... is deadtime?

Another post of Jodi‘s got me thinking, and empathizing. It’s called “why bother?” and strikes me it can be considered an iteration on the theme of deadtime.
What’s deadtime? The name of a band I was friends with once, for whom I have a tattoo. Also a term in physics, a friend once told me, signifying the time it takes the computer to count, during which the particles passing through the counting … thing … while the computer is counting can’t be counted. A loss.

This was written a while ago, rather frantically to squeeze out some time to think and to breathe while working and planning my wedding, it’s a post at the Work Time blog that Angela set up, thought I’d repaste it here as a reminder to self, among other things once in a while one gets what one wants.

Dead Tired Time

Nate writes, “My job expects 42-58 hours per week. It’s a ‘progressive’ ‘non-profit’ organization, so I’ll be dying for the cause, I suppose. And I was looking over budget stuff today and they may only have money to keep me employed through the end of February or March! So it’s wring as much ‘social change’ from my aching body (and social life) as quickly as possible before the grants run out.

It’s endemic in this kind of work. I want out, bad. It make me think about what Virno talks about, the distinction between labor time and production time. I’m thoroughly sold on Harry Cleaver’s reading of Marx – value a social process, power, not a substance – and yet, there is a difference I think. There’s the work we do for the boss, directly, and then there’s the work we do to maintain our labor power – which my job shortchanges, both due to quantity of time spent working directly for them, and in that I spend my off hours stressed, wound up, complaining to my friends on the other side of the planet.

The inability to sustain one’s labor power leads to burn out, also endemic in the nonprofit industry. My bosses want me to kill myself for their organization, and the arrangement of work means that the quantity of unpaid work time is very high as well (notes for a materialist theory of stress?), and some of this unpaid work time maybe isn’t productive work time for the boss, it’s more like ‘the job fucking up my life’ time, a time that is at least sometimes unproductive for the boss too: if I’m tired because I can’t sleep at night because I’m worrying about a meeting then I don’t work as well the next day, which maybe counts as resistance, but feels more like illness – something I don’t like and that also isn’t functional for the boss, a dead time like the old Situationist slogan, but not just dead for me (like all worktime!) but also dead for the boss, not a time of value production.

I think revisiting absolute and relative surplus value is a really good idea. And I think the stuff on work time etc is very relevant to Negri etc and to the materialist feminist stuff we’ve been talking about reading on aut-op-sy, I’ve been reading Power of Women and Subversion of the Community by James and Dalla Costa, and I definitely get the sense that they differ from Hardt/Negri: the latter sound to me like they’re saying the productivity (for capital) of domestic work is a recent historical phenomenon in capitalism, whereas I think the former are saying this was always part of capital. An important difference I think. “

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Jodi says:

March 5, 2006 at 6:50 pm

So, is deadtime the time the job demands but doesn’t remunerate? Or is it what underlies the remunerated time but which ultimately is incommensurable with it, something like the human cost or like the loss of an ability to do more or other in the future? Might there be a difference between dead and dying time? And, then, there could be undead time…

Nate says:

March 5, 2006 at 9:03 pm

hi Jodi,
Thanks for your comments. “is deadtime the time the job demands but doesn’t remunerate?” I hadn’t thought of it so much in terms of wages. “Or is it what underlies the remunerated time but which ultimately is incommensurable with it, something like the human cost or like the loss of an ability to do more or other in the future?” That’s more what I had in mind. I’ll have to think about dead vs dying, I think I’m not particularly fussed on either term, given that I think these are not final states but processes subject to reversibility. This is all stuff that was on my mind when I used to work in so-called ‘social justice nonprofit organizations’ (all four terms of which are at best only ambiguously true, many of the places I worked felt just as much like antisocial unjust for-profit disorganziations).

I think of it this way. We might plot a grid or make table, with two axes: productive for us, productive for the boss.

1. Some time is productive for us and not the boss.
2. Some time is productive for us and for the boss.
3. Some time is productive for the boss and not for us.
4. Some time is productive neither for us nor for the boss.

It must be noted, of course, that placement in one or the other position is not automatic (rather it’s the subject of conflict), nor uncontroversial (productive in what sense, and who gets to decide) nor final (disasters of all sorts might prevent the realization of value advanced, or strip us of what we’ve gained; enclosure – whether involuntary in the classical sense or voluntary in the sense of a contract to sell the novel/thesis/painting/album/etc that we’ve already made – might render something unproductive for the boss into something productive for the boss, etc).

I would call #4 deadtime, though at least some things under #3 is in many way deadtime too. #4′s the one I most had in mind. We might say this is the result of excess or gratuitous command or violence on capital’s part, or on the part of the local instantiation thereof. For instance, fulltime organizing staff at some unions and other NGOs are worked to death (I don’t mean this entirely metaphorically, longterm/lifetime staff tend to die in their mid 50s, anecdotally), in a way that causes high turnover (and as a result loss of productive knowledges and skills and contacts), employee discontent, and less productive work sometimes to the point where it’s not only less efficient per hour but less efficient in terms of the total quantity of work that gets done. People are sometimes simply too tired and stressed and sick to do the work well. That’s deadtime – when the bosses are killing us and it doesn’t even benefit them. In a sense this is probably me replaying a version of the old ‘irrationality of capitalism’ motif within marxism, which makes me a bit nervous, but I think this is right in this case.

I think remunerated or unremunerated is an additional variable the complicates this picture, in a good way. So, running each of the 4 types I listed…

#1. At an office job with poor surveillance and an internet connection one might, hypothetically, spend a ton of time on aut-op-sy and print out a few copy paper boxes worth of online texts by Italian marxists, and translate artices from European precarity movements for circulation in anglophone networks. Those types of hypothetical actions would be remunerated and unproductive for the boss.

#2. The labor of buying and preparing food is typically unremunerated and is productive for the boss (if I’m too hungry – or, for that matter, hungover or drunk – to work it impacts the boss) and productive for me, as I need to eat to live. In some cases, though, these goods are provided or directly subsidized by the bosses (I used to earn a per diem when I was out of town, and the office often supplied coffee, bottled water, juice, breakfast food, etc). In some cases, remunerated, in some cases not, in all cases productive for me, productive for the boss at least some of the time.

#3. In typical and remunerated form this is any value productive labor that’s not in some way productive for us. Unremunerated froms would be, say, the labor of tying a tie every morning, commute time, time spent laying awake at night thinking through how to make the workday or some work assignment turn out better, etc. This is generally activity that’s unremunerated, though there are some instances where employees get partial remuneration – clothing discounts, partial or full transportation subsidy, etc. To my mind this time can be safely expected to always exceed the quantity of time remunerated, and not only in terms of the difference between value produced and wages paid (surplus value in the classic sense).

#4. I’m not sure about this. If my work leaves me too fucked up to live and to work, I suspect that’s rarely compensated. Some of the activities designed to reduce the effects (render productive again after) this time can sometimes be remunerated or subsidized – health insurance that covers different types of restorative or preventive care (therapy, trips to the gym, etc) might be considered an instance. But I’m pretty this time also outstrips remuneration for it. Aside from the stress of work environment and quantity of hours stuff that I had in mind from my work experience another example might be environmental contamination in heavy industry, which might lower productivity by the impacts on workers. Other than ‘irrationality of capitalism’, another old idea that this replays might be overconsumption of means of production/resources (in this instance variable capital), which is one source of crisis (not the most important one, and in fact with regard to variable capital and labor power one that it’s in our interests to fight hard to avoid).

Is this clearer than before and does it make sense?

For me one of the stakes here is to argue against Negri’s view that everything – all of social and biological lifetime – is productive. This is just not the case. At the aggregate level, in terms of collective capital, capitalist do probably have an interest in reducing deadtime, but they don’t always follow their interests perfectly, they sometimes require pressure from other capitalists and their lackeys, or from us. And the position of where some time falls in this typology, and whether it’s remunerated or not, are all matters of conflict at least as much (or more) as they are objectively given. Negri’s whole omni-productivist impulse papers over some of these important distinctions, and makes it harder to think through conflicts that happen around work, both remunerated and unremunerated.

This also relates to a note I made back in October, against a certain Negrian/Deleuzian (I think) impulse in some friends of mine. It’s a paragraph long, here.

I’d like to write something longer on this, the question of what are the different sense of production, as I think it’s pretty important. I think it’s really important to retain some distinctions. One can, of course, redescribe anything in any number of ways – that which is unproductive is actually productive of something else, so deadtime produces new types of bodies etc – but I think it’s really important that value production/surplus value production not get lost in the redescription. Or rather, if these types of production do get lost then probably that redescription is not particularly useful for the purposes I’m concerned about. I think Negri’s celebration of the opportunities and the tremendous novelty of the present is linked to his accounts of production today, which is also linked to his strange and I think contradictory accounts of types of production. (For instance, he’s said in recent memory that work is our dignity, a very old fashioned and problematic kind of claim, especially for people at lower ends of intra-proletarian hierarchies. He says this here, which, come to think of it, might be relevant for the Refusal conversation to come, as in this piece he also says that the refusal of work is no longer possible.) I suspect this stuff also has its roots in his early work on the breakdown of the law of value/measurability. That’s something that I hope to look into in depth in the future. I hope this makes sense.

take care,
Nate