This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence–to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as … Continue reading “Introduction”
First, a word about what these thoughts, and we, are not. We write not as archivists, historians, or even critics of what has been called the Occupy Movement, nor for that matter as particularly historicizing readers of Walt Whitman’s … Continue reading “Never the Usual Terms: A Song for 21st Century Occupations”
Marcia D. works at a suicide prevention center in California. Her job is emotionally draining and requires a great deal of dedication. As with other social workers, Marcia probably got involved in such work because of her commitment to … Continue reading “Burnout, Reaganomics, and the Waning of Empire”
In perhaps the jauntiest Broadway ditty ever written to punctuate that precious moment before everything falls apart — “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” from Lerner and Lowe’s Camelot (1960) — King Arthur and Guinevere, speculate about the amusements … Continue reading “Downton Abbey and the Fantasy of Structured Idleness”
“What does Occupy Wall Street want?” This anxious media meme was yoked to the increase of Occupy protests in 2011. Against the backdrop of other, more angry, characterizations of the Occupy protestors as deservedly unemployed, lazy, or overinvested[1] in idealistic … Continue reading “"Preferring Not To" in the Age of Occupy”
“What if they say I’m no good?” Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) asks his girlfriend Jennifer Parker (Claudia Wells) during an early scene from Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 blockbuster Back to the Future. “What if they say, ‘Get outta here kid, … Continue reading “Back to the Future and the Politics of Potential”
As expected, twenty cigarettes are consumed in James Benning’s latest experimental feature, 20 Cigarettes (2011). In a series of portraits that borrow from (as Benning has explained in interviews) but also depart from Andy Warhol’s iconic Screen Tests, the … Continue reading “Smoke Break”
If the events of history, as Karl Marx once famously argued, happen first as tragedy and recur as re-enacted farce, the reoccurrence of any number of harbingers of doom typical of the last great global recession of the 1970s … Continue reading “Retromania, the Canon, the Refusal to Work and the Present: The Crassical Connection”
The concept of a “jobless recovery” offers just one more example of the many ways that work is not working as a system of income allocation, pathway to individual achievement, or mode of social belonging. And yet, the only … Continue reading “Imagining Non-Work”
