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’.
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 lecturers are encouraged to ensure the employability of their graduates, and doctors are called upon to advise on healthy life styles rather than specifically treating illnesses’, observe Peter Fairbrother and Gavin Poynter.13 Interviews with academic librarians shown to us by Penny Andrews evidenced these workers’ irritation at being expected to take more and more compliance tasks (ensuring academics comply with fast-changing rules about how their research is made available to the public) in addition to those they recognised as proper to librarianship itself. Such professions increasingly resemble the extreme form of Anderson’s ‘aquarium’, referred to by David Graeber as ‘bullshit jobs’: jobs made up of interchangeable flows of managerial, clerical, sales and service tasks, which often seem to exist only to create time-filling bureaucratic tasks for each other to perform.14 If this can be seen as the record of the scattering of a hegemonic class, it is also – in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s terms – a change in the hegemonic form of labour: the kind of labour, that is, which ‘impose[s] … a tendency on other forms of labour and society itself’, so that everything gets gradually reconstructed in its image.15 Bullshit jobs are what happens when it doesn’t matter which job you applied for; they are all subject to the same rules of customer service increasingly encumbered by routine administration.
These processes are reflected in the logic of the professional networking app LinkedIn, which breaks down the experience on one’s CV into a series of isolatable ‘skills’, with colleagues and former employers invited to vouch for one’s efficacy in each. On LinkedIn, one is less a lawyer or a land-surveyor, than a composition of separate abilities that might be appealing to any number of kinds of employer: a logic increasingly replicated in job application and interview processes, and extended to more and more parts of one’s life history. ‘Activities which were felt to be valuable in their own right are reframed in the language of employability’, as David Frayne describes, ‘my charity work with the homeless must be mentioned because it has given me experience in the voluntary sector, and my hitchhike across Europe promoted because it has developed my ability to use initiative and solve problems’.16
Criticisms of these processes tend to be made from the point of view of the welfare of the worker, in the manner of Sennett’s position that such erosions of clarity about what our work consists of are specifically psychologically damaging. But limiting our perspective in this way overlooks the broader authoritarian social drift that these work practices have lent themselves to. Since the 2014 Immigration Act, Britain has pursued a ‘Hostile Environment’ policy against illegal immigrants, which includes having landlords and employers check the immigration credentials of those they house or employ, but also obligates public sector workers to do the same while discharging their services. As of 2015, the latest extension of the UK’s ‘Prevent’ anti-terrorism strategy has obligated teachers, council workers, social workers, doctors, university lecturers, nurses, librarians, and opticians to identify and refer anyone fitting the profile of ‘vulnerable to terrorism’.17 Andrews’s librarians resented having a ‘compliance’ function imposed on their relations with the academics they work alongside. The same pattern is found in both these state policies, only here it is the most oppressive and illiberal tendencies of the state that are appearing in the gaps in our increasingly fragmented professional roles. These tendencies become ‘embedded’, as the campaign group Liberty have put it, ‘in everyday interactions between trusted public sector workers and the people they are supposed to serve: nurses and patients, police and victims of crime and teachers and their pupils’.18
We have hardly addressed the kinds of precarious, low-paid jobs lower down the social scale that, in Chapter 2, we will describe as ‘malemployment’. Nor have we touched on the variations on these processes and their human effects in the economy globally. Yet even within these limited parameters, the picture emerging from the changes in work we have discussed is dark. There is a risk, however, that in focusing on how the break-up of stable and clearly defined careers has numerous negative effects on workers and invites reactionary political deployments of work, one ends up implicitly idealising an older model of work. The danger, in other words, is in imagining that all our problems could be solved if only we could push back on these changes, and return to something like the working model of the post-war era: to a time when wages were high and careers were lifelong, and we were not yet entangled in the tyranny of extraneous ‘bullshit’ that has built up in the fragmented workplace of the succeeding neoliberal decades.
The post-war period’s achievement of peak economic equality and robust trade unionism makes it an appealing memory for today’s left; even as this places it in what has been described as ‘the paradoxical situation of having to defend … institutions that we criticised earlier for not being radical enough’.19 It is no coincidence that Bernie Sanders invokes the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, while socialists on both sides of the Atlantic have tried to make radical environmental reform palatable with the branding of a ‘Green New Deal’. It is even tempting to think of the unlikely emergence of Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn as figureheads for the young left as partly attributable to their being old enough to have been political agents (albeit of a minor kind) in this pre-neoliberal world. On the right, a parallel nostalgia underlies Donald Trump’s talk of ‘bringing back jobs’ to the immiserated Rust Belt, and the Brexit Leave campaign’s message of freeing Britain from the ‘red tape’ of Brussels bureaucrats and from immigrants ‘taking our jobs’. Both left and right, in other words, have a ‘nostalgia for work’, arranged – openly or not – around the norms of the post-war settlement.20 And this nostalgia involves acting as if the shortcomings, forms of precariousness and everyday violence that existed in that earlier settlement were merely local flaws.
The working world of the post-war regime was born of the economic trauma of the Great Depression, the demands of working-class movements that promises of a better society made during the Second World War be honoured, and the threat of actually-existing communism to the East if they weren’t. Its aspiration was that a generous welfare state should create basic entitlements beyond waged work, while being contingent on most people performing it; a rooting premise that Andrea Komlosy refers to as the ‘inevitable, quasi-automatic connection between proletarianization and social protection’.21 ‘Automatic’ as it came to seem, the possibility of this connection between waged work and social protection was in fact strikingly novel, beginning only with the Bismarck Chancellorship in Germany, the Liberal reforms of 1909 in Britain, and the 1930s New Deal in the USA. As Robert Castel has argued, it represented nothing short of a reversal of the association the pre-industrial world had made between waged work and vulnerability, which had held that it was those who ‘slipped down’ from independent artisanship into dependent labour who were the precarious ones.22
The post-war regime’s grounding in this recently formed ‘connection’ led it to two potentially deleterious gestures. First, it had the effect of further universalising work. Post-war welfare states took responsibility for protecting those out of work and hoped to render certain areas of life (health, education, old age) universally non-contingent on it. Yet these processes constituted, in Guy Standing’s terms, only a ‘fictitious decommodification’. ‘“Universalistic” meant covering the needs of formal employees’:23 to treat those out of work fully ‘as free citizens’ was regarded as ‘inconsistent with the principles of a free community’.24 Even as they offered new protection to those out of work, welfare regimes naturalised the idea that truly belonging to their citizenry meant being in waged work. Second, the structure of the post-war work regime had the effect of essentialising work and what counted as work. The male waged worker was its standard unit, supported in the domestic sphere by a housewife whose domestic work (rarely recognised as such) was subsidiary to her new role as chief consumer of the Keynesian-Fordist economy’s bounty, paid for by the new expectation of a ‘family wage’ for the male breadwinner. As Nancy Fraser points out, this also had the effect of ‘institutionalising androcentric understandings of family and work’ while ‘naturaliz[ing] heteronormativity and gender hierarchy’.25
Even putting aside the ways such ‘protection’ of the family remained an at best mixed benefit to the women it ensconced, radicals of the time identified how its provision was still racialised and regional, and quickly collapsed when combined with other forms of injustice. Mariarosa Dalla Costa wrote in 1972 of the hypocrisy of post-war welfare states’ claim to protect the nuclear family, when, in the regime’s very heartlands, ‘six-year-olds have already come up against police dogs in the South of the United States’, and ‘today we find the same phenomenon in Southern Italy and Northern Ireland’.26 Angela Davis exposed how liberal policy-makers had absolved themselves of extending proper protections to black families, precisely (and ironically) with the self-accusation that slavery had done permanent damage to ‘black masculinity’ and so state protections for black families were bound to fail.27 And in the psychoanalytic work of Shulamith Firestone, the ideal of the nuclear family was itself found to be sustained on exploited domestic labour from the ‘black ghetto Whorehouse’ (in the form of sex work, domestic work, and precarious menial labour, ‘the black community in America makes possible the existence of the family structure of the larger white community’), creating new and pathological forms of racist fantasy on all sides in the process.28
Racialised inequality in general was also perpetuated, not as a by-product, but as a deliberate aim of essentialising definitions of work. Scholars such as Jill Quadagno and Ira Katznelson have shown how waves of progressive legislation remembered as having radically expanded social protection in post-war America, disproportionately excluded black Americans. This was the consequence of explicit compromises Roosevelt had made with Southern Democrats in the original striking of the New Deal. The main mechanism deployed to effect this exclusion was to fix benefits precisely to what we have seen was an ‘essentialised’ definition of waged work, which now excluded sharecroppers – the many Southerners who lived by borrowing equipment and farming materials from their landlords and paying off their debts at the end of the year – as well as domestic workers and day labourers: all work done disproportionately by black people. Continuing this pattern after the war, the majority of black Americans were not entitled to social security until the 1950s, unionisation was clamped down on in the South where most black people lived, and agricultural and domestic employers of primarily black workers were spared the requirement of a minimum wage and maximum hours.29
It is therefore not enough to claim that the post-war work regime was admirable in itself, but made insufficient allowances for women and non-whites. In both cases, these were not unfortunate slips, but the specific outcome of the definition of work at its very core: and the relegation within that definition of raced and gendered domestic and agricultural work. For the same reason, it is also not enough now, from the position of the new precarious work regime, to simply bewail the breaking of the ‘inevitable connection’ this earlier period made between waged work and social protection, as if retaining that bond would resolve the problem of precarity. As Isabel Lorey has pointed out, to frame matters in this way is to fall to too ready an opposition between ‘security’, ‘stability’, ‘normality’ on the one hand, and ‘precarity’ on the other. That is, to fail to consider either ‘who was already not (sufficiently) safeguarded in the Fordist welfare-state system’, or ‘in what way social insecurity is currently becoming a component of social reality’: that is, a grim kind of stable norm in itself.30 The many ways in which the latter is the case we will consider in the following chapter. To conclude the discussion of nostalgia for work: criticising today’s precarious work landscape carries with it the danger of inadvertently idealising the previous one. This is troublesome because a regime, which for all its welcome protections of parts of life outside work for some, was nonetheless constructed around a damagingly essentialising and universalising definition of work as such that, like all universalisms, effectively concealed the many that it left out.
What will we do in the post-work utopia?
For all that, it still seems remarkable how convinced post-war culture apparently was that part of its destiny was that the amount of time we spend in work would inevitably be subject to a massive reduction. In a text written in the depths of the Great Depression in 1930, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, John Maynard Keynes – the economist who would posthumously become the guiding voice of post-war economies – had treated the arrival of a fifteen-hour working week and luxury for all as virtually inevitable. His analysis set the horizon of such post-war investigations of the nature of economic growth as Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism (1956) and J.K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958).31 As the confidence of this liberal tradition subsided with the crisis of the economic model that sustained it, the reduction of work returned to being a priority of the left. During 1968, Raoul Vaneigem condemned not only capitalism but also Soviet and Maoist communism for their collusion in the universalisation of the principle of work.32 In Italy, a hippie-inflected Marxist movement demanded ‘zero work for income’ and proclaimed, ‘the revolution is probable’.33 And in Britain, as the Edward Heath government responded to fuel shortages and industrial action by imposing a three-day working week, many were surprised at the creativity and experimentalism the partial liberation from work brought out in them.34
As ideologically heterogeneous as these positions were, it is startling to realise that their shared assumption was the desirability and probability – if not the inevitability – that a version of Keynes’s luxury post-work future would come to pass. Not only this, as Peter Frase puts it, people ‘actually worried about what people would do after being liberated from work’.35 In the 1950s and 1960s, there was even a significant minor industry of liberal cultural criticism committed to anticipating the dangers human sensibility would face if it was liberated into the free play of consumption in the affluence to come.36 So far from such a starting point today, says Frayne, ‘we would be forgiven for seeing earlier predictions for a radically reduced working week as nothing more than a historical curio – a nice but rather outlandish idea that was forgotten decades ago’.37 But efforts are being made to reverse this great forgetting. The most radical of these are found among the ‘anti-work’ movement of thinkers and activists who demand that the new conditions of work described above be seized by the left: not in the spirit of ‘nostalgia for work’, but to demand a ‘postcapitalist’, ‘post-work’ society, sustained by ‘full automation’.
The argument, put briefly, is that current developments in digital technology are placing capitalism in the position of being able to absorb less and less labour, while production itself becomes easier and easier. At the same time, ‘value’ is increasingly found not in objects and their labour time, but in rents collected on intellectual property, with the effect of creating an unsustainable degree of monopoly ownership. In the face of dystopian predictions of mass unemployment, anti-work thinkers propose to simply go with the grain of these changes, to take capital at its word about the superfluity of labour, and to demand the transition to a post-work society. As much work as possible could be performed by machines, with humans left to pursue flourishing in all the areas of life they are currently kept from by bullshit work, sustained – for as long as money is an appropriate unit of exchange – by something like a Universal Basic Income (UBI), paid to all citizens.
Our stress here is not on the empirical limits of technology, the political challenge of transitioning to such societies in the context of global inequality, or the environmental implications.38 Nor do we respond to the justified misgivings of some campaigners, who point out that the UBI idea originated with neoliberal thinkers who wanted to use it as an excuse for abandoning targeted welfare altogether, or who see it as an economically false concession that mass unemployment is inevitable, rather than a result of political choices.39 Our interest here and once again in Chapter 4 is rather in the philosophical implications of the ‘post-work hypothesis’;40 both in terms of what such tools of analysis can tell about what a society commensurate with the theory of désœuvrement could look like, and also what it means that – now – at the very moment of ‘lifework’ and the ‘putting to work of everything we do’, this formerly unfashionable fantasy should have returned to our collective imaginary and to our radical politics.
Much of Frayne’s The Refusal of Work (2015) is given to a series of case studies of people in Britain who have tried to escape their hectic and unhappy work lives by doing as little paid work as possible. A common perception among them is that one of the main impediments in such attempts to anticipate a ‘post-work’ life is the moral judgement and exclusion they experience in a society where so much sociability and sense of worth is organised around work. That said, Frayne warns, ‘a lot of popular anti-capitalist polemic’ also ‘tells people (often in a rather pious fashion) that they will be happier if they choose to work less and moderate their spending’.41 As much as the ‘work ethic’ is obviously moralised in culture, it seems there is also the danger of an equivalent moralism of the refusal to participate in capitalist culture, meaning that work and non-work both end up being justified in moralising terms. Frayne tries to avoid this trap by declining to romanticise his subjects’ struggles, and by emphasising how hard it is in our current culture for ordinary people to try to work less. However, when he does become specific about what people could be doing if they were not working, he steps into what we argue is one of the main inbuilt dangers of anti-work writing as a genre: the speed with which naming something as a possibility for the good life we could pursue, if freed from work, turns into a prescription about what it is we should be doing. As one of the most prolific anti-work writers, André Gorz has remarked, ‘it is the function of utopias … to provide us with the distance from the existing state of affairs which allows us to judge what we are doing in the light of what we could or should do’.42 The separation between the ‘could’ and the ‘should’, we argue, is not so easy to police.
Several of Frayne’s interviewees found that giving up work in fact gave them a head-start on making up for lost income because they were no longer paying for the many services they only needed because they were spending so much time in work. ‘Given the extent to which many modern commodities – from pre-prepared meals to high-caffeine drinks, car washes, repair services, care services, personal trainers, dating agencies and so on – are capitalising on our lack of free-time’, Frayne says, ‘it is not surprising that many of the people I met found that working less was allowing them to save money. They were able to do more for themselves’.43 Perhaps doing one’s own chores and looking after one’s children or relatives is better than many people’s paid work. The problem, we suggest, comes in at the point that much anti-work discourse ends up having to assume it is necessarily better. Wherever one comes down on the question, this is a kind of moral evaluation and implicit prescriptiveness, and it means that Frayne’s discourse, like that of many others making a similar case, cannot avoid a certain structural ‘piety’ of the kind he imputes to both mainstream pro-work opinion and anti-capitalist activism.
Not only this, but the move also risks repeating the core gesture of the industrial and post-war work regimes: of essentialising paid ‘labour’ as qualitatively different from domestic and social-reproductive ‘work’ (in Chapter 3, we will turn to the major tradition of feminism that has made the case that it is a kind of labour for capitalism in itself). One can only sign up to the idea that doing these things ‘for ourselves’ is necessarily liberating if one agrees that waged work is the only thing that makes an arduous activity undesirable. The implication of such an ideology is that child-rearing, cooking, even sex, are all an unalienated good … until you get paid for them, at which point they’re instantaneously transfigured into ‘bad’ labour.
Something more of the logic behind ‘doing more for ourselves’ can be understood by returning to one of the canonical versions of the argument that liberation from certain kinds of work can give rise to personal autonomy and creativity. ‘Daughters of educated men have always done their thinking from hand to mouth’, ran Virginia Woolf’s famous defence of female creativity stifled under patriarchy, ‘they have thought while they stirred the pot, while they rocked the cradle’.44 It would be tempting to see Woolf’s demand for autonomy from drudgery as one of the prototypes for today’s anti-work movement. But on closer inspection, Frayne’s comments turn out to have more in common with those of Woolf’s harshest detractors. ‘I feel bound to disagree with Mrs. Woolf’s assumption that running a household and family unaided necessarily hinders or weakens thinking’, remarked Q.D. Leavis in a review of Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) in the literary journal Scrutiny, ‘one’s own kitchen and nursery, and not the drawing-room and dinner-table … is the realm where living takes place, and I see no profit in letting our servants live for us’.45 This objection is inflected by class, contrasting Leavis’s (and Scrutiny’s) petit-bourgeois self-reliance to Woolf’s suspiciously louche ‘drawing-room’ bohemianism. In one of the better jokes in literary criticism, Leavis wonders whether someone of Woolf’s background would ‘know which end of the cradle to stir’.
For Leavis, intellectual creation and self-fulfilment are not to be abstracted from the tasks of ordinary life, but draw their strength precisely from them: though in Leavis’s case this comes at the cost of her silence over whether men are expected to find the cradle-stirring intellectually rewarding too.46 No more inclined than Leavis to ‘let servants live our lives for us’, Frayne refers to ‘the injustice in a society where one section of the population buys their free-time by offloading their chores on to the other’.47 But – as for Leavis – it is not merely unjust that many of us offload our unpleasant but regrettably necessary day-to-day tasks: rather, we are also missing out when our hectic work lives oblige us to do so. We were duped into thinking work was life, and now we learn that life is staying at home.
This is not to accuse Frayne of some special theoretical neglect. It is simply a problem structural to anti-work writing. While the post-work hypothesis aims to rescue us from both the material need and the faulty moralism that keeps us in jobs we hate, it does so by proposing a better life ‘after work’. What will make it better it falls to the anti-work writer to define; and it is very difficult to make such a definition without becoming surreptitiously prescriptive. This problem surfaces whenever anti-work writing is forced to become specific about what everyone is projected to do once they have stopped working for a wage, even beyond the simple example of domestic and social-reproductive work we have focused on thus far. For instance, the futures envisaged by other recent anti-work authors such as Frase, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Helen Hester, and Sophie Lewis, all avoid idealising caring and social-reproductive activities by returning to the old demand of Second-Wave feminists such as Firestone that ‘full automation’ should extend to these forms of work too.48 Much ‘highly personal and embarrassing care work … might be better carried out by robots’, they argue, while even ‘the pain and suffering involved in pregnancy [c]ould be relegated to the past, rather than mystified as natural and beautiful’.49 Yet this only pushes the question a frame back. If we are not (primarily) caring for babies and the elderly, then what are we doing?
The totemic example of this bind can be found in Marx himself. In a remark in The German Ideology, which every anti-work writer must quote sooner or later, Marx proposes that under ideal circumstances, communism would make it possible ‘to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind’.50 As we will see in Chapter 4, Marx is not naïve to the dangers of trying to determine what people are to do with their new freedom; and some anti-work writers have followed him in this reservation, declining to make predictions and to instead focus on demands.51 Yet there are enough statements of this kind across Marx’s writings for his more humanist admirers to see him as the philosopher of a kind of personal liberation, the core values of which do indeed seem to have been set in advance:
Marx, the man who every year read all the works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, who brought to life in himself the greatest works of human thought, would never have dreamt that his idea of socialism could be interpreted as having as its aim [merely] the well-fed and well-clad ‘welfare’ or ‘workers’ state. Man, in Marx’s view, has created in the course of history a culture which he will be free to make his own when he is freed from the chains, not only of economic poverty, but of the spiritual poverty created by alienation.52
It is not incidental that these examples of fulfilling human activity – from fishing to reading Aeschylus – are made up entirely of what we might call ‘productive enjoyments’. It is not about viewing waxworks and magic lanterns in the morning, reading penny novels in the afternoon, and drinking gin all evening (all of which must doubtless be left behind as the pastimes of alienated ‘spiritual poverty’). Though they are aware of the problem (as we show in Chapter 4), the analogous statements in Srnicek and Williams are similarly compelled to reassure us of their ‘productiveness’: ‘leisure should not be confused with idleness, as many things we enjoy most involve immense amounts of effort. Learning a musical instrument, reading literature, socializing with friends and playing sports all involve varying degrees of effort’.53 And so in Frayne: ‘shorter working hours would open up more space for political engagement, for cultural creation and appreciation, and for the development of a range of voluntary and self-defined activities outside work’.54
Comparing the post-work utopias envisaged by two of Marx’s immediate successors, William Morris and Oscar Wilde, Owen Hatherley points out that ‘while Morris imagines everyone becoming village craftsmen, Wilde imagines them all becoming leisured polymaths’.55 What they share, however, is the archetypal anti-work rhetorical dependence on making the case that, not only should we do away with work because it is unjust, unnecessary, and damaging, but also because the alternative activities we would be freed to do would be indisputably good for us. But there will be some for whom even the new leisure activities themselves – be they Morris’s handicrafts, Wilde’s new Renaissance of art, or Marx’s Aeschylus – would be encountered as a totally alienating set of tasks in themselves. We consider in Chapter 4 the anti-work writers who are attempting the opposite move of abolishing work while having no aspiration to prescribe the ‘cultural’ lives of those it is liberating (as well as the problems that come with that approach too). For now, we note that our aim is not to dismiss out of hand the content of various visions of the good life; no doubt many will find the activities proposed by the anti-work writers discussed above appealing. The point is rather that the ‘good’ is aimed at according to an uninspected set of moral and cultural imperatives. As such, post-work visions run the danger of conceding to a humanism that doesn’t respect that we cannot know what the other wants, and does not take seriously the idea that a consensus on the basis of a life well spent, if there may be such a thing, is liable to change.
Work always points beyond itself, socially, culturally, and politically. For the thinkers of désœuvrement introduced in this chapter’s first section, the concept as well as the material experience of ‘work’ shapes the ways in which we think about ourselves; Nancy in particular, in The Inoperative Community (1991), describes the ways in which work structures ideas of human community in different political models. Communism is Nancy’s most obvious example. For Nancy, communism is fundamentally based on the ideal of a community of human beings defined as ‘producers, and fundamentally as the producers of their own essence in the form of their labour or their work’.56 You are what you do; or rather, what you do simultaneously describes the human club and proves your membership in it.
Nancy argues that work, in the context of community, always does such ideological overtime, whether in Soviet communism, Nazi fascism, or the neoliberal regimes of the 1980s that provide Nancy’s own context. William Empson made a similar observation in his discussion of government propaganda relating to the lingering unemployment of the 1930s in Versions of the Pastoral (1935). One poster discussed by Empson shows a worker with a chisel and reassuring statistics of ‘men back at work’: ‘to accept the picture is to feel that the skilled worker’s interests are bound up with his place in the class system and the success in British foreign policy in finding markets’. On top of that, Empson adds, the talismanic image of the worker provokes the conviction in his compatriots that ‘while he is like this he is Natural and that will induce Nature to make us prosperous’.57 So what Empson calls the ‘mythic’ work in the poster encourages its 1930s viewer to content themselves with the current arrangements of labour and class, and to identify with the political status quo in the form of the government and the nation.
The problem with such talismanic deployments of work, as Nancy sees it, is that as a ‘regulative idea’ of community it has a structurally totalitarian bent, even in ostensibly non-totalitarian contexts. ‘Economic ties, technological operations, and political fusions (into a body or under a leader)’ all present themselves as the necessary realisation of the community’s essence.58 This, Nancy insists, is inevitably a bad thing, and leads to concentration camps, gulags, and refugee detention camps, as well as less visible forms of violence. Work is put to work to lend hard and unequivocal borders to a community. Immigration, instrumentalised by both left and right either as a threat to the job market or as a benefit to a given economy, is likely the most visible and most common fashion of this ‘putting to work’ of work in political discourse today; meanwhile, having a job lined up will commonly make the difference between a rejected and an accepted citizenship application. For Nancy, the question is whether it is even possible to envisage a form of non-coercive work, with an attendant kind of community that refuses essentialism and exclusivity. Nancy’s own, surprising answer is that there is, and that a glimmer of it might be found to be ‘communism’s secret’, for instance, in gestures of Marx of the kind discussed above, where a promise is held out for ‘a reign of freedom, one beyond the collective regulation of necessity, in which surplus work would no longer be exploitative work, but rather art and invention’.59 According to Nancy’s reading of Marx, it would seem that the substantial amount of free time that post-work models of society promise to everyone might be just the thing required for a community to resist totalitarianism.
‘Art and invention’ must shoulder a heavy burden here – how could they have the power to undo the structurally conservative function of the ideal of work in a given community? We have already suggested that the kinds of creative activity anti-work writers tend to reach for when describing what we are to do in the post-work utopia end up containing their own ‘work-like’ prescriptiveness, inimical to désœuvrement. More generally, popular culture has been sceptical of the idea that ‘creativity’, however broadly defined, might successfully replace paid labour as a way of structuring life in any form of society. A deep-rooted suspicion, often instinctively called up as a response to post-work propositions like UBI, is that self-directed creativity must lead to infantilising laziness or chaos. Bourgeois nineteenth-century literature did its share to bolster this idea; in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), amateur artist Harold Skimpole lives in an alternative world of unfinished sketches, half-composed airs, and sky-gazing with his many artistically inclined children and grandchildren, all precariously dependent on the charity of his wealthier friends. The novel leaves no room to doubt the wickedness of this arrangement. It emphasises not only Skimpole’s exploitation of his benefactors but also insists that his childish refusal of paid labour is synonymous with a fundamental moral irresponsibility, which precipitates several of the novel’s eventual tragedies. The artist and his family’s refusal to work for money threatens to unravel the social fabric as it leads to exploit and ultimately to destroy others alongside the moral order by which they live.
That it is not parasitism alone that we have learnt to suspect in those on the side of art against work, but a more far-reaching affront to the idea of citizenship itself, might be demonstrated in the prevalent hostile reaction to those who have erected their own communities in real life, within but apart from modern capitalism, with the goal of sharing labour in such a way that it creates as much time as possible for ‘art and invention’ for all of its members. Modern utopian socialist communes, as have existed at least since European socialists settled in nineteenth-century California, tend to be presented in media and fiction as cultish and fascistic at worst and, like Skimpole and his family, as deluded and naïve at best.60 In one episode of the TV drama Mad Men, Roger Sterling, boss of the creative, dynamic, relatively underdog advertising firm, spends a day in 1970 on a hippie commune with his grown-up daughter, who has retreated there to escape from the strictures of bourgeois motherhood. He initially seems charmed by the commune’s care-free ways where ‘everyone does what they want’, but among the pregnant, potato-peeling women gathered around a young man who apparently does little apart from owning a truck, Roger comes to the unspoken conclusion that the egalitarian ethics of the commune is a cover for a patriarchal order in miniature, and so tries and fails to import his daughter back to his own ‘real’ world as the lesser, more honest evil.
The consistent hostility of these tropes document the provocation represented by the proposal that self-directed creativity might replace work. The often passionate protests raised by the idea reveal the instinctive understanding, and fear, that changing the meaning of work must change the principles of politics, community, and human life alongside. It is precisely this risk Nancy asks us to embrace when he suggests that the horizon of free time in Marx’s writing promises room for ‘art and invention’ as a ‘reign of freedom’, as a route to a désœuvrement that would not only free us from unwanted work but also ‘unwork’ conventional ideas of the state, the self, and of labour.
To understand how, we need to turn to Nancy’s philosophical ideas on ‘being’ itself. According to Nancy, what is at issue when a state, a self, or a product of our labour – like a work of art – is presented as ‘perfectly detached, distinct and closed’, this is a fundamental ontological error.61 Neither workers nor nations nor ‘works’ are ever absolutely detached from the rest of the world. Nancy points out that we cannot even do as much as say ‘I’ in any meaningful way unless there are other ‘I’s, even if at moments the other ‘I’s are as minimal as voices in our heads. ‘Solitude’, Nancy points out, ‘is a pretense’: we are never truly alone, we can only be ‘singular plural’: it is the plurality of the more than one that makes the singular possible in the first instance.62 This might serve to explain why in fiction, the idea of an isolated human, the only one left, is often raised but just as often breaks down. Where there is one, there are others of some form, and in their absence, scattered objects of human culture come starkly alive, like tins of food do in the scorched landscapes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), or the footprint, the human entrails left by cannibals, or the disembodied human voice imitated by a parrot in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). To Nancy, this applies on the most basic, physical level – singular living bodies only exist and can only experience themselves as singular at the point of touch, at the limits that expose them to other bodies and other objects of resistance. ‘Community means’, Nancy concludes, ‘that there is no singular being without another singular being, and that there is, therefore, an originary or ontological ‘sociality’.63 We never are alone – and we never work alone, either.
Nancy’s view not only refuses the individual its self-contained independence, but also bars it from the option of transcendence of the self by communion with the larger entity of a group, even a group as generously defined as all of mankind or even all life on earth. These two rejected positions correlate with those occupied by Woolf and Q.D. Leavis discussed above. While ‘a room of one’s own’ undeniably is a good material prerequisite for concentrated writing, it is also the emblem for a freedom from outside interruption that stands for just the kind of modern individualism that Woolf’s Bloomsbury supported. As Raymond Williams suggests, the Bloomsbury group, so keen to point out that they were not really a group but merely a collection of individual artists and thinkers, were united in their variously artistic, political, and economic endeavours to ensure the autonomy and free expression of the ‘civilised’ individual without change to society overall.64 While the door of Woolf’s hypothetical room keeps out the housework that goes on below stairs, it also keeps at bay questions about the splendid isolation of the ‘individual intelligence’ that works within: the problem with making ‘a room of one’s own’ your avatar for freedom is it is ‘a room of one’s own’. Q.D. Leavis’s embrace of housework and childcare as manifestation of living your ‘own’ life, by contrast, assumes that the tedium of everyday tasks provides communion with the essence of the culture via the spirit of family.
In Nancy’s version of community, by contrast, singular beings remain singular beings. Nancy’s vision offers a way of looking at singularity and multiplicity at the same time, as ‘being singular plural’. Nancy presents us with a world that does not have meaning as a unified whole but only has meaning at the demarcations that make and remake different, unique but not individual singularities: ‘at every single instant singular beings share their limits, share each other on their limits’.65 Nancy’s ‘being singular plural’ would point not only to how the door makes Woolf and how the family laundry makes Leavis but to what other ‘shared limits’ are kept from view by the reification of each, and what cultures they work to support – that of upper middle-class individualism and the bourgeois family respectively.
Nancy’s contextual, differential logic has much in common with the work of other poststructuralist thinkers and especially with that of his friend Jacques Derrida. Like Derrida, Nancy insists that meaning does not adhere to essences but is made at the demarcations of living beings as well as of objects and systems like language; to an extent, what Derrida calls différance and the trace, Nancy calls shared limits: it’s the space between words that makes meaning as much as it is the ‘between’ between the ‘you’ and the ‘I’ that makes two mutually defining singularities. Both insist that in consequence of this logic of multiplying differences, a system of language, just like a group of living beings, is never complete or closed off against its multiple outsides.66 Nancy’s own version of these ideas stands out in its insistence that this differential logic is community itself, community understood as a form of communication: ‘communication is the constitutive fact of an exposition to the outside that defines singularity’.67 If that means we have nothing in common but (to communicate) our differences, to Nancy that is the opposite of nothing, as it is only the sharing of limits, or being-with, that delineates the existence of singular beings at a given moment.
The reason that all this amounts to désœuvrement is that being exposed at our limits to others leads to ‘the risk – or the chance – of changing identity in it’.68 For Nancy, ‘art and literature’ are not different from people in this respect; in fact, they are the privileged instance of ‘being singular plural’ and ‘unworking’ as the logic of life in general. Works of literature are evident instances of the exceptional and so of the singular, yet of a singularity that only exists inside a shared language; meanwhile its existence changes the contours of that very language and what is sayable and conceivable in it, which is also why there is no stepping outside those shared and multiplying limits at a future point. It’s what Derrida infamously refers to when he writes that ‘there is no outside of the text’.69 People as well as books lean into each other in order to exist in the first instance; a book’s cover and human skin are foldable limits rather than absolute containers.
This then, would be literary communism; the acknowledgement that community is the risk, and the chance, of changing identity at multiplying limits with other people, objects and stories around us; but also, the active pursuit of encounters at these limits. Nancy sees hope on the side of Marx’s endorsement of daily free time for ‘art and invention’ because here, art as we know it can become the place holder for a general freedom to experiment, not in empty space but in encounters with limits so significant they will warp your very shape. In as far as there is a vision of the future in this, it doesn’t give away much detail; the difference to visions of ‘free time’ as individualist freedom or homely family pursuits is the enormous creative potential it bundles, where it imagines people sufficiently well fed and comfortable to pursue creative difference as a source of pleasure and creative self-modification. Literary communism’s political significance lies in the link Nancy draws between community and work, and it is one that should arm us against the nostalgia for work discussed in this chapter. If work has the structuring function in a community in the way Nancy describes, then there are links between the kind of work that excludes many from its benefits and yet presents itself as freely available, and nations that declare themselves open to the world while building unyielding borders. Accordingly, an alternative form of work, one that is not the prize in a fight-to-the-death job market but a form of production based on creatively shared limits, might make forms of community more accepting of its changeable and multiple boundaries.