Without Classes

I recently read a book of essays by an Italian philosopher named Giorgio Agamben. The work is titled “The Coming Community”. It was published in Italian in 1990 and appeared in English in 93. As best I can tell, the book advances a view of ontology in which being is defined by potentiality and a contingent everything-and-nothing relationship to phenomena rather than the traditional dichotomy between ideals and tautology that has always dominated the western discussion about metaphysics. He characterizes this new ontology as “whatever singularity”. Use of the term “whatever” (qualunque in Italian) is intended to denote a synthesis of the particular and the general, or a continual vacillation between the two. Because this system of meaning is predicated on allowance rather than differentiation, it creates unities as opposed to divisions. This coalescing of factors results in singularity, which is the basis fo the coming community that Agamben envisions.

In one of the book’s more lively chapters, Agamben explores the social implications of whatever singularity in contemporary class relations. His conclusions are surprising and not altogether plausible in my opinion. But I do think he’s correct. Here’s what he says about class in contemporary society:

“If we had once again to conceive of the fortunes of humanity in terms of class, then today we would have to say that there are no longer social classes, but just a single planetary petty bourgeoisie, in which all the old social classes are dissolved.”

He goes on to describe the qualities of this universal class…

“The planetary petty bourgeoisie… has taken over the aptitude of the proletariat to refuse any recognizable social identity…. They know only the improper and the inauthentic and even refuse the idea of a discourse that could be proper to them. That which constituted the truth and falsity of the peoples and generations that have followed one another on the earth—differences in language, of dialect, of ways of life, of character, of custom, and even the physical particularities of each person—has lost any meaning for them and any capacity for expression and communication.”

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I don’t disagree with his premise, that the dissolution of determinate meanings is causing a collapse of social divisions. And there are plenty of reasons to think that a homogenization of social relations is taking place and that the modern profusion of shared dependencies has lashed together all the peoples of the world to a common destiny. But there are other ways in which our differences are becoming more entrenched and more seemingly insurmountable. To say that we are all merging into a universal middle class seems naïve. There are entire regions of the globe where people still rely on subsistence farming, while in other sectors the rich and privileged classes reign supreme like feudal lords. Perhaps it could be said that the nations of the world are moving toward an industrialized, consumer-driven social model, but it’s premature to say that they are all likely to make it there.

Agamben goes on to point out that although the exponents of this new social order of the planetary petty bourgeoisie have willingly consigned themselves to anonymity and rootlessness, they still grasp in vain for meaningful identity; perhaps as a habit of ideological thinking or out of fear of the unknown and the unknowable. He predicts that the continued execution of this futile enterprise might culminate in mankind’s destruction. If not, we may progress to a new era of possibility and unity:

“If instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity—if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable.”

Here Agamben sounds distinctly utopian—or dystopian, if you like. A world whose inhabitants embrace the whatever singularity is a world with neither identity nor stable classifications. It is a world of only surfaces, no depth. Depth is fallacy; only the surface is to be trusted, and in this world where the surface is revered and taken at face value, the surface constitutes the extent of the known. There are no other concerns. That deeper sequence of causalities that we accept as phenomenon goes utterly unacknowledged. Supplementary information becomes useless.

What changes most, I think, is how we think of human beings. A person is neither esteemed an individual nor a member of a group. Man looses agency and he loses sense of belonging. I don’t see how free will could have a place in this world. It seems that everything would be pre-determined. Everything just is. There is no play.

The Demise of the Productive Classes

In a previous post, I described the European aristocracy’s fading relevance during the 19th century. I characterized this decline as a cultural shift, perpetuated by changing attitudes toward social roles and class following the Age of Enlightenment. I do not disavow this claim, but I must concede that really the more influential factors were economic. The development of industrial production in European cities caused an absolute explosion of capital which propelled the productive classes into a place of sudden prominence. With their fortunes still tied to the land and to agricultural output the aristocracy largely missed out on the industrial boom. Thus their wealth and power were eventually eclipsed by that of a new enterprising class which was more interested in generating new capital rather than protecting old. This was the bourgeois revolution, an age when society ceased to be ordered around obedience to traditional authority and transitioned instead into an organized system in which individuals conformed to capital markets to discover and exploit opportunities for new production. It should sound familiar because it is our own age. It is the dawn of modernity, industrial development and the rise of market capitalism. As for the old order, it was swept aside in the tumult and allowed to burn itself out in quite resignation.

The lesson to be learned is that class systems change, often very rapidly; sometimes in violent revolution, sometimes as a symptom of changing economic conditions. Ostensibly, our modern class system has progressed has not progressed much beyond what it was following the overthrow of the Ancien Régime. Our society is still ordered around property ownership, market exchange and obedience to law. According to Marx this is “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” invented for the growth of capital and freely expressed productivity. And like all systems it follows the same pattern of ascent and decline. Marx predicted that the bourgeois order would be toppled by the proletariat and that the working classes would rise up to supplant the owning classes, in the same way that the owning classes wrested control away from the noble class. It would seem history has not played out that way, not exactly. In fact, one could argue it is the working classes which have been marginalized over the course of modern history and have gradually been rendered irrelevant. The cause of this unexpected turn of events is 1: automation of work processes and 2: globalization of capital. Productivity within the world’s post-industrial economies is derived from mechanized labor; this has been the primary reason productivity has continued increasing in the industrialized world even though population growth has more or less stalled out. Outside of the post-industrial economies, traditional industry and human labor remain relevant and continue to escalate, but the effect this has on core capitalist economies is such that industrial labor vanishes. Slavoj Zizek explains our current economic milieu quite nicely in this article from The New Left Review:

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How else should we conceive the connexion between the two mega-powers, the United States and China, for example? They relate to each other more and more as Capital and Labour. The US is turning into a country of managerial planning, banking, servicing etc., while its ‘disappearing working class’ (except for migrant Chicanos and others who mainly toil in the service economy) is reappearing in China, where a large proportion of American goods, from toys to electronic hardware, are manufactured in ideal conditions for capitalist exploitation: no strikes, little safety, tied labour, miserable wages. Far from being merely antagonistic, the relationship of China and US is actually also symbiotic. The irony of history is that China is coming to deserve the title of a ‘working class state’: it is turning into the state of the working class for American capital. (“Why We All Love to Hate Heider“)

Of course, there are still masses of people in the core economies that require employment and ever greater quantities of capital floating around those economies that require spending. Consequently we see the formation of vast service sectors which emerge out of the market to cater to that thin layer of citizenry who still has money to toss at it. But where does the wealth of the rich originate? Certainly not from the generation of capital. This is wealth derived from a rentier economy. There was a time when people became rich by extracting raw resource from the earth and refining them into manufactured products. The main driving force of the old industrial economy was creation of capital goods (goods used to create more goods). Industry supported industry and the primary aim of industry was to expand productive capacity. Now industry functions to support a sprawling consumer economy which seems to just feed on itself in a recursive fashion: people go to work to buy goods which other people go to work to make so that they themselves can buy goods that still some more people went to work to make and so on and so on. I think we can interpret this state of events as indication that we live in an age of obvious decline. The question then becomes where will we go once this decline has damaged our social fabric so thoroughly that the forces which keep everything together dissolve and change becomes inevitable? So far we’ve witnessed an increasingly exaggerated stratification of wealth—completely to be expected, I think—and lately it seems that mass unemployment will be another manifestation of the transition. But these are not final outcomes; they are transformational occurrences. I think there is something else in store for us. I haven’t a clue what.

Somber Diminution of European Aristocracy

A few days ago I tweeted a quote from Auerbach’s Mimesis relating to the state of the European aristocracy at the close of the Napoleonic Wars. A new French king was crowned and the old order was put back into place, but the ideals of the revolution continued to circulate throughout European society. The Age of Enlightenment had broken over the continent and rational order was the new program around which civic life was to be organized. Even the aristocracy—above all the aristocracy!—acknowledged the supremacy of reason and welcomed its ascension into the public sphere, but by doing so, they were also implicitly calling into question their own places in the future of Europe. Religion and feudalism, the two great pillars of the medieval society, were now supplanted by the more rigorous, more totalizing forces of modernity. Nobility ceased to serve any practical purpose. It no longer signaled power or even wealth. It became merely a feature of social status, a sign of dignity and moral standing. And so Auerbach writes (I shall quote it fully here since I was not able to do so in twitter’s 140 characters):

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“As these people are conscious that they no longer themselves believe in the thing they represent, and that they are bound to be defeated in public argument, they choose to talk of nothing but the weather, music, and court gossip.” (Mimesis, 456)

In this passage, Auerbach explains why aristocratic life had grown so stale and sedate in the 19th century. In previous ages, men of the aristocracy were daring, inquisitive thinkers. Their educations were wide-ranging and their interests multifarious. The Age of Enlightenment came about in the salons of French marquises, and Italian counts, and the courts of minor German princes. It was the aristocracy that retrieved from antiquity ideas like an organized civil service, the conscript army, and scientific method. They sponsored the translation of classics into vernacular tongues and paid to distribute them in print. But with an employed civil service, there was no need for a court. If the state could levy an army through conscription, there was no need for knights. If scientists could understand natural phenomena through experimentation, liturgical explanations of creation posited by the church became impractical and unreliable by comparison. With the Age of Enlightenment the European aristocracy had essentially dug its own grave. In it’s inevitable culmination, the French Revolution, this was at times very literally the case. But it was not yet the end. The nobles still controlled the land; they still had the support and obedience of the rural peasantry. The European monarchies prevailed against Napoleon and the Revolutionary army. They had preserved themselves for the time being, but they would never be able to reverse the historical inertia generated by the Revolution and the Enlightenment. The aristocracy was discredited and had not the means to argue otherwise. And so, throughout the 19th century and into the industrial age they behaved as delicately as possible so as not to disturb the status quo, and they clung tenaciously to what little they had remaining.