Irene ist Viele! Or What We Call “Productive” Forces

Irene ist Viele!1

An extensive 2004 study undertaken by the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics (BFS) found that, in one of the world’s wealthiest countries, of nearly fifteen billion annual work hours, eight billion went unpaid. Two-thirds of that free labor was performed by women, while women in the wage-labor sector were paid on average 18 percent less than men.2 The study shows that the “invisible hand of the market,” with its celebrated promise of economic equality, fails when it comes to social, cultural, and life-sustaining activities; furthermore, it appears that the “free market” has something against women. If, on top of this, the current form of capitalism is characterized by its extension of the logic of commodity production into the social realm (although, according to its classical self-conception, the capitalist economy actually claims to exclude the interpersonal realm), this means that not only wages and social services are reduced and cut, but above all that the reproductive reserves are plundered.3 According to many contemporary theorists, what was considered in the Fordist system to be external to the concerns of the economy—communication, personalized services, social relationships, lifestyle, subjectivity—today establishes the conditions for the generation of wealth. Social and cultural competences and processes—the most varied forms of knowledge production and dissemination—are central to what Antonella Corsani calls “cognitive” capitalism.4

Thus the current debate surrounding precarity in Europe, as a neoliberal condition and a comprehensive mode of subjectivity, doesn’t stop where wage labor or social-state welfare ends, but rather seeks out perspectives that help us to think beyond the reductive logic of the current conception of work, and beyond the nation-state as well. This also means being able to consider the material, social, and symbolic conditions necessary for life as interconnected entities that can overcome the traditional dichotomies of public/private and production/reproduction to set new standards for living life with all its facets and contingencies.5

Redupers. Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit, 1978. Directed by Helke Sander. Courtesy Deutsche Kinemathek.

But how does a life look when it doesn’t define itself in relation to the status of wage labor, but rather through the desire to freely decide one’s own conditions for living and working, effectively comprising a demand for a flexible labor market? What does it mean for our work and life when the social, the cultural, and the economic cease to be clearly distinguishable categories and instead condition and permeate each other? Beyond this, what does it mean when people come to terms with these new forms of work as isolated individuals? What can forms of collectivity look like? And what does it mean when there is not only no consideration of the redistribution of wealth in the precarity debate, but also no consideration of a good life for all? How do we expect to work politically to develop overall social conditions when the theoretical premises of their transformation remain to a large degree unexplained?

In this text I will pursue these questions in relation to a 1978 film by Helke Sander titled Redupers. Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit (The All-Around Reduced Personality: Outtakes). At the end of the 1970s, this film already tried to consider the immanence of liberation ideals and self-determination in capitalist societies. In a way, it represents a possible historical starting point for the current debate over forces of production, precarity, and critical potential by illustrating that, even in the upheaval of changes in the capitalist as well as gender order that took place in the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, many networked and self-organizing production conditions (what today would be considered the source of “immaterial work”) were already present—and were being analyzed by feminists.

From the beginning, this can be understood as political positioning on the filmmaker’s part. Helke Sander is also a central figure of the so-called First Women’s Movement. At the 1968 conference of the Socialist German Student Union (SDS) in Berlin she delivered the speech on behalf of the Action Committee on the Liberation of Women, an event that ended with the famous tomato being thrown at her comrades. In this speech, Sander demanded that the functionalist precept rooted in political economy, according to which capitalism must determine all social conditions, be set aside. Power relations in the private sphere, which affect women above all, cannot be accommodated in this perspective, but are instead denied and dismissed as a secondary contradiction. The political project shared by leftist men and women could not, according to Sander, be successful as long as only “exceptional women” were recognized by the merit system of the leftist intelligentsia. The question of the political project lies, according to Sander, in the method by which it is practiced. What was necessary was a political practice that recognizes the private realm, the body, gender relations, and the realm of reproduction as a political sphere.

The politicization of the private is a central motif of the social movements of the 1970s and is found throughout the film. Redupers no longer places this critique of the normative role of the housewife at the center. Instead, the filmmaker uses the politicized perspective on the private to examine the most varied activities and constraints, drawing connections to the social, economic, and cultural fields, and the power relationships at work between them. The question of the mother’s care for the daughter and their relationship plays an important role, although social conditions in the film are indicated primarily by the ever-changing demands imposed upon the overworked protagonist, whose career as a press photographer requires her to be on location at irregular times, and with little notice. Beyond the unresolved question of care, the film remains attentive to all the invisible operations that comprise work within the culture as well—those not related directly to the sale of photographs: shopping for film, working in the darkroom, developing the film and printing the photos, drying and pressing the prints as well as retouching the images; but also: negotiating assignments, remaining informed about social events, maintaining contact with the persons photographed, which also goes beyond a working relationship, as well as submitting invoices and collecting honoraria, preparing tax returns, etc. The cash-value of the compensation that the photographer Edda receives in Sander’s film for her photos, with which she defrays all expenses for both her daughter’s and her own subsistence, and for all her other projects, can never make up for all of this activity. Even just with regard to the production of the photos, it doesn’t even amount to a decent hourly wage. The sale of photographs as a finished product thus contains contradictions very similar to those of selling one’s own labor to capital. As the photograph is only a snapshot of an instant in a live event, frozen and commodified, so also is the work performed for the production of the image not contained in the price. In a similar way, life-sustaining, social, and communicative activities are also frozen in the concept of labor, consumed by capital like a commodity.6

Redupers. Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit, 1978. Directed by Helke Sander. Courtesy Deutsche Kinemathek.

This understanding has a historical side: that of the discovery of work as a source of property and wealth, from John Locke and Adam Smith to Marx’s Systems of Work and the political economy as science. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thinkers of all stripes apparently agreed that “work” alone represents human beings’ most productive means of shaping the world and forming values. Even when Karl Marx, in his critique of the Gotha program, strongly criticized the claim that work is the source of all wealth (he asserted that nature is also a source of wealth and that the fetish for work is an expression of bourgeois ideology), during the period of industrialization through the radical re-evaluation of the overall social status of work, there were a striking number of other activities that assumed that they could form world and value as well. The most obvious reason why the theorists of the nineteenth century weren’t aware of the radical limitations of this concept of work is rooted, according to Hannah Arendt, in the fact that they only attributed work to the production of sellable goods.7

Throughout industrialization, the concept of work came to be understood according to its capacity for maximizing profit and producing value. But this also meant that such a concept can neither encompass “work” in the life-sustaining sense nor productivity in any non-capitalist sense. Karl Marx conceived of work in much broader terms than those of the male factory worker. He also considered “making the audience laugh” (cultural work / entertainment industry) to be work, and protested against those of the workers’ movement who only understood traditional industrial labor as work. Sweat and muscle power, real manpower, and the machine hall were apparently easier to politicize than the comics, entertainers, or women—for whom the “other” industry of unpaid caretaking, childrearing, shopping, and housework were intended—on the basis of their so-called feminine characteristics. The circumstances of their exploitation were hidden, but no less brutal in their effects. In contrast to the entertainment industry, which was quite small at the time, this second industry concerned almost the entire “other half” of society. Alongside the sticky psycho-social dependency of the genders, the dichotomy formed by the woman’s dependency upon the money of the man would determine the entire symbolic order of industrial capitalism.

But reducing work to production also went beyond this to lock the theoretical approaches inside the factory, so to speak. It did not take long for the critique of capitalism to consider the gendering of paid and unpaid labor alongside its role in producing capital as well.8

Living a life that unfolds in opposing directions, the main character in Helke Sander’s film points to the imprecision of this discourse. While her “free time” is spent working with her female friends on an art project—as she says “one interesting project or another is always blowing into my house”—her days remain filled with different activities characterized by usefulness and/or idealism, both informal and normally undocumented. While her work as a press photographer secures her income and is what she describes as her actual career, the other activity—working on a cultural project—fulfills her desire for a collective, feminist practice, for change and cultural and political empowerment. At the same time, both are work, as is caring for her daughter. But in these apparently self-determined conditions, as the film shows, the unpaid care work remains not only the responsibility of women, but also invisible to the commodity forms of knowledge and cultural production. Self-organized work is also split into remunerative work offering financial support and artistic, self-actualizing, collective work that brings in cultural and social capital. And yet the care work at home is taken into account by neither occupation. While her cultural-political work is coupled with the actualization of meaningful individual and collective desires, the care work must somehow be organized around it. Her work with a group of women on a project to design a counter-image to the dominant one of a divided and cut-off Berlin is indeed more meaningful than freezing into photographs “events which are of publishable value for the newspaper.” The women’s project for the Berlin art association doesn’t only reflect the de-valuation of care work to that of a burdensome activity, but also points to the different levels of their own participation in the same dominant condition, as well as to their individual desires for public recognition. The sexist logic of society and the desire to change it thus come dangerously close to one another. In this way, the film’s politicization of the private dissolves into new concepts of occupation and career, but while it finds its place in the self-actualization of “more meaningful” work, it no longer locates this change in the social conditions themselves.9

All-Around Reduced Views

Sander’s film focuses on this absence in its descriptions of all the daily activities we perform in private and public space. For more than thirty years, feminist economists have examined work relationships and conditions from the perspective of non-work, calling our attention to the fact that the field of political economy (which is about two hundred and fifty years old) has until now only addressed commodity production and not the question of how to bring about sociality. On the one hand, this is because the field developed alongside mechanization and industrialization and was in a position to theorize these new production systems and capital relations, but also because a specific ruling form of subjectivity became central to the development of Western capitalist society: the homo economicus, the subject of this economy, with white skin and masculine gender, who follows his own interests and whose self-interest is also believed to serve the interests of all others. According to Elisabeth Stiefel, an economist from Cologne, the homo economicus represents not only the tasks of the public economic sphere, but also those of the head of household, while the interior of the household is terra incognita for economic theory. The social and the cultural thus remain fundamentally exterior to the understanding of the economical. As classical economic theory assumed care work to be self-evident—and therefore performed for free—women had to take on unpaid “extra-economical” activities for “cultural” reasons, and this gendering of paid and unpaid work, which even today finds a significant disparity in the pay of men and women, has not hurt capital in the slightest in two hundred years.

The separation of social, cultural, and economic discourses from those of production and reproduction has solidified a theoretical reductionism which has made it difficult to discern where and how to economically position the analysis and critique of post-Fordist work and life conditions, especially because it is precisely those extra-economic conditions that have become central for the production of added value. How can we begin to bring these into a discussion about the re-distribution of wealth, when above all wage labor can no longer be guaranteed? How can we demand payment for something that is not yet considered in an economic sense work? And do we even want to recognize and monetize non-work as “work” at all, thereby economizing all aspects of life?

It becomes even more complicated to address these questions when they extend, together with gender duality and its location in the (neo-)classical work imperative, into the desire economy of a “good life.”

Redupers. Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit, 1978. Directed by Helke Sander. Courtesy Deutsche Kinemathek.

Sander’s film also speaks to this. The figure of the photographer also plays a double role in the film: as both occupation and as a self-actualization project. The photographer historically represents an exception to the gendered division of labor, as it was one of the first occupations to witness an altered discourse of visuality brought about by new technologies, and this opened possibilities for self-sufficiency and financial independence to not just men. The female photographer thus functions as a kind of role model for women, since the possession of her own money in this “creative occupation” could be associated with liberation from the heterosexual regime. Thus it was not unusual for these self-sufficient women to live with other women and not be married to men. The techno-emancipative role model in Sander’s film witnesses this historical narrative at the end of the 1970s, in a new situation between diligent self-organization and a relatively bureaucratic information and culture industry, in which the underpayment of freelance workers has become the rule. At the same time, Sander’s figure of the photographer shows who has access to the representation of the world and who selects, determines, and utilizes it.

In a central scene, in which the photographer Edda calls the newspaper editors seeking payment due to her, and her just-awoken friend finds the bathroom full of developed film, a conflict emerges: the good, non-heteronormative life together—being self-sufficient and earning money from home—and being dependent on editors. The economic reality of self-employment that was previously understood as emancipatory eats more and more into Edda’s personal relationships. The emancipatory struggle that had the good life as its objective now reappears in the unsatisfied longing for change and the struggle to survive.

Against this backdrop, the film reflects the fact that the desire for feminist, occupational, and cultural-political self-sufficiency—the personal responsibility of earning money and working in the counterculture—have inverted to become their opposites. They are not only unable to resolve the social contradictions that they set out to overcome, but become mired in them instead. The protagonist’s various motivations for wanting to become self-sufficient (by becoming a press photographer and an artist) connect completely in the film for the first time when the protagonist enters a new relationship with herself by going on a visit to the editorial floor of the magazine Stern to promote her feminist art project. In the scene, the photographer Edda puts on makeup and perfume, and, thinking as she walks down the hall to the journalist’s office, “if I really wanted to represent what is right in my job as press photographer, I would have to be at home here (in the halls of Stern).” In this situation, it is her cultural self speaking, but not her career self, and certainly not her activist self. The interplay of her various repertoires—the fragmentation of her person—is especially clear here. This scene suggests how, by working by herself and on projects outside of her career, Edda finds options for a “better position” on the horizon. The mix of positions and activities also becomes a “portfolio”: what she has done without pay and possibly with a higher degree of political investment accumulates social or cultural capital which is usable in other markets for a better position or a career in art. This points to a practice that has transformed into a dominant work-related demand today, in which unpaid internships and other indignities are part of a “normal career.”

Redupers. Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit, 1978. Directed by Helke Sander. Courtesy Deutsche Kinemathek.

In Switzerland today, job seekers show their unpaid work in their résumés, on the one hand to signal their “willingness to work,” but also to show their flexibility and versatility in the tightening job market. The feminist demand for the visibility of unpaid work seems realized here, but at the same time, the documentation of the informal serves only the efficiency logic of existing capitalist conditions by indicating a capability and readiness for wage labor.

The Stern editor was unresponsive to the film’s protagonist. For him, she is “only” a figure of the women’s movement—a feminist and a political activist. Not only is she denied the role of a cultural producer who can represent political conditions, but so is she denied any possible success as well. Here Sander illustrates what usually remains acknowledged in current theories on the emergent productivity of individual desires within neoliberalism: that pay for work performed in vastly different markets does not equal the sum of the parts. Viewed from today’s perspective, the film not only caricatures government-funded start-ups and the plans of the Hartz commission, but also corrects the idea that the celebrated figure of the “entrepreneurial self” is not gendered or part of a hierarchy. The reflective, connection-forming, and knowledge-producing form of work sketched out here also points to a change in society through which new claims to activity, collectivity, and property can be negotiated.

The protagonist is not only photographer, feminist activist, and theorist, that is, cultural producer, but also a product of emancipatory demands and capitalist impositions, a subject who has pulled away from wage labor and its regulatory apparatus in the factory or in the office, as the Autonomia Operaia called for. At the same time, she is a Reduper (an all-around REDUced PERson)—a figure who cannot be located biographically, and instead requires a new form of subjectivity to be realized in the contradictions of capitalist socialization. In this way, Redupers marks the post-Fordist convergence of work relationships, subjectivity, desires, and political demands that has consequently brought about a multitude of all-around reduced personalities.

Creating Probabilities

Three decades after Redupers, the call for self-determination and social participation is no longer only an emancipatory demand, but increasingly also a social obligation. In the new conditions of governance, subjects are pushed towards maturity, autonomy, and personal responsibility. They seem to willingly subordinate themselves to the dispositions of power—they are “obliged to be free” (Nikolas Rose). Forms of discipline that were used in the time of mechanization and industrialization have been extended in post-Fordist societies into new forms of control. Contemporary forms of organization discipline subjects and their bodies less through “guilt and punishment,” and more by aiming at internalizing productivity goals. This produces a new relationship of the subject to itself—friendliness towards customers, working with the team, increasing one’s own motivation, self-organizing work routines, managing time efficiently, and being personally responsible for both the company’s and one’s own actions are not only demands being made on the work subject, but increasingly also on the unemployed. According to Michel Foucault, this new concept of governing “is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself.”10 One’s behavior in a more or less open field of possibility therefore determines the path of success. Exertion of power consists, in this sense and according to Foucault, in the “creation of probability.”11

Accordingly, it is not a disciplinary regime that guides the subject’s actions, but rather a set of governing practices that mobilize and encourage rather than “survey and punish.” The new subjects of work should apparently be as contingent and flexible as the “markets.” A work subject who is able to find a productive relationship between work time and life time is “supported and challenged,” and within this relationship private activities are also geared toward economic use value. The entrepreneur of one’s own labor12 should also be the artist of his/her own life. The hope that these paradoxical demands could become dominant labor market politics is likely due to the fact that under such conditions, workers can always feel “liberated” from constraints, as Helke Sander’s film was already able to show in 1978. It must be worked out, therefore, how the transition from liberation programs to job specifications takes place, and whether and for whom they are effective. Three decades after Redupers, we need to ask how the relationship between work and non-work can be politicized when their coupling has already become hegemonic in its representation.

Although the economic field, in a double sense, mobilizes and controls the social realm, the paradigms of capitalist production remain the same. They do not inform the “resources” of our social lives themselves, even (and especially) if cognitive capitalism has parasitically positioned itself at the side of reproduction. Acceleration and maximizing profit continue to be advanced as the necessary logic of the market. Life itself is subsumed under the rules of efficiency and optimization that were first encountered under the regime of automated industrial work in order to synchronize the body with machines.13 Today, it is our cognitive capabilities that we are expected to optimize and our self-relation (to our work) that we are expected to correct in the interest of lifelong learning.14

Abisag Tuellmann, Flying Clipper - Traumreise Unter Weissen Segeln, 1962. Photograph used in Redupers. Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit, 1978. Directed by Helke Sander. Courtesy Deutsche Kinemathek.

Beyond this, the film Redupers shows that the anchoring of neoliberal ideology in the subject cannot only be considered to be a product of post-Fordist production or the information economy. Rather, the film points to arguments made by Éve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski, who in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism undertake a sociology of the critique of capitalism since 1968.15 They examine the “social critique” that became engaged on the political level for the redistribution of wealth and for equal rights as well as the “artistic critique” that emerged from the artistic and intellectual avant-gardes such as the Situationists and various social movements of the postwar era. With demands for autonomy, authenticity, and creativity, but also through artistic practices beyond the classical concept of the work of art, these critiques attacked the use of the social as commodity form, discipline in the factory, bureaucratic inertia, and hierarchical power relations in the industrial societies. Boltanski and Chiapello then argue that it is precisely capitalism’s adaptation to these “cultural critiques” that increasingly corroded the politicization of life and the social critique of property relations, thus paving the way for neoliberalism.

According to Yann Moulier Boutang, the classical conception of economic value and measurement changes in cognitive capitalism, since the growing use and exchange of knowledge in post-Fordist production extends far beyond its economic utilization as commodity.16 The viral dynamics of new distribution technologies such as the internet renders information and knowledge far less accessible to supervisory bodies, as Sander’s film also suggests. In the transformation of the old economy, these new possibilities also point to a new field of struggle—such as the conflicts and arguments over intellectual property and the so-called commons.

After viewing Redupers against a backdrop of contemporary economic analysis, it seems insufficient to simply point out the limits in the study of political economy or to show that capitalism has incorporated certain concepts of life for its own advancement. Rather, we must also ask whether and how a critique of capitalism can make allowances for the alliance of work and life within the subject’s own domain—its biopolitical preparations and desires—without getting mired in merely describing them as another advanced form of exploitation.