What Do You Want?
- What Do You Want?
I read Work Want Work: Labour and Desire at the End of Capitalism over a few days on lockdown at a time when work, or the lack of it, is on a lot of people’s minds. It makes for a compelling read, both grounded in a breadth of theory – sociological, philosophical and psychoanalytic – and replete with examples from literature, art, film, popular culture and politics. The title alone offers plenty to consider, given now might be a particularly pertinent time to try to imagine the possibility of the end of capitalism. Astute analysis of a range of attempts to contend with ‘the problem of work’ sit comfortably alongside commentary on some of the stranger elements of late capitalism that serve to illustrate the tensions between what we want and what we actually get in the (dis)pleasures of ‘bleeding vegan burgers’, Googling your symptoms and trawling Tinder. As arguments develop, so too do considerations of the cultural politics of the moment. #Metoo, the UK’s ‘Prevent’ strategy, TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), wokeness, and snowflakes all feature, though always with a critical edge putting them into context. Despite its range, the work never seeks to skirt the complexity of its subject matter and succeeds in questioning its own arguments. This is perhaps a consequence of having been co-authored and creates the impression, for me at least, that a concerted effort has been made to create space for the reader to develop their own responses and imagine what their own post-work desires might be.
Pfannebecker and Smith begin by setting out the view that a ‘new lifework regime’ has led to a scenario in which ‘all you do is work, and everything you do can be put to work’ (pix). The authors adopt the term désoeuvrement – ‘literally ‘unworking’, but also ‘inoperability’, ‘the absence of work’, and ‘the absence of a work” in order to conceptualise not-working as ‘something more than just a passive withdrawal of effort’ (p1). Not-working might instead be thought of as having ‘an active, positive, even material quality’, though one ‘increasingly under threat in the lifework regime’ (p1). Now, the authors argue, ‘we are living through a generalised diminishing of désoeuvrement’ (p6), as it becomes increasingly difficult to make an ‘imaginative leap to ‘something that is not work” (p5). As work has crept into so many areas of life and so many areas of life have come to be conceptualised in terms of work, the loss of the permanent career, or what the authors call the ‘tragedy of not being a baker’ (drawing on Richard Sennett), has also come to dominate much discussion of employment. The authors are cautious [End Page 214] not to implicitly romanticise older models, recognising the ways in which nostalgia for certain kinds of work has been a productive part of the politics of Brexit in Britain and MAGA in the USA. They avoid perpetuating the notion that being a university lecturer, for example, was nothing but brilliant before it came under the ‘tyranny of extraneous bullshit’ (p12) that arguably preoccupies so much time in so many professions now. Work has never been straightforward. The authors acknowledge this, describing precarity as ‘a grim kind of stable norm in itself ’ (p17).
Under current conditions, the authors argue, when an increasing ‘porousness between the lives of the unemployed and those in low-pay employment’ is accompanied by ‘new powers for the state to expel people from the economy and polity altogether’ (pxi), there is a need for a ‘totally new vocabulary for talking about employment and unemployment’ (p50). Chapter two, ‘Work Expulsions’, features the analysis of Lucien Freud’s painting ‘The Benefits Supervisor Sleeping’ (1995) as a springboard for thinking about differing perspectives on worklessness as unemployment and offers two new terms. The first, malemployment, denotes a break in any conventional binary opposition of employment/unemployment and emphasises the ways in which it has become ‘hard to firmly tell the difference’ (p64) between the two. Unemployment has...
