Szymon Wróbel
(Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw)
Abstract:
Among theoretical errors with practical consequences irritating Marx the most are always those involving the very word “labour.” According to Marx’s main intuition it is not labour but its disappropriation that forms the proletarian. What the proletarian learns at work is how to discard the status of a worker. If the proletariat comes to be the agent of history, it is not because it creates everything but because it is dispossessed of everything. Thus the proletarian is nothing else than the negation of the worker. By the same token, the worker who is not yet a proletarian can be christened with a variety of names that are all equivalent: artisan, lumpen, petty bourgeois, ideologue. Starting from this kind of premises, the paper will ask whether today, in the post-digital world, we are dealing with the birth of a proletariat deprived of work and in this sense liberated from the status of a worker. Or, rather, what we are dealing with is the production of an army of workers who are just waiting for work, who are ready to work, who are in the disposition to render work – though themselves they never work and never rest. In post-digital age, everywhere, there are productive bodies liberated from the prison of the soul. Everywhere there is meaning at work. This is the word of generalized production. The creative industry, financial capitalism, and non-material work have all become the sign of our times. This world has brought to life new apparatuses of power, economies of meaning, textual machines, and productions of desire. There has been an unexpected reversal of the hierarchy of souls and bodies: there are more or less productive bodies, organs, and productions more or less liberated from the soul, in other words; from anti-production. Is this a world of working machines and without a worker or a world of mass of proletarian without work?
Szymon Wróbel is a professor of philosophy at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” of the University of Warsaw and at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He graduated in psychology (specialization: clinical psychology) at the Institute of Psychology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. For many years associated with the Pedagogical and Artistic Faculty of Adam Mickiewicz University in Kalisz. He is the author of numerous books and articles scattered in various scientific journals. His latest books include Deferring the Self and Grammar and Glamour of Cooperation. Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind, Language and Action, published in 2013 and 2014 by Peter Lang. In Polish: Exercises in Friendship, Retroactive Reading. Pedigrees of Contemporary Philosophical Thought and Polish Depressive Position. From Gombrowicz to Mrożek and Back published by the Krakow Publishing House Universitas in 2012, 2014 and 2015. His last book, also in Polish, Philosopher and Territory. The Policy of Ideas in the Thoughts of Leszek Kołakowski, Bronisław Baczko, Krzysztof Pomian and Marek J. Siemek was published by the IFiS PAN Institute in 2016. He leads the experimental Laboratory of Techno-Humanities at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales.” His current interests focus on “ontologies of failure” and “humanities of looting” based on the tactics of studying the remains of other discourses, shreds of incomprehensible languages, obsolete thoughts, abandoned sentences, interrupted gestures, unfinished intentions, dead poses, enigmatic images.