“Do we who are to come have an ear for the resonance of the echo, which has to be made to resonate
in the preparation for the other beginning?” So asks Heidegger in Contributions to Philosophy. Heidegger
tells us that we must attune ourselves to this “echo”—a vague resonance of
sound that does not simply emerge from a single identifiable source but that
metaleptically produces a new origin, a “new beginning” from which it emanates.
What echoes is an alternative past that generates a future collectivity “to come.”
Should we not make ourselves resonate with this other-sound, we will simply
hear what we have always heard, accessing the history we’ve always known. We
can take Heidegger’s challenge as a means of rethinking the relationship
between Occupy’s May Day and the whole host of May Days past that resonated
through it. Echoed through it.
An echo, then. Let’s listen, and try to be affected by the
tonalities of an other beginning as they emerge in and through slogans that
seem to have no future. Let’s listen to Robert Owen, and see if his slogan
resounds from an other beginning: “Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation,
Eight hours rest.” Circulating throughout the Atlantic world, Owen’s somewhat
moralistic division of the day would be transformed in the 1860s, when I.G.
Blanchard penned the lyrics to “Eight Hours,” a labor song that would be set to
music in the 1880s by Jesse Jones. Note the difference: “Eight hours for work,
eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” The time of
“recreation” mutates into a period in which laborers’ wills are asserted; it is
formally structured as a time of self-activation. In the U.S., we tend to think
of this time “for what we will” as having been earned in the latter part of the
19th century following a series of mass marches and brutal
repressions (e.g., Haymarket). Whether this in fact happened, whether we earned
our eight hours for self-valorization, the demand is still with us; it echoes,
faintly, up until today, May Day. And the echo changes—its intensity, its
meaning—as it is received within different conjunctures. Even as recently as
last year, this echo was heard in the mode of memorialization—a past with
assignable limits and no future. (I had the fantastic fortune to be present for
the re-dedication of the Haymarket memorial in Chicago.) Today it seems as if
we are hearing this echo as a call to arms, Occupy answering the demand of
those who struggled, and died, for something that many of us take for granted.
Eight hours for what we will.
How to hear this echo? Is it enough for Occupy to inscribe
itself within this history of listeners and actors? Or might we not have to
develop new ears to hear how we might push this slogan in the direction of new
beginnings, and thus futures to come? Let’s be clear: In choosing May Day as a
kickoff date for a spring offensive, Occupy has situated itself within this
ongoing history of labor, within the space opened by the demand that workers
have eight hours “for what we will.” And, in no small way, the slogan retains a
radical force. “Eight hours for work,” for instance, might be a useful slogan
for both affective/cognitive laborers, those whose jobs—like mine—seep into
their lives, into the other sixteen hours, transforming all of life into a
modality of labor. It might also be a useful slogan for those without work, or
those whose work is not understood as susceptible to remuneration: the
out-of-work, on one hand, and domestic labor, on the other. “Eight hours for
rest,” similarly, might not only partition time, keeping sleep free from the
demands of labor—it might also articulate a demand for a place to rest,
for housing security. And so on.
On its own, the utility of the slogan is inexhaustible. But
it seems unclear if we today inhabit the same social ontology of labor that
made this call radical. As a transnationally-minded movement that—at least
rhetorically—situates itself between Wall Street and the Global South, it seems
to me that Occupy is situated between two new modalities of social being that
are irreducible to a laborist ontology. On one hand, finance capital, as we
know, has little to do with the form of capitalism enshrined in the process of
valorization discussed in Capital vol. 1—one that we can
figure in terms of its juridical, social, and political dynamics through the
apparently voluntary contract between labor and owner. Finance is simply the
agglomeration of the power to command that is indifferent to the wills of those
whom it commands; finance does not need to simulate the voluntary conformation of
wills of those whom it effects, be these wills those of individual people or
entire states. We’re talking, quite simply, about a rent-seeking mode of
accumulation articulated to an increasingly feudal power dynamic. On the other
hand, the neoliberalization of the world has resulted, as Mike Davis puts it,
in a billion people being expelled from productive participation (even
exploitative participation) in the world-system. In this emergent planet of
slums, the meaning of labor will alter beyond recognition as we try to get a
read on the new forms of life being produced (or being survived). Labor,
indeed, probably won’t serve as a meaningful category of being-in-the-world.
This is because the Hegelian ontology of labor that programs the social consists
in our ability to separate it from other modalities of being even as we might
recognize the ontological priority of labor as such. Labor, as we know it, is a
term that produces a set (the world) in which it is itself a member (just as,
for Marx, production is a moment incorporated into the movement
production-exchange-circulation-consumption even as it stands outside of it).
Labor, as we knew it, thus engendered modes of being (resting, recreating,
being-for-what-we-will) that are irreducible to it—ending with freedom. But
none of that remains for the world’s abandoned, insofar as labor can’t engender
the separations that made it, for Marx, a technology of becoming-free. Life
doesn’t separate into ontologically thick regions when a survivalist battle
with necropolitical accumulation is the law of the land. Labor no longer
matters, because labor is embedded within a neo-feudal structure of command
that, via structural abandonment, has commanded a billion people to die. We can
get a sense of Occupy’s sense of this dual positioning in the rhetorical
structure of Occupation. Just think: a tent city, a kind of village outside the
castle, forms around Wall Street, and what this village manifests to Wall
Street is nothing but the precarity of life exposed to pure heteronomy, lacking
even the time-honored tool (i.e., labor) to transform this heteronomous
condition into the substrate of a freedom to come.
If this slogan is to mean anything to us, if the location of
ourselves in a history of May Days past is to do anything more than simply frighten
wealthy folks by our deployment of Red signifiers, we need to become resonant
in such a way that the alternative origins intimated in these slogans and signs
echoes through us. And I think, to an extent, that Occupy has done a fantastic
job in keeping the ontology of labor at arms length and in attempting to
develop new modalities of being in the world. Note that, despite the verbal
link, the practice of occupying is discontinuous with having an occupation. (No
one in the future will mark down, under “Previous Employment,” “I occupied!”)
And most of us don’t occupy to gain occupations, either—the social ontology Occupy
thinks, materializes, and materialized from, is post-labor, post-work. For
better or worse, we’re outside of the parameters that made “Eight hours for
work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” a meaningful slogan. So
what remains of it, what echoes? That last bit, that last prepositional clause—provided
that we rip it from its temporal partitions and provided that we attempt
determining relations of work and rest from the perspective of this last eight
hours. An other beginning echoes here, the foundationless beginning of a
self-constituting collectivity that aims only at constituting itself. The irreducible,
aimless circularity of democratic self-production.
What, we will be asked, we have
been asked, we will be asked, are we after? What is Occupy working for?
For all
time to be a period of self-activation. For all time to be for what we will.
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