Laziness & Work: An Interview with Pierre Saint-Amand
Sina Najafi and Pierre Saint-Amand Jean-Siméon Chardin, Auguste-Gabriel Godefroy Watching a Top Spin, 1738. The roots of our contemporary obsession with work and productivity are usually traced to the eighteenth century, when the new social and philosophical project of the Enlightenment, founded on rationality, dovetailed with the emergence of a capitalist economic system based on maximizing efficiency and productivity. This is the century in which the secular gospel of work in its modern form was written. In its most radical articulation, this gospel proposes that freedom and work are in fact equivalent. In his book, Paresse des Lumiéres (Editions du Seuil, 2008; The Pursuit of Laziness: Idle Philosophy and the Enlightenment), Pierre Saint-Amand, professor in the departments of French studies and comparative literature at Brown University, looks to the eighteenth century paradoxically not for a critique of laziness but instead for a counter-tradition that champions it. In figures as diverse as Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Siméon Chardin, and Pierre Marivaux, he finds the beginnings of a refusal to participate in a social project governed by the work ethic and of a skepticism toward the notion that productivity and industry should be our ultimate goals. Sina Najafi spoke with Saint-Amand by phone. Why did you choose the eighteenth century as the focus of a book on laziness?The discourse against laziness really starts in a coherent way in the eighteenth century, as we reach the cusp of industrial capitalism, and as the discourses on labor and economy emerge in their rationality. That is when we see the previously marginal discourse on laziness becoming more and more pointed. In many of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, one finds an equivalence between work and life itself. In Discourse on the Political Economy, for example, Rousseau acknowledges the inevitability of work; when he considers the responsibilities of the State and the well-being of its citizens, he argues that it’s imperative that work always be necessary and never useless. Voltaire champions the spirit of industry that pervades his century when he writes, “To work is to live.” And in his famous essay What Is Enlightenment?, Kant defines the project of the Enlightenment as having “the courage to use your own reason.” For him, laziness is associated with cowardice, which is the condition for remaining in what he calls a state of “tutelage.” For Kant, laziness is the primary obstacle to an autonomous life. I was interested, however, in examining a counter-discourse that valorizes laziness. This counter-discourse rejects functionality, resists the ideology of utility, and affirms forms of marginality that radically unsettle the Enlightenment project. What is especially interesting is that some of the same figures in my book who promote laziness are also the ones writing apologies for work and labor. Diderot would be one example, as would Rousseau, who begins to associate laziness with freedom in his later work, especially Reveries of the Solitary Walker. This is also the case with the painter Chardin. Many of his canvases celebrate domestic activity, but then you have the other paintings where work is suspended, and the subjects are distracted—they indulge in relaxation and even indolence. That’s basically the contradiction, the moment of dialectic, that I wanted to explore in the book. But I wanted to leave aside the question of aristocratic idleness, which is of course a given in the eighteenth century. I wanted to confront instead the particular area where laziness and idleness become figures of resistance within bourgeois economy. Is the aristocracy exempted from critiques of laziness?Not exactly. In religious treatises and in a lot of satire, you do see aristocrats being portrayed as lazy, as unproductive. And, of course, during the French Revolution the aristocrat will become the iconic figure of laziness. In 1789, for example, Emmanuel Sieyès formulated, in his influential What Is the Third Estate?, the revolutionary ideas of the nation, which he saw as bound by a common obligation to work. And aristocrats became “strangers” to this common project because they did not produce anything. But the aristocracy is not really affected by the context of the rising bourgeois economy and its values, which is what I’m concerned with. After all, the aristocracy is a class that is exempted from all forms of work. Leisure is an inherent privilege. Are people like Diderot in fact reading the emerging bourgeois theories of economics and labor?We have traces of these theories in the work of someone like Diderot, of the way the discourse of liberal economy is infiltrating the discourse of the philosopher and the encyclopedist. The historian Annie Jacob has written on the alignment between the physiocrats, who were the early economists of the eighteenth century, and the encyclopedists like Diderot. We even find in Diderot allusions to Benjamin Franklin’s writings on economy—the proto-Weberian apology for work. Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack was translated very early on into French as La Science du Bonhomme Richard. When in Rameau’s Nephew —Diderot’s imaginary dialogue between a philosopher and an idler—he portrays the nephew as a parasite, as someone who lives on the margins of the market economy, he knows exactly what he’s doing. But there is a contradiction in Diderot’s work. He certainly belongs to the category of philosophers who promote labor, who want to valorize work. But in Rameau’s Nephew, Diderot creates this unique character who is a hero of non-production—a bohemian musician who does not produce anything that lasts. Diderot shows his admiration for the genius of an artist of unfinished works, for an idler who resists economic finality and is consumed by the present, who refuses employment and subjugation. And it’s interesting that Rameau’s Nephew was written while Diderot was involved in the great busy work of his life, the Encyclopedia, for which he wrote around five thousand entries. There are also entries in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia that deal with laziness.There are several of them, and they establish a hierarchy; I focus on three. The articles were written by the Chevalier de Jaucourt, who contributed many entries to the encyclopedia. At the lowest level, there is fainéantise, literally “doing nothing,” which is described as the most physical negation of activity,
Books on the Footpath
Kala-Pyacha Though I am yet to witness writers begging on the footpath, their books have long made their way there and have thus been silently facilitating their own journey there at some future point. It is sheer luck that the books have arrived but the authors have not yet. Once born, humans must die; once written, books must arrive on the footpath. This observation is quite scientific, in fact. I know of some eminent and insane people who heartily believe in this theorem. They are also avid footpath book ‘collectors.’ In a few select cities, and such cities are now rare in India, you may often bump into such lost and insane souls. They do not frequent cinema halls or other adda sessions. They do not have time for all that—their heads are filled up with books on the footpath. And most of their fallow time is spent on rummaging through books on the footpath. Often you will find them lost and vigorously trying to spy some pearl within the piles of books that lie strewn on the footpath. Having gone to buy wives’ sarees in the market, they will return with old books instead. I know of a man who is hardly able to run his family but the lure to collect first editions is simply irresistible for him. Nothing much at home, but the one full almirah is stashed with first editions. I have known quite a few people who are dead certain about the scientific thesis that I have just advanced: that books must come to the footpath once written. These collectors keep track of every new book that arrives in the market. But if you happen to ask one of them, “Have you seen that new book, written by so and so?” The inevitable reply will be, “Yes I have been following. The book hit the stands a couple of months ago, right? I sure will buy it; just hoping that it will reach the footpath in 3-4 months’ time.” Even a vegetable vendor will be horrified to hear this, and a writer, hah! What immense faith the soothsayer has in his own conclusion. As if he is the grand astrologer, the raj-jyotishi of each and every book and can easily predict their destiny. I have been fortunate to have known a few of the astrologers of this class. By merely glancing at the book or at the very mention of the author’s name these jolly souls can predict at what point the book will arrive on the footpath at half the original price. It is thus that I have been able to work out some sort of a horoscope of various classes of books from these folks. The half-price dateline looks somewhat like this: Poetry 2 weeks History, Philosophy, Politics, Science, Criticism 3 months Good Novel 6 months Film Gossip & Fiction 1 year Detective & Crime 2 years Pornography 5 years Religious books 5 days I have consulted some rather experienced hands about this distribution, and there has not been too much of a variation in the past 50 odd years. If you have a sense about this particular horoscope, you will naturally be enlightened about the selling power of new books too. They are intricately linked. Look at the last two entry—the number 5 is common; but the rest? Thereby hangs a tale, does it not? I have already proffered this quite scientific thesis about books—that if you venture to write, tablets and pamphlets and books must appear on the footpath. An obvious corollary to this thesis may come from the table above: the quicker a book arrives at the footpath, the less it gets sold in its first hand version and vice versa. The other corollary can be drawn from the first one: that the reader’s relationship with particular genres of books may reflect the nature of a social condition. It is pretty clear that poetry or religion are not visceral genres any more, difficult and serious subjects perhaps bore lay people and there is not even much time to read a good novel. These are no new observations. But that robust imaginative or analytical literature has taken a backseat is not even good news for popular literature, forget the classic. Those who have read the likes of Marquis de Sade or old vernacular fiction/poetry/lyric know well the art and romance of serious pornography, its lazy ruses, and its capacity to complicate relationships. Boisterous, messy, heartbreaking. They take it headlong. So also with religion or
The Humanities in Ferment: Strategizing for our Times, August 16-18, (MargH collaborates with NMML)
The Humanities in Ferment: Strategizing for our Times An International Conference organized by MargHumanities as part of its Global Humanities Initiative, in collaboration with the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library from August 16-18, 2012, at Teen Murti House, New Delhi, India. Day 1: August 16, 2012 9.00 am Registration 9.15- 10.00 am Welcome & Introduction Mahesh Rangarajan (NMML), Welcome address Brinda Bose and Prasanta Chakravarty, “Introduction: The Humanities in Ferment” (MargHumanities/University of Delhi) 10.00-11.30 am Keynote session Michael Levenson, (University of Virginia), “The University, the Human and the Humanities” Sukanta Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University, Kolkata), “The Humanities Today and Tomorrow: Changes and Challenges” 11.30-11.45 am Coffee 11.45-1.45 pm Interpretation Chair: Michael Levenson Rimli Bhattacharya (University of Delhi), “Reading Lies. In Many Tongues” Rita Felski (University of Virginia, USA), “Postcritical Reading” 1.45 – 2.30 pm Lunch 2.30- 4.30 pm Intellectual Histories Chair: Soumyabrata Choudhury Helen Small (University of Oxford, UK), “Distinction” Jairus Banaji (SOAS, UK), “Sartre, the Critique and the Interviews of 1969” 4.30 pm Tea Day 2, August 17, 2012 9.15 – 11.15 am Passages Chair: Rita Felski Swapan Chakravorty (National Library, Kolkata), “Desh: The History of an Idea of Bengal and the Study of the Humanities” Nicholas Allen (University of Georgia, USA), “The Humanities at Sea” 11.15 – 11.30 am Coffee 11.30– 1.30pm The Political Chair: Jairus Banaji Soumyabrata Choudhury (CSDS, Delhi), “Ambedkar contra Aristotle: A Contention about Who is Capable of Politics” Rajarshi Dasgupta (JNU, Delhi), “Factory Noise: Poetics and Technology in Ritwik Ghatak’s Film Ajantrik” 1.30 – 2.30 pm Lunch 2.30- 3.30 pm Praxis Chair: Moinak Biswas Suman Mukhopadhyay (Filmmaker/Actor/theatre director), “’That way madness lies’: Chaos and Calm in the Urban Contemporary” 3:30-3.45 pm Tea 3.45- 5.45 pm Reclamations Chair: Ajay Skaria Sophie Rosenfeld (University of Virginia, USA), “History as Philosophy for Our Times” Krishan Kumar (University of Virginia, USA), “’Civilization’ as a Concept for the Global Humanities: The Example of Arnold Toynbee” Day 3, August 18, 2012 9.15 – 11.15 am Ethics Chair: Sukanta Chaudhuri Ajay Skaria (University of Minnesota, USA), “Daya Otherwise: The Notness of Ahimsa” Milind Wakankar (CSCS, Bangalore), “Notes Toward a Critique of Historicity” 11.15 – 11.30 am Coffee 11.30- 1.30 pm The Digital Chair: Rajarshi Dasgupta Moinak Biswas (Jadavpur University, Kolkata), “Learning with Images in the Digital Age” Souvik Mukherjee (Presidency University, Kolkata), “Digital Humanities, Or, What You Will” 1.30-2.30 pm Lunch 2.30–4.30 pm Closing Panel Discussion: “Institutions, the Humanities and New India” Mahesh Rangarajan (NMML, New Delhi) Sukanta Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University, Kolkata) Simi Malhotra (Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi) Nandini Chandra (University of Delhi) 4.30 pm Tea **As a part of the Conference, a photography exhibition on The Travelling Tent Cinemas of Maharashtra will be brought to the NMML by Amit Madheshiya and Shirley Abraham, photographers/researchers who work out of Mumbai. ****************************************************************************** Nicholas Allen The Humanities at Sea The global economic crisis has made visible many pressures in culture and society that were veiled by the idea of constant progress in the late twentieth century. The European Union, to take one example, was to the major powers a balm for the atrocities of the first and second world wars; to the minor it was legal security against the ambitions of the powerful. The concert between large nations and small can be traced back into the history of empire. Ireland inhabits an exemplary position in this regard. A part of the British Empire it was a hub of the Atlantic world that opened on to the Americas. A colony with a history of famine and dispossession, the island was connected to global pressures of exchange and trade centuries before this latest recession destroyed much of a national identity that had seemed secure since independence. Ireland’s imperial history was buried quickly after 1922. The collapse of the Celtic Tiger, as the boom economy was known, has had the surprising effect of bringing this past back to life. Now that the story of nation has failed the monuments of an old world order have come back into view, not least because we are entering a decade of centenary commemorations of revolutionary events, events that had their influence on other parts of the British Empire, most notably India with regard to Home Rule and mass public protest. I would like to explore some of the ways in which creative work in the humanities has traced and drawn this global history of Ireland. This history extends to connection with other places including India, that other emerald isle. Using ideas of the sea as a connective metaphor I want to show some of the many ways in which art and literature can illuminate the hidden cost of cultural exchange. James Joyce approached this idea in his reflections in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was first published in 1916, the same year of the great rebellion that began the final movement towards independence. In A Portrait Joyce has his character Stephen Dedalus reflect on the word ivory and its consonants in other languages, as ivoire and eborio. This reminds the young man of his Latin schooling: India mittit ebur. If the world economy is made of an exchange of things, things make their world anew in the sequence of their transit. Small in scale, partitioned and caught between competing ideas of nation, empire and union, thinking about Ireland invites reflection on larger questions of culture and economy. With the humanities at sea in a rapidly changing contemporary world I will argue that our current crisis is a familiar mode with a long and
Explaining Neo-Malthusianism?
Mohan Rao Introduction Politically correct, influential people in policy making circles in the First World do not, any more, talk of the yellow peril, or use phrases such as population explosion, or metaphors like the population bomb. Nevertheless, neo-Malthusian thinking frames other policy discourses, those on welfare, immigration and the environment being prominent ones. Soon after the London riots last year, commentators were talking of the undeserving poor, whose council housing should be razed if their children had participated in the riots. The children themselves were referred to as vermin, who needed to be dealt with firmly, with real bullets. At the same time, partly due to the very reach and influence of such doomsday demographic discourses emanating from the West in the past, and the modified ones today, the elites and the middle classes in much of the Third World remain convinced that the cause of social and economic problems in their countries stem primarily, if not only, from population growth. It is also clear that there is an anxiety among elites in our country about population growth, the belief that this lies at heart of a range of social and economic problems that we face. This belief enjoys widespread appeal in the media and among middle class professionals, including of course doctors. What explains the enormous appeal of this argument? Is it propaganda over the last 50 years, initially stemming from the West, but now deeply internalized in our country?[i] Many of these beliefs are sanitised in public pronouncements, made acceptable, and yet it is undeniable they represent powerful undercurrents of thinking in an astonishingly wide range of areas. This paper, preliminary and tentative in nature, attempts to explain what seems to be inexplicable. Do these ideas stem from other atavistic anxieties, about tribe and race? This too was evident after the London riots when commentators spoke of a Caribbean culture of violence and laziness taking over the streets of London. Do they arise from their evident simplicity in explaining a deeply fractured world? Why are they such overwhelming tropes in the discourse of fundamentalisms of various sorts? Does neo-liberalism provide them with impetus? Why are they entangled with other anti-feminist discourses? How do issues of identity, currently au courant, get imbricated in this? I begin, then, with the almost irrelevant, if achingly tantalizing, question: what explains this abiding and widespread belief in neo-Malthusianism? This question, though terribly moot, is difficult to answer with any certainty, since it involves feelings, opinions and prejudices that are not always easily explicable. How does one, for example, explain racism? Or, in India, the profound hold of casteism, the hatred and distaste for the lower castes, especially dalits? Or, the recent growth of suspicion, anxiety, and indeed, hatred and fear, for anything to do with Islam? There are many and complex reasons, some inter-linked. Is it primarily about with economic factors? It is obviously not only to do with economic factors, although these are no doubt contributory. There are many more reasons, and population arguments also feed into this: the creation and hardening of prejudices, and of fear. In neo-imperial times, creation of fear is a growth industry (Lipschutz and Turcotte 2005)[ii] with sometimes utterly transparent political ends. II I begin this paper attempting to explain the neo Malthusian appeal by examining the astonishing case of Anders Behring Breveik. On the 22nd of July 2011, following the setting off of bombs in central Oslo, this young white man cold bloodedly killed 69 young men and women attending a youth camp organized by the ruling Labour Party at the island of Utoya, not far from Oslo. He wanted to draw attention to the dystopia that awaited Norway because of the appeasement of Muslims by what he called, with utterly no irony, “multi-cultural Marxists”. When the bombs went off in Oslo, the New York Times reported, and everyone assumed, that this was the handiwork of Muslim terrorists. When the terrorist was identified as a White supremacist, the explanations quickly proffered were the familiar: while not all Muslims were terrorists, most terrorists were Muslim. But of course this is equally untrue. In 2007, two out of a total of 581 terrorist attacks in Europe were carried out by Muslims; in 2008, not one of the 441 documented terrorist attacks was by a Muslim. In 2009, there were 294 terrorist attacks, out of which one was committed by a Muslim. The vast majority of terrorist attacks (237 out of 297) were perpetrated by White, non-Muslim separatist groups mainly in Spain and France ( Europol 2010).[iii] What is interesting is that Breveik, a Right wing Christian fundamentalist, has left a 1500 page manifesto entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, an event he was attempting to usher in by his barbaric act. The year 2083 that he chose is also symbolically interesting: it represents the 400th anniversary of the Battle of Vienna in 1683 where the invading troops of the Ottoman empire suffered a defeat, ensuring that most parts of Europe did not come under Islamic rule. It is equally interesting that a Polish king took part in that holy battle. Today of course Poland, ruled by extreme Right wing twins, is seen as the heart of pro-family values, a Catholic nation besieged in a Europe that is awash with feminists, pro-abortion and gay- rights people, together emasculating Christianity as much as the Christian male. Poland, it is believed, is the last bastion of pro-family values that will rescue Europe from demographic doom that awaits it if women refuse to breed. The 2008 World Congress of Families was held in Warsaw, where the film Demographic Winter was screened (Posner 2011).[iv] The film, echoing Mark Steyn’s bestselling book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, predicts the death of European civilizations and the extinctions of her races “too self absorbed to breed” as they are engulfed by tides of Muslim immigrants, leading to the transformation of Europe into Eurabia. This will, it is