Refusing and Remythologising Labour in Outlaw Literature
The following was presented at the 19th Annual Historical Materialism Conference in London (10 – 13 November, 2022).
Reflecting on his youthful involvement with a delinquent gang calling itself ‘The Club of Midnight Gentlemen’, the narrator of Roberto Arlt’s novel The Mad Toy (1926) fondly recalls that money made from robberies ‘had a special value for us and even seemed to speak to us in its own lively idiom’. Money acquired through theft and deception, Silvio continues, ‘seemed much more worthy and subtle, seemed to have some kind of maximum value, seemed to whisper in our ears with smiling praise and enticing mischief’ – an impish, intoxicating money which distinguishes itself from the silent furies of waged work. The Mad Toy initiates its readers in the ‘delights and thrills of outlaw literature’, following characters who are obsessed with the romantic ideals of the ‘social bandit’, but who also redeploy the stories of anarchists and Apaches in their present, that of early twentieth-century Buenos Aires. The affective split introduced here between the ‘hated’ money earned through hard work and the ‘jocular’ money obtained through criminal schemes is pivotal for another Argentinian novelist and critic, Ricardo Piglia, who, ventriloquising Arlt, speculates that perhaps money is the ‘best novelist in the world’. Given the popularity of Netflix shows like Money Heist (2017-2021), Squid Game (2021), Inventing Anna (2022), and Ozark (2017-2022), as well prestige dramas like Breaking Bad (2008-2013), it would seem that Piglia is not alone in identifying money’s narrative pretensions. In the following presentation, I would like to sketch out the novelistic tendencies of money, as theorized by Piglia, re-situating his arguments in relation to the refusal and remythologization of labour which runs throughout contemporary iterations of the outlaw tradition.
Part One: An Economy of Passion
Money, the history of its violent acquisition and the neurotic ambitions it sustains, is a significant feature of Ricardo Piglia’s fiction. In works like the heist novel Money to Burn (1997) and the paranoid neo-noir Target in the Night (2010), money legislates an ‘economy of passions’ and, in the ‘mystery of its origins’, organizes the various plots that must be deciphered. Such texts arguably take their cues from his earlier essay titled ‘Roberto Arlt and the Fiction of Money’, originally published in 1974. Here, Piglia notes that money is ‘a machine for producing fiction’, one whose powerful combination of affects, gestures, and dreams sets bodies and minds in motion, producing and circulating stories designed to search out and appropriate riches. As Piglia glosses, ‘money is fiction itself’: ‘firstly, because to have money one has to invent, falsify, con, “make believe”; and secondly because getting rich is the illusion […] that is always built on what one might have in money’. Money, then, is a cause and effect of fiction. Effect, because it is the medium through which to dream, the magical object which promises to materialize every conceivable desire. Cause, because to obtain money, characters must make up stories, fabulous tales in which their marks can be sutured, cards swiped, and assets stripped.
Money’s centrality to the mediation and mystification of capitalist social relations has long been an object of critical discussion. In the Grundrisse, Marx waxes that money ‘represents the divine existence of commodities, while they represent its earthly form’. Not merely a measure of value or medium of circulation, money is constituted – and consecrated – as the general form of wealth, acquiring a ‘power over society, over the whole world of gratifications [and] labours’. As Jason Read has more recently argued, money operates as an ‘affective general equivalent, an object that functions as the necessary precondition of every other desire’. With the elimination of direct access to the means of existence and the extension of the commodity-form into every aspect of life – including death – money, Read adds, changes from ‘one object of desire to the focus of all desire’. The affective dimension of money can be understood not just in relation to the objects of joy it promises to realize but also by its standing as the only means available of increasing one’s power of acting, of maximizing one’s striving. Hence, in Piglia’s essay, characters do not earn or even follow money: ‘they make it; and in that imaginary labour they find literature’ – a symbolic act which enables them to unmake, via the imagination, their real conditions of destitution.
However, if money legislates an economy of passions, not all its exchanges have the same capacity for poetic self-expression. And it is here that the distinction between money earned through obsequious labour and money fabulated out of the mind comes to the fore. ‘It is pointless to write about work’, Piglia contends, ‘because work only produces poverty, a poverty of signs’. Marx similarly argues that workers ‘cannot become rich’ through the employment relation, because in exchange for their ‘labour capacity’ they surrender their ‘creative power, like Esau his birthright for a mess of pottage’. Workers are doubly impoverished: on the one hand, the power of their labour-power establishes itself as the ‘power of capital’; and on the other, they reproduce the very class relation which enables accumulation to expand through space and time. For Piglia, money received in exchange for the subordination of one’s creative volition can only be experienced through affects like resentment: such money is ‘vile’ and ‘abominable’, a token of one’s humiliating servitude. Subjected to the desire of a boss, the worker has no other story to tell than the story of the boss’s plan – which is no story at all.
Part Two: Epics of Refusal
To acquire ‘expressivity and become the language – the sign of fiction – money’, Piglia observes, must instead ‘record the history of an acquisition based on crime and transgression’. If gainful employment naturalizes and internalizes the mute compulsion to work, money made outside of the wage relation breaks with such a history of order and necessity, instantiating its own contingent voices. ‘To become rich’, Piglia summarizes, ‘is always an imaginary adventure, the epic of a magical and outlawed appropriation’. Aspiring outlaws say no to the commodification of their labour-power and cross over to the other side, searching out situations from which their cunning can extract maximum value. These are epics of the imaginary because, on the one hand, outlaws rely on forms of storytelling – like blackmail, fraud, and extortion – to secure their autonomy; and, on the other, these efforts to win salvation become themselves the subject of folklore and balladry. One such imaginary adventure would be that undertaken by Breaking Bad’s Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who redirects his immaterial labour towards the production of an exceptional brand of crystal meth, becoming a mythic drug kingpin in the process. Magic in Breaking Bad is practiced in a series of meth labs but for appropriation to occur, White and his accomplices must cleanse the money of its narcotic residue, turning to the stories of everyday American capitalism – fast food franchises, nail salons, and car washes – to launder their riches.
It is not enough for imaginary labour to manufacture, conjure, or summon money out of thin air: its fictions must also dominate rivals and eliminate the competition. As Piglia adds: ‘so that money may speak its “expressive language” it is necessary to conquer it: we might say that the relations of production money conceals become the site of a heroic struggle which makes of the economy a personal war’. This certainly characterizes Walter White’s transformation from a hapless teacher working extra hours in a car wash to the ruthless drug lord Heisenberg. Yet by turning the economy into a personal war, outlaw texts might be felt to short-circuit the distinction between the political scene of subjection and the economic scene of exploitation. Workers, Jason Read writes, are on the one hand ‘subjectified as individual wage earners’: they are interpellated as free labour and their contribution is measured, represented, and socially validated. On the other, workers, are ‘enslaved as collective bodies’: they are dehumanized, broken down into the replaceable parts and conscious organs of machines, their mental and physical exertion going unrecognised. If the refusal to work for a living constitutes a rift with the ‘social subjection’ of the respectable citizen, outlaws also overcome the ‘machinic enslavement’ and exploitation of labour, reintegrating part and whole, bringing the enterprise of work back under individual control.
That said, the designation of the economic as a site of individuated struggle imposes its own ideological restraints. Piglia concedes that the ‘fundamental structure of bandit literature will always be an opposition between good and bad’, a Manichean binary which continues to mask ‘the opposition between rich and poor, diluting the class struggle into a struggle between moral values’. Something of this dilution is at work in family dramas like Breaking Bad and Ozark which revel in the excessive cruelty required to stave off the further proletarianization of characters whose symbolic identification with capital is unwavering. The refusal of work undergoes a modification: proletarians might say no to the transformation of their labour-power into the commodity labour, but they also refuse narratives of collective solidarity too, eschewing the red epic of communism.
Part Three: Remythologization
Somewhat paradoxically, the outlaw refusal of work and flight from scenes of employment ends up affirming the power of labour-power, the power of imaginative labour to transform their situation. As Piglia observes: ‘in a society that sustains the illusion of becoming wealthy on the myth of making money, falsification presents itself as the very metaphor of productive labour’. The activities of labour that are usually effaced and erased by capitalist social relations acquire striking new forms of visibility in the exploits of hustlers who embrace and literalise the fantasy of making money. Encompassing intangibles like knowledge, ingenuity, and personal charm as well as inventiveness and guile, imaginary labour reinvests the gestures of work with new intentionality, turning them into acts and actions set on freedom. Something of this scripting is at stake in Frédéric Lordon’s account of work too, in particular, the belief that the master-desire of the boss not only extracts surplus-value but also dispossesses workers of their creative labour, a process Lordon refers to as the ‘dispossession of authorship’. If enlisted work strips labour of its mastery and pleasure, imaginary labour re-appropriates the potentiality of writing: instituting a literature which designs, scripts, and executes the plan to become rich miraculously.
Whilst an emergent outlaw poetics might re-enchant the movements of brains and bodies at work, its most prominent representatives are associated less with the traditions of the organized workers’ movement and more with the virtuoso, with individuals who become legendary figures of ‘capitalist magic’. Piglia for one is adamant that the criminals who turn to imaginary labour are the antithesis of slackers: work is refused but also sped up, accelerated and intensified by the complexity of the schemes, the intricacy of the plots intent on capturing absolute wealth. There is, Piglia adds, a ‘puritanical ethic of effort’ driving these endeavours, projects which experiment with the ideas of commodities, with abstract goods, with formulas and chemical mixtures in addition to the many ruses of the trickster. At its core, imaginary labour affirms the joy and adrenaline rush of work that is preoccupied with ‘transforming a vacuum into cash’, with sublimated alchemical forms of processing which extract money from nothing.
The politics of this new mythology of labour, of the ‘contrepreneur’, money launderer, and hustler, is ambiguous at best. Whilst such figures expose the decay of liberal social institutions, the alienation structurally embedded within the labour process, and the disappearance of ‘good jobs’, they do so through a hypertrophied vision of work: celebrating both its generic qualities (the ethic of working hard) and its concrete forms (the singular talents, skills, and traits, which separate the prodigiously gifted individual from the masses). Latent within imaginative labour’s ongoing remythologization is what might be called a bad workerism, one whose exponents do not so much challenge class domination as exacerbate and intensify competition between the dominated. The refusal of work is privatized, and its stories, signs, and poetry are set in motion by the virtuosity of capital itself.
Refusing to provide their services to an employer, the heroes of the outlaw tradition nonetheless re-enter the hidden abode of production, drawing on the resources of the imagination to maximize their economic striving, provoking fierce political repression in turn. This magical appropriation agitates against the constraints on joyful affects imposed by capitalism, but it also pushes against the degradation of labour into deskilled, mechanical gestures, and recklessly turns on the impersonal domination of workers who have otherwise learned to control themselves. If outlaws break with the history of separation by finding literature, they also enter the realm of literature too, writing their own mythologies like the signature blue hue running through and authenticating Walter White’s product. The task, then, is to refunction these imaginary adventures for the left, to socialize their myths and turn their gestures, affects, and dreams away from the abyss, converting money into a novelist for collective emancipation.
Thomas Travers 