Arendt, The Human Condition Chapter 3 “Labor” Sections 13, 14, 17
Questions:
Pg 132: Connection between AI and “waste economy.” Where are all these aspects of life where automation (today) is rendering away tangibility in work?
How is history operating in the text, if at all? Locke, Smith, and Marx do understand civilization in relation to labor (and wealth). So, since Arendt underplays this relation here, how should we think about civilization in Arendt’s account?
Pg 127-128: When Arendt talks about playfulness/ hobbies. What do we make of this?
What does Arendt mean by the world? E.g., p 97, “Without a world into which…” If the world is what brings people together, then should we understand it aside from just physicality or objects?
“Metabolic rift,” vis-a-vis labor and waste, what is this? (99)
P. 109: How do classical distinctions between productive/ unproductive and skilled/unskilled labor map onto her categorical distinctions? (i.e. labor, work, action)
What is Arendt doing with the zoe/ bios distinction?
Discussion
We’re going to start with the labor/work distinction by way of a parlor game, i.e., going to see what sort of “activities” belong in each category.
Seems like a lot of things that come under “labor” are what would be particular to social reproduction, though Arendt doesn’t discuss gender in this text.
At the level of civilization, we can see that who gets to be assigned different categories is gendered as well.
(99): regenerating life processes produce new labor power (c.p. Marx), and she discusses the repetitive aspect of laboring. Unlike working, where something is finished, it moves into the common world.
Part of the argument seems to be that things that used to be work have fallen into the category of labor. Where, things that can be commodified have now made life’s reproductive activities and the cycles of regeneration.
So, some activities can mean different things, however, depending on their relation to capital.
There is a worry then about this work/labor distinction because it doesn’t seem to track the blurriness or the “how” that an activity is situated in relation to capital, especially given the gendering that isn’t being extricated.
Worry that there is an overcorrection of work at the expense of labor.
Seems like she may have a naturalistic view of labor, which would be departing from late Marx, where the society determines.
Could be following the early Marx
Passage on 101: Hercules and the stables, is labor, or the danger of it, really just its monotony, its “relentless repetition?”
Ultimately, Arendt isn’t giving any delineation between the “activity” as subjectively versus objectively meaningful, but maybe that’s not the point. The point being that we are accustomed to seeing most things today as labor, whereas otherwise we could view some activities as work.
Transcendental condition of labor is actually work, that is, need or require work and its products to sustain birth and death.
Perhaps Arendt wants a normative conception of the subject of the vitae activa, and in articulating this distinction of activities, she is affirming a world wherein we all partake in each aspect of these: labor, work, action.
That capitalism expropriates time, connected to Arendt’s account of “laborification” as pushing aside possibilities for time or temporality that overflows or disrupts chrononormativity and cyclical time.
Maybe her concern isn’t that we aren’t all equal in inhabiting all three spaces, but that none of us are currently free to. Not so much that she’s worried about equality, but about freedom.
Okay so there is now another can of worms: What is Arendt’s conception of freedom? Freedom from labor?
No, that’s impossible really, since labor is necessary for the human condition.
Going back to the automation question…something interesting about fertility and what it would mean to automate labor as a sphere.
Parlor Game: is exercise labor or work?
Also worth bringing up Benjamin’s worry about art and mechanical, mass reproduction. The problem isn’t so much that art is subsumed, but that perception is changed. Like a form of subjectivation.
Under what conditions does an action become labor, work, or action? The trichotomy maps conditions, not kinds of action.
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