Labor in Culture, Or, Worker of the World(s)

Worker of the World(s)

Peter Hitchcock

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319453996
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

This book is a cultural critique of labor and globalization that considers whether one can represent the other. The cultural representation of labor is a challenge in how globalization is understood. Workers may be everywhere in the world but cultural correlatives are problematic. By elaborating cultural theory and practice this book examines why this might be so. If globalization unites workers via production and capital flows, it often writes over traditional or progressive forms of unity. Worlds of work have expanded in the last half century, yet labor has receded within cultural discourse. By considering critical and historical concepts in the workers' inquiry, the subject, and value, and provocative projects in cultural representation itself, this study expands our lexicon of labor to understand more fully what "workers of the world" means under globalization. As such the book offers broad appeal to students and teachers of Global and Cultural Studies and will interest all those who take seriously how the worker is articulated at a global scale.

Part IWorker

© The Author(s) 2017

Peter HitchcockLabor in Culture, Or, Worker of the World(s)Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45399-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. An Inquiry of Labor

Peter Hitchcock¹

(1)

The Graduate Center and Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY), New York, New York, USA

End Abstract

In what Allan Bloom calls a “permanent book” (Plato’s Republic),¹ Socrates rationalizes social division in some very provocative ways by using hierarchies that have the appeal of universality. Gods mixed gold in the souls of rulers so that gold is somewhat literally the substance of their command. Farmers and other laborers, we are told, are subject to an admixture of bronze and iron and live that reality according to appropriate subjection. These soulful combinations are not absolute, and occasionally workers will reveal a little gold and will be encouraged to become guardians instead. Yet a pall hangs over this anomaly, since the oracle says, “the city will be destroyed when an iron or bronze man is its guardian” (94—the prospect of an iron lady, of course, was not even imagined, still less divisions of labor in general as gendered and raced). Jacques Rancière seizes on the Republic’s reason to argue for “countermyths, tales that muddy this difference of natures.”² In Rancière’s Proletarian Nights, artisans dream of so much more than their allotted place and Rancière underlines, in detailed examples, why this is proof enough “the equality of intelligences” must continue to be articulated. Of course, artisanal reverie is not quite or not always proletarian reality but nevertheless, and in contradistinction to the persistence of some kind of gold standard (which includes the notion of proletarian itself, the point of Rancière’s distinction), worker narratives are a cultural and political horizon, a resource of hope in Raymond Williams’s sense, in a world of more resolutely inevitable determinations.³ Farmers and laborers will feature prominently in the case studies in the second half of this book, but the latter do not extend proletarian nights in Rancière’s otherwise ardent provocation. Instead, I wish to “muddy the difference of natures” through a complementary and dialectical polemic. Les Revoltes Logiques, co-founded by Rancière, begins with a question: “How does one form, in its limits and contradictions, a class thought?”⁴ It is a vital inquiry, not just for politics but for culture and one that must give us pause about the nature of inquiry itself (thus, although the question might be deemed inappropriate within a workers’ inquiry, it is nevertheless the interrogative basis of its form). All kinds of conditions mediate what is appropriate to the question that simultaneously implies appropriation and misappropriation. A logical revolt for some can be revolting logic for others (a torsion that is at the heart of Rancière’s project), and inquiry puts into play contradictions, of class, of workers, of working class, that bespeak the relations of their materialization and complex divisions. In this way, the problem of who makes the inquiry extends well beyond the subject who asks, and never more so when the subject of the question is the worker.

We take it as axiomatic that the key to working-class expression is the worker’s experience; that the being of worker finds cultural articulation adequate to it. Much of my previous analysis of class and culture has cleaved to this principle, but only by questioning its meaning for knowledge. Interestingly, this position both confirms and contradicts Socrates’ peremptory distinction. There is poetry, and then there is the worker’s expression of her lot which is something else again. Or, the worker is aesthetically true to her experience which must mean there is gold in her soul or else that we have seriously underestimated iron. Mixing metals might seem to alleviate the tensions Socrates’ divisions promote, but then the city in his judgment appears most secure when each is “in” their endeavor. Poets make poems, shoemakers make shoes, and philosophers make philosophy. Yet since it is obvious we are not solely defined by one attribute, and perhaps not by attributes in the conventional sense at all (which is one of the many lessons of intersectionality, if not of Spinozism), it seems there is more than ontological violence in making these distinctions in the first place. Two small points: first, the importance of Plato’s Republic rests on how categories come to construct and negotiate the social—our souls may be of different mettle, but the logic of such distinction continues to overdetermine much of what we think of as social and aesthetic particularity; second, man’s [sic] ideal state both undermines the position of the worker socially (for instance, on the question of social reproduction) while bracketing any aesthetic merit, especially if it might come to rest on mimesis. The social question can in part be explained by distinguishing the worker as an individual from labor in its relation to capital (in practice, of course, the distinction is necessarily problematized by different types of work and worker). Here, however, the mimetic faculty deserves special comment.⁵

Guardians of the city are not playing roles, they are not imitating anyone else; they simply are the position they inhabit and if they are to remain that way they must not be bewitched by mimetic art, by art’s copying of an original rather than being it. The origins of the work of art and the distractions of mimesis are very much written into the quandary of the worker in her representation. The aesthetic representation of a life is paradoxically the ground of its authenticity: whether in poetry, fiction, drama, painting, etc., the worker’s expression of worker life is its truth in correspondence, its Erlebnis, to borrow from Dilthey.⁶ Yet it is just as much its misapprehension, a representation as misrepresentation, and for Plato undermines all claims to authenticity in its form. As is often the case, the philosophical distinction holds better than the actual processes of socialization in which mimesis is manifest (Bourdieu’s entire project of Distinction is grounded by this tension⁷). If the carpenter makes a table, then later makes a poem about a table, we could argue both the latter is a copy of the copy that is the former, but that neither preclude the creativity in making. It is the instinct of creativity in mimesis that is missing from Plato’s account even as we must acknowledge the situatedness of this elision for Plato in his own time. This is not to say he simply “mirrors” the concerns of history in which he is enmeshed. Far from it. Yet the logical consequences of his fear of mimesis, the lure of weakness and distraction through “copying,” accentuate that worldviews, particularly those that aim to codify the social, are material through and through. Certainly the guardians today should have little trepidation about the mimetic per se since it has long been commodified and copying itself is the original condition of capital circulation. The question remains whether this development obtains for all forms of mimesis that occur within such a system of making. On this issue, mimesis must be further clarified and historicized.

Mimesis as an aesthetic mode challenges the pure gold guardian thesis of The Republic by mixing forms in its genealogy, by democratizing art without sacrificing the idea of some kind of artistic autonomy. It can be used as a foundation of human endeavor that Walter Benjamin in particular remarks upon (even in the age of “technical reproducibility”),⁸ or as a specific historical aesthetics in the imposing mold Erich Auerbach presents. While Auerbach’s philological tradition is unabashedly Eurocentric, the passage from high to low style in mimetic practices that is epitomized in the central example of Dante offers a trenchant answer to the purification procedures of Plato’s divisions. The lessons of Auerbach’s Mimesis for the representation of worker reality are many but here I will offer an initial assertion: representation in the present study is not simply a token of authenticity but a focus on the components of worker representation, however partial or flawed.⁹ It is the belief worker representation is taking place even if the artist is not or does not claim to be a worker that riddles the wonder of the mimetic, a process that derives from a place where Auerbach’s own commitment as an interpreter is at stake (although much of Auerbach’s philology is unique, the practice of intimate identification, even if sometimes naïve and idealistic, is a reminder about what is and is not possible in cultural critique). For Auerbach, this approach often meant concern for the figural and for me this has always constituted a challenge for cultural representations of the worker. Why? Briefly, the figural proposes that a recent worker representation, for instance, may complete an earlier or otherwise disconnected figural realism but also that an instance of worker figuration may offer a representation of a worker yet to be and a future for workers not yet articulated or visible as such. One need not necessarily subscribe, like Auerbach, to Hegelian teleology to make sense of these connections (the figure disorders time), but the question of figura is resolutely historical in its inclinations and fosters dialectical thinking in cultural critique. Lurking in the background is a related discussion that links Auerbach and Goethe’s thoughts on Weltliteratur to the knot of “world” where workers have not, in fact, united, a dialectic that is the very cultural and political ground of the current project.¹⁰

If this book’s subtitle alludes to the final line of the Communist Manifesto, it also registers a Marxist dilemma. Should a cultural concern for the representation of workers be first and foremost empirically verifiable? Here we circle back to the problem of experience in contrast to the “as if” modes of identification in Auerbach. Discussion of worker representation necessarily entails a sociology of culture but what, if any, are the epistemological claims? This is not the place to suture the cuts between empiricism and rationalism, between sense and reason, which has a separate existence from that which the worker represents (for workers, knowledge is not an entirely philosophical problem of interpretation, especially where change is concerned). In a way, figura traverses and transforms such division, offering a spirit of relation that, like Raymond Williams’ “structure of feeling,” is its own kind of truth. For his part, Marx once pondered a survey, a workers’ inquiry, to complement and complicate all thoughts of abstract labor. In 1880, La Revue socialiste asked Marx what questions for workers he could devise to elaborate the substance of their experience. Marx came up with 101 questions (in the “Enquête ouvrière,” rounded off to a hundred in the Workers’ Inquiry, the English translation¹¹) and what they trace are the liminal spaces between workers’ self-identity and the constituents of class for political economy, a space where the mimetic faculty lives to undo subject reason between the transcendental and the empirically sound. All this despite the aim, Marx argued, that was “an exact and positive knowledge of the conditions in which the working-class—the class to whom the future belongs—works and moves.” This belief, and indeed the content of the inquiry, are fascinating on their own terms but are necessarily at some remove from the aesthetic and philosophical issues in which the worker subjects, and is subject. The idea one might check off these attributes of working-class existence against a contemporaneous cultural expression would seem ludicrous. Why should art, even art “about” workers, be verifiable and approximate to some arguably tendentious survey of “real” experience? The point is to hold these modes of representation in tension rather than to repeat endlessly they inhabit alien spaces of expressibility. Both might be said to objectify in the sense they assume a worker is being addressed in their elaboration, but then again it is the ambivalence of this knowing that drives the “inquiry” in the first place, even when the verisimilitude of the worker is at its most explicit. Marx’s interest is clearly spurred by a desire for knowledge from below: the experience of exploitation is necessarily different from the formula for it. Like Auerbach’s crafted argument for Dante’s use of popular or “vulgar” language as enabling what we know as “literature” to exist (with the support that Dante’s aim is “true reality”), so the revelation of the worker as integral to knowing the world has a cultural correlative that reaches beyond the basic questions of the inquiry. It acknowledges that representing the worker’s reality is vital to the possibility of narrating per se, and especially when labor is vulgarized by value extraction or impossibly subjected. Marx’s Workers’ Inquiry has served more as a catalyst rather than as a model of investigation in its own right although some have been quite willing to limit it to a basic sociological framework. The story of the workers’ inquiry is, whatever else it is, an allegory of the fraught imbrication of the working class and intellectual.

Perhaps one can mark its permutations by thinking of the questions in terms of their collective name. Clearly the questions are posed to workers, but the hope is the inquiry becomes the workers’ by virtue of the knowledge provided in the answers. If the dice is loaded by the form of Marx’s questions (certain information is being sought and Marx acknowledges that more questions could be asked), the worker emerges in the details of the reply. There is an expansive literature around the logic of such inquiry which is never far from the general problem of the representation of reality.¹² Even the grammatical question of possession (Does the inquiry belong to the workers? Is it ever their inquiry? Can it be an individual inquiry, a “worker’s inquiry”? Why questions? Can’t these be implied merely be narration itself?) points to key issues about knowledge, politics, and subjectivity. Marx knew his questions had a programmatic political bias and that those who answered were knowing in their own way—“We hope to meet in this work with the support of all workers in town and country who understand that they alone can describe with full knowledge the misfortunes from which they suffer and that only they, and not savio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Worker
• Part II. World(s)
• Back Matter