Neoliberalism and the Right to Be Lazy: Inactivity as Resistance in Lazzarato and Agamben

Abstract

Neoliberalism has installed an unending competitive struggle in the economy. Within this context activists have pushed for a reappraisal of laziness and inactivity as forms of resistance. This idea has been picked up by Maurizio Lazzarato and Giorgio Agamben, but in different ways. This essay first explains the former’s appraisal of laziness as a release of potentialities unrealizable under financial capitalism. However, Lazzarato’s appraisal of laziness resembles neoliberal theories of innovation because it shares with neoliberalism the conceptual persona of a subject whose potentialities exceed the current status quo. Potentiality is thus not an unambiguous antagonist of capitalism, as Lazzarato suggests. In order to adequately oppose neoliberalism, Lazzarato should question the role of potentiality in capitalism. Agamben has undertaken such a project. The second part of the essay consequently argues that Agamben’s philosophy of inactivity as impotentiality is able to circumvent neoliberalism and the society of the spectacle.

Key Words:

• Giorgio Agamben
• Impotentiality
• Laziness
• Maurizio Lazzarato
• Resistance

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Professor Toon Braeckman, Professor Stefano Micali, Massimiliano Simons, and Liesbeth Schoonheim for their comments together with the people from the Resistance Conference at the University of Brighton (2016) and the Critical Finance Studies Conference at Southampton (2016) where I presented earlier versions of this paper. I am grateful to my friends and colleagues for contributing to the idle environment indispensable for philosophical creativity.

Notes

1 Barkan (2009, 247–8) assumes a parallelism between the state of exception and the society of the spectacle. He stresses the fact that in both instances language is reduced to a state of impotentiality. I follow De Cauter (2012) in claiming that there is a difference, first because the state of exception and the society of the spectacle are confined to different geographical spaces. It makes sense to describe a shopping mall as a spectacle and a detention camp as a state of exception, but not vice versa. Secondly, Agamben frequently invokes impotentiality as a form of resistance against sovereignty but not explicitly against capital. The impotentiality of communication in the society of the spectacle is hidden behind empty talk. The spectacle therefore does not “signify nothing but the inability to communicate” (Barkan 2009, 247) but rather the ability to communicate. The performance of empty talk displays its capacity to mean anything. Only a second-order impotentiality can disrupt this smooth image by exposing the inability to speak (see below).

2 Paolo Virno develops a similar theory of spectacular capitalism in A Grammar of the Multitude (Virno 2004, 59–63) and Déjà Vu and the End of History (Virno 2015, 159–73). He argues that capitalism has always already commodified potentiality as such in the form of labor power. The latter is the commodified human bodily capacity to produce and create, localizable in a past that was never present but that fuels every present with its capacity to instigate the new. The society of the spectacle is the specific form this expropriation of bodily potentiality takes today. It extends the culture industry’s mode of production, based on language and communication, to the whole economy. It thereby renders the virtuosic indeterminate potentiality to speak as the dominant commodity. In contrast to traditional capitalism, the society of the spectacle hence makes human potentiality as such “come to the surface, brought into relief as a most concrete phenomenon” (Virno 2015, 141). In contrast to Agamben, however, Virno does not see impotentiality or inactivity as the appropriate form of resistance, but rather living labor. Similar to Lazzarato, he argues that human potentiality exceeds the bounds of capital accumulation and can hence break the imposed limitations on potentiality for a fuller cultivation of life (Virno 1991, 24).

3 I do not deny that commodities take on a specific meaning for consumers but that such a specific function is already intended in the act of promoting the commodity. A smartphone is in itself a blank canvas, but each consumer makes it into a particular phone with specific functions. Phones perform their impotentiality to assume any function so that consumers can select the potentialities they prefer.

4 Hardt and Negri (2017, 139–47) have recently acknowledged the proximity between neoliberal entrepreneurship and the creativity of living labor. They argue that the entrepreneurial potentiality to foster new forms of cooperation originally resides in the multitude but that neoliberalism recuperates this potentiality in the figure of the individual hero of capitalist innovation. However, according to Hardt and Negri, this assimilation is always precarious since the multitude at any time exceeds the constraints of private capital accumulation. Hardt and Negri remain in the dark, unfortunately, about how and why this recuperation works, why it is certain a priori that neoliberal entrepreneurship is derivative of the entrepreneurship of the multitude and not vice versa, or why it is self-evident that the multitude would be able to operate a nonrecapturable excess of potentialities. Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2009, 154–5), for instance, refers to the proliferation of depression, suicidality, and the anxieties of precarious workers to question Negri’s faith in the multitude’s infinite creativity. According to Berardi, there are limits to the multitude’s capacity to escape capitalist recuperations of creativity. Once these limits have been crossed, the potentiality of living labor is completely subsumed under capital. Precarious workers can be so forced to permanent creativity in entrepeneurializing their own lives that they are simply too exhausted to create something new beyond capitalist capture. Calling for idle creativity, like Lazzarato does, hence risks working in capital’s favor when people are unable to exceed the bounds of capital accumulation.

5 Lazzarato is aware of this affinity between his promotion of potentiality and neoliberalism. In the essay on Marcel Duchamp, he mentions that there is a fine line between the self-subjectivation of potentiality and the integration of this creativity by capital. The art market’s instrument of integration is the signature, which turns a ready-made into an artistic commodity with a certain exchange value (Lazzarato 2014a, 39–40). The autograph makes the work a commodity that is worth more than a simple urinal. In Les révolutions du capitalisme, Lazzarato (2004, 252–6) provides an explanation of this mechanism. Originally, creativity was an extracapitalist process that had no need for capital to function. Capital, however, tried to capture this energy through the paradigm of innovation. By making creativity the basis of economic growth, capitalism has included creativity in its own fabric while maintaining creativity’s mysterious nature. Capital needs “innovation” but does not pretend to be able to produce it independently from the commons.

6 Ziarek (2008) uses the example of the hunger strike to criticize Agamben’s theory of impotentiality for lacking a perspective on gender and race while also refusing to see how bare life can be used as a political weapon of confrontation. She is right in stating that most hunger strikes actually serve to enforce the inclusion of a class of people that previously felt excluded from society. Hunger strikes are frequently temporary events of impotentiality in exchange for social recognition. Agamben, however, calls for impotentiality as a way of life, not a temporary practice, since it is the defining characteristic of humankind. This would imply a hunger strike that continues beyond social recognition, as in Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist (see Christiaens 2015, 126–8).

7 Jessica Whyte overlooks this distinction when she criticizes Agamben’s use of the concept of the society of the spectacle. According to Whyte (2013, 128), Agamben proposes a kind of accelerationism as “active nihilism” wherein people should live by the spectacle as a precursor to redemption. This reading is common among Agamben scholars (see Mills 2008, 126–8) but is questionable. Given Agamben’s (2013) insistence on the Franciscan opposition to property as a paradigm of new use, it seems unlikely that he neglects commodification or agrees to it in any possible way. I argue instead that the spectacle is a problem left unsolved by the rendering inoperative of bios through impotentiality because the spectacle exploits impotentiality itself. It looks like Agamben promotes the society of the spectacle or sees it as an image of the redemption to come because he uses the same strategy twice. Bios was rendered inoperative through the performance of impotentiality, but this performance was later captured by capital. By performing a second-order impotentiality to render capitalist impotentiality inoperative, form-of-life is installed as a condition in which life and its form are inseparable (see below).