Sociology and the end of work
The end of work is nothing new. The idea of eliminating work as we know it has exercised the imaginations of utopians from Fourier to Marcuse, and can even be traced back to ancient Greek thought. For the nineteenth century utopian Charles Fourier, the key to eliminating drudgery in ‘civilisation’ (by which he meant modern commercial and embryonic industrial society), lay in radically transforming work patterns; aligning work with the ‘passions’, or instincts, of the individuals involved.Even Marx, it can be argued, is something of an enthusiast for the elimination of labour. Although it may seem strange that a thinker so closely linked to the workers’ movement should hold such a view, Marx at suggests that increased use of automated technology will lead ultimately to ‘emancipation from labour’, that is, the end of work (Marx 1972:136). Further, as the ‘realm of freedom’, of non labouring time increases, we are to develop our capacities as truly human beings, rather than as alienated subjects of the division of labour.
In the 1950’s and 60’s in books such as Eros and Civilisation (1955) and One Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse drew on the insights of Marx, Fourier, and Freud, amongst others, and proposed that the moment Marx had written about in the latter half of the nineteenth century had finally arrived. Modern production techniques, automation in an age of affluence, had made it objectively possible to radically reduce work time. Marcuse went even further, and suggested, rather like Fourier, that pleasure and work could be combined, that the realms of necessity and freedom could coincide.
The theory of the end of work receives it’s most extensive and intensive treatment in the writings of French social theorist and radical journalist André Gorz. Like Marcuse, with whom he was friends, Gorz sees advanced technology and a planned decrease in waste and deliberate obsolescence, as offering possibilities for the reduction of working time to a bare minimum, leaving the balance of existence for the activities that make us truly human; developing, creating, learning, cooperating.
The current paper, however, is primarily concerned not with the theory of the end of work in an empirical sense; that is, work being eliminatedin society as such. Rather, we are focused here on the move away from work as the key sociological category; the end of work specifically in sociology and social theory, rather than in the social world itself.
To an extent both dimensions have similar conceptual and temporal foundations. Somewhat ironically, it was writers such as Marcuse, whose main concern was in fact the liberation of humanity from the consumer society, who helped open the way for critiques of the privileging of work in the social sciences, and the turn to consumption with which these critiques are often associated. It should be noted, of course, that Marcuse himself was writing in a particular intellectual and historical context. During the 1950’s and 60’s , theories of the ‘post-industrial’, ‘affluent’ or‘technological’ society were influential; this was the case both in the USA, and in France, where writers such as Touraine and Ellul produced accounts that often paralleled those of Bell and Galbraith. These commentaries tended to include predictions of both the declining importance of work in society, and the objective possibility of a decrease in necessary working time.[1]
Often, the diagnostic social theory of writers such as Bell or Touraine was combined with Marxist critiques – as was the case with both Marcuse and Gorz (the latter being considerably influenced by the former). By the May events of 1968, critical analyses of everyday life by writers such as Henri Lefebvre were also gaining in prominence, particularly in France. One writer who, like Guy Debord and the Situationists,[2] was influenced both by the radical critiques of everyday life that so inspired the students of Nanterre, and by the (similarly influential) Marxian analyses of Marcuse and the Critical Theorists, wasJean Baudrillard.
Baudrillard: Shattering the Mirror of Production
The parallels between Marcuse’s thought and Baudrillard’s writing of the 1970’s are fairly clear. Wernick suggests that:
The guiding assumptions are identical: that the mass
cultural instance has become crucial to social reproduction, that it represents indeed a strategic built-in mechanism for ensuring the social order's real statis through all the incipient upheavals it continues to induce, and that this is why the Revolution (if the term retains any meaning) has perhaps permanently missed the historical boat (Wernick, 1984:17).
In The Consumer Society (1970), Baudrillard’s logic does indeed follow that of Marcuse; mass consumer culture exists as a reflection of the alienated world of capitalist labour. Needs for the goods consumerism offers are artificially created by the giant combines which control both production and reproduction, where superfluousconsumption predominates.Consumerism offers compensation, to the mass of the population, for the stultifying nullity of work in bureaucratic capitalism. The consumer, however, enters into something of a Faustian bargain, since they must continue to sell their labour in an ever more intensive and competitive fashion, in order to keep up with the inexorably rising levels of conventionallyexpected consumption. Thus, satisfactions are always transitory and economically dependent; satiety is held forever beyond our grasp.While capitalism robs us of our true individuality and independence so that we can be inserted into the economic complex as a disciplined and productive unit, it sells us back a simulation of human identity in the form of fashion, shopping, holidays, hobbies, entertainments.
Thus, a deep logical collusion links the mega-corporation and the micro consumer, the monopoly structure of production and the ‘individualistic’ structure of consumption, since the ‘consumed’ difference in which the individual revels is also one of the key sectors of generalised production (Baudrillard, 2000: 110).
A veneer of contentment is created, and any discontent surfaces either as the plaintive cry of the intellectual, the artist, and the dropout, or as outbursts of violence and degradation; the massacre, the gang rape, the riot. The former is easily absorbed as proof that different opinions exist in our democratic society, the latter is absorbed, profitably, by the prison industrial complex.
Marcuse was not averse to making observations on the concrete ways in which consumption is experienced in everyday life, but Baudrillard, in The Consumer Society provides a richer and more detailed dissection of the arrayed elements of consumer culture, taking in kitsch, silent films, and cellulite, along the way. Although the focus is clearly on consumption, Baudrillard still views consumer society in relation to the system of production (Kellner, 1989:14).Consumerism and leisure, asserts Baudrillard, are subject to the same ‘reality principle’ as work.
the obsession with getting a tan, that bewildered whirl in which tourists ‘do’ Italy, Spain and all the art galleries, the gymnastics and nudity which are de rigueur under any obligatory sun and, most important of all, the smiles and unfailing joie de vivre all attest to the fact that the holiday-maker conforms in every detail to the principles of duty, sacrifice and asceticism (Baudrillard 2000:155).
By the time he wrote The Mirror of Production in 1975, Baudrillard had begun to see critical social theory itself in a similar way; that is, trapped within the very bourgeois, productivist ideology it sought to escape from.
Baudrillard acknowledges that Marcuse and Marx are not to be seen as enthusiasts of work; rather, they envision a realm beyond labour and political economy, a realm of play, of creativity and humanity. However,
The sphere of play is defined as the fulfilment of human rationality, the dialectical culmination of man’s activity of incessant objectification of nature and control of his exchanges with it. It presupposes the full development of productive forces (Baudrillard 1975:40).
Baudrillard asserts that Marxist critiques maintain the concept of a realm of freedom beyond necessity as an ideal realm of transcendence-but one that can only be reached through that from which transcendence is sought-the productive process. The very framework of Marxist though prevents any effective conceptual opposition – critical social theory remains trapped within the confines of productivist discourse, which is not only non-oppositional, it is unable to effectively criticise and oppose a society that has moved beyond domination through commodity production, and into domination by images, information and knowledge, by the ‘sign’.
Critical social theory should recognise, according to Baudrillard, that domination is no longer the domination of capital and commodities, the consumer is no-longer merely a recuperating labourer. In our society of consumers, domination is the domination of ‘the code’, which operates through the“super-ideology of the sign…”(Baudrillard 1975:122). As in Baudrillard’s earlier work, consumption functions as a mechanism of social control, but rather than linking domination to the production of commodities, it is now seen in terms of the reproduction of the code. Social theory then, should abandon it’s obsession with production, and move instead to an analysis of the world of consumption, since it is through the consumption of ‘signs’ (cultural products) that the we are enmeshed by the code.
What though, is ‘the code’? This, as various commentators have noted, is never made clear.[3] In fact, despite Baudrillard’s attempts to extricate critical theory from the bourgeois metaphysics of political economy, he continues to use concepts such as ‘capitalist’ and ‘monopolistic’. This may well indicate that social theory remains trapped within the framework of economic thought, which is Baudrillard’s very point, but it hardly supports his claim to have discovered a set of categories (such as the code) with which tomove beyond conventional critical analyses.
Baudrillard attacks a ‘straw man’ Marx, apparently ignoring the passages where
Marx presents his goal as achieving a ‘realm of freedom’ beyond labour...[where] social activity would supplant labour and production as the organizing principle of society (Kellner 1989:41).
A similar accusation could be made of Baudrillard’s critique of Marcuse. It is difficult to see how Marcuse, particularly the later, more avowedly utopian Marcuse could be accused of theoretical confinement within the categories of bourgeois political economy. Productivism, under the aegis of the ‘performance principle’, is Marcuse’s target in Eros and Civilisation, and One Dimensional Man contains critiques of social science that remains under its spell. Marcuse’s social philosophy is not based on acceptance of economic principles; ‘play’ is not, as Baudrillard asserts, seen by Marcuse as the “fulfilment of human rationality” (Baudrillard 1975:40), but as something connected to the transcendence of this rationality, and the development of a new one. Contrary to what Baudrillard asserts, escaping the dialectic of freedom and necessity, both empirically and discursively,is exactly what Marcuse aims at. Of course his writing must retain certain economic categories, in order to prevent it degenerating into some kind of avante garde poetry, and it is true that Marcuse also retains analysis of the economic system, since unlike Baudrillard, he prefers to base his analyses on a social reality where the economic continues to hold sway over people’s lives.
Since Marcuse considered that classic Marxist ‘economic category’, the traditional working class, as having been integrated quite thoroughly into the capitalist system, he suggested that ‘outsider’ groups might be more likely handmaidens of revolutionary change. Tellingly, Baudrillard’s new revolutionary groups are almost identical to those proposed by Marcuse.
students, youth who are disqualified in advance, voluntarily or not, as well as all types of social groups, of regional communities, ethnic or linguistic…(Baudrillard 1975:134)
But just what are these groups disqualified from, if not from participation in the economy as producers? Baudrillard even suggests that these groups end up fighting for their place “in the circuit of work and of productivity” (1975:132), but extricates himself from the charge of productivism by suggesting that labour is now nothing more than “playing the game”, a “ritual engagement of the worker in the circulation of values of the society” (Dant 2005:57). The fact that much of what passes for labour in contemporary societies is non productive or ‘service’ work adds some credence to this line of argument, but we must then consider the question of whether service workers are any less exploited, less subject to the logic of capitalism, than those in primary or secondary industries.One interesting observation Baudrillard makes is that “The Black revolt aims at race as a code, at a level much more radical than economic exploitation…”(1975:134). The debate over whether racial inequalities should be conceived of primarily in economic terms continues toengage sociologists and social theorists to the present day.[4]
The problem with theories like those expounded by the Baudrillard of The Mirror of Production, is that they appear to sacrifice the traditional sociological strategy of basing analysis on social reality, to the tactic of creating a sense that they are unprecedentedly radical. Once again though, Baudrillard is off the hook, effectively arguing that even though he describes a society that may not exist, his social theory is still valid.
The objection that our society is still largely dominated by the logic of commodities is irrelevant. When Marx set out to analyze capital, capitalist industrial production was still largely a minority phenomenon…The theoretical decision is never made at the quantitative level, but at the level of a structural critique (1975:121)
Cultural studies; consumption as resistance
Baudrillard remained fairly pessimistic about mankind’s chances of escaping from the domination of the code, and consumer culture was viewed as an integral part of this domination; certainly it offered little opportunity for resistance to it. For Baudrillard, possible methods of resistance included subverting the system of exchange through spontaneous gift giving; others appeared to parallel Marcuse’s notion of a ‘great refusal’, conceived of as a total refusal to play by the rules of ‘the code’. With the development of what came to be known as Cultural Studies in the 1980’s and 90’s, a new understanding of the relationship between consumption and resistance became evident. Writers within this emergingsub-discipline of sociology retained a focus on the detail of everyday life, and appeared to heed Baudrillard’s call for social thought to privilege the cultural sphere. Ironically, since Marcuse and the other Frankfurt Schoolwriters can be seen as instrumental in highlighting the importance of the super-structural level to social theory, they began to be criticised for depicting the consumer as a dupe, for overstating both the power of the culture industries to mystify the population, and the susceptibility of the consumer to this mystification. Mica Nava, in an interesting 1991 article, singles out Marcuse for his
lack of respect for the mentality of ordinary people, exemplified by the view that they are easily duped by advertisers and politically pacified by the buying of useless objects (Nava 1991:162).
Nava then surveys the ways in which cultural studies should, as it moves away from the oppressive primacy of the economic, “seek to examine what is rewarding, rational and indeed sometimes liberating about popular culture” (Nava 1991:164). There are, for instance, “progressive elements” in TV soaps and romantic fiction, which offer “ambiguous pleasures”. Advertisements, far from being some kind of sinister mass hypnosis, are but another element for the consumer, as bricoleur, to use for the construction of their individual identity, often in opposition to the messages intended by their producers. Fiske, for example, illustrates this with an anecdote about a group of young people jeering the slogan from an underwear advert at a female student in a short skirt. These kids, according to Fiske,
were using the ad for their own cheeky resistive subcultural purposes: they were far from the helpless victims of any subliminal consumerism, but were able to turn even an advertising text into their popular culture (Fiske 2000[1989]:286).
It is not only in the context of the media that consumption offers possibilities for resistance, Elsewhere we learn that humorous bumper stickers (Slater[on Fiske]:168-169) or torn jeans (Fiske 2000[1989]:284) are other possible ‘tactics of resistance’. Nava further illustrates this with a referenceto one writerfor whomstockings “operate as a form of protest and confrontation in a dreary and routinized existence:...” (Nava 1991:165). An extended quote from Frank Mort, one of the so-called New Times writers of the 1980’s, reveals a perception of the consumer as active and quite possibly resistive, not only at the level of underwear and adverts, but even in the spheres of shopping and make-up:
what people do when they go shopping may be quite different from the official script. Commodities and their images are multi-accented, they can be pushed and pulled into the service of resistant demands and dreams. High-tech in the hands of young blacks or girls making-up are not simply forms of buying into the system. They can be very effectively hijacked for cultures of resistance, reappearing as street-style cred or assertive femininity (Mort 2000[1989]:279)