Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Gilson says, “Or l’intellect de l’homme, dans sa condition présent, peut concevoir l’être sans le concevoir comme fini ou comme infini, comme créé ou comme incréé, donc le concept d’ ‘être’ est un concept distinct de ces derniers. Sans doute, lui-même est inclus dans l’un et l’autre, mais ni l’un ni l’autre ne sont inclus en lui. De lui-même, il n’est ni l’un ni l’autre... , il est ‘neutre’ à leur égard; bref, il leur est ‘univoque’”(Gilson 1952: 100). 2. “Le concept commun d’être est formellement neutre au fini et à l’infini, mais un être reel est nécessairement l’un ou l’autre.” 3. The notion of labor as a univocal and common concept is absolutely central in the present study. Indeed, it was on this initial intuition that an original graduate paper (written in 1996) was developed into an article (Gullì 1999), then into a dissertation (Gullì 2003), and finally into a book. This understanding of labor is necessary to a new political ontology, one that is based on an adequate notion of the contingent; that is, contingency at the potential level, and thus an adequate concept of history. I become even more persuaded of its importance today that I find the concept of the commonality of labor under the pen of Hardt and Negri in their recent study of the multitude (Hardt and Negri 2004). 4. For an example of how the question of productivity is fundamental in giving a political direction to an analysis of labor, see Rifkin (1995), in which the concept of productivity plays the most central role. 5. Informalization: “Informal work is usually defined as any which takes place outside the formal wage-labour market, such as clandestine work and illegal work, but also including various forms of self-employment. It is a global phenomenon and not just pertaining to the South, although its level there is considerably higher” (Munck 2002: 111–112). Flexibility amounts to “a reduction in wages (‘labor costs flexibility’), a reduction in the number of workers (‘numerical flexibility’), and an increase in the number of tasks the remaining workers had to perform (‘functional flexibility’). Overall , across the North the ‘flexibility’ offensive had created by the end of the 1990s a workforce which was much more insecure and had seen many of the welfare rights gained under Fordism wiped away” (ibid., 78). 6. In their most recent work, Hardt and Negri clarify the controversial concept of immaterial labor by pointing out that immaterial is the product of a labor that remains material (Hardt and Negri 2004: 109). 7. On neoregulation, see, for instance, Emmons (2000). 8. In this sense, see also Jean-Luc Nancy (1991). 9. The reference is to Lewis Mumford, who uses the phrase “esthetic idiocy” in his critique of modernity (Mumford 2000). 10. The United Nations is curiously shy when it comes to poverty and hunger. Goal 1 of the Millennium Development Goals adopted in 2001 seeks to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, not eradicate them in their totality—a thing that our proud century could easily do (see Miniatlas of Global Development, Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2004). 11. When I refer to this work later, I will use the subtitle rather than the title. The second and third books on physics and ethics were never written. 12. In this respect, see Milbank (1991), who calls attention to the Aristotelian difference between poiesis (making) and praxis (doing). Even though it may be true that Vico—as Milbank says—prefers the more precise poiesis to the “generic” praxis, this does not alter the fundamental practical dimension of his philosophy. Milbank uses this distinction in an argument that intends to defend Vico’s anti-Platonic metaphysics against two different readings of his thought. Milbank says, “Those who stress scientia at the expense of conscientia, understand verum-factum as still lying within the Platonic paradigm, and assume the priority of verum. By contrast, the ‘humanist’ group reduces the specificity of ‘making’ to a generic ‘practice’ in which we are to act on the basis of (non-mathematical) probabilities. This fails to allow that in ‘making’ as opposed to ‘doing,’ Vico acknowledges a specially adequate ‘comprehension’ of the product through the synthesis of all its different elements” (1991: 95). However, to see the Aristotelian distinction as one of opposition is very problematic. In fact, any act of poiesis is fundamentally practical. In...