When will this labour end?

Labouring against work. Mulling over the contributions and remarks made during the course of these readings, this is what strikes me as the first paradox, which is also the specific paradox of abstract labour and concrete labours that, in turn, characterises Marx's distinctive account of capitalism, that which brings all others paradoxes to the fore and makes them boil over. It's all about specificity, the difference and the cut. And is there anything more paradoxical than communism, a class politics that gears itself toward the abolition of class society? Operaismo - ie., workerism - against work. And Tronti's essay is nothing if not paradoxical.

Who would have guessed that a discussion of the refusal of work would result in so much toil?

Passivity in relation to wage labour given expression with passionate exertions. Boredom, too, is a kind of passion.

But the difficulty I keep returning to at these moments - and it might well have something to do with my fatigue - is whether and how Lazzarato is right. Whether the command to work assumes, in the register of an increasingly self-managed organisation of the exploitation of cognitive labour, the very particular form of the injunction: Become Subjects!, communicate, circulate, network?  And what might this mean with regard to a 'becoming labourious of existence' or, to articule this difficulty in another way, the absurdity of imagining that there might be some kind of future labour that does not involve pain, fatigue, exertion, difficulty - and particularly so as to recall the sense of 'giving labour'. But, still, there has been an extravagance of labours here (and here).

This is how Lacoue-Labarthe describes the paradoxical in "Diderot: Paradox and Mimesis", as an extravagance. For him, the paradox "is not simply a contradicting or surprising opinion", but suggestive of "a passing to the extreme, a sort of 'maximisation'", through which "the equivalence of ordinaries is established (probably without ever establishing itself) - the contraries pushed to the extreme, in principle infinite, of contrareity." And, he adds, that "paradox is defined by the infinite exchange, or the hyperbolic identity of contraries." I mention Lacoue-Labarthe, and this particular quotation, because I find myself constantly turning around and between the philosophers of the désistance and the theoreticians of the refusal, and oftentimes playing one against the other.

But it's this quote from Lacoue-Labarthe that springs to mind when, on this occasion anyway, I re-read Tronti's essay. The derisory remarks on the veneration of work, the renunciation of Leftist morality tales of proletarian impotentia, the critique of social democratic understandings of 'globalisation', the savaging of understandings of consciousness as pivotal to the struggle, the refusal to defer to the figurative and representational terms of democracy or socialism, the demos or society. And more besides.

Tronti is nothing if not extravagant in his refusals. And deeply elliptical, if not strictly paradoxical: labour is capital, capital is labour. And so on, pushing the contraries to their extreme, a hyperbolic identity which never settles, is always tense, because we are in the present tense, in the time of the 'interval' that secures no grounds for intervention - but decide we must, in the form I think of a decision also that this 'we' amounts also to a 'no' - and where this vacillation between abstract labour and concrete labours, among other things, remains in play, and cuts both ways. 

Basta.