Work Want Work

Labour and Desire at the End of Capitalism

Mareile Pfannebecker, James Smith

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781786997289
• eBook ISBN: 9781786999962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Labour Economics

Work Want Work considers in captivating detail how a logic of work has become integral to everything we do, even as the place of formal work has become increasingly precarious. With reference to sociological data, philosophy, political theory, legislation, the testimonies of workers and an eclectic mix of cultural texts – from Lucian Freud to Google, Anthony Giddens to selfies, Jean-Luc Nancy to Amy Winehouse – Pfannebecker and Smith lay out how the capitalism of globalized technologies has put our time, our subjectivities, our experiences and our desires to work in unprecedented ways. As every part of life is colonized by work without securing our livelihoods, new questions need to be asked: whether a nostalgia for work can save us, how ideas of work change conceptions of political community, how employment and unemployment alike have become malemployment, and whether the work of our desire online can be disentangled from capitalist exploitation. The biggest question, at a time when the end of work and a fully automated future are proclaimed by Silicon Valley idealists as well as by social democratic politicians and left-wing theorists, is this: how can we propose a post-work society and culture that we will actually want?

1

Lifework

A conversation is staged over three decades in the work of Alexandre Kojève, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben, around these thinkers’ shared and often conflicting use of the term désœuvrement: literally ‘unworking’, but also ‘inoperability’, ‘the absence of work’, and ‘the absence of a work’. Less frequently taken up in scholarship on work than the vocabulary of work’s three ‘classical’ interrogators, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber, the term’s usefulness to the theory of work is in recognising not-working as something more than just a passive withdrawal of effort.¹ Instead, not-working is conceptualised as an active, positive, even material quality, and – as we conceive it – one that is increasingly under threat in the lifework regime. As every Humanities undergraduate eventually finds out, Foucault’s early book, the History of Madness (1961) argued that whereas previous periods in Europe’s history had thought there was some oblique and mystified wisdom in mental illness, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries subjected it to a ‘great confinement’, applying for the first time a rigorous medical taxonomy – with attendant forced hospitalisations – to the mad. Yet the era’s authorities were not strict about separating this newly medicalised idea of madness from the confinement of paupers, beggars, and sexual delinquents: all those, in short, it regarded as socially useless because of their inability to work. In this way, Foucault says, ‘madness was seen through an ethical condemnation of idleness in the social immanence now grounded on a community of work’.²

Historians of medicine sceptical of Foucault’s remarkable association of madness and désœuvrement might well be right to question how ‘prominent in eighteenth-century discourse the couplings Foucault emphasizes between sanity and work, madness and sloth’ really were.³ But to respond to Foucault’s argument only on this empirical level of historical fact is to overlook part of the playful, philosophical, even literary logic of Foucault’s own text. For what he later referred to as ‘a phrase I ventured rather blindly: “madness, the absence of an oeuvre”’, imposes itself in Foucault’s History not only as a historical claim about how madness was excluded from a ‘community of work’ by a particular culture at a particular time. It also represents madness as oppositional to a work, in the sense meant when we refer to a ‘work of art’. Foucault writes of a tradition of modern artists of madness – Sade, Goya, Hölderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Artaud – whose creations represent ‘precisely the absence of an oeuvre, the constantly repeated presence of that absence, the central void that is experienced and measured in its never-ending dimensions’.⁴ When Foucault described a particular historical deployment of the idea of work – of labour – in an earlier epoch’s treatment of madness, he did so with one eye on the existence of such a literature, which with every sentence, seems to try to undo the possibility of its totalisation and elevation as ‘work’, a concluded, canonical achievement.

To identify something called désœuvrement hiding in literature is to claim that the problem with ‘great works’ is precisely that they too readily get ‘put to work’: get treated as useful, improving, educational, or otherwise as status symbols, reaffirming hierarchies. And yet they nonetheless contain a certain ‘mad’ counter-flow that seeks to undermine the process altogether. The re-echoing voice in Foucault here is that of his sometime friend, Blanchot. In The Space of Literature (1955), Blanchot had expanded on an idea established at least since the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement of the late nineteenth century: the bohemian doctrine that art is opposed to work because radically useless, free from all utilitarian responsibility of being morally or socially productive. Blanchot’s upgraded version of this idea finds a rather gnomic parable in one of the important myths of the origin of art: that of Orpheus, doomed to sing forever of his love, Eurydice, whom he could have saved from the Underworld had he only resisted the temptation to turn back and check she was still walking behind him. In Blanchot’s retelling, Eurydice is art (the gender implications are not explored), ‘the furthest art can reach’, and is to be brought ‘back to the light of day’, given ‘form, shape, and reality’, by the task of the journey from the Underworld it falls to Orpheus to guide, as the work of the artist.

But before Eurydice the work of art can emerge into the light, Orpheus fecklessly abandons his task, unable to resist the temptation to look back at her too soon. Far from regarding this as a moralistic warning, however, Blanchot goes as far as to interpret the failure of Orpheus the worker as, in itself, the entire ‘proper movement’ of art. True art refuses its own manifesting as ‘work’. In the analogy, Orpheus looks back not merely to Eurydice, still occluded in the night, but to ‘what night hides, the other night’: Orpheus shows himself an artist by wanting to see the unending dark, to see his own not-seeing as Eurydice turns away, and his subsequent fate, to sing an unending song of this dark, is in that sense the reward for his refusal of the work of the light of day.⁵ It is tempting to say that the turning away of Eurydice under the gaze of Orpheus anticipates art withdrawing from its onlooker the instant it is perceived. Art, in this way, is not merely opposed to, but is always breaking with its own status as ‘work’.

All this will seem a considerable distance from our discussions of low pay, precarity, and digital labour elsewhere in this book. As we show a little later in this chapter, it would take Nancy’s development of the idea of désœuvrement to reveal its full social application. But at its simplest, when we say that work is coming to characterise more and more parts of ours lives, what we mean is that it is this space of désœuvrement – that which is opposed to and undoes work – that is facing a greater and greater diminishment. So much so, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to make these thinkers’ imaginative leap to ‘something that is not work’.

On not being a baker

In 1998, the sociologist Richard Sennett wrote of returning to a large bakery in Boston, whose workers he had first met and interviewed twenty-five years earlier. Previously, Sennett had observed a homogeneously Greek immigrant workforce, tied together by a combination of the local union and family. The bakers did not enjoy their work – it was often extremely arduous and the hours were antisocial – but it was also highly specialised and technically difficult to perform, and the ability to do it well was valued among them. Revisiting the bakery in the 1990s, Sennett found that the work of the Greek bakers was now carried out by a non-unionised and ethnically mixed group of ‘flexi-workers’, operating extremely simple and user-friendly modern ovens. The dough no longer required muscle to pound, burning one’s hands and arms while using the ovens was less likely, the different kinds of bread no longer required years of experience to be able to get right, and the old night shifts had been replaced with flexible part-time schedules, now filled by both women and men.⁶

As Sennett suggests, what is remarkable about the second group of workers is that it is impossible for them to think of themselves as bakers, or even as particularly or permanently attached to the baking industry. The characteristic actions of their work could just as well be performed in any number of other areas of the service sector. At the time of Sennett’s first visit in the early 1970s, it was becoming common to speak of a ‘knowledge economy’ to come, where cognitive skills would replace manual labour.⁷ Yet the second visit demonstrates how technological advances welcomed for making labour more ‘cognitive’ in this way can also have the opposite effect: flattening out tasks that once required extremely specialised knowledge, and replacing them with work that could not be less edifying. ‘In all forms of work, from sculpting to serving meals, people identify with tasks which challenge them, tasks which are difficult’, Sennett concludes, ‘by a terrible paradox, when we diminish difficulty and resistance, we create the very conditions for uncritical and indifferent activity on the part of the users’.⁸

If – as this book argues – we are living through a generalised diminishing of désœuvrement – the becoming-work-like of things that weren’t work before – then one of the ironies is that it is taking place precisely alongside the dismantling of labour’s conventional locus: the profession or career. In previous technological revolutions, while blue-collar labour was turned inside out, the middle-class professions retained their integrity, even cementing their position by representing themselves as the crucial overseers of new social realities. As a growing branch of scholarship claims, what is distinctive about the technological transformations of the turn of the twenty-first century is that the white-collar work of ‘professionals’, protected in previous eras, is now subject to a rapid automation of tasks, accompanied by precarity or deskilling for those who used to carry them out. In fact, as exponential developments in automation take place, it may be these kinds of white-collar workers who experience Sennett’s ‘tragedy of not being a baker’ soonest.⁹

The examples of work’s new colonisations of various parts of life that we describe in this book are occurring, then, in the context of a kind of capitalism that constitutes an immediate threat to the existence of much of its traditionally hegemonic class: ‘the bourgeoisie’, in which cultural capital and economic capital (the right to determine what is best in the culture and the ownership of property) historically coincide. This class looks back at an immediate past in which its cultural identity has been abandoned, a present where its traditional social and professional privileges have eroded, and a future that has no need of it at all. To take these three ‘deaths’ in turn: excepting some ‘provincial cities of Europe, and perhaps … certain regions of North America’, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson has observed:

[T]he bourgeoisie as Baudelaire or Marx, Ibsen or Rimbaud, Grosz or Brecht – or even Sartre or O’Hara – knew it, is a thing of the past. In place of that solid amphitheatre is an aquarium of floating, evanescent forms – the projectors and managers, auditors and janitors, administrators and speculators of contemporary capital: functions of a monetary universe that knows no social fixities or stable identities.¹⁰

The bowler-hatted fathers of Wendy Darling and of Mary Poppins’s charges provided both the shocked denouncers and the main audience for the century of avant-garde culture Anderson invokes, before negotiating their surrender to mass culture in the decades following the Second World War. ‘As capitalism brought a relative well-being to the lives of large working masses in the West’, writes Franco Moretti of this post-war moment, ‘commodities became the new principle of legitimation: consensus was built on things, not men – let alone principles. It was the dawn of today: capitalism triumphant, and bourgeois culture dead’.¹¹

This surrender of the bourgeoisie’s unique claim to ‘culture’ preceded the dismantling of its mode of work: the trading of Anderson’s ‘amphitheatre’ of exclusive professional expertise for the ‘aquarium’ of continuously floating functions, tasks, and roles. As Richard and Daniel Susskind describe, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen technological challenge to the gatekeeping expertise of bourgeois professionals in health, education, divinity, law, journalism, management, tax and auditing, and architecture, democratising their knowledge, distributing their tasks across several less-elevated workers, and – in some cases – automating their roles altogether.¹² If Sennett recognised the tragedy of not being a baker, it is also possible today to be, but not exactly be a teacher, a lecturer, a solicitor, or an architect either, as these professionals complain that more and more of what they used to do uniquely is crowded out by interchangeable bureaucratic tasks and ‘customer facing’ affective labour.

‘Employees are increasingly entreated to take on tasks that their occupation previously did not require – teachers are engaged in health promotion activities, university lec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• About the Authors
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface: The Putting to Work of Everything We Do
• 1 Lifework
• 2 Work Expulsions
• 3 We Young-Girls
• 4 Three Ways to Want Things After Capitalism
• Epilogue: Share Your Limits
• Notes
• Index