Category: Boltanski and Chiapello

Mobility

Boltanski and Chiapello argue—fairly convincingly—that is the key source of profit—and the privileged site of exploitation—in the new form of capitalism. Plenty to think about in this formulation.

To explain: the “winner” in post 1975 capitalism, or what they call “network” and “project oriented” capitalism, is the person who can extend her networks, moving successfully from one project to the next, acquiring contacts and skills in each encounter. Thus, the successful person “accumulates” contacts and work experiences/knowledge—and does do precisely by never staying in one place too long. Only by being in circulation through a variety of locales can one’s network expand.

The person who is exploited in such a system is anyone who—for whatever reason (family situation, loyalty, lack of requisite ambition or social skills)—is not mobile, is tied to one place and one job. Such people are needed by the mobile winner—because it is the people who stay in place who secure that he still has a contact in the place that he has left. And that necessary work is not compensated in proper proportion to its necessity. Hence the exploitation of the stationary person. You might say that, luckily for businesses, many people, for various reasons, are stationary, are even loyal, despite the monetary penalty paid for being so. Businesses (and other work places such as universities) are parasitic on kinds of loyalty and non-mobility that they do everything to discourage.

Certainly, in the growing individuation of incomes (i.e. the decline of unions negotiating the same wage for everyone doing the same work in favor of each worker negotiating his or her own salary for his or her own self), it is the worker who can credibly say “I am leaving” who gets the raise or the bigger bonus. This is called letting the market set wages. And certainly being able to leave is, to a large extent, based on having established networks that enable mobility.

But—and this is the first big but—having the networks is necessary, but not sufficient. I think B&C underestimate productivity. That is, to move on to another job or project, one must have some evidence of success, some record of having delivered in the past. In other words, it is not just the accumulation of contacts that matters. Also required is the accumulation of skills. B&C don’t pay any attention to the resume, to the CV. Yet the CV is precisely a document of accumulation, a site of gathering. And it is precisely its function as a “site” that counterbalances mobility. What is accumulated is the opposite of what is scattered; what is banked takes a form quite distinct from a network, which is dispersed. For all the talk of postmodern selves (a talk, I hasten to add, that B&C don’t indulge in), the CV is testimony to the ways in which the bourgeois self is still the dominant form. The self is the product of its experiences—and its experiences are meant to be educative. Return of investment during a lifetime is based on turning experience to account. That’s the essence of all the fancy talk of “human capital.” I can’t see it as much more than old wine in new bottles.

I needn’t be entirely cynical about this. There is a difference between people who efficiently and successfully produce things—and those who do not. No doubt, I am speaking from the winner’s circle in saying so. I am someone who epitomizes mobility and networking. I have worked the system extremely well—having been a good boy who does what the system sets out as the things that will be most rewarded. I have even internalized much of that system, since I did the work with enthusiasm and voluntarily. My labor was, for the most part, not alienated since I found the game intricate and difficult enough to hold my interest, to call forth my most strenuous efforts. (Yeats: “the shoulder that has not pushed against an immovable fence has not experienced its full strength” or William James on the “strenuous mode.”) Even while (as I have written about before) I maintained a somewhat (and protective) ironic sense that it was a game, with low stakes and laughably low impact, even as I pursued it ardently. I often thought of Eugene McCarthy’s comment about politics being like coaching basketball. You have to be smart enough to play the game, but dumb enough to think it important.

The game came fairly easily to me—which is why I could on another level) afford the irony. I sat easy in my chains. But—and here is the uncynical part—I did produce the work. My mobility was based on temperament (I couldn’t stick to a discipline or a topic; I roamed the academic field, even as I roamed my home institution, not sticking to my department, which led to various administrative posts), but also based on the track record, on the books I had written. There was an objective measure, not just personal contacts. And, yes, that objective measure could often be laughably disconnected from quality (when it comes to academic publication, as my friend Hans Kellner was fond of saying, quantity doesn’t count, quantity is everything.) I got offers based on the titles of my publications—books that few on the hiring committees (or those asking me to write for this or that) had actually read. Still and all, the work had to be done.

And, as I say, I enjoyed doing the work. Just as I now enjoy writing a blog that cannot have any return on investment—and which has never landed on my CV.

All of which, I guess, is to say that a “career” must be built—and as a building is more stationary and table than “mobility” would suggest. But if one wants the biggest rewards, one must prove that one is willing and able to move, and thus career building is undertaken in relation to mobility. Which leads to another way of characterizing the stationary: they don’t think in terms of a career, in terms of building toward the “next thing.” They want to stay where they are. And in this new world of post-1970s capitalism one pays a fearful price for that, since it is the stationary (the one a firm doesn’t have to worry about their leaving) who are pushed onto contract work and made redundant at the drop of a hat.

Because, at a level below the stationary, the expendable, are “the excluded.” It is the return of high unemployment since 1975 that, in many ways, drives the whole system. If you don’t keep up your contacts, don’t keep adding to your skills, don’t exist within an extended network, you risk falling off the map altogether, so isolated and unconnected that you become unemployable. You bring nothing to the table. The long-term unemployed are a, if not permanent, at least constant feature of capitalism since 1975. Publish or perish, becomes “keep moving or perish.”

On Unions

Boltanski and Chiapello (B&C hereafter) devote a whole chapter to the decline of labor unions. Contrary to what I believed, labor unions are, in fact, very weak in France and have been getting weaker steadily since the 1960s. Their weakness is measured in the steep decline of the number of strike days imposed on capitalist enterprises each year and in rapidly declining membership.

Of course, strikes have become almost non-existent in the US. France, at least, has a tradition of “general strikes,” i.e. of people taking to the street to protest various government policies. The French demonstrations have some bite because, unlike American demonstrations, they do not take place on weekends and thus actually—and sometimes seriously—disrupt business as usual. At the very least, I’d say, you have to have a significant number of workers not showing up for work for a demonstration to have any leverage on either the economic or political powers that be.

In short, only actions that impact the bottom line will garner a response. Witness the power of a firm like Marriott when it weighs in against discriminatory legislation against gays. Making such legislation carry an economic cost—as happened in both Arizona and North Carolina—has been just about the only effective strategy against right-wing legislation over the past ten years.

B&C’s question is why the transition to neoliberalism occurred without very much being mounted in the way of resistance. “Changes in the world of work during this period continued to prompt complaints or indignation. But the institutions traditionally responsible for transforming complaint—a way of expressing discontent that remains attached to people in their particularity—into a general condemnation and public protest were widely discredited and/or paralysed at the time” (273).

The particular institution that had been dismantled was the union. I want to dwell for a moment on the general point—and it is my disagreement with Occupy and Hardt/Negri. Getting people out onto the street via Twitter cannot substitute for having the institutions that will translate that expressed discontent into power that can be brought to bear against the opposing powers that are exploiting people.

It is, of course, an old story in the US, one that dates back to the 1950s (but not to the 1930s): the quiescence of the workers. Why do they let themselves be mistreated? It is certainly not that they don’t see the mistreatment. It is because they don’t see an alternative, a truly effective way to force a change in the conditions of work.

In the 1950s were pretty bad, the 2000s are much worse. Now there are no strikes at all, and just about no collective bargaining. Each worker is on his or her own, negotiating for herself in terms of salary, and subject to workplace rules that are simply imposed from above and against which she waives all rights of appeal upon signing the work contract. In the state employment system in which I oversaw a staff of seven, it was the worst of both worlds for my staff members. They were constrained by the salary ranges within a job “band” (hence a collectively designated wage), but got none of the benefits of being part of a collective because all of the details of working conditions, as well as the established salaries for each band, were not a product of or subject to collective bargaining. It was take it or leave it.

B&C give a meticulous account of the multiple causes of deunionization. The economic causes—subcontracting, the movement to part-time or short-term contracts, rising unemployment, smaller, integrated (i.e. mixing levels of workers) work teams that had the effect of isolating workers from one another, individualized performance reviews and bonuses that differentiate among workers doing the same jobs—are many and powerful. Some of them were deliberately adopted to weaken the strength of unions. Others were driven more by the new management ideas about how to increase productivity. Others still (like rising unemployment and the downward pressure on wages) could be linked to macro-economic factors beyond any firm’s or even any state’s (simple or obvious) control.

But they also insist on the affective dimension. Here’s what I take to be the most plausible case to be made along those lines; I am inspired here by B&C but not following them exactly. My account is more my way of making sense of the transformation. And here academia seems pretty much in line with the rest of the economic world. The key is the fairly rigid distinction between permanent employees and those who are non-permanent. On the one hand, the insiders (those with tenure in the academy, or the essential workers who are central to a firm’s “core mission”) are given a ladder to climb—one that makes it imperative to manage one’s career, to enhance (at every turn) one’s “human capital.” In the business world, this becomes in B&C’s terms, the “projective” model. One attaches oneself to successive projects—and networks out from them to the next project. The workers who show an ability to bring projects to successful completion become highly prized—and efforts are made to “retain” them. The winners in this contest are those who develop—and show off—rare and valuable skills.

The losers, on the other hand, are those who do something that lots of other people can also do. They are easily replaceable (given high rates of unemployment) and, thus, need not be retained on long-term contracts. The firm gains much needed “flexibility” by having workers it can easily let go when economic conditions demand, while it can also save money by outsourcing non-core functions to subcontractors, who (inevitably) pay workers less and offer little to nothing in the way of benefits. (Of course, the benefits debacle is fairly unique to the US. Health benefits are not tied to employment elsewhere.)

How does this connect to the decline of unions? Pretty straightforwardly. The winners have nothing that the want or could get from a union. Their leverage against an employer is entirely individual. They can threaten to take their skills elsewhere—the infamous “outside offer” of academia. They are their own best advocates—and they are negotiating with the employer for something for themselves, not for any collective, not for colleagues and fellow workers.

Once shorn of these highly prized workers, the winners that the enterprise sees as vital to its success, the union loses much power. And when the firm outsources to subcontractors (who are, invariably, nonunion shops), the union even loses the workers who would find a union crucial to their interests. For the lower level workers still left in the firm, their loyalty to the union is undermined by the union’s impotence. The union has done—and seems incapable of doing—anything for them; it cannot prevent outsourcing and it hasn’t the strength to either win significant wage increases or improved working conditions in negotiations in which management seems to hold all the trump cards. Instead, the union (where it still exists) negotiates a set of “concessions” that make working conditions and wages worse in order to protect the existence of what jobs still remain. And going on strike is off the table because the union isn’t strong enough to make a strike actually effective.

No wonder, then, that any affective connection to the union is lost. All the union has ever done is to agree to “concessions” and it is taking my money while proving spectacularly ineffective in promoting or protecting my interests.

Thus, the decline of unions is easy to understand. But that decline has had disastrous consequences. It has left workers utterly naked in the face of neoliberalism. The obvious question, then, is what institution can provide that crucial transition (that B&C identify) from randomized complaints/discontent to effective transformation of the causes of those complaints?

Frankly, I don’t see any alternative to the state as that institution. So that’s where I will go in subsequent posts.

Unintelligible

The world no longer makes sense to me. Boltanski and Chiapello (in their superb book, The New Spirit of Capitalism [Verso, 2005]) talk about the need for intelligibility and, crucially, insist that intelligibility, which underwrites motivation, must include some standard of justice. Only such a standard makes judgment possible, thus creating ways to select between possible courses of action and different assessments of people. Justice is not the only standard. Efficiency and profit (cost/benefits analysis) are also standards employed in making decisions. But pure cynicism is very, very rare. Some notion of justice always acts as a “constraint” upon efficiency and profit. Pure greed is not a motive many are willing to embrace—and fewer are willing to publicly announce as their sole purpose. Crucially, Boltanski and Chiapello insist that the standards of justice provide real and effective brakes on capitalism’s search for profit. It is not true that anything goes. Some kind of working compromise—one that is intelligible and deemed legitimate—between justice and capitalist exigencies has to be in place.

Just what compromise exists at any given moment varies. That is the burden of their book. The think that we have, since 1990 (or so), entered a new “spirit of capitalism,” a new way of understanding (and internalizing) its justificatory bases. The justification of capitalism is both the way it publicly explains itself and the source of personal motivation for individual actors.

And here is where I run into my current trouble. In terms of the academy, the demand of “publish or perish,” and the assignment of status (among other rewards) on those who publish the most, now seems to me insane. Society is paying for us (the academics) to fill up libraries with books and journals that are mostly not read and which are incredibly redundant. The only possible justifications that I can see are: 1. You need to seed the field prodigally in order to get the 2-3% of work that represents real advancements of knowledge. Research is just inherently a very wasteful process, and we should just accept that fact—although it is one that is almost never acknowledged. And certainly this justification of the whole academic edifice is never offered in public as the primary one. 2. You need to have all that mediocre research in order that educators remain up to date with the advancement of knowledge in their fields. Since it is important for the educated (i.e. our students) to know what is the current best knowledge, their teachers have to be au currant.

I really don’t see any other convincing account of the whole research apparatus of the universities. In my field especially, picking over the carcass of Moby Dick seems particularly pointless—even while having students read Moby Dick still seems to me a very good idea. Which means we have our priorities exactly backwards, emphasizing the “research” over the teaching.

At the societal level, it seems to me that we have entered an age of cynicism that calls Boltanski and Chiapello’s view of justice as a real constraint overly optimistic. What has been so discouraging about the past year (from the election through to the efforts to repeal Obama-care and alter the tax code to favor the rich and corporations) is that appeals to justice are simply off the table. “Winning” is enough justification. We need to make America “more competitive” and we need to insure that we are economically better off and militarily stronger than every other nation. This looks like fascism because the average citizen is expected to identify with the nation’s “win” even when no benefits of that winning accrue to him. It’s sacrifice for the average Joe in order to secure the national victory.

Sure, there is some claptrap about freedom and some gestures toward meritocracy. But they are so obviously claptrap (how is getting cancer a matter of merit, of failed individual effort?; for that matter, what did the laid-off worker do to deserve her fate?) that no one, in this age of cynicism, is taken in. Rather, it is sauve qui peut and the devil take the hindmost. And that’s why the world no longer makes sense to me. Such naked disregard for others, such straight-forward hostility to any notions of justice or of the common good are, quite simply, incredible. Especially since people, in their face-to-face interactions, don’t act this way. Yet they vote for politicians whose cynicism and venery, whose lack of commitment to the people they are supposed to serve, are on vivid display every day.

All the polls show that people want government guaranteed health care, want the rich taxed more heavily, want the “dreamers” granted legal status, want sensible gun control. But then they vote for representatives who refuse to deliver any of those things. That makes no sense to me. I don’t understand this world anymore.