Work

The idea that ties together several of my current projects is the idea of “work.” If you are not fortunate enough to be able to contemplate life from the peak of a mountain of money, it is likely that work is one of your most important activities. You probably give more time to it than you do just about anything else. If you consider the time you spend looking for work, preparing for work, travelling to and from work, and recovering from work, it would be very plausible to say that work is your core preoccupation. It seems to me that this is the case even for people who derive their satisfactions or build their identities around parts of their lives that seem to them not to be work-related, such as family or sports or politics or hobbies.

The idea that work is so crucial in defining who we are and what kind of life we can live is – bizarrely – controversial. There are all kinds of definitions of contemporary societies that specifically deny the importance of work: a “consumer society,” for instance, is one in which people are supposed to realize themselves and their potential through the free expression of their desires in the marketplace, or an “information society” is one in which communication and information technologies are supposed to reduce the burdens of work. It seems to me that the people who came up with these notions did not have to spend much time working for miserable wages in call-centres. But the element of truth in such descriptions is that if work is the most important part of life in terms of shaping our identities and life-chances, it is also something many working people try very hard not to think about. For most people in the world – including people who don’t have jobs – work is a burden to be dispensed with as briefly as possible in order to get on with living.

One implication of this is that much of the work that people do is not very fulfilling; another is that work is organized socially, and right on up to the global scale, in such a way that it can’t be very fulfilling. I’m interested in thinking about why this might be the case and how these implications are connected to each other, for example, how the experience of work in daily life is connected to the organization of work at the workplace or in a city or through the international division of labour. Right now I am reading Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, which attempts to address these connections. In a few days, I should be posting a few annotations on his ideas. I have started out here making some extremely general statements about work; I’ll be trying to explore some of these ideas more concretely in order to be more sensitive to how work is different for people in different circumstances, as well as how the experience of work as compelled labour is related to and different from the work we invest into our friends and relationships, into our home environments, into our larger communities and into our personal development.