lies in the detail of what Weil
is actually proposing, since I read this slightly differently from you, as
follows:
Yes, it's certainly true that Weil bemoans the brutalising and
debasing nature of factory work, arguing for the need for workers to have a
rational grasp of what they're doing by being made aware of the purpose (the use
value) of the components they produce. However, this is only one part of the
story.
For all her criticisms of the dehumanising realities of factory
labour, Weil is not entirely insensitive to the "moments d'euphorie [moments of
euphoria]" that factory work affords her (Weil 1951, 52), to what she terms "une
certaine joie de l'effort musculaire [a certain joy in physical effort]" (76).
In a kind of dialectic of euphoria and debasement, the joy Weil derives from her
labours relates directly to way in which the repetitive rhythms of factory work
"brutalise" workers by reducing them to a more primitive, animalistic state, to
the state of unthinking beasts of burden. As she puts it in one of her diary
entries: "7h-10h40: continué * rythme rapide, malgré malaise. Effort, mais aussi
après quelque temps sorte de bonheur machinal, plutôt avilissant [7am-10.40am:
continued * rapid rate, despite unease. Effort, but also after a while a sort of
machine-like happiness, more or less debasing]" (61).
Thus, even in Weil's account of the working conditions in a Fordist
factory, the apparently unnatural rhythms of modern factory labour are taken to
reduce or return the worker to a more primitive state that, although debasing or
"avilissant"--or rather, precisely because it is "avilissant"--elicits a strange
"bonheur machinal."
In her suggestions for the reform of working
conditions in French factories, Weil proposes to mitigate the brutalising,
debasing effects of routinised factory labour by increasing the extent to which
workers are made aware of the purpose of their efforts, reconnected with the
products of their labours, at least intellectually, and hence included in the
decision-making process.
However, this strengthening of reason and
intellect in the face of the debasement of purely physical labour does not imply
rejecting outright the "joy", "euphoria", or "happiness" Weil experienced
through submitting herself to Fordism's repetitive rhythms. Rather, as she puts
it, "la condition d'un bonheur plein [the precondition for complete happiness]"
in the factory is the achievement of a harmonious "union entre un ouvrier et sa
machine [union between a worker and her machine]," since it this union alone
that "fait du travail un équivalent de l'art [makes of work an equivalent of
art]" (168).
Weil's suggestion reflects what appears to be an adherence
to a Kantian conception of art and the aesthetic. As Terry Eagleton has
explained, for Kant the aesthetic offers a way of mediating between the realms
of pure sensuality and disembodied intellect, representing "an elusive third way
between the vagaries of subjective feeling and the bloodless rigour of the
understanding" (
The Ideology of the Aesthetic 17). As such, the
aesthetic holds out the promise of healing "the fissure between abstract duty
and pleasurable inclination" (20).
In Weil's proposed reforms of working
conditions, then, the initially disruptive, debasing rhythms of factory labour
will, when leavened with an increased emphasis on the intellectual component of
labour, ultimately prove essential to a harmonious working experience, in which
abstract duty, in the form of the orders of the time and motion man, and
pleasurable inclination, the "bonheur machinal", will be reconciled.
It
is because of its ability to heal the fissure between abstract duty and
pleasurable inclination that Eagleton attributes a particular role to the
aesthetic in bourgeois ideology:
The ultimate binding force of the bourgeois social order, in
contrast to the coercive apparatus of absolutism, will be habits, pieties,
sentiments, and affections. And this is equivalent to saying that power in
such an order has become aestheticized. It is at one with the body's
spontaneous impulses, entwined with sensibility and the affections, lived out
in unreflective custom. Power is now inscribed in the minutiae of subjective
experience, and the fissure between abstract duty and pleasurable inclination
is accordingly healed. To dissolve the law to custom, to sheer unthinking
habit, is to identify it with the human subject's own pleasurable well-being,
so that to transgress the law would signify a deep self-violation. The new
subject, which bestows on itself self-referentially a law at one with its
immediate experience, finding its freedom in its necessity, is modelled on the
aesthetic artefact. (20)
Now, isn't this precisely a definition of
the functioning of
habitus in Bourdieu, of the "amor fati", of the way
objective necessity (working class kids don't go to university) becomes
internalised, allied with subjective inclination, so that to even imagine going
to university becomes "a deep self-violation" of the collective ethos ("who do
you think you are?").
The
habitus, after all, generates
"actions which are reasonable without being the product of reasoned design [. .
.] informed by a kind of objective finality without being consciously organized
in relation to an explicitly constituted end" (
Logic of Practice
50-51). In other words, practice is endowed with the very "purposefulness
without purpose" that defines the Kantian aesthetic object. Hence Bourdieu can
describe practice in unmistakably aesthetic terms as containing "something
ineffable, something [. . .] which pleases (or displeases) without concepts"
(
Outline 1-2). Hence also Bourdieu's constant recourse to poetic
and musical motifs to communicate how practice and
habitus function:
Bachelard's
Poetics of Space, Mallarme's poem "Le Demon de
l'analogie" as title of the final chapter of
The Logic of Practice,
allusions to musical improvisation, Kabyle
habitus endowed with "the
eternal charm of Greek art, of which Marx spoke," and so on.
To return to
Weil, then, and to shifting relations of power and forms of sovereignty. . .
Consider Bourdieu's narrative of a shift from the "gentle" forms of domination
under pre-capitalism ("disinterested" gift exchange, relations of fealty and
honour) to outright coercion (the brutal conditions Weil experiences in the
factory) followed by a "return" to a modernised version of those earlier
"gentle" forms of domination. Wouldn't this be useful here?
(Bourdieu's
is, of course, an inflection and extension of Marx's description of the shift
from feudalism, with its relations of fealty, loyalty, and personal honour
between lord and serf, to the "naked exploitation" of capitalist relations: viz.
both
The Communist Manifesto and the
1844
Manuscripts.)
If we apply Bourdieu's narrative to this case, then
we get not the institution of hegemony which, paradoxically, leads to
posthegemony. Rather we get the institution of an aestheticized relation of
power, which mediates between reasoned consent and let's call it affect or
sensibility, yes by involving a greater dose of intellect or reason, but not by
that alone and hence anticipating our current world of affective labour, "take
your kid to work," and so on. This seems to me to get you out of the problem I
identified at the beginning, of seeing posthegemony as being created by
hegemony.
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Jeremy.technorati tags:
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