Paid Laziness

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds sway.  This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy

Maurizio Lazzarato's small pamphlet, Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work (semiotext(e), 2014), was for me the most interesting product of the 2014 Whitney Biennial. It was produced as one of a series of 28 pamphlets that comprised the independent publisher's participation in the exhibition. In its 48 pages Lazzarato uses the figure of Marcel Duchamp to argue for a revolutionary politics based not on Marx but on Paul Lafargue's 1883 essay, “The Right to be Lazy.”

“Duchamp,” Lazzarato says, “encourages us to conceive of and exercise a 'refusal of work' which constitutes an ethical-political principle that goes beyond work, which frees us from the enchanted circle of production, productivity, and producers. This stands in contrast to the communist tradition, in which the notion of work has always been at once the strength and weakness. Is the objective emancipation from work or emancipation through it? Nothing has resolved the confusion.”

Lazzarato emphasizes that it is not so much Duchamp's evasion of ordinary employment that interests him but rather Duchamp's withdrawal from artistic work. This refusal is not a renunciation of effort: Duchamp puts considerable energy into his multi-year attempt to become a chess champion. It is, however, a refusal to allow effort to be integrated into the monetary economy, in other words it is a refusal to be paid.

“More generally,” says Lazzarato, “the refusal of ‘artistic’ work means refusing to produce for the market and collectors in order to meet the aesthetic demands of an ever-expanding public. It means refusing to submit to their standards of evaluation and their demand for ‘quantity’ and ‘quality.’”

Lazzarato admires Duchamp’s resistance to the integration of the artist into the ordinary division of labor because it is also a resistance to what he sees the kind of subjectivity produced under capitalism: “Integration into capitalism is also and above all subjective. Even if the artist, unlike the factory work[er], has no direct boss, he is nonetheless subject to apparatuses of power which do more than merely define the space in which he produces, they determine the composition of subjectivity.”

Duchamp’s resistance isn’t pure. He did sell work from time to time and found other ways of bringing in money including advances on an inheritance. When he married Teeny Matisse (the former wife of Pierre Matisse), they were able to live in part off of the sale of paintings from her collection. He survived within a capitalist economy and the money that supported his life always came from somewhere. Nevertheless, Duchamp had enough freedom from the situation of work for hire that he could consider alternatives. What seems to fascinate Lazzarato, and what seems particularly at odds with life at this moment, is Duchamp's refusal to value work.

Here is Duchamp's vision of a post-work society, as related to Calvin Tomkins in a 1964 interview:

God knows there’s enough food for everybody on earth, without having to work for it. [laughs] Who made all those little rules that dictate you won’t get food if you don’t show signs of activity or production of some kind? No, I mean the give and take, for me, is a very amusing problem. I’m not talking about money now; I’m talking about barter or even the exchange between mother and child. For example, a mother generally gives and never takes from her child except affection. In the family there is more giving than taking. But when you go beyond the concept of the family, you find the need for equivalences. If you give me a flower, I give you a flower. That is an equivalent. Why? If you want to give, you give. If you want to take, you take. But society won’t let you, because society is based on that exchange called money, or barter. But I don’t know where it originated, as far as plain living is concerned. And don’t ask me who will make the bread or anything, because there is enough vitality in man in general that he cannot stay lazy. There would be very few lazies in my home [for lazies], because they couldn’t stand to be lazy too long. In such a society barter would not exist, and the great people would be the garbage collectors. It would be the highest and noblest form of activity. And since the garbage collectors would do it out of pleasure instead of being paid for it, they would have a medal that would correspond to being the Duke of Windsor today. [laughs] I am afraid it’s a bit like communism, but it is not. I am seriously and very much from a capitalist country.

Duchamp is joking around here, and his position is not what you’d call fully thought, but I quote it at length because we have so few such imaginaries.

Contemporary possibility doesn't look much beyond the notion of a society organized around wage labor, despite our knowledge that there have been many such societies in other times and places. What Duchamp questions in this passage is the whole idea of exchange, in particular equal exchange, as the only basis of economic life. Duchamp points out something we have almost, as a society, forgotten: that there are other reasons to do things besides the promise of payment or equal exchange.

Given the current conditions, conditions that will extend into the foreseeable future, how could one argue that people shouldn’t be paid for as much of their work as possible? Of course users of social media should be paid, in the way that we would say of course artists should be paid: both exist as the motive force at the center of a vast system of economic activity. Money changes hands all around them, and all of that financial value is directly dependent on the work that artists and users do for free. Similarly, as feminists have long pointed out, the entire economic system depends on the unpaid work taking place within households. By all means, let whoever washes the dishes and changes the diapers be paid.

And yet, our society is so deeply committed to paidness that our imagination in relation to alternatives has shriveled. Why do anything if you're not paid for it? How would we even get a cup of coffee if without a chain of paidness from grower to middleman to hauler to distributor to roaster to trucker to espresso bar?

It is tempting to imagine that what predated paidness was some kind of brute struggle for survival - I shoot that deer because if I don't, I starve - but even a cursory familiarity with the anthropology of societies that exist or have existed without money economies shows an intricate mix of activities undertaken for innumerable reasons. In the category of our own unpaid actions we find a treasury of such reasons.

“Lazy action is incomparably ‘richer’ than capitalist activity,” says Lazzarato, “for it contains possibilities that are not based on economic production (on surplus value) but open to an indefinite becoming which must be constructed, invented, and cultivated. Lazy action does not derive from aesthetics, it is part of an existentialist pragmatics. Duchamp demonstrates that in order to act differently one must live differently and that in capitalism to do so doesn't depend on work but on its refusal, one which belongs to a different kind of ethics and a different “anthropology.”

What is this lazy action, and what would it mean to extend our imaginations towards it? N.E.W.S. has put forth the idea of paid usership as compensation for the effort of creating content online, and even paid lurkership, compensation for the effort of reading. I would propose that we expand our social imaginary to include paid laziness. In so doing we may begin the gradual undermining of the the idea of paidness itself.

2014