Justice and the right to non-functionality

1 Introduction. An omitted right: the right to non-functionality

In the declaration of rights, among the different human rights, the one that is generally neglected and omitted is the right to non-functionality. The fact that this concept is formulated in the negative – NON-functionality – indicates the difficulty we experience in expressing it.

Two great phenomena of our times impose the question of the need to recognise the right to non-functionality upon our attention. These phenomena include: 1) uncontainable migration; and 2) structural unemployment. However, the position we aim to demonstrate with this paper is that as human beings we can all benefit from recognising the common right to non-functionality.

In fact, the right to non-functionality concerns each one of us in our singularity, especially in those relations in which we are most involved such as relations of affection, love and friendship.

The right to non-functionality means to have value in oneself, to be considered for nothing, to be loved for nothing, independently of one’s usefulness, to be valuable in oneself. The right to non-functionality is the right to be considered for oneself. Otherwise we speak of untrue affections, of self-interested friendship or love.

The fact that it is in private life that we know the right to non-functionality, the right to have value in oneself, denotes the persistence, in our social system, of separation between public and private. This separation has a strong influence over rights, justice and law.

The non-functional is the human. If we consider any utensil whatever, even the most ancient, the most “prehistoric”, we will note that beyond its functionality and usefulness it contains some element characterized by non-functionality – a decoration, a special shape, a design, almost like a signature, a sign of human manufacture. And it is this excess, precisely, this non-functionality, this witness to the properly human which makes that utensil, that vase, that cup a precious object to preserve in a museum eventually.

We have never seen nor has there ever existed a human community without a surplus in terms of non-functionality, without time for the non-functional together with the time of the functional and of the satisfaction of needs common to human and nonhuman animals. The expression “Man is an animal that works” if understood in the sense that the human animal does not eat raw food, but elaborates it and transforms it – man is not interested in food, if not in inhuman situations of mere subsistence, instead he is interested in the “dish” – means that “man is a non-functional animal”, in the sense that he does not merely live at the level of the satisfaction of needs. The non-functional, the superfluous with respect to the mere satisfaction of needs is the brand of the human.

The “human”, “humanity” as we are now describing it does not refer to the type of group identity that includes us all. In the name of the latter, group identity, we segregate the “abnormal”, we isolate the “different”, the “extracommunitarian”, we reserve differential treatment for him, we intervene through war – “humanitarian intervention”, “humanitarian war” –, “for the other’s good”, for our “neighbour”, “for his good”, so that like ourselves the other too can enjoy “peace, freedom and democracy”.

2 Fundamental implications of the “right to non-functionality”

Returning to the topic of my book of 1997 (2nd ed. 2004), Elogio dell’infunzionale. Critica dell’ideologia della produttività (Praise of the non-functional. Critique of the ideology of productivness), this paper addresses the concept of the “right to non-functionality”. The importance of such a right for a social system characterised by productiveness, as is our own, is enormous.

In contrast to this system, the “right to non-functionality” is connected with a system open to humanism. But this is not a matter of humanism centred on identity self-interests (whether individual or collective), but of the humanism of otherness. “Humanism of the rights of the other” is something different from the proclamation of “human rights” which inevitably end up serving the “humanism of identity”. In fact, so-called human rights are functional to the humanism of identity, they refer to the rights of the self, and not of the other. It is eloquent, meaningful and revealing that Emmanuel Levinas should have entitled one of his essays “Human Rights and the Rights of the Other” (in Levinas 1987b; see also Ponzio 1995, 2006; and A. Ponzio, S. Petrilli, J. Ponzio 2005). This expression underlines that the other is excluded from human rights.

We may say that non-functionality subtends all human rights understood as the right to alterity.

By contrast with “productivity”, the right of the other and of the self as other is specified as “the right to non-functionality”. This is the right to value not as the other relatively to…, not as one of us or one of them, not as an individual representative of a genre, group, or community of some sort, but rather as a unique other, an absolute other, an irreplaceable other, as occurs in a relation of friendship or of love. In friendship and in love we do not expect the other to be interested in us simply because we are useful. In this case we would speak of cupboard love, false friendship, a marriage of convenience. Such examples testify to the difference, indeed the separation as established in our society between private life and public life. In private life not only are with familiar with the value of non-functionality, but we also make claims to such a right.

Implicitly, tacitly we have the right to non-functionality at heart and we know that ultimately the human is the non-functional. But “human rights” do not contemplate the right to non-functionality. And yet we use such expressions as “this life is not life!” (from the Italian saying “questa vita non è vita!”). And generally when we make such claims we are referring to a life in which the right to non-functionality is neglected, eliminated, excluded.

In relationships of friendship and love we expect, indeed we make claims to an un-self-interested interest in the other. We claim that we are not interested in the other’s functionality. If this were not the case, even if someone declares they love you and want to be with you, the perception is that the friendship is self-interested and that the love is untrue. But all this importance that we attribute to friendship and love in private life (private life is ever more deprived of its real rights, in spite of all the trumpeting in today’s world about the “right to privacy”) is altogether absent in public life, in public social relationships, in public relations.

Until the right to life is not firmly connected to the right to non-functionality, it remains bonded to a vision of man reduced to the status of means, to “capital”, to the status of a “human resource for production. The value of this man is recognised “for the whole course of active life” (as recited in programmatic documents produced by the European Commission), that is, for as long as he is productive and contributes to reproduction of the production system. But the human is not a resource, because the human is not a means, the human is not endowed with instrumental value: the human is an end. To invest the human with an instrumental function for the increase of “global competitiveness” on the world market is already demeaning in itself, and even more so when such a value becomes the goal of education and professional training (see Ponzio 2002a, 2002b; and Ponzio and Petrilli 2016).

3 Functionality, efficiency, competitiveness

In today’s communication-production system, development, efficiency, competitiveness are fundamental values, and the most important value of all is to be functional in this sense. Innovation and destruction: the European Commission (Grteen Book on Innovation) defines “innovation” in the production system in terms of the “destruction” of a product by a similar product introduced onto the market (see Ponzio 2009a, 2009b, 2013).

Let me repeat: competitiveness, innovation and destruction; to the point of the extrema ratio of war in which the humanism of identity translates into “humanitarian war”, “preventive war”, and given that non-recognition of the other is unbounded, “infinite war”.

In this system the right to non-functionality is not foreseen. But the right to non-functionality alone guarantees fairness, impartiality, equity, justice, non discrimination in the face of law.

As stated, two phenomena today open ever greater spaces to non-functionality.

One is spreading unemployment, a phenomenon that is non contingent, but structural to the current production system, as demonstrated by authors like Adam Schaff, Hanna Arendt, André Gorz, Geremy Rifkin. Hanna Arendt evidenced the absurdity of a society in which people trained for the work market do not have work, a society of workers without work (see Arendt 2008; Gorz 1988; Rifkin 1995).

The other event that opens growing spaces to the non-functional, as we shall see in what follows, is the irreducible phenomenon of migration. Unemployment and migratory fluxes across the world today enhance the need to recognise the right to non-functionality, which is now ever more urgent.

4 Contradictions in the project for the European Constitution

The programmatic logic of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe is the logic of capital according to a new-liberal ideology, free market logic, free competition. According to this logic freedom is first of all freedom to buy and to sell. Justice and security focus above all on equity in exchange relations and on the possibility of maintaining the lifestyle foreseen by market society. Article I-3, 2 of Part I, Title I: “Definition and Objectives of the Union”, recites the following: “The Union shall offer its citizens an area of freedom, security and justice without internal frontiers, and an internal market where competition is free and undistorted”.

On this account the European Constitution is perfectly in line with the conception of freedom as expressed in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (September 2002, a text renowned for declaring the need for “preventive war”). In the introductory section we find such claims as the following: “the great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom – and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise”; “freedom is the non-negotiable demand of human dignity. Today, humanity holds in its hands the opportunity to further freedom’s triumph over all these foes. The United States welcomes our responsibility to lead in this great mission”. Subsequently this document goes on to formulate a definition of “freedom” as the ability to buy and sell what people most value:

If you can make something that others value, you should be able to sell it to them. If others make something that you value, you should be able to buy it. This is real freedom, the freedom for a person – or a nation – to make a living (in VI. “Ignite a New Era of Global Economic Growth through Free Markets and Free Trade”).

The European Constitution (I.3, 3) states that the Union will work for the “sustainable development of Europe, based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment”.

But this goal contains an insoluble contradiction. It is very difficult, in truth impossible, to associate high competition characteristic of new-liberal ideology with full employment and high-level protection of the environment. This is the contradiction also present in Jacques Delors’s White Book on Development, Competition, Employment, produced in 1993 by the Commission for European Communities. In this document there emerges an inversely proportional relation between development and competition, on the one side, and employment, on the other. An inversely proportional relation between highly competitive social market economy, on the one side, and full employment and high-level protection and improvement of the quality of the environment, on the other also clearly emerges in the Treaty. Production functional to highly competitive social market economy causes an increase in unemployment and in the destruction of the environment, as is obvious to all.

The words forming dominant discourse are the keywords of global communication – its lexicon. These words form common discourse, common sense, common understanding in global communication. These words are part of an international language which generally makes use of the English language: a sort of a New Speak in the globalisation era (see Athanor 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014).

Think of expressions like sustainable development, sustainable growth, knowledge society, budget, job offer, equal opportunities, competitiveness, work marketing, material work, immaterial work, spread, lifelong education, freedom, democracy, humanitarian war, just and necessary war. These words play a central role in the reproduction of the identical in conformity with a common understanding of the programmes of communications, which are indissolubly connected with production and reproduction of the dominant social production system (see Ponzio 1993).

In this production system “free work”, work that “renders free” – as written on the lager of Dachau and a principle that is generally accepted today (the Protestant conception of work has won over the Jewish) – is abstract work, quantified, commodified, indifferent work.

Some of the keywords of global communication act as pivots, while others revolve around them.

Around “identity” rotate words like “belonging”, “difference”, “origin”, “roots”, “genealogy”.

Around “work”, “disposable time”, “employment” “unemployment”, “job”, “employer”, “work market”, “material work” / “immaterial work”.

Around “productivity”: “growth”, “development”, “competitiveness”, “efficiency”, “resource”.

Around “training”: “knowledge”, “competence”, “formative package”, “credit” (CFU).

Around “health”: “sickness”, “mental sickness”, “prevention”, “cure”.

Around “security”: “control”, “trust”, “fear”, “peace”, “preventive war”.

Around “freedom” and “democracy”, “freedom of the word”, “free exchange”, “independence”.

These words circulate freely through global communication channels and subtend consensus functional to the reproduction of the identical.

Understanding (seeing, perceiving, feeling, interpreting, responding and behaving as a consequence) occurs through signs, both the signs of the immediate social environment, and signs of a more or less extended social environment whether in terms of contemporaneity or of historical succession. This applies not only when we speak, but also when a question of “interior discourse”, of awareness, through language. Perceiving and understanding is always semiotically connoted. And global communication today with its signs and machines, commodities and messages, extension and velocity, space and time, criteria and values has consequences on understanding at a planetary level.

6 Today’s capitalist phase in communication-production and its consequences

The world today belongs to an era where communication is production. The productive cycle contains communication not only in the circulation, market or exchange phase, but also in the production and consumption phases.

The global communication social system converges with the global market which is based on the reality of free work and on the ideology of free exchange (freedom of selling one’s labour force – “material” or “immaterial”, that is, “intellectual”), on the free offer and free request of work. The global communication system activates mechanisms for the identification and assertion of identity. At the same time these mechanisms have their very own presuppositions in the foundations of this same system. We are specifically alluding here to the condition of belonging, to the capacity to make decisions, to take responsibility, to the possibility of creating one’s own destiny.

Individual and collective subjectivity is exalted. But free work, work that “renders free” “Arbeit macht frei” – as written at the lager in Dachau and as generally accepted today (the Protestant conception of work has won over the Jewish) – is abstract work. Work thus conceived is quantified, indifferent, subject to the production of exchange value, functional to the amplified reproduction of the production mechanism itself with the ongoing development of globalisation.

Given that identity depends on work, the loss of work causes the loss of the sense of identity. And in the global communication system unemployment is on the rise as the request for work-merchandise is exhausted.

This situation generates a convulsive search for identity. Identity as produced by difference-indifference in this social system is reached by negating the other, the other from self and the other of self. In fact assertion of identity calls for sacrifice of the other. The world market is accompanied by indifference at the level of social relations (which are based on abstract work) and imposes homologation, negation of otherness. Paradoxically, the reaction to all this consists in re-asserting identity which, as indifferent difference, is again itself negation of otherness.

If we do not keep account of these exaltation-frustration mechanisms characteristic of identity and specific to capitalist social systems, we will not understand Fascism and National Socialism. Rather than an anomaly, such phenomena constitute a permanent modality in the manifestation of this social system itself, whether individual, collective, cultural or political.

The “philosophy of Hitlerism” is not a contingent anomaly, as Emmanuel Lévinas observes in his Preface of 1990 to the English translation of his 1934 essay, which bears this expression in the title (“Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’hitlerisme”, Eng. trans. 1990). On the contrary, it is inscribed like a steady threat in western ideologic (ideology that emerges as the logic itself of “reality”, of the “being of things”), which in fact suffers from allergy to otherness.

Without getting over this “allergy”, liberalism and democracy can do nothing against this threat given that though provoked by the “question of the other”, they were constituted fundamentally to defend one’s own rights, rather than those of others; to defend the rights of the identical, rather than the different; of the similar rather than the extraneous, the stranger. Liberalism and democracy revolve around the defence of those who belong to the community, the so-called “communitarians”, to the exclusion of those who do not belong, the “extra-communitarians”, others. Recognition of the latter has generally not gone beyond declaring one’s solidarity and tolerance.

For the rights of others not to be excluded from human rights (an essay by Lévinas is significantly entitled “Human rights and the rights of the other” (in Levinas 1987c), the concept of humanity (from humus as in humilitas, and not from Homo) should be revisited in terms of the welcome, hospitality, listening to the other.

7 Relative otherness and absolute otherness

As anticipated, by contrast with “productivity” which regulates the communication-production system, the right to otherness is specified as the “right to non-functionality”. Otherness here is not otherness relative to roles, social positions, professions, gender, etc., the other “relatively to…” – “professors” to “students”, “fathers” to “sons”, “women” to “men”, “work force” to “capital”, “communitarian” to “extracommunitarian”, etc. Relative otherness constitutes identity. But if all relative alterities constituting identity are eliminated, does nothing remain or does a “residue” persist independently from them? Unlike what this social system wants us to believe, such a residue subsists. Our reference here is to non-relative otherness thanks to which we all flourish not only as individuals, therefore as representatives of a group, class, set, as other-relatively-to…; and not only as a person even, a term of reference for what is “personal”, “belongs”, for “one’s own”. Non-relative otherness alludes to the unique, to the absolutely other, the unreplaceable, not interchangeable, sui generis other, whether the other of self or the other from self (under this aspect see Bakhtin’s analyses of the otherness relation in “For a philosophy of the act” [1920–24] and his monograph on Dostoevskij [1929], both of which are included in the bilingual Russian/Italian volume, Bachtin e il suo circolo, 2014). The right to non-functionality is the right to being a value in oneself, to being an end in oneself, as non-relative otherness.

Communication-production today opens ever greater spaces to the non-functional in spite itself thanks to liberation from indifferent work in the form of spreading unemployment and the consequent need for occupations dedicated to non-functional otherness. Unemployment in today’s world is not contingent, but structural to the system, just like emigration which is now de-commodified and presents itself as the irreducible phenomenon of migration (see Petrilli and Ponzio 2005; Ponzio 1997).

To repeat then all this results in 1) liberation from indifferent work which in the presentday world and in the capitalist system takes the form of structural unemployment; and in 2) the decommodification of traditional “emigration” now presenting itself in terms of the growing phenomenon of migration, irreducible to that which can be “absorbed” by and is functional to “emigration”. That the presentday communication-production system produces spaces for the non-functional also emerges from the increase in the need for socially useful occupations dedicated to non-functional otherness.

All such phenomena increase the need to recognise the right to non-functionality. Not only is the request for recognition of the right to non-functionality ever more urgent, but also the objective need for its recognition.

8 The destructive character of the actual

Production-reproduction today has a “destructive character” (an expression introduced by Walter Benjamin 1972a [1931], “Der destruktive Charakter“) not only toward the product, but also toward the means of production, now automatic machines, toward workplaces, jobs, the natural environment, our bodies, the quality of life. The latter is now made dependent on indifferent work, reduced to the alternation between work time / free time, or emptied and impoverished by the lack of work classified as unemployment.

We know that the European Commission has dedicated special attention to inventiveness and innovation (see The Green Book on Innovation, 1995). The perspective is always that of profit, “immaterial investment”. And the only criterion for evaluation is the “reason of the market”. An example of “radical innovation” presented by the European Commission is the compact disc. This has made traditional discs obsolete together with the relative equipment.

So, paradoxically – but in full respect of capitalist logic – the innovative character of the product is made to consist in its destructive capacity: it destroys similar products already on the market. The innovative capacity up with the times converges with the descructive capacity. Benjamin was already well aware of this at the time of writing his 1931 essay dedicated to the “destructive character of the actual”.

9 Communication-production and war

The most visible aspect of the destructive character of world communication-production is war insofar as it is the communication-production of war. War needs new markets, conventional and unconventional weapons, including weapons of mass destruction. War also requires wide consensus recognising it as just and necessary, as a defence mechanism against the menacing “other” considered a growing danger, and way of asserting the rights of one’s own “identity”, one’s own “difference”.

Identities and differences which in truth are not threatened or destroyed by the “other”, but by the social system itself that at once promotes them. The social system has rendered identity phantasmagorical, but precisely because of this people hold on to it obsessively. And all this benefits the logic of the communication-production of war.

The Gulf war in 1991 marked a decisive turn, at a world level, regarding the idea and the practice of war. From that moment onward the idea of war as “just and necessary”, as a “policing action”, and even as a “humanitarian operation” spread throughout worldwide communication-production circuits.

The idea of “just and necessary” war was asserted in 1991 by all those nations that united against Iraq under the banner of the UN, led by the USA. Not only was this conception of war proposed by political leaders and by the voices of mass media, but it was also undersigned by eminent intellectuals such as Jacques Le Goff and Lyotard in France, and Norberto Bobbio in Italy. The concept of just and necessary war replaced earlier ideas about war which had dominated in Europe since the end of World War II, and had been officially ratified with the Helsinki Final Act. This is the document produced by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (1975), in which war is firmly excluded as a solution to international conflict.

Instead, in the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (August 1st 1975), war is considered as an inadmissible means to resolve international conflicts. There is absolutely no justification, as recited in the Helsinki Final Act, for war, a principle that was to apply to the nations that entered the accord as much to those that did not. This document was undersigned by European states, the Soviet Union, The United States of America, Canada and Turkey, and was considered unanimously as a milestone in cooperation between the East and West. By initiative of the Polish philosopher Adam Schaff the European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in Social Science in Vienna promoted a series of meetings beginning from the mid 1980s held in different cities including Moscow, under the general title, Semiotic Analysis of the Helsinki Final Act (see Schaff 1992, 1997, 1999, 2001; and Ponzio 1990, 2002).

The word “security” appears both in the denomination of the conference as well as in the document produced by the White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America of 2002, mentioned above. But, according to the first text, security can only be reached by refusing war as the way to solving international conflict; instead, the second text maintains that the only path to security is “preventive war”, the aim being to stop so-called “rogue states” from “shooting first”.

In the Helsinki Final Act the relationship of cooperation and mutual support among states based on mutual responsibility, oscillates between:

1) a relation of mutual recognition based on a convention established among self-sufficient entities that freely accept given mutual obligations, that freely undersign the same treaty imposed by the ideology of the pact; and

2) a relation of assimilation of the Other for cooperation among States on the basis of a common history, a common past, common traditions and values. Assimilation ideology also subtends national identity understood in terms of ethnicity, the ideology of unity and understanding among groups that share the same history, the same tradition, the same culture. Consequently, the Helsinki Final Act does not provide any theoretical explanation for understanding and mutual cooperation at a world level, which no doubt it aims to promote.

But the Helsinki Final Act also proposes a third way to understand the otherness relation among Nation-States. In this case it is not a question of a compromise, an accord, a contract, and even less a decision, or concession. The type of otherness relation we are now discussing is neither decided nor chosen by the subject. It inexorably imposes mutual solidarity, mutual cooperation as the necessary condition for the existence and development of all states. This depends on:

a) economic interdependence at a world level;

b) inevitable spread on a worldwide scale of the effects of technologic development: in fact 1) advanced technologies invade the world market; 2) territorial restriction of pollution, of the dangers of radioactivity, of the greenhouse effect, etc. is impossible; 3) new technologies produce new needs that cannot be circumscribed within territorial boundaries, increasing discrepancy between the developed world and the underdeveloped world;

c) the fact that safety and welfare in one part of the world (Europe, the West, the North) cannot be separated from safety and welfare in the rest of the world. This implies that living conditions cannot be improved, nor the environment protected without international (interstate) cooperation.

According to this third sense, the otherness relationship understood as unindifferent difference among national identities is independent of relations of reciprocity established on the basis of a convention, a pact, of assimilation in the name of a common past, common traditions, values, etc. In spite of the condition of difference and extraneousness among States and their peoples (eventually even with respect to relations accorded and sanctioned by a convention or treaty), the third way of understanding the otherness relationship recognizes the condition of passive solidarity based on the fact that self-sufficient identity is impossible. Passive solidarity is the condition of mutual implication among identities and destinies, implication that may be altogether passive and not at all decided, nor desired.

Such is the orientation of the Helsinki Final Act as it emerges when it recognizes: indivisibility of security in Europe and in the world at large, independently of eventual accords or treaties; the need for international cooperation; the need to protect the environment; dependence of peace in Europe on peace in the world as a whole such that principles regulating relations among participating States (which exclude recourse to force or even threat under any circumstance) may also be applied to non participating States.

In this case, the argument in favour of cooperation and mutual help is based on recognition of mutual compromise, mutual responsibility prior to accords, conventions and contracts, therefore on the condition of inevitable solidarity and unindifference toward every other.

But the other two senses according to which the concepts of cooperation and mutual responsibility may be understood interfere with the third sense. In other words: the sense according to which cooperation and mutual responsibility ensue from a pact that is freely undersigned by autonomous and self-sufficient entities; and the sense which appeals to a common history, a common past, common traditions and values, both interfere with non identity responsibility. This is responsibility that is not grounded in identity logic: responsibility that knows no loopholes, no escape, responsibility without alibis, unlimited responsibility. This type of responsibility implicates and exposes the subject totally. However, though the Helsinki Final Act does not fail to evoke this type of responsibility, it does not focus on it.

Because the Helsinki Final Act does not concentrate on the third sense of the otherness relation among national identities and, therefore, on the third type of argumentation, the reasons for international cooperation, including the reasons for improving relations with non participating States are not fully analyzed. Consequently, the aim for peace and cooperation on a world level is not sufficiently argued and explained. Consequently, this extraordinary document produced by the Helsinki Conference ends up becoming no more than a sort of list of good intentions, thereby losing in argumentative force. Ultimately, as has emerged ever more clearly since the 1991 Gulf War, this document has failed to exert any real influence on international politics.

War as a necessary realistic choice threatens and advances. This inescapable truth subtends Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the “destructive character” developed in “Erfahrung und Armut” (Benjamin 1972b [1933]): “The economic crisis is at the doors, behind them a shadow, the war that advances”.

Let us conclude this part with the observation that what the “destructive character” sacrifices is otherness, the time of otherness, time disposable for otherness, one’s own and that of others, the time of “creative work”, as Benjamin says. And all this is at the service of identity, whether individual or collective, an identity that is ever more reduced and impoverished through its juxtaposition to otherness.

It is not possible to get free from the humanism of identity simply by opposing antihumanism to the “destructive character” inherent in the exaltation of subjectivity, in the humanism of western thought, the arrogance of reason, exaltation of technique, work, productivity.

Humanism must be denounced, as Emmanuel Lévinas 1991 [1961] claims, only because it is not sufficiently human. Specifically it is a question of juxtaposing to humanism destructive of otherness, a humanism that is founded upon the right to otherness, on the right to non-functionality.

10 So-called “immaterial work”

But there’s still another aspect to consider relatively to work in the communication-pruduction system today: this concerns the concept of so-called “immaterial work” considered as a resource (a somewhat unfortunate expression given that it implies a rather vulgar conception of “material”). This aspect is the direct consequence of the objective contradiction inherent in capital: namely, while capital uses knowledge, inventiveness, scientific and technological research to minimize work time and exclude work even from the production process, it continues measuring these same social forces (“immaterial resources”, “immaterial investment”) on the basis of work time. Wealth as represented by intelligence, communication, languages, education, innovation, research, amplified and improved relations (Priority to the human resource is the topic of one of the documents released by the European Commission, 1996) is commonly recognized, but we continue measuring all this in terms of work time for investment in to the advantage of profit.

In spite of its incommensurability as the source of all historical-social value, human work has been subjected to the process of commodification and reduced to the status of a commodity. This is quantified abstract work, measured in hours, the condition of the constitution itself of this social system. These days measurement in labour-hours, work-hours (in “man-hours”), when instead a question of brains, intelligence, inventiveness, communication, organization is not only anachronistic but clearly evidences how human work cannot be reduced to the status of a commodity – this is certainly more the case now by comparison to work understood “simply” as “material work”, falsely but concretely separated from “intellectual work”.

Human work understood as immaterial work, intellectual work clearly evidences its irreducibility to measurement and quantification. Here human work presents itself in its constitutive incommensurability, in its essentially qualitative character. Quantity is subordinate and cannot become a criterion and norm to measure human work. The time of inventiveneness, innovation, interactive response cannot be contained in itineraries that have already been planned and determined. Consequently the time of creativity and interactive response is not repetitive. It can be a very short time or a very long time and cannot be pre-established in terms of duration contracted a priori, in view of retribution calculated in hours.

So never before has the contrast been so evident between the incommensurability, irreducibility of human work to quantification, therefore to indifferent abstract work as established in the capitalist social system, on the one hand, and the expectation to treat work like any other commodity, on the other.

As intellectual work, now considered a fundamental productive resource, work is difficult to quantify and to compare: the pretence, the parody of equal exchange between work and salary, the incommensurability of “live work”, the impossibility of measuring the process of enhancement and increase in value through the work flow is all too obvious in the present day and age, especially when a question of quantifying in hours things like study, research, education, information, innovation, inventiveness, talent. All this is now part of the highly competitive “work market” and constitute the fundamental characteristics of labour-merchandise today. It is only through a process of mystification That production forces distinguished in terms of quality, that consequently cannot be measured in terms of the market and yet are reconducted to the latter is well and truly a mystification.

The “credit” system has been conceived to evaluate study and education and is functional to this mystification. The credit system forms people: it accustoms them to evaluation in quantitative terms, in hours. University programs with their reforms and new orientations aim for sectorial, specialized professional education for the sake of the “labour market”. This system forms and educates individuals in the sense that it trains them to accept as natural the ambition to become “immaterial investment” – if study even can be counted, quantified and compared in terms of hours –, accumulating “didactic”, “formative” and “professional” credits in the process of “permanent education”, for “the whole time of their active life” (lifelong education) to the end of finding work that “renders one free” (as written somewhere).

The university that to renew itself believes it must adapt to (intellectual) labour-force buying and selling relations while, instead, they are disappearing with the rise in structural unemployment ensuing from the increase in automation and competitivity; the university that decides to adopt quantification in hours similarly to traditional work – but in this case to evaluate education (“credits”) – now that it has been put into crisis; the university that accepts that its wealth should be considered in terms of “immaterial resources” and of “immaterial investment” is not only exposed to “this world”, but has no space outside it.

In spite of all this, it is “this world” precisely with the end of work and its metamorphosis, with the crisis of the end of the “work market” that actually accommodates the university’s vocation for unconditioned research and study. If the university can be “without condition”, as Jacques Derrida (2002) claims, this will only be possible on the condition that it will allow itself to be conditioned by the new perspectives that have opened up to us with the end of commodified work, with the end of the “world of work-merchandise”. And this has been achieved thanks to the high levels of development reached in human capacities and social relations such that the basis of production today seems too restricted and its goals and interests too limited and petty, parochial. And we will add that to insist on making this basis last, at all costs and with all necessary means, is proving to be ever more dangerous, not only for human life, but for all of life over the entire planet.

11 To be exposed

In this phase of capitalist production generally indicated as “globalization”, where communication itself has become production so that the production cycle contains communication not only in the circulation, exchange phase, the market, but also in production and consumption, the space we live in can no longer be closed, fenced in. All environments are part of a larger environment. This is so both in the “natural” sphere, the biosphere, and in the historical-social, the anthroposphere. These two levels in turn (and problems of ecology today evidence this strongly) cannot be separated. No part of the natural environment in today’s world can be said not to be involved in the historical-social process.

The situation is one of exposition, that is, of being necessarily exposed, subject to the outside. To live and to operate in the illusion of isolation is not possible. In spite of the widespread pars pro toto fallacy, in fact all presumed totalities are inserted in larger totalities; and the possibility of understanding the internal characteristics of a totality, its logic, its needs, its balances, and the ensuing possibility of planning a new totality do not simply depend on a capacity for analysis internal to the totality. In order to read and understand the totality, rather than its breakdown, we need to study how it is inserted into ever larger totalities. On this basis, in the first place, that which seemed a unitary whole emerges only as its part, a result, a factor, or a piece of a larger totality. Therefore this is not about an analytical method, but a detotalizing method.

There is no shelter: this is man’s situation in global communication-production. The interpermeability that characterizes it is caused by two factors: technological development and expansion of the market to the point of becoming a world market.

The first factor is such that human action can affect the entire planet Earth (apart from the possible effects of nuclear energy, simply think of daily “pollution” which is only one of the multiple negative effects of the processes of “anthropization of the planet”). The second factor involves dependence of any product whatsoever upon a totality that is far broader than the market relatively to those same products and entire national market to involve instead the overall structures of worldwide exchange.

But these two factors are in turn parts, the surface of a deeper structure: that of the social relations of production.

12 The work community and those who do not belong

All social systems in the modern Western world including those born to oppose capitalism, have been and still are work communities. In the work community recognition of human rights is conditional to employment. Knowledge society, anticipated by the European Commission (see Delors’ White Book) where everybody counts on the basis of and in proportion to one’s productive functionality, is a work community. In Nazi Germany, where Gesellschaft (society) was replaced by Gemeinschaft (community) understood as a closed, identity community, a work community, even the Jew (as celebrated by Speilberg’s Schindler’s List) was safe if he had work. Likewise today even the extracommunitarian migrant, the one who does not belong to the European Union, who is not an EU immigrant, is not considered an “illegal”, “clandestine”, “underground”, is not “rejected” if he has work. His residence permit corresponds to the time of employment and terminates with dismissal from his work post: clandestine and illegal is the unemployed Jew; clandestine and illegal is the unemployed “extracommunitarian”.

The community that globalized comnunication-production produces with its identity logic is now called to question not so much by conflict among different self-interests as presented by the identities forming the community, as by the request for hospitality put forward by migrants and their appeal to the rights of alterity. The migrant’s request for hospitality is something altogether different from an appeal to difference connected with a group or class of some sort (sex, social class, region, ethnic group, religion, etc.).

In fact, the request for hospitality comes from an alterity that is altogether unassociated with group logic, this request is not limited to a group, to association with a group. This is a request from absolute alterity (Levinas), a request that comes from the unique single individual and not from the individual representing a group. The extracommunitarian demands a response and this involves interrogating community identity and its laws, the logic of identity.

This request is not even made in the name of “human rights”, which in fact are the rights of identity. Instead, this is a question of humanism that is other, another humanism, humanism of the other man. This is a question of the rights of otherness, the rights of difference – but of difference that is not relative to a group, that is not internal to community identity and its dialectics.

This is the difference of the extracommunitarian. The inescapable presence of the extracommunitarian evidences how urgent the need now is for communities that are other, communities that are extra-communitarian, extra-communitarian communities by comparison to communities as they have been conceived so far: work communities, superbly described in that experiment at the limits that is the novel by Orwell, 1984.

13 What is social wealth? Labour time and disposable time

Work in general, abstract, indifferent work is so widespread that even projects for alternative social systems have generally not succeeded in imagining other sources of social wealth if not work in the form of alienated work; nor other solutions but a “workplace for everybody”.

Benjamin was well aware of this state of affairs when in his renowned text Über den Begriff der Geschichte (Benjamin 1972c [1939-40]), he observed that old Protestant work ethics re-presented itself in a secularized form in the German workers “Gotha’s Programme”. “Gotha’s Programme” defines work as “the source of all wealth and all culture”. Allarmed, Karl Marx, intervened in his “Critique of the Gotha programme” observing that until man possesses no other property than his labour-force, he will always be a slave to those other men who have become the owners of the material conditions of labour. In spite of this, as Benjamin observes, confusion continues to spread and at a certain point J. Dietzgen proclaims work as “the messiah of the new time”. This concept of the nature of work, proper to vulgar Marxism only wants to see progress in the dominion of nature, as Benjamin observes, and not regress in society; and it already reveals the technocratic traits which were later to appear with Fascism.

“Labour is not the source of all wealth”, as Marx specified in his Kritik des Gothaer Programms (1875). And he added that the bourgeosie have their good reasons for attributing a “supernatural creative force” to work.

In Ökonomish-philosophische Manuscripte, 1844, Marx critiques “vulgar and material communism” (as well as ante litteram, ante factum, “real socialism”), which suppresses private property by generalizing it. To private property Marx opposes general private property, physical possession, ownership extended to all. He fights the misunderstanding subtending newly planned societies that continue to consider work in general as the source of wealth, as does capitalist society, where the category of the worker is not done away with, but instead is extended to all men (Marx 1844b: Point 1). For crude and vulgar communism thus understood, community is no more than a labour community and equality in wages paid out by communal capital – the community as the universal capital (Ibid.). For such vulgar and material communism, the community is no more than a labour community, where a salary is paid by common capital, by the community as the general capitalist. Therefore, the essential components of this community, as Marx says, are work insofar as everybody is determined by work and capital as the recognized generality and recognized power of the community.

In Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1857–58), Marx predicted transformation through technological development, through automation, reduction of labour time, a necessary goal for the sake of profit in capitalist production, a condition for the full development of wealth of single individuals and of the whole of society, wealth that consists of time disposable for oneself and for the other, in being able to give time to the other, to the other of self and to the other from self: disposable time and not labour time is the real social wealth.

The effective wealth of society and the possibility of continuously increasing the production process, as Marx says in the third book of Das Kapital (1867–94), does not depend on the duration of surplus labour. In fact the reign of freedom can only begin when work determined by necessity and external finality ceases. So long as this lasts we are in the reign of necessity. Only beyond it can there being the development of human capacities as an end themselves which, as Marx says, is “the true reign of freedom”.

14 Identities as concrete abstractions of reality and history

Identity dominates today’s world. Concrete abstractions (which constitute Reality) are constructed on it: Individual, Society, State, Nation, Truth, Knowledge, Equality, Justice, Freedom, limited Responsibility, Need, Equal exchange, etc., all concrete abstractions “internal” to the overall social reproduction system.

Equality and Justice are included in this list. Not only do they stand together with other concrete abstractions, functional to today’s social system, but they are their support and prerequisite.

The whole system is based on Identity which, concretely, tends structurally, constitutively to present itself as Universal, as the only possible Production, Market and Consumption process worldwide. Concrete abstraction logic characterizes Social reproduction processes and is Identity logic.

To it, to the logic of identity, obeys the Individual with its rights, duties, responsibilities; Society with its self-interests; the State with its Politics faithful to Reality; Equal exchange with its needs; and for our immediate concerns here, in this paper, at this conference dedicated to the problem of “Communication and fairness in legal settings”, Equality and Justice.

A critique of Identity – which is also a critique of the social reproduction system concretely based on identity logic – calls for awareness of otherness sacrificed (in different senses and degrees of “sacrifice”) to the construction of different identities. In fact, otherness is sacrificed to the identity of the Individual with its self-protective definition of responsibility, for which it renounces its singularity, unreplaceability, and with which it attempts to evade involvement without limits; identity of the groups and systems to which that Individual belongs, in which are determined duties and rights (identity logic regulates Role, Profession, Social position, Party, Sex, Nation, Citizenship, Ethnic group, etc.); identity of the social reproduction system with its concrete need for a universal production-exchange-consumption process, which means to say the concrete generalization, universalization of the Market, Politics, Law, Ethics, Freedom, Democracy, Human rights.

At the individual level the sacrifice of otherness is manifest in mental illness. At the macroscopic level and in the relation among nations, the sacrifice of otherness is manifest in war, sacrifice to the point of death, extermination, genocide, destruction of natural life conditions; sacrifice of otherness is already manifest, within the nation, in the different ways of destroying the environment, in segregation, apartheid, elimination of the other, massacre in the name of generalized identity.

The same errors, indeed horrors of reality and past history are repeated in the name of Identity, as much as we may think of future history keeping account of Reality and History, as much as Politics may take instructions from History.

To see the repetition, not to deceive oneself that there can be development, innovation, progress in the Identical, we need a viewpoint that is other.

Alterity enables us to imagine a story that is other from the past, because it shows how the History of Reality and Politics, of Wars and Peace repeats itself always.

The viewpoint of the other, recognition of the other (which is the condition for the viewpoint of the other) break the monotony of repetition and on being put into practice – to evoke Merleau-Ponty (“There has been war” [1948], in Sens et non sens, 1962) – lead to the hope that political and social relations may be reabsorbed by human relations.

15 An objective resistance to general commodification: belonging and not belonging to a community that the market cannot absorb

Together with structural unemployment, migration is another internal limit in today’s global communication system, “internal” in the sense that it is produced by this very same system. From this point of view, unemployment and migration are the effects of the same cause. The unemployed and the migrant are both redundancies that constitute a limit on the possibility of exploiting so-called “free work”. This limit is a condition that relates them. But such proximity as it emerges in the reality of facts finds resistance. To this proximity is juxtapposed a difference in rights, the difference between belonging (the former) and not belonging (the latter) to national territory, the difference between “communitarian” and “extracommunitarian”. In other words, this objective proximity between the unemployed and the migrant currently finds resistance in the unemployed insofar as he is a “communitarian” (which is mostly an illusion). Proximity finds resistance in attempts at recovering threatened identity (in its different forms), in the defence of the right to work, with all consequent regurgitations in terms of racism and the expulsion, if not physical elimination, of the extracommunitarian. But, whether we like it or not, the truth is that today’s production system transforms the communitarian, insofar as he is unemployed, into a redundancy, a migrant, that is, an individual constitutively useless to the production process. Unlike the emigrant and the traditional unemployed person, today these redundancies (as the term itself tells us) cannot be absorbed by the dominant production system.

We are now witnesses to invasion in Europe by great masses of migrants, in reality refugees. Will armies and walls, in defence of the rights of identity, succeed in stopping them? What is the (illusory) justice of their rejection based on, if not denial of the right to non-functionality? And yet the situation of unsustainability which these masses are escaping from was originally produced by the humanism of identity, the humanism of “humanitarian interventions”, of “humanitarian war” – interventions made to the end of exporting democracy and freedom as the conditions of justice, the justice itself of military intervention, of war, paradoxically passed off as “just and necessary”.

16 Democracy, the “open society”, and the right to non-functionality

In Voyous Jacques Derrida observes that the conception of “democracy” as “today’s democracy” and as “our democracy” is a mystification: “la démocratie [est] à venir: il faut que ça donne le temps qu’il n’y a pas” (2003: 19).

On the use of the word “democracy”, the American semiotician, Charles Morris, in The Open Self, 1948, observes that:

Democracy has become a strongly appraisive term, designatively unclear. To call oneself democratic is now as unrevealing, and as inevitable, as for politicians to be photographed with babies. We have been told by one who ought to know that when fascism conquers America it will do so in the name of democracy. In fact, whatever is now done in America – or elsewhere on the earth – will be done in the name of democracy. […] If we were to use the term “democracy” designatively it would be synonymous with the phrase “open society of open selves.” But since we have this more exact phrase, and since no labels are sacred or indispensable, we can dispense with the word “democracy.”

(Morris, 1948: 156)

What is democracy? What is time? What is the Other? What is life? Democracy, time and the Other, democracy and life are closely related. Nor can democracy, time, the other, life answer to the question “What is it?”. Democracy is subject to processes of substantialisation, ontologisation and reification, when normally, in the ordinary places of discourse, we speak of its defence. It appears to be something we posses, something to defend at all costs, with all necessary means: the defence of democracy. We know that the defence of democracy is achieved through means that are the negation of democracy. Democracy is not a prerogative, nor is it national, nor can it be nationalised. It is not even a cultural prerogative. It is not an ideality.

Democracy is not the government of the majority, otherwise we should have to call it differently. Democracy means freedom of the word, listening to the other, to the word of the other (see Petrilli 2012, 2014). Each time someone arrogates democracy – intending that we have democracy and we export it – there is arrogance precisely, expunction of the Other. Even when we declare we are democratic there is arrogance. Democracy is not the pregrogative of an individual or of a group, a party, an association. We can make the same considerations about the adjective “democracy” as we can about the adjective “humble”. We cannot say “I’m humble”, because as soon as we say it, one’s humility is called to question. Nobody can boast of one’s own humility. Humility is something we show. Humilitas, humanitas, humus are connected in relation to humanity and the human.

“I’m humble”, “I’m democratic”. Sören Kierkegaard said: “I will not say I am a Christian. I can’t.” And he was a pastor. To say “I’m Christian” is pretentious. The verb to be returns and again the declaration “what it is”, “what I am”, “who I am”. I would be better to say “I would love” or “I’ll try”, “I’ll attempt”. The story has it that Marx once said laughing that there was one thing he could claim without hesitation, that was that he was not a Marxist” (cf. Enzensberger 1977: 456).

And yet we know something about democracy if we are able to say that “This is not democracy”. Nobody can define life or say what it is. However, we can use and do use the expression “This life is not life!”. And we know that this life is not life. In the same way we can claim that “This is not democracy”.

So then, paraphrasing the livre à venir by Mallarmé, we might speak of a “democracy to come”.

But no doubt democracy cannot exist in a “closed society” (Morris), as the labour community is: we need an extra, extracomunitarian community, an open society; and to this end recognition of the right to non-functionality is indispensable.

The right to non functionality takes the character of another form of humanism, another way of understanding and promoting human rights, recognition of the other – including myself as other and all my own possible identities – as a value in itself.

English translation from the Italian by Susan Petrilli