François Bon's factory writing and a word too many

Abstract

François Bon's Sortie d'usine (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1982), Paysage fer (Lagrasse: Editions Verdier, 2000), and Daewoo (Paris: Fayard, 2004) suggest a connection between the industrial factory and the work of fiction that is integral to the question of the social in today's immaterial economy. The three novels offer a mode for thinking the limit of capital social relations and the excess of living labor in digital networks of the common. This mode is figured in the mot de trop of fiction, as derived from Maurice Blanchot's writing. In the context of cognitive capitalism and the immaterial economy, the mot de trop of Bon's fiction figures the ethics of encountering the other as a mutual interruption between Breu's material, corporeal insubordination, and Hardt's argued biopolitical autonomy of the common. Literature's figuration of material life points to the ethical sociality of thinking subjects behind immaterial faculties and technologies. They are ethical and thinking in the attention to the impossible but necessary coinciding of immeasurable excess and marked corporeality in the encounter with the other.

Keywords:

• François Bon
• Cognitive capitalism
• Immaterial economy
• Digital

This work was supported by the Graduate School at the University of Minnesota under the William W. Stout Fellowship.

Notes

1. In the case of Paysage fer and 15021, “l’énigme rapide d'une usine morte” relates to the altered vision one experiences in the accelerated motion of looking out through the train window (Bon, Paysage fer, 49). Énigme and magique are recurring words throughout Bon's other works and denote the opaque aesthetics of representing the alterity of others's lives and their milieus.

2. For more on the “fleeting window” in Bon's Paysage fer, see Armstrong.

3. Bon's work in digital and hybrid writing includes his personal website or “web magazine,” Le Tiers livre (tierslivre.net), the collective web project remue.net (including literary essays, columns, online subscriptions, audio-video resources, etc.), and the publishing house publie.net (“une coopérative d'auteurs dédiée à la littérature numérique, où chacun peut participer au processus d’édition”), as well as online and offline writing workshops. Daewoo, Tumulte, and L'incendie du Hilton each have online dossiers of materials with varied relationships to the printed text. See James.

4. André Gorz, Michel Husson, Yann Moulier Boutang, and Carlo Vercellone, among others.

5. See Hardt and Roggero.

6. The notion of the mot de trop also appears in L'attente l'oubli (19) and La part du feu (334), particularly in relation to silence. On a more personal level, Blanchot appeals to the mot de trop when responding, in a letter to Roger Laporte, to the accusations against his polemical political writings from the 1930s (Nancy 55). He expresses a dimension of his relationship with Emmanuel Levinas that exceeds political explication. The same use of the mot de trop, as an explanation for saying too much when one could not keep silent, on the one hand, and on the other, as a literary trope for the coincidence of the excess and limit of language, can only be noted here but merits closer study.

7. Hence the correlation Foucault made between the biopolitical production of human faculties and neoliberalism: the codification and regulation of facets of human life towards the accumulation of “human capital” (232–236).

8. Moulier Boutang uses the term bio-production to name the production of knowledge by means of knowledge, and forms of living by means of the living.

9. I use simulation in the Platonic sense that Jean-François Mattéi, in his book La puissance du simulacre, has theorized in light of digital simulations.

10. Also see Chaudier and his reading of the novel as drawing on the Marxist tradition.

11. See Virno's discussion of knowledge and production as linguistic co-operation.

12. In developing Marx's notion of the general intellect, Virno proposes that the living labor of mass intellectuality (“cognitive competencies that cannot be objectified in machinery”) constitutes a “rupture between general intellect and fixed capital” (6). Vercellone's interpretation of the general intellect deviates from that of Virno's, as the former situates cognitive capitalism within the historical continuity of “capitalism in the longue durée,” likening the conflicts between living knowledge-labor and fixed capital to formal subsumption (15).

13. See Breu on the resistance of the corporeal in biopolitics.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jiewon Baek

Jiewon Baek (University of Minnesota) is a PhD candidate currently writing on a thesis on ethics, immaterial economy, and contemporary French literature and visual arts. Her article, “The Ethics of Uncovering the Something Else in Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” appears in the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy (Spring/Summer 2014).