The Problem with Work

The illuminated building is surrounded by nocturnal darkness. Visibly displayed are people working late at the office. The cover of Kathi Weeks's excellent book clearly sets the scene for her analysis of the problems we might well have—or should have—with work in its current configuration. One apparently has to work, but it is also supposed to be “good” to work; one should always try to work more, be more performative, exert oneself more, put in the extra hours to become more efficient. Drawing on Weber's analysis of the Protestant work ethic and its constitutive contradictions, Weeks wants us to question this productivist model of the “ever more” that can cost us so dearly. She sets out to render strange our relation to work, calling into question its obviousness: Why is work so often represented as an end in itself, of benefit to us as individuals? If work is also a means to an end, of necessity to us for survival, do we nevertheless really need to accept dominant forms of organizing our working activities? Aren't different approaches to work feasible? How about beginning with a refusal to be defined by whether we work or not, by what work we do or do not do, by how much or how little we work? Let's be radical and imagine a “postwork future”!Her “utopian demand,” which promises to contribute to remodeling society as a whole, is for a basic income, paid to all regardless of whether one officially works or not or, presumably, whether one already has vast reserves of inherited wealth or not (137). Not even indexed to recognized “socially useful” activities, this basic income would guarantee a satisfactory standard of living for all. Life, its production and reproduction, is thereby unhitched from its supposedly necessary tie with, often hard, work (139).However, “getting a life” should itself be no easy affair. Indeed, Weeks draws on Nietzsche, Bloch, and Deleuze to demonstrate how the “utopian imagination” she invokes stretches our habitual ways of thinking and doing, challenging us not to “embrace the life we have, the life that has been made for us—the life of a consumer or a worker—but the one that we might want.” Weeks then adds a coda: “This is not to say that it is an individual life. Rather ... it is a life of singularities rather than individualities ... a life that is common to and shared with others without being the same as theirs” (232). However, it is less obvious, given the lack of persuasive or coercive enforcement in her utopian proposition for a basic income for all regardless of one's social outlook and contribution, how extra-individualistic participation and preoccupations can be assumed in this way.What is particularly challenging about Weeks's analysis is that she is not simply turning her back on work and advocating an opting out of its constraints, a solution that would be available only to the minority. Instead her proposals could lead to a different investment in “work.” Armed with the theories and practices of the Italian Autonomist Marxists (such as those of Negri, Virno, and Bifo), Weeks predicates her exorbitant demand for a guaranteed basic income for all on four radical stances that could resist, destabilize, and displace the regimes currently governing work. These objectionable attitudes are “an insubordination to the work ethic, a skepticism about the virtues of self-discipline for the sake of capital accumulation, an unwillingness to cultivate, simply on principle, a good ‘professional’ attitude about work, and a refusal to subordinate all of life to work” (77; my italics). Work is to become a variety of activities one autonomously decides to do or not. Keenly aware of how “giving one's all” has been all too co-opted by managerial policies that claim to be providing for our health, safety, and general well-being in order to best extract the most from us, Weeks is encouraging us not necessarily to leave work behind but, rather, to dare to be hopeful and happy in spite of it (231). This challenge is not as easy as it sounds. Suicides due to adverse working conditions are no rare occurrence. For instance, in France twenty-nine cases between July 2009 and May 2010 were attributed to the adoption by France Telecom of the notorious Plan NExT, which endorsed aggressive managerial strategies; at the French Post Office, also currently undergoing “restructuration,” four cases occurred in 2012. A recent incident involved a man who hanged himself during the lunch break out of a sense of nonrecognition for his efforts for and commitment to the organization after being threatened with a disciplinary procedure for “underperformance.”It would require a follow-on book by Weeks to consider how Nietzsche's eternal recurrence—of importance for her analysis of a “more hopeful temporality”—would engage with such actual cases of despair without reducing them to instances of weak ressentiment (199–200). Weeks's interesting work could also be furthered by carrying out a comparative sociological study of employment law and the ensuing working conditions in different nations. The case of France is an interesting one given that one might think that French employees have more protection and rights than those elsewhere. However, given the above damning data about evident vital suffering in the workplace and the subsequent works of psychologists/psychoanalysts, sociologists, and philosophers—such as Christian Dejours, Yves Clot, and Dominique Méda, who are not considered by Weeks—on the critical necessity of revalorizing “living work” (travail vivant), the situation, even there, is evidently not as enviable as all that.Of particular interest for those involved in “utopian studies” is Weeks's infusing of utopian theory with her evident commitment to militant political action. In chapter 5, “The Future Is Now: Utopian Demands and the Temporalities of Hope,” she offers a sustained and convincing account of how “the political practice of demanding” differs from making a request or a plea (131). Her proposition for a future politics emerges from a historical analysis of the feminist movement and, for example, its campaign for wages for housework or domestic labor. Having analyzed the weaknesses and contradictions of such searches for recognition and parity, Weeks suggests that a “utopian demand,” which emerges from the unfulfilled potentials of the past, is more forceful than strivings for “equality,” as it is not “an effort to persuade, let alone to coax, entice or seduce” (132). Undergirded by a flat refusal to accept dominant conditions, the “demand” for a basic income for all is charged with a confident sense of defiance that can confound those in power by unexpectedly and radically putting into question accepted practices, beliefs, and distinctions. Her particularized demand for a basic income for all renders redundant the assumption that one must always work for money; it would free us up for a multitude of desired activities and interests that would necessarily expand our notion of “work”; it would encourage us to distance ourselves from the moral importance attached to working hard; it would not oblige us to gain recognition according to the vocabulary of “waged labour” for the “social work”—and thereby somehow “prove” ourselves—that we might spontaneously do anyway; it would also displace otherwise counterproductively entrenched terms: the guaranteed basic income for all blurs the limits between the private and public spheres by bypassing what the world of waged labor—already a world of privilege that, paradoxically, coercively foists its “values” on its “own”—would call “spare” or “free” time. As it is not an attempt to gain recognition and financial support for work carried out at home, it is not a defense of the traditional family unit but, instead, an invitation to rethink social relations: such a reorganization is desirable given Weeks's suggestion that the “work ethic” and the “family ethic” have colluded to reproduce capitalist conditions and values (166). She claims that the refusal to recognize ideologically purposed distinctions such as work/family and public/private can free us up for the generation of “critical perspectives” that would encourage us to live not only less ascetically but also more inventively and expansively (144, 146).Also interesting for further thought about utopian history and theory is Weeks's account of how the “utopian demand” differs from, and has more potential to “generate political effects” than, “classical utopias,” “critical utopias,” and “manifestos” (208–25). She defends the apparently “limited scope” and the “fragmentary” nature of her single-issue proposal and points out how it does not depend on an identitarian politics that risks preaching to the converted and closing down opportunities for the new (219). She gives a demonstration of the demand's open-endedness by demonstrating how it is articulated in time as a “tendential method” (102). In its punctual intransigence—a guaranteed basic income: “This is we want now”!—it is also “pointing in the direction of a different future and the possibility of desires and subjects yet to come” (222; my italics). Thus referring to her proposal as both an immediate “goal” and yet a bridge (to other possibilities), Weeks is neatly and suggestively drawing on Nietzsche, whose affirmative philosophy of life is a welcome addition to utopian theory and practice

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Feminism · Performative utterance · Political science · Politics · Protestant work ethic · Sociology · Computer Science · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Gender Studies · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism

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