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Wyoming Evenings: What is the Good of Work? (1/4)
What is the good of work? How and why did the sixties and seventies vision of a future defined by leisure change into the reality of an exhausting life of increasingly purposeless work? What are the implications of the shift from a Fordist model of production to a post-Fordist one? Why is work valorized in contemporary society? What happened to the radical potential of labor? What can we learn by examining its various critiques, from those expressed in the Middle Ages and up through the strategies employed by the Situationists and others? Unemployment is becoming a reality for an increasing number of people. How might we think of unemployment as an artistic and philosophical category?
These questions will be examined during four events at the Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building in the East Village. Each event will involve two guests–one artist and one cultural producer of another kind. Marysia Lewandowska and Peter Fleming will be the guests at the first event on October 17, 2009.
The series takes its starting point in the claim that today the artist--defined by creativity, unconventionality, and flexibility--might be seen as a role model for contemporary workers. Bohemians in general and artists in particular are the perfect entrepreneurs.
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Marysia Lewandowska—Labor of Love
Not so long ago, in the middle of Europe, labor was closely linked to leisure. Standards of productivity were commonly perceived not only as an indicator of value of one's endeavors but also as the meaning of one's whole life. In times of repression, work served as a site of social cohesion but it also led to dissent. Some works showed signs of resistance by engaging in creative immaterial labor: filmmaking, which was driven by passion rather than necessity. Collective and individual conflicts found expression through the production of film inside factory clubs.
The space of the amateur, enthusiast, or hobbyist opens onto a range of interests and experiences that are generally invisible in the flow of the state-sponsored or professionally-mediated creations. The traditional model for representing the enthusiast happens in a binary structure that pitches work against leisure—the absence of one implicates the other. According to this opposition, work becomes the site of rational production while amateur pursuits become the location of all that is denied by wage labor—they are the space of happiness, desire, and enthusiasm.
In our contemporary, networked, and digital economies, creativity and enthusiasm can potentially become new sources for capital. In many ways, the future of the enthusiast records our forgotten past and prefigures our potential futures. What we experience now is that political and economic systems try to harness this kind of enthusiasm for instrumental ends.
Peter Fleming—Authenticity and the Labor of "Being Yourself" in the Workplace
Recently walking into a call-center (often dubbed the 'electronic sweatshop') I was very surprised by what I saw: rather than the drab lifeless world that one would expect, the organization had attempted to create an atmosphere more akin to a party. "We try to make work fun—in fact we try to make it fun instead of work," said one manager. This presentation explores recent trends in corporate ideology that invites employees to "just be themselves." All those aspects of selfhood once prohibited in the realm of work—sexuality, fun, play, leisure, lifestyle, authentic feelings and even dissent—now appear to be welcome in the so-called post-modern firm.
This new jargon of managed authenticity certainly does entail the reification of the individual at the expense of social relations à la Adorno's famous critique. But something else is going on in which 'the social' is central. Drawing on the Italian post-workerist movement, it is argued that such invitations to be authentic at work might also be an instrument of capture, in which an indomitable pre- (and even anti) corporate sociality is mined, commodified and put to work in the service of exploitation. A creative undercommon residing both inside and outside the formal enterprise is the base material of authenticity, and its capture involves struggle, simulation and a painful transposition. If this 'communism of capital' (that is, the immaterial labor of associative relations that generates wealth despite the blockage of economic rationality) is the proper reservoir of authenticity, then perhaps it might also be the staging ground for a fuller and more positive socialization of contemporary work.
Marysia Lewandowska is a Polish-born, London-based artist and a Professor at Konstfack Stockholm. Her past and current projects reflect the ways in which institutions determine the exchange of values between art and its publics. She is currently developing Women’s Audio Archive as part of her residency at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.
Peter Fleming is professor of Work, Organization and Society at the Queen Mary College (University of London). One of his areas of research concerns the cultural politics of work organizations and the modes of ideological control that operate to enlist the participation of labor.
Click on the images below to view images from the event. Photographs by Peter Leuders.
Events to follow in this series:
December 5th, 2009. 4pm
Marion von Osten and Tom McCarthy
January 30th, 2010. 4pm
Liam Gillick and Gianni Vattimo
March 13th, 2010. 4pm
Carles Guerra and Michael Hardt
For more information and to purchase tickets, click here.
Click here to see all events in this series.