30 May 2008
how to exploit oneself and get away with it
[This is a piece I wrote for the forthcoming Kino Fist on the topic of Work. Sunday 2pm, E:vent Gallery...]
In Marin Karmitz's 1972 Coup pour Coup (Blow for Blow), a film about a group of women mounting a successful strike at a textiles factory, the nature of work is clear: there is exploitation (long hours, sexual harassment, physical exertion and foremen and women whose job it is to prevent you from slacking off), there is a site (the factory itself, which becomes a fortress complete with ad hoc crèche, kitchen and sleeping quarters during the strike) and there is an enemy (the boss himself, who is later held hostage in his office and forbidden to use the toilet, as the women themselves had been). The final scene, a freeze-frame of the workers united in struggle accompanied by a voice-over extolling the virtues of continued resistance, is formally paralleled by the last scene in Schrader's Blue Collar six years later, although the horizon of victory has now shrivelled to a bleak and relentless recognition of the divisive power of the bosses: 'They pit the lifers against the new boy and the young against the old. The black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.'
The triad exploitation-site-enemy, the classic vision of work as well as of the potential locus of solidarity, thirty-five years later, is oddly quaint, if stirring. Who today even knows who their boss is? Where the money ends up? What job you'll have next month?
Karmitz's film tries directly to bypass the social and cinematic obstacles to present a realistic picture of both work and the struggle against work – the actors consist of an effective combination of real strikers and film extras in equal measures, and the alphabetical list of names at the end includes the director as merely one name amongst others. It is a genuine attempt to undercut the non-egalitarian nature of most cinematic production and present a didactic model of social resistance at the same time. Godard, in a discussion of Coup pour Coup alongside his own Tout Va Bien is suspicious of 'approach: 'He thinks we can listen directly to what they [the workers] have to say...and that we [militant film makers] can be of use to them with no problem.' For Godard, the simple seizing of the factory, and of the means of cinematic production, misses a step, or several – these things have always been out of the hands of those who now seek to control and change them. Rather than 'simply filming female workers speaking' as Godard puts it, we must first ask ourselves the question 'who can speak when he's had his mouth shut?'
The challenge instead is to make films not 'in the name of', but rather in the first place '(we should speak) with our own name', which for a film director would perhaps mean using the very resources of the medium to go to forbidden territory, visually and geographical, to film the factory where cameras are banned, to film the 'public spaces' that in fact forbid recording. If 'the exploiter never tells the exploited how he’s exploiting him', as Godard rightly points out, then it is the political duty of cinema, television and photography, of all images in fact, to show this in so far as it is possible in a non-exploitative way. To enter into what Marx in Capital calls 'the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face "No admittance except on business"' For Godard the directness of Karmitz's film neglects the responsibility of images and the initial shock of seeing labour on the screen. The question for cinema today would be how can it try to show the exploitation specific to contemporary forms of labour when these very places and relations, exploitation-site-enemy, are unclear. Does the agency worker, for example, know who their boss is? Who their peers are? How much of their pay gets taken? And by whom?
We do not need to accept all the arguments for so-called immaterial labour in the work of Lazzarato, Hardt & Negri, Virno, et al., to think that there might be something at stake in the argument that 'waged labor and direct subjugation (to organization) no longer constitute the principal form of the contractual relationship between capitalist and worker' as Lazzarato puts it, or that 'post-Fordist "professionality" does not correspond to any precise profession. It consists rather of certain character traits' as Virno claims. Worldwide, it is true that in recent years agriculture has lost its place as the main sector of employment and has been replaced by the services sector, which in 2006 constituted 42.0 per cent of world employment compared to 36.1 per cent for agriculture. As for the industry sector, it represented 21.9 per cent of total employment, which is almost unchanged from ten years ago (taken from Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM 5th Edition)). Of course, we should be extremely wary of any claims about contemporary labour that might mean we take a fantastical creative conception of work-as-fun at its word, as if everyone had access to Google's massage chairs and play-rooms-for adults – it is not of course the case that labour has disappeared into an idealist puff of excitable smoke, but it has certainly become more difficult to work out where exploitation begins and ends (the 9-5 working day bleeding into emails from the boss, taking work home at the weekends, out of hours calls). The service sector is certainly run in the main on those character traits that Virno mentions, and the exploitation of basic forms of sociability and linguistic capacity, but it is also not entirely removed from modes of Taylorism, and the old idea that 'you are not paid to think', as Steve Wright reminds us. In fact, the generally rather impoverished forms of service one receives in the UK compared, say, to the ubiquitous forced (if effective) charm of the US is a mark in its favour – an acknowledgment that actually, no, this is not 'fun', this is work. And it is boring and long and badly paid. Don't have a nice day.
Steve Wright is correct also to point out that affective labour, those jobs that directly involve care, compassion and kindness (or at least their simulacra), from housework to reproduction to the sex industry have long accompanied and indeed made possible the labour we associate with more manly, 'proper' work (and, contra Godard, the feminisation of factory labour in Karmitz's film is perhaps the most important thing about it).
Nevertheless, there is a problem for contemporary political cinema here. Virno reminds us that: 'by being paid after labor has been made available, the wage in fact powerfully imposes the false belief that what is being remunerated is the work performed, when in fact what the capitalist purchases on the market is, for Marx, rather labor-power, the worker’s pure psychosomatic capacity to produce' – how do we capture this pre psychosomatic capacity to produce on camera? How do we go to the places we're not supposed to go if those places are, in the end, our own heads? How do we capture exploitation if in fact what we’re dealing with are pure forms of self-exploitation, linguistic, affective and social? We should perhaps revisit Eisenstein's criticism of Vertov – 'what we need is a kino-fist, not a kino-eye' – but turn it inwards and beat the crap out of the way we sell our very being, day in and day out.
References:
KILM 5th Edition
Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labour’, in P. Virno & M. Hardt (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. See here.
Paolo Virno, 'Post-Fordist Semblance', SubStance Issue 112 (Volume 36, Number 1), 2007
Steve Wright 'Reality check: Are We Living In An Immaterial World?', Mute Vol 2 #1
In Marin Karmitz's 1972 Coup pour Coup (Blow for Blow), a film about a group of women mounting a successful strike at a textiles factory, the nature of work is clear: there is exploitation (long hours, sexual harassment, physical exertion and foremen and women whose job it is to prevent you from slacking off), there is a site (the factory itself, which becomes a fortress complete with ad hoc crèche, kitchen and sleeping quarters during the strike) and there is an enemy (the boss himself, who is later held hostage in his office and forbidden to use the toilet, as the women themselves had been). The final scene, a freeze-frame of the workers united in struggle accompanied by a voice-over extolling the virtues of continued resistance, is formally paralleled by the last scene in Schrader's Blue Collar six years later, although the horizon of victory has now shrivelled to a bleak and relentless recognition of the divisive power of the bosses: 'They pit the lifers against the new boy and the young against the old. The black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.'
The triad exploitation-site-enemy, the classic vision of work as well as of the potential locus of solidarity, thirty-five years later, is oddly quaint, if stirring. Who today even knows who their boss is? Where the money ends up? What job you'll have next month?
Karmitz's film tries directly to bypass the social and cinematic obstacles to present a realistic picture of both work and the struggle against work – the actors consist of an effective combination of real strikers and film extras in equal measures, and the alphabetical list of names at the end includes the director as merely one name amongst others. It is a genuine attempt to undercut the non-egalitarian nature of most cinematic production and present a didactic model of social resistance at the same time. Godard, in a discussion of Coup pour Coup alongside his own Tout Va Bien is suspicious of 'approach: 'He thinks we can listen directly to what they [the workers] have to say...and that we [militant film makers] can be of use to them with no problem.' For Godard, the simple seizing of the factory, and of the means of cinematic production, misses a step, or several – these things have always been out of the hands of those who now seek to control and change them. Rather than 'simply filming female workers speaking' as Godard puts it, we must first ask ourselves the question 'who can speak when he's had his mouth shut?'
The challenge instead is to make films not 'in the name of', but rather in the first place '(we should speak) with our own name', which for a film director would perhaps mean using the very resources of the medium to go to forbidden territory, visually and geographical, to film the factory where cameras are banned, to film the 'public spaces' that in fact forbid recording. If 'the exploiter never tells the exploited how he’s exploiting him', as Godard rightly points out, then it is the political duty of cinema, television and photography, of all images in fact, to show this in so far as it is possible in a non-exploitative way. To enter into what Marx in Capital calls 'the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face "No admittance except on business"' For Godard the directness of Karmitz's film neglects the responsibility of images and the initial shock of seeing labour on the screen. The question for cinema today would be how can it try to show the exploitation specific to contemporary forms of labour when these very places and relations, exploitation-site-enemy, are unclear. Does the agency worker, for example, know who their boss is? Who their peers are? How much of their pay gets taken? And by whom?
We do not need to accept all the arguments for so-called immaterial labour in the work of Lazzarato, Hardt & Negri, Virno, et al., to think that there might be something at stake in the argument that 'waged labor and direct subjugation (to organization) no longer constitute the principal form of the contractual relationship between capitalist and worker' as Lazzarato puts it, or that 'post-Fordist "professionality" does not correspond to any precise profession. It consists rather of certain character traits' as Virno claims. Worldwide, it is true that in recent years agriculture has lost its place as the main sector of employment and has been replaced by the services sector, which in 2006 constituted 42.0 per cent of world employment compared to 36.1 per cent for agriculture. As for the industry sector, it represented 21.9 per cent of total employment, which is almost unchanged from ten years ago (taken from Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM 5th Edition)). Of course, we should be extremely wary of any claims about contemporary labour that might mean we take a fantastical creative conception of work-as-fun at its word, as if everyone had access to Google's massage chairs and play-rooms-for adults – it is not of course the case that labour has disappeared into an idealist puff of excitable smoke, but it has certainly become more difficult to work out where exploitation begins and ends (the 9-5 working day bleeding into emails from the boss, taking work home at the weekends, out of hours calls). The service sector is certainly run in the main on those character traits that Virno mentions, and the exploitation of basic forms of sociability and linguistic capacity, but it is also not entirely removed from modes of Taylorism, and the old idea that 'you are not paid to think', as Steve Wright reminds us. In fact, the generally rather impoverished forms of service one receives in the UK compared, say, to the ubiquitous forced (if effective) charm of the US is a mark in its favour – an acknowledgment that actually, no, this is not 'fun', this is work. And it is boring and long and badly paid. Don't have a nice day.
Steve Wright is correct also to point out that affective labour, those jobs that directly involve care, compassion and kindness (or at least their simulacra), from housework to reproduction to the sex industry have long accompanied and indeed made possible the labour we associate with more manly, 'proper' work (and, contra Godard, the feminisation of factory labour in Karmitz's film is perhaps the most important thing about it).
Nevertheless, there is a problem for contemporary political cinema here. Virno reminds us that: 'by being paid after labor has been made available, the wage in fact powerfully imposes the false belief that what is being remunerated is the work performed, when in fact what the capitalist purchases on the market is, for Marx, rather labor-power, the worker’s pure psychosomatic capacity to produce' – how do we capture this pre psychosomatic capacity to produce on camera? How do we go to the places we're not supposed to go if those places are, in the end, our own heads? How do we capture exploitation if in fact what we’re dealing with are pure forms of self-exploitation, linguistic, affective and social? We should perhaps revisit Eisenstein's criticism of Vertov – 'what we need is a kino-fist, not a kino-eye' – but turn it inwards and beat the crap out of the way we sell our very being, day in and day out.
References:
KILM 5th Edition
Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labour’, in P. Virno & M. Hardt (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. See here.
Paolo Virno, 'Post-Fordist Semblance', SubStance Issue 112 (Volume 36, Number 1), 2007
Steve Wright 'Reality check: Are We Living In An Immaterial World?', Mute Vol 2 #1
