In
principle, fictitious capital always arises when a money owner leaves
his money to another person and in return receives a title of
ownership (bond, share, etc.) representing the claim to this money
and its increase (e.g. in the form of interest or dividends). In this
way, the original sum of money is doubled. It now exists twice and
can be used by both parties. The recipient can spend the money on
consumption, investments or financial assets and for the donor his
money has become money capital, which yields a regular profit.
This
money capital, however, consists of nothing more than a securitized
claim representing the anticipation of future value. Whether this
anticipation is actually covered becomes clear only after the fact.
If the sum of money in question is invested in a production plant and
this investment is successful, the value is preserved in the form of
the acting capital and increases through the use of labour in the
production of goods. If, on the other hand, the investment fails or
the borrowed money is spent immediately on private or state
consumption, the original value is consumed, but the claim to it
lives on (for example in the form of a credit agreement or a bond).
In this case, the fictitious capital is uncovered and must be
replaced and “serviced” by the creation of new claims to
future value (such as the issue of new bonds) so that the monetary
claim can be redeemed. The financialisation of developed economies
can be measured by the relative size of the financial sector compared
to GDP, the volume of profits realised by financial institutions
compared to other enterprises, and the portfolio income of
non-financial enterprises. Beyond those indicators that demonstrate
the transfer of funds from the real economy to the speculative
financial circuits that lenders today are characterized by, their
power to select those projects that deserve to be financed is their
power to select those that deserve to be financed, which in turn
requires those that are dependent on credit to constantly demonstrate
their attractiveness to investors and thus to align their economic
activities not only to generating profit but also to the creation of
creditworthiness. Above all, the stock corporations must not only
strive to maximize the difference between revenues and production
costs in the long term, but also to work in the short term for the
benefit of the shareholders on an increase in stock prices, which are
valued by the financial markets. Thus, the real success of these
companies does not result exclusively from the realization of profits
from the sale of products and services, but is based on the capital
gain that can also be obtained from share buybacks.
Now the
anticipation of future value in the form of fictitious capital
belongs to the capitalistic normal operation. But in the fundamental
crisis of exploitation in the wake of the Third Industrial Revolution
it took on a fundamental new meaning. While the creation of
fictitious capital has so far essentially served to flank and support
the process of capital exploitation (for instance by pre-financing
large investments), a change of role has now taken place since the
basis of this process broke away. From then on, capital accumulation
was no longer largely based on the use of labor in the production of
goods such as cars, hamburger rolls and smartphones, but on the mass
issuance of securities such as stocks, bonds and financial
derivatives, which represented claims to future value. In this way,
fictitious capital itself became the engine of capital accumulation,
while the production of goods market goods decreased to dependent
variables.
This form of capital accumulation, however, differs
in one crucial respect from the previous form of capitalist
self-purpose movement. Since it is based on the anticipation of value
to be produced in the future, it is capital accumulation without
capital utilization. Its basis is not the current utilization of
labor in the production of value, but the expectation of future real
economic gains, which in the last instance must come from the
additional utilization of labor. However, since this expectation
cannot be fulfilled in view of the development of productive power,
the demands must be renewed again and again and the anticipation of
future value must be stretched further and further into the future.
The consequence of this is that the mass of financial stocks is
subject to an increased exponential growth constraint. For this
reason, the number of financial securities exceeds the number of the
produced and traded goods market goods many times over. In public
opinion, this “lifting off of the financial markets” is
usually criticised as the alleged cause of the crisis; in fact,
however, once the foundations of exploitation have been lost, the
accumulation of capital can only continue in this way.
The
compulsion to exponentially increase exponential growth, however,
marks a logical limit for the accumulation of fictitious capital; for
the real economic reference points to which the expectations of
future profits refer cannot be multiplied at will and emerge one
after the other as chimera (new economy, real estate boom, etc.).
Nevertheless, this limit can be postponed to a considerable extent,
as a glance back at the era of fictitious capital, which has now
lasted around thirty-five years, shows. However, this postponement is
at the expense of steadily rising social costs, which are becoming
increasingly intolerable. Income and wealth have concentrated in
fewer and fewer hands, the precarization of working and living
conditions has increased worldwide, and the remaining natural
resources have been squandered mercilessly – just to keep the
dynamics of capital accumulation going.
In order to better
understand the causes of this, we must first examine what effects the
shift of capital accumulation into the sphere of fictitious capital
has had on the basic form of social relationship, mediation through
work. Then we have to ask how the relationship between the two sides
of the capitalist form of wealth, abstract wealth in the form of
value and material wealth, has changed at the same time.
I have
argued above that until the 1970s social mediation through labor was
characterized by a mutual dependence of capital and labor. This was
based on the fact that capital in its urge to exploit was dependent
on living labor, while the owners of the commodity labor depended on
the successful sale of precisely this commodity in order to be able
to live. In the era of fictitious capital, however, this relationship
changed fundamentally. Not only did the Third Industrial Revolution
make masses of living labor superfluous, but more importantly, the
focus of capital accumulation has shifted from the use of labor in
the production of market commodities to anticipating future value. As
a result, capital has become self-referential in a whole new sense in
its movement for its own ends. The anticipation of future value,
which is capitalized and accumulated in the here and now, remains
within the logic and form of the production of goods; for it is
produced through the sale of a good, namely through the sale of a
title to property, which securitizes the claim to a certain sum of
money and its multiplication. But the sellers of these property
titles are by no means any workers who sell the promise of work in
ten or twenty years’ time, i.e. receive a kind of long-term advance
whose fulfilment would remain uncertain; it is rather the
functionaries of capital itself, first and foremost the banks and
other financial institutions, who sell each other the securitized
claims to future value and thus produce and accumulate fictitious
capital. In this respect, therefore, capital has indeed become
completely self-referential; the commodity that represents additional
social capital arises within the sphere of capital
itself.
Conversely, however, this now means that the sellers of
the commodity Arbeitskraft largely lose their bargaining power. Not
only can they in any case be replaced by machines or by cheaper
competitors anywhere in the world in the face of the advancing
development of productivity and globalization; even more decisive is
the fact that their commodity is no longer the basic commodity of
capital accumulation. This results in a structural imbalance. For the
overwhelming majority of the world’s population, social mediation
through work is still central insofar as they have to sell their
labor or their work products as goods here and now in order to be
able to participate in social wealth in return, i.e. to buy the
necessary means of consumption. Capital, on the other hand, also
remains related to social mediation through labor; for it has by no
means left the universe of commodity production. To the extent that
capital accumulates through anticipation of future value production,
that is, anticipates the results of possible labor in the future, it
frees itself from its dependence on the future.
2.The
phenomenology
And the work is everywhere, anytime. When
oppression is absolute, there is no leisure, no “free time”.
Sleep is monitored. The sense of work is then the destruction of work
at and through work. But if, as has happened in some concentration
camps, work consists of dragging stones to a place at a run, piling
them up and then, still running, taking them back to the starting
point … Then work can no longer be destroyed by any sabotage if it
is already destined to destroy itself. Nevertheless, it retains its
meaning; not only to destroy the worker, but, directly, to occupy
him, to fix him, to control him, and at the same time to give him the
awareness that producing and non-producing are one and the same
thing, is also work … Maurice Blanchot to the labour camp
Isn’t
today’s situation quite similar? In the mostly precarious working
conditions there is a large number of meaningless and even
capitalistically unproductive occupations, which Graeber calls
bullshit jobs1, and which, no matter whether they are connected with
long waiting in which nothing happens or intolerable hustle and
bustle, are complementary to the ubiquitous circulation logic of
capital (the main thing is that work circulates as employment); The
affectively occupied, lightning speed that one has to cultivate in
dealing with digital devices and media is often expected in dealing
with people, objects and materials, and this attitude, if it is paid
for, is today disguised as employment. Nonstop-doing is hip and
trendy, even if it is still the very last nonsense that is carried
out, at least a little spiritual profit should arise from employment,
for which the rampant hobby sector from the hardware store to the
nudist oasis, the boom of therapeutic wellness and leisure activities
with their patchworks of self-enhancing activities and the spiritual
feel-good industry from Tantra to Yoga to Thai Chi provide the
affective model, whereby monetary profits from such activities are
usually only obtained through mediation.
Industrial labor has
always been about hiring the worker (as variable capital), whose
labor was never identical to the labor he performed and created the
added value for capital. Today, however, the employee (not the
worker) is increasingly no longer primarily the owner of a labour
force composed of wealth, skills, qualifications and potential, which
the owner offers on the labour market and rents out for a certain
period of time in order to function as a producer who, in addition to
performing the (extra) work guaranteed by his labour force, also
exists as a leisure person. As a modern consumer of work or as a
customer of work (at the Employment Agency for Work), however, the
employee is regarded as human capital in the 24/7 mode or as a
customer of work. as a holder of a self-portfolio, to be filled with
professional, social and emotional competences (not qualifications)
and to be constantly improved, whereby a feeling for favourable
opportunities and options in the jobs is to be developed and the
speculation of opportunities is to be taken for granted, so that the
employee translates into the language of the economy, can be regarded
as a conglomerate of various small types of capital that is
constantly in need of improvement; indeed, the employee is this
conglomerate that he must credibly embody for the Employment Agency
as a client by providing evidence of small securities documenting his
employment history and ability. As a consumer of labor he is at the
same time the small capital x, the speculative competence
conglomerate, which he has to increase in his alleged
inexchangeability or singularity, at least these are the neoliberal
imperatives, but he always remains a profile attributed to him by
companies, social media and labor agencies, a product oscillating
between consolidation and versatility. At the same time, the consumer
always remains frozen in a volatile work process (training for job),
which is sometimes even called “life”. Wringing its hands,
as far as it has reached a certain status, the competence
conglomerate looks for its always refreshing talents as well as for a
unique selling proposition, which of course lies in its (never to be
updated) potential to embody it in the distant future, while it
remains entirely subject to the techniques of the plusquamperfect of
a “it will have been”, techniques that transform the future
into the past in a continuous process.
Today, wage labour must
endure a particular paradox. On the one hand, work is a general
virtue that inscribes itself in life. Everything has become work, be
it body work, relationship work, sex work, mourning work etc…
Really free time thus becomes a state that should be avoided in any
case. On the other hand, the importance of work as occupation and
vocation decreases, so that only the job and the occupation remain,
whereby a working life is often enough regarded as the accumulation
of the next best opportunities, without the chance to tell his
employment biography as a successful life (Sennett). In addition,
fewer and fewer people have access to a job that ensures their
livelihood. And finally, the fear of unemployment hangs over almost
everyone who buys their labour”. Then one would have to ask why
people do not understand their bullshit jobs as such.
Basically
it has to be said that Marx replaced the subjectively oriented
concept of alienation later on in capital by the concept of the
extraction of added value, which subjectively cannot be experienced
without further ado, because the separation of necessary and extra
work is not visible. The added value is necessarily evoked by the
capital relation.
Instead of the producer, who in the course of
capitalist history had emancipated himself, at least for certain
phases of his life, from his internment in the factory and from
complete lawlessness in matters of freedom, and who thus nevertheless
possessed the freedom to offer his labor at markets, today the
employee or the consumer of “labor”, who is chained to this
day and night, is increasingly taking the place of the producer.
While the potential producer on the labor market embodies an offer as
a labor force, the consumer of labor represents the embodied demand
for the agencies that mediate labor, whereby the labor force on the
labor markets is permanently designed and traded, coached, and cast;
it now becomes the flexible mode for the business model of a
labor-design industry that imposes permanent casting on the labor
force. And even if today the producer still spends his labor force,
it tends to be cut off from him insofar as he no longer defines
himself solely through a production act, but also as a consumer of
labor through an act of purchase. And the less today, in view of
automation and the excessive increase in bullshit jobs, it is still
possible to convey the necessity of work to employees, the more the
demand for work is to coalesce into the ubiquitous model, which also
means that potential producers are transferred into the role of
consumers of “work” via the job centres and the various
private placement services.
The flexible labour market today is
characterised to a large extent by precarious services, which the
Federal Employment Agency, among others, offers, but which can only
actually provide employment if it is also available, which is
something that the Federal Employment Agency automatically assumes.
Consequently, the unemployed must also be responsible for their own
unemployment, which in turn implies that they are mostly lazy or
redundantly unwilling to work subjects. If we now refute this claim
with facts/figures, then nothing remains but the lack of work. And it
is precisely this lack of work that the Federal Employment Agency, as
its “service on the labour market”, must constantly deal
with by miraculously transforming the lack of work into a work of
potency. And if one continues to assume that work is often precarious
and underpaid work, with workers either potentially hounded to death
and bullied or subjected to pure occupational therapies, the lack of
work will never be absent.
To repeat it, the Federal Employment
Agency defiantly maintains that there is no lack of work, turning the
lack of work itself into work.2 Whatever work is offered by the
agency, it now seems to circulate itself as a potential commodity
(the classic misconception of work as confusing or equating work with
labour), but it is usually only updated for a limited time, with the
potential involvement of clients in the search for work no longer a
guarantee that it will result in actual participation in work. When
the unemployed mutate into customers of state or private employment
agencies, another reversal comes into play: unemployed people who by
definition are producers without work potentially become consumers,
buyers of work. It follows from this that the unemployed, as
demanders of labour, are at the same time the entrepreneurs of their
own who seem to buy their own labour. In any case, they have to
increase their small capital X, and since this is usually zero except
for their potency to be labour force, they came to the conclusion
that the unemployed are the entrepreneurs of their own companies who
seem to buy their own labour. In any case, they have to increase
their small capital X, and since this, apart from their potency to be
manpower, is usually equal to zero, the Federal Agency at work one
day came up with the clever idea of improving this small capital X,
password “I AG”, but more or less quickly gave up these
efforts again. The precarious employee should now experience for
himself what responsibility and entrepreneurship means, so that he
can finally identify himself with the victims who the state and
capital provide for him, in order to release the state apparatuses
and companies from their legal and social responsibility.
The
precariously employed person has to repeat the act of buying work
quite frequently in the course of his job life, so that factors such
as further training, performance potential, knowledge acquisition and
improvement of qualifications and competence are set in the long
term, with the result that a proliferating range of consulting,
training and further training opportunities is created on the labour
and coaching markets. We are dealing here with the logistification of
an employment mobility regime that consists of transferring the right
amount of labour, with the right skills and qualifications, at the
right time and at the right cost, to the right place, with permanent
tracking of labour movements in order to do justice to this type of
just-in-time production, and this applies in particular to
to-the-point migration (logistical frontiers 54), the management of
which requires logistics of waiting times, comprehensive monitoring,
control and prevention of friction.
The knowledge mostly
acquired on the screen results in a fluctuating information value (of
the consumer of work), whereby this has little to do with the
manpower of a classical producer who is confronted with a site-bound
machine park designed for a specific production. The new paradigm of
employment is the computer, which is mobile and flexible and
integrated into a network. In order to be successful, one has to be
networked in almost all professional areas today, because this is the
only way to attract investors who promote and advance one’s own
humane investment capital. Through the purchase and application of
affective and social skills, as well as the professional knowledge
that comes from consulting, coaching and training programmes, which
seem to be well informed, the consumer of work must be able to sell
himself flexibly and attractively, precisely by constantly acquiring
a type of asset, namely certificates, expertises, employment
contracts, time vouchers, tax relief, etc., which he, as well as his
identity card, must present at every presentation.
In some
professions, labour is still spent, but its symbolic value, which is
represented by the right to work that is fought for, has been largely
eliminated. It is thus replaced by the information value of the
consumer of work, who is characterized by coaching competence, the
value acquired through education and training, the performance
self-portfolio and the genetic code. In this fourfold connotation of
the information value exists the small capital x, which covers the
information processing of the competences and the purchased knowledge
in self-sales. Now we can see whether the consumer of labour
functions as a self-informing network or not. The act of purchase is
then processed via the recognition of the assets, provided that the
consumer of labour has an attractive information value (and possibly
also the necessary purchasing power). And if his assets are then
updated by an employment contract, then he is sufficiently mobilized
for employment as a temporary worker. The assets, like all financial
assets, contain a potency which, however, is only updated as
participation in the work or as employment. If an asset is then also
updated, then everything has to be accepted at work, because
according to the Federal Employment Agency there is no unreasonable
work. If, however, the capitalisation of one’s own information value
does not succeed, the market will pronounce the judgement that the
creation of work through its absence failed.
Temporary work and
agency work put the permanent creation (and disappearance) of jobs on
a permanent footing, with which nothing more than unemployment is to
disappear, so that temporary work knows intermediate times without
work, but no more unemployment. In these interim periods without
work, the assets circulate without interruption in the form of
applications by the private and state agencies, because although
temporary work is limited in time, the application period is not, so
that the assets are not used for work. In these interim periods
without work, the assets circulate without interruption in the form
of applications by the private and state agencies, because although
the temporary work is limited in time, but the application period is
not, so that the assets circulate on the labor market years or almost
the entire life, but they are not lost years, because the assets
traded by the agencies (allegedly) always serve to improve their own
information and competence value. It should now be clear that the
consumer of labour is a risk subject, and if he sells his information
value invested in assets for a while or even forever below value,
then that is his bad luck, because of all things in the “loan
and temporary work game with profit and loss” there are no
insurance claims.
And to go further, unemployment benefit is
only a right if the right to work is presupposed. It was fought for
by the producers and their organizations in long class battles with
reference to the alleged world-forming potency of the industrial
labor force, which today is cut off from the consumer, with which
actually also the right to unemployment assistance is cancelled and
was finally consequently transformed into Hartz4, which resembles a
panic laboratory with a charity (which introduces criminal law into
social law), for the self-inflicted misfortune, which actually only
falls to those who consider any work mediated by the “Modern
Service on the Labor Market” unreasonable. The Hartz4 recipient
has no place on the official labour market where there is a highly
qualified, academic, privileged wage-working class, i.e. the secured
core workforce of large and medium-sized enterprises and the partly
independent and at least in some phases well-earning precariat. The
rest of the population is in the low-wage sector or at the level of
state-subsidised and/or state-forced employment, or is completely out
of employment, which only exacerbates the misfortune.3 Part of the
superfluous remainder, as Hartz4 recipients, is commonly referred to
forced labour, where employment itself is the marginal income, as a
basic income independent of work is still strictly rejected. Forced
labour means permanent mobilisation for work. And there is one more
point to be made: The sharply delineated division between employment
and unemployment (unemployment as the flip side of employment), which
goes back to an entirely different accumulation regime
(standardisation and continuity of production, hence stability and
continuity of employment), has changed into an ever closer
intertwining of periods of employment and periods of unemployment.
The fact that unemployment has become structural does not mean that
millions of people are waiting for a permanent contract, but that
they are working while being registered as unemployed. Unemployment
is now part of the norm of employability. To be unemployed means to
be available and ready for immediate use, not for a permanent
contract, but for a fixed-term contract with a
duration.(Lazzarato)
If larger parts of the work, in particular
auxiliary work, cannot be completely detached from the income, they
become a service which does not consist in the work itself, but in
the submission to work ordered by the state. As such, service today
is a service to work which is expressed in compulsory labour. This is
de facto labour service. And the less the service is still a service
to work, the more it mutates into a service to competence and
information by absorbing, processing and storing it. The information
migrates into the body and its cognitive faculties and tends to
become identical with the service. The demand for work, which is
objectively lacking, becomes the demand for what takes its place, it
becomes the demand for what replaces work: competence, information,
automation and digitisation. Therefore, more and more powerful
software must be available to interconnect the data and information
streams with the bodies, affects and brains of individuals, who are
literally imprisoned by the control, regulation and feedback
processes encoded in the digital programs, because the traceability
of each individual action and the anticipation of further actions are
built into the circulating logic of the information streams.
The
transitive normalization of behavior, i.e. the full integration of
the actors into systems, in which they merely function as points in
networks that are to be captured and utilized, is quite oddly
transformed by the consumption of the offerings which in turn make it
possible to use all the forces of self-increase in the pull of
performance activities like a service. The competence, fitness and
wellness status here acts like “systemic doping”, providing
a host of positive placebo effects. To the same extent that the new
consumer of work, who tends to be unemployed, affirms his unemployed
as the execution of a service, he continually appropriates his
precarious appropriation with self-responsibility, the blackmail
inherent in the classical employment contract seems to be lifted, as
if out of nowhere there were an endlessly creative and performatively
applicable work capacity, as if the service provider were the
reincarnation of the deification of positive work and competence.
This also reflects the fact that the loss of work for the individuals
today appears as a catastrophe that must be averted with all
available means – if no one believes in work any more, only then does
belief in its necessity become universal. While Marx could still
dryly state that the worker does not produce for himself, but for
capital, in order to really exclude any apotheosis that elevates work
to an idol, the creative self-configuration through the purchase of
work, which is stylishly accompanied by the constant consumption of
coaching, casting and enhancement programs, rediscovers a truly
uncanny joy of enjoyment in (digitized) work, whose propagandists
constantly proclaim that the persons integrated into the
informational networks are indeed the embodiment of creative
participations and singularity demonstrations – instead of simply
admitting that these persons are still mostly recipients of orders
who may give each other orders in the team at a lower or middle level
of the company.
Work, which is increasingly disappearing as
industrial work (in the metropolises), remains a scarce commodity and
an occupation that is simultaneously administered as amphetamine and
tranquilizer. As a result, work, which in fact is no longer work, but
employment, which consists either in waiting or, alternatively, in
the worst agitation, must be embellished in a special way: it is
rewritten as self-realization and self-increase, a euphemism that not
only those who are in the process of doing so are able to do, who
once benefited from a job center measure, but also those who do a
normal job in the office – a frightening convulsion of mobbing,
agitation and paralyzing boredom at the same time, as meaningless
activity – can only be understood as a bad joke. If they don’t, and
even show some delinquent behavior, then data science engines today
extract data and signals from the web and other sources that indicate
exactly this deviant behavior, and this quickly turns you into a work
risk that is classified on a risk index, so that the company and its
management can intervene preventively and simply put the personalized
risk outside the door. Because most employees do not do anything
different, they have to consume their own employment as a
self-actualization project as a punishment, the maximum punishment
that the capital has available for such beaten up subjects, who
themselves are still denied the work in the sweat of their faces. And
such a consumption of labor today often enough resembles the
scrapping of labor, so that the imperative of labor is still dropped,
because the new Stakhanovs of vulgar hedonism and affective
competence no longer need orders to perform whole work (in itself)
and for the others, they only need the emotional and empathetic
touch, the impetus that the coach or leader constantly instills in
them.
And this punishment continues in leisure time; as is well
known, the seriousness of life – inseparable from the fun of life –
begins in leisure time, in which not only the conglomerate of
products, affects and events, but also consumption in a loop wants to
be consumed. Designations such as leisure industry, wellness centre,
leisure pedagogy and the like point to the affiliation of leisure to
business, whereby leisure and work compete with each other for the
highest recognition, whereby in life it is no longer just a matter of
working as much as possible, but also of having consumed or enjoyed
plenty of leisure time within the framework of supposedly highly
individualised worlds of experience. This applies especially to the
elites and the high-income part of the middle class, who, dissolved
in their madness of singularity and excess of uniqueness, constantly
mix leisure and work with each other and have both undergone the
glamour of the “creativity”.
The
people who are happy all around with their kind of singular
self-increase, while the greater part of the population even in the
western feel-good oases of the West can only bear the bizarre nature
of daily occupation so well that they can somehow get to the most
precious weeks of the year and enjoy their holidays, that is to say
to hang around in some hotel bunkers in the south, that is to say to
be under the supervision and guidance of professional specialists,
coaches and entertainers, who teach you day and night how to dance,
to do gymnastics, to eat and to sleep. Wolfgang Pohrt writes about
it: “The hard fact that the capital relationship, according to
its historical purpose, transforms the wage workers into superfluous
human material, into useless eaters who can be starved to death in
poor countries, while in rich countries they have to be kept halfway
in a good mood as recipients of support, this hard fact is thus
treated with a lot of ideological fabric softener, and at the end of
the fabric softening cycle, which some call a rethink, others a label
fraud, the cleaning lady to the room attendant has transformed the
simple time killing into, for example, finding her own identity.« A
breath of mink pohrt.186
And if even the left still wants the
work, which in the hip circles is now called creative work, to be
understood as the self-realization of the individual one last time,
then one is not at all in the neighborhood of Marx, but one is in the
wake of the philosophy of life of a youth movement that cannot be
killed, which, in turn, in the wake of being absorbed within a pool
of “interesting options”, relies on the permanent
implementation of cultural novelties with which the inflated self of
little bourgeois willing to ascend is confronted with the illusion of
uniqueness, in new speech, singularity, distinctiveness and
ingenuity, something that the powerless specimen absolutely needs
today in order not to have to visit a life-therapeutic specialist
against the daily mix of paralyzing boredom and stressful occupation,
which adds two and two together, namely that for living beautifully,
drinking well and eating healthier must be added to the creative
work, otherwise you can not be happy and content, but remain the
meaningless hedonist, of whom, one must add, no one has warned you.
And so the freedom to create something new out of nothing is combined
with the compulsion to be constantly creative in the various
attractiveness competitions, and the more everyone has to be
creative, the less the individuals can still do it, but because they
continue to try desperately, a world of pseudo-originality, of fakes
and plagiarisms emerges, which above all shows one thing: That
despite the millions of inventions and the abundance of goods with
alleged uniqueness character, there is nothing left to invent. And
the faster the object decays today, the more it has to be dressed up
with a creative idea, from the creative fruitcake to the creative
wall decoration to the creative self, which one can multiply at the
labour and attention markets as the small capital x, invest or simply
buy from a consulting firm. But here, as Seeßlen/Metz think, there
is no destruction of old meanings and their replacement by new
meanings, what they call surreal, but the energetically produced
surplus of meaning only refers to the fact that meaning must be
meant, what is meant is completely indifferent. But still every
meaning must be capitalized.
Even today, even the less fragile
life and work designs still fray the omnipresence of the cuts, with
which life, employment and the generation of the surplus are divided
into intervals, pressed and scattered again or recombined ever faster
beyond a chronological time, thus replacing continuity with a kind of
indeterminate postponement – truly a lasting state of suspense of a
speculative time, with which the never-ending coming of lifelong
learning and investing is also perpetuated. There is an ever deeper
fragmentation of working time and life time, and both times remain
caught up in the process of a furious, deterritorializing
recombination in which, for example, work on the telephone can be
called up for a week, a day, or an hour, thus making employment
fractal and recombinant. The digital work is fragmented; the
individual – itself a cellular form – experiences a recombinant
fragmentation in the digitized production processes in cellular and
at the same time recombinable segments. It is not only a question
here of the work itself becoming precarious, but also of the work
processes being constantly divided, possibly leading to the
dissolution of the person as an unified productive agent, as a labor
force. It is quite clear that as cells of productive time, the
individuals in the punctual and fragmented forms of work processes
can be constantly mobilized, incited, and recombined anew. We are
dealing with an immense increase in depersonalized working time,
inasmuch as capital is increasingly moving over to it, instead of
hiring the worker who works eight hours at a time to rent various
time packages in order to recombine them just in time (out- and
crowdsourcing) – and this regardless of their interchangeable and
thus more or less random carrier. Even the “self” now
fluctuates as a fluid residual ego and is recombined in ever new
relations, and this formation resembles a kaleidoscope, “which
shows a new pattern with every shaking. “10 This kind of spasmic
recombination of employment, which extends far beyond labor
relations, is also carried out today in the various social networks.
In the mastery of accelerating and decelerating, stretching and
postponing, compressing and resetting schedules, employees also
create expanded possibilities for generating surplus for financial
capital with non-chronological flows of money. Prerequisites for this
kind of surplus generation, which goes hand in hand with debt, are
both low wages and precarious forms of work, in which the employees
have to constantly adapt to unpredictable working hours and volatile
wages, not least to leveraging their debts, so that they are almost
drawn into undetermined and unpredictable streams of time.
In
the share economy, the digital interfaces that are now called
platforms control and steer work in a completely restructured labour
market. Thus, the drivers and bicycle couriers of new platforms such
as Uber differ from the dependent employees of traditional companies
in that they themselves offer a service, and the means to provide the
service that an app on the platform gives them, be it the car or the
bicycle and in any case the smartphone, must be provided by
themselves. So what is worn out during the execution of the service
is the property of the drivers and couriers. The drivers, who, for
example, are able to pick up passengers, are under strict digitalised
control and are forced to follow the platform’s algorithms. The
routes they drive are dictated by the GPS, while their efficiency,
availability and interaction with passengers are the subject of
constant evaluation, which then continues to determine how, when and
where the drivers are deployed.
The drivers and couriers do not
act as official employees, but are private contractors to the
companies of the platforms. Far from offering an alternative to
precarious work, those who ultimately provide the service to
customers oscillate in the tension between the restrictive conditions
of wage labour and the risk of self-employment. Thus, service
providers who use the platforms’ services are freed from the
repression of wage labour, but also from the associated social
guarantees (because the platforms do not pay social security
contributions). In this way, they seem to represent the epitome of
neoliberal subjects. At least the personal dependence on a boss who
sweetens a working day with all sorts of commands disappears, because
the drivers have little to do with the organizers of the platform,
even in an emergency it is hardly impossible to contact them. So it’s
apparently up to the drivers themselves how they organise their daily
work, but they must never become too slow during work and they have
to keep up with the competition at all costs, and that’s why it’s so
important to just step on the pedal whatever happens.
The
companies always increase the hourly wage for the most effective of
their drivers, but this means nothing more than that the permanent
monitoring and automated evaluation of the drivers’ performance
ensures the competition, the comparison and the scaling in the long
run. For self-employed drivers, for example, earnings are measured by
the number of deliveries made. And this usually increases the
driver’s willingness to take risks while driving and thus also the
demand for accident insurance benefits; the rising insurance premiums
reflect the courage to take risks. which in turn boosts the
performance of the drivers, because they also have to earn the money
for accident insurance. If no orders are received during a shift, the
drivers do not receive any wages, but their working hours are
converted seamlessly into free time. But because the couriers can’t
and don’t want to do anything with this free time – who wants to eat
their way through the paralyzing time porridge of everyday life – not
only are the really stressful shifts the most popular among
self-employed drivers, but they also constantly demand new shifts.
Drivers usually take care of the so-called market clearance in a very
reliable manner and, due to their own lack of financial resources,
they also constantly register further demand for work shifts and thus
increase the demand for courier workstations, which is why the
algorithm can further worsen the financial conditions for its
customers with every update, but this in no way leads to a noticeable
drop in demand.
For many theorists, the major platforms are
nothing more than the assemblage of commercial contracts between a
principal authority that concludes contracts on behalf of the company
and a multiplicity of agents that independently provide services to
the companies. The platforms thus multiply partnerships based on
purely commercial encounters that offer services to third parties
without regulated employment contracts and wage earners. (However, it
is still difficult for a number of companies in different sectors to
produce without the recruitment of wage earners.) Finally, the new
service providers are dependent not only on their own work but also
on their integration into networks structured by ratings and rankings
and other regulatory procedures, and this means that the exploitation
of their labour resources and their risk management ultimately depend
on credit, which is promoted by positive ratings and which they
absolutely must accumulate. That is why one’s work performance and
the promotion of one’s skills in the course of self-marketing
constantly requires positive evaluation and recognition by customers,
which manifests itself in scores, likes, friends and followers, and
optimising these evaluations is an important task that a driver must
perform. And the accumulation of reputational capital must
necessarily result in an efficient credit score in order to gain the
confidence of banks and insurance companies. The sustainability of
the service providers’ operations therefore depends much more on the
approval of the lenders and sponsors than on the entrepreneurial
ethos put into the foreground by neo-liberal ideologues or the price
of human capital to be increased, whereby the sponsors are mostly
financial speculators, who use production means based on digital
machines for the extraction and forecasting of certain resources and
raw materials (in this case the behaviour of users), which serve to
profitably modify the behaviour of customers, which in turn cannot be
achieved without the total control of the drivers, so that today
these are also tracked on Facebook, for example, by track-reading
machines.
On the web pages of the platforms where service
providers and their customers can exchange information with each
other, the platforms assign their service providers a specific set of
assets to be continuously evaluated, which the service providers in
turn have to combine, move and manage as part of their “reputational
capital”. Some theorists already see the management of the
reputational capital as the main resource that the mobile players
must manage and cultivate in order to ascend the hierarchy or simply
survive. In the end, service providers such as drivers or couriers
will have to manage a Facebook hyperpage themselves, on which the
various recommendations of friends, mentors, lenders, sponsors,
customers and service providers are documented. These open profile
portfolios, designed using algorithms, make it possible to show the
attractiveness and trustworthiness of a person, to determine his or
her reputation value and thus his or her ability for a job, a credit
line or a partnership. Obviously, private asset managers now have to
speculate on their own reputational capital or follow the
speculations of others, but they are also seduced or guided into
their most secret desires by using complex and yet difficult to
comprehend behavioural modification machines and that is, algorithms
operating in the black box or automated protocols that attempt not
only to steer work behavior, but even the spread of emotions via the
platforms. (zuboff)
When
it finally happens that the time of work and the time of non-work are
no longer separated by an exact boundary, then there is no longer any
significant difference between employment and non-work. That is why
Paolo Virno can write in all exaggeration: “Unemployment is
unpaid work; work is then paid unemployment. So with good reason you
can say that you never stop working, as you can say that there is
less and less work. Paolo Virno thus points to the fact that the
customer of the “modern service on the labour market” has
long since corresponded to the subject Günther Anders calls
“automation servant” or to the “work mannequin”
described by Baudrillard, which simulates the non-existent work as if
it were present, or simulates it despite the too much work as if it
was not present at all. Today, a widespread form of employment, which
is completely integrated into machine complexes, is that of the
employment mannequin, who in certain cycles carries out the activity
of waiting or pressing a key, depending on a programmed sequence of a
machine feedback system elsewhere. Thus the agility, cleverness and
speed of today’s divide, a prozak and ritalin mutant, often consists
in the devastating waiting, in waiting to be allowed to press the red
button, while the decision elsewhere has long since expired or been
made, namely in the recursive loops of the machine system
itself.
Strangely enough, this kind of abysmal desolation
(employment) requires a whole series of conditions in terms of pay
and control, be it the individual management of time accounts, the
logging of the length of telephone calls, the meticulous recording of
meetings in companies or the detailed study of compliance,
sustainability and control compendia, all in all methods that
intensify the hustle and bustle at the workplace. There are
ADHD-producing activities where the time that office workers have to
deal with various tasks is notoriously interrupted by communication
via telephone, fax, email, with the times of these interruptions
often being longer than those of task completion. The interruption,
which is due to the rhythm of information flows in communication
networks, partially suspends the time of task processing. With the
ubiquitous propaganda of work, the weekends, the late evenings, even
the dreams are colonized until the employees not only have a job or
perform a job, but are the job itself.
Since the new management
methods with their proliferating semantics and semiotics constantly
place the word “performance” at the centre of their
strategies, the difference between performance, casting and pure
bravado, which can also be a measure for self-modification, seems to
be tending to disappear for the employees. The decisive factor is no
longer just the product or the quality of the work, but the
performance added as a supplement, in which one may savour all
possible roles, from the ethicist to the bad guy, the performance may
only not go too far and harm the company, because then one acts up a
reference. The performance must in turn be assigned a profile that
shows the potential that constitutes the (alleged) peculiarity of an
employee and that is systematically simulated and ultimately even
demanded in the company. This pseudo-difference, which makes a
difference, is firmly inscribed in the company system.
Foreign
singularization and self singularization interlock like a perfectly
functioning zipper. (Reckwitz 3441) Precisely this tension, which
drives performance activities to the cutting edge, leads not only to
non-linear phases of career building, which can be influenced to a
certain extent by networking potential, profile enhancement, matching
and competencies, but also to the universally feared career stress
that lives from fear, that one’s own performance, which is to be
treated like “capital”, could not correspond to the
supplementary performance (or vice versa), so that in the end one is
forced to synchronize one’s own performance with the performance,
which in turn means that in addition to the tiresome completion of
the tasks the representation of the tasks is added. This generalized
performativity, which is closely welded to the ideal of creative work
and incessantly propagates self-invention and at the same time
self-increase, creates the functional psychopath, who includes the
subject afflicted with ADHD, in case of success, or in case of
failure, the depressive subject unfolds. In addition, the
acceleration of the exchange of information often enough generates
further pathologies, because the employees in the offices are often
simply unable to process the immense and constantly increasing
amounts of information that penetrate the brains like voracious
parasites via computers, smartphones, screens and electronic diaries.
One reacts with a further acceleration of communication, works as
well as possible on solutions and if something does not work out,
then one relaxes best, according to the script of the coaches, for a
few minutes in the small, pseudo-exotic and warm-hearted wellness
oases of the offices under artificial palm trees or runs a round on
the treadmill in the fitness room of the company.
That the
employees are also busy training the readymades of
neo-Buddhist-inspired coaching discourses and other soft skills in
order to create something like a community of socially competent and
at the same time self-reliant actors, especially in office
operations, where, beyond the corridors of the factory system, wage
labour continues to be the determining principle, this really makes
you sit up and take notice, because a polite tone or a brief tactical
conversation, which is contrary to any tendency towards “you”
or over-communication, is no longer sufficient to facilitate
cooperation in the office under conditions that one has truly not
chosen oneself. Large companies have been using data software for a
long time, which analyses and predicts the behavior of their
employees by searching the Internet for their data traces. The
machine learning models of certain software companies then assign the
company’s employees to a risk index, and the predictions made on this
basis about employee behavior should at best be identical to the
actual staff turnover. Thus, the company’s management can intervene
preventively by purchasing information and forecasting products about
its own employees, if it pursues an active personnel policy. But this
is only the machine-objective side of the game, to which the
subjective constitution of the employees must be added.
Skillful
surfing on the waves of employment requires perseverance and
suppleness for the employees in the mode of auto-operative
manoeuvrability, in order to immediately perceive surprising options
in the job or quick decisions in order to carry out new tasks almost
abruptly, it demands playful opportunism as a maxim of action, with
which one always keeps oneself open to a multitude of possibilities
in order to seize the best that is just offered, or, in order to drop
an option without hesitation, in favour of a better opportunity; so
this kind of perfromative surfing requires the formulation of a
cynical interest that often enough defames the same excretions made
by others as unfortunate but inevitable deformations. This form of
employment corresponds to a volatile subjectivity that is extended to
the limits of digital mobility, in particular, in order to be able to
bring in any affective and monetary surplus. In this context,
Bernhard Stiegler sharply criticizes a mentality (of the functional
psychopath) prevailing today, which he describes as
“I-don’t-give-a-fuckism,” a general attitude of organized
irresponsibility. And the more intensively the employees of a company
expose themselves to the operational rules, programs and dispositives
and at the same time make use of them – including the cybernetic
feedback mechanisms that no stupid state with its organs and
apparatuses of surveillance and control could ever invent – due to a
temporary but at the same time unrestricted agreement, because there
is actually no current need for ultra-hard research, spying and
imprisonment of agents of dissatisfaction (and yet this monitoring
takes place) – the more the range of variation of individual options
and performance in the operational field shines out. So today the
office employees remain obligated to the half-hearted and
nevertheless dutiful introduction into the office everyday life just
because of their tormenting opportunism, which tries to use still the
smallest advantage, at any time, without there absolutely must exist
a bad-hard work instruction, and this happens in the context of an
operational control and optimization of the own person, which like
which in turn in the best case presupposes or requires 100%
identification with the company’s objectives. In this, the rather
whispering community of employees takes over the business of a
therapeutic, secondary control, which flank and complete the primary
control of the wage worker and the precarious, staged by the
capitalist economy.
Instead, they are embedded in flexible
technological control systems and horizontal group dispositives,
which keep their own effectiveness, their status, their professional
and emotional competencies and operational tasks, as well as those of
the other employees, in some cases also available on the screens at
all times. Being “online” condenses the hegemonic form of
work and life, constantly mobile and mobilizable availability in the
context of flexible normalization is the work itself, which the
employees additionally train themselves by consuming worlds of
experience, wellness and fitness programs, until they virtually
smoothly incorporate employment in the course of a permanent
recursion with the machines. Using microtechnologies, laptops and
smartphones, which are usually operated sitting down, the employees
are constantly integrated into the information streams circulating in
the networks of the companies, following a modular logic. The
employees remain mentally stimulated to react excitedly in real time
during working hours to the fluctuations of the information flows,
which constantly flicker across their screens. Within the framework
of technical scientific and psychological dispositives, programming
and construction principles, there is hardly a workplace today that
is not permanently put on evaluation and at the same time not
questioned about the creative potential and the performance ability
of individuals and project groups, only to be evaluated again, i.e.
examined for new performance potentials, but this less due to the
totalitarian pressure of a leader, but the evaluation remains mostly
integrated into the team; and not a team that doesn’t demand
discussions, speeches and agreements qua anglizierter language games,
which Wittgenstein wouldn’t have dreamed of in his sleep. In the
middle of the team, however, there is the leader who, for example,
enthusiastically comments on a PowerPoint presentation in a kind of
action art, so that everyone can get an idea of the company, the
product or the project. Of course, the leader is not wearing a tie
and on the casual, open, white leisure shirt the logo of the company
shines at heart level, the grey coloured hair with white strands and
the small snake tattoo on the back of the neck also reveal a little
bit of individualism, which, however, is put to the service of team
spirit when it counts. This situation perpetuates itself into the
hair ends of the company, when contemporary bosses give themselves
up, when they impose this on the employees and notoriously claim that
their companies have a wonderfully flat hierarchy and an almost
cosmological wellness atmosphere, while the bosses mob their
employees in the same breath, often cut them off from the flow of
information out of pure harassment or shower them with ill work or
chase them through the various departments. Instead of proceeding
strategically as before, the task of managers today is to reduce the
susceptibility to errors and the slowness of human decisions in
comparison to algorithmic processes, just to keep the algorithmic
technocracy going. The managers themselves are completely deskilled
to act as unscrupulous enforcement bodies of the companies and as
social police in the organization itself. They do not give any
directions and also have no explanation for the direction the company
is taking, they are highly flexible, offensive and defensive at the
same time, mobbing, cheering up and hurting, focused and apparently
insecure, that is clever, and in the end they are limited to
reflecting the imperatives of the shareholder value system and
following their guidelines meticulously, spurring on the employees,
but also giving them a nice violin of opinion, of course only within
the framework of creative teamwork and for the benefit of the team.
Anyone who is good at finishing floppy cocks has a future today.
The
performance of the employees and their valorisation does not aim at
the devaluation of the average at all, as Reckwitz assumes, but the
average is now based on its amplitudes, configured by the team, the
leader and the project you are working on, with the leaders trying to
focus on reinforcing the skills and abilities of the employees and
selling the enthusiasm for new tasks, a soft tolerance and tactical
friendship, opportunism and quick-wittedness, the ability to present
oneself in and in front of the team as potency. The project-oriented
employee, who has to present his ego in fundamental casting
splendidly on the stage of the office, even if the obsessive search
for the ego turns out to be the search for a ghost, perhaps still for
a virtual ego, which is strangely congruent with the adaptable
subject, can only follow the narration of casting if coaching and
casting are mutually dependent.
The ethos, which is composed of
opportunism, creativity and social commitment and articulates itself
in Heideggerian as talk or system-German as singularity game or
communication, an ethos about which every application event today
provides sufficient information, is constantly renegotiated or
balanced, without a coach, who in his function as a management
consultant rather resembles a postmodern itinerant preacher,
constantly having to explicitly recommend it. Nevertheless, the coach
in his special kind of clown remains a not unimportant figure,
besides whom sometimes even the manager fades as the remixer or DJ of
post-industrial production. Seeßen 97 Within the framework of the
demanded and willingly also executed and above all very operatively
talkative, creative and performance-impregnated forced harmonization,
with the help of a pseudo-sadism, i.e. secretly mutual contempt as
well as the paradoxical interest in active passivity, a fight of all
against all is waged, which results in the intensification of
resentment as well as of experience, which no longer knows any
reference in talk, in the process of a public segregation of opinion.
All stages of social exchange are tried out in the office, from games
that promote community and at the same time tickle out the
individual’s willingness to perform, the infamous flat hierarchies
and the mixture of work and leisure, through the promotion of
competition, the slapping away of failures and the surveillance of
everyone by everyone to the joint consumption of
performance-enhancing drugs, amphetamines and vitamins. But in the
end, everyone is next to himself. “Clever is,” writes
Wolfgang Pohrt, “who knows how to take them (the others) for
himself or to trick them. He who does not understand it is the
fool.
(The logic of office space consists, among other things,
in removing an employee, if necessary, in accordance with specific
organisational strategies, without immediately replacing him with
another employee, because the (social) place and not the person is
constitutive for the social space of the office. If both the work
productivity and the flexibility potential of this employee were
miserable, then it was not necessarily due to his personal variables
& coefficients, not even to his lack of motivation or creativity,
not to his skills, but to certain systemic conditions, sufficient but
not necessary conditions under which a place is a place. One has
favoured the wrong conditions and thus encouraged the employee to all
sorts of nonsense.)The key to a successful performance lies in the
fact that speculations on a falling course are well balanced with
those on a rising course.)
The absolute automat shifts the
working world from manpower to brainpower. Just as at the beginning
of industrialization there was a coupling of hand and machine, so
today the brain and the machine are coupled in a new economy, which
Stiegler calls “economy”. This transformation involves a
transductive relation in which production is no longer based on
working time but on machine time. Even with the coupling of hand and
machine, it is the latter that really works, and it does so blindly
and automatically, with which this process can hardly still be
described as work, insofar as it always also contains an opening,
while serial and automated production is always completed. In this
respect, the products are then ready-made goods.
The question
today is whether the (alleged) escalation of productivity achieved
with automated production should end in free time or in liberated
work.4 If automation liberates time in general, how do we avoid this
liberated and thus available time becoming an available brain time, a
time that is no longer transmitted to television, but is connected to
Google, Amazon and Facebook. The social media networks create a
reality that is real, but as a technology of immediacy you can’t get
satisfaction even though we love them right now because of their
separation from the present. They are social drugs for those who want
the humane localized somewhere in time and space. It’s the
pseudo-other that users connect to, not the radical other or the
stranger or even the real other. We work on the weakness and
vagueness to promote the exhibition of the self, but no matter how
stylish, aggressive, desperate or diplomatic the promotion of the
self is on the dominant media platforms, it remains part of the old
logic of the media: the message is emptiness.
Liberated time
must be liberated work, in which energy and its potential must not be
abstracted, hand, brain and energy must be connected. Today things
look quite different. Maurizio Lazzarato writes: “In order to
guarantee growing revenues for financial investors, the availability
for precarious and inadequate employment as well as for poorly
compensated unemployment, for austerity as well as for “reforms”
must be total. To refuse work today means to deny this availability,
which financialisation would like to have, without limits and in
return. To practice the refusal of work under the conditions of
current exploitation means to invent new modalities of struggle and
organization in order not only to preserve the inherited rights of
historical struggles against wage labor, but also and above all to
enforce new rights, adapted to the new modalities of the exploitation
of time, to construct forms of solidarity capable of preventing the
expropriation of knowledge and savoir-faire, and to avoid the
modalities of production being dictated by the requirements of
financial valorisation that neither art nor cultural industries can
escape.” Outside the unbearable system of employment, it is
necessary to search again for activities in the Marxian sense that
create sustainable wealth and abolish wage labor in favor of
knowledge that is today completely materialized in machines, but of a
transformed knowledge, insofar as time is liberated through the work
of de-automation, in order to achieve a free time of
transindividuation, in the sense of otium or sholhe, a leisure, new
techniques of the self and the others, and that is, to work for
oneself and through the other. This requires an organological
revolution, the invention of new instruments of knowledge and
publication, an epistemic and epistemological revolution, and this
cannot then be reduced to the expansion of the service sector or the
creation of new jobs, or to a minimal basic income subordinated to
capitalization, the market and money. Wealth is time and time must
also be available for interruptions, because it provides xer quantum
leap for mental and social individuations, which in turn are formed
and metastabilized by transindividuations. This time of interruptions
is important to invent a new form of work that differs from entropy
and promotes negentropy, an energeia, a passage to action, where
energies like fossil energy can always be only a condition for
neotenic energy, not itself. “The possible, the becoming and the
event open up areas that are neither controlled by time nor space and
that are animated by other speeds (infinite speeds, Guattari would
say), be it of highest speed or of greatest slowness (Deleuze)…
Gorz assumes that his income will be divided into two parts: on
the one hand, an income from creative work, which falls with the
duration, and a basic social income. While Hegel synthesizes work
with abolition and therefore knows no proletarization, Marx knows
this negative aspect of deproletarization very well, but synthesizes
work in communism again, thus eliminating the pharmacon, which is
also to be considered, that it is not the proletarization of labor,
but the end of employment combined with the organological mutation
(freely available software) made possible by digital ternary
retention, as a caring-carrying of a pharmacon transindividualized by
the objectified knowledge. Today, the power of the computer –
determined by the speed of microprocessors and data transfer –
empties creative work and energeia, although Stiegler does not want
to return to an original intuitive intelligence, because intelligence
sui generis artificial, i.e. organological, i.e. the coupling of life
with inorganic organs.
translated by Deepl.
Foto: Stefan Paulus