LIFE AS WORK, an introduction
1. The New Religion You are standing in an open field. The year is 2000-n-L8
Envision a dissolution of all foundational western mythologies like christianity, modern rationalism, the welfare state. Computer algorithms controlling the stock market. Countries being tossed around on the international ocean of economy. Art institutions turning into art supermarkets turning into predatory brand strategies. Politics as pure performance, populist rhetorics as the norm of discourse. No collective revolutionary subject, no manifest destiny, no founding fathers...
In this void, the contemporary post-industrial system re-enacts the great dream of religion. It has invented it’s own symbols, rituals and liturgies around the image of infinite growth. Success on its terms becomes your only moral duty.
Because there is no alternative, the moral ideal of a human becomes that of someone who learns to love the system: Just do what you love, love what you do (as long as your desire is aligned with the master-desire of capital), and your work will contain its own gratification.
2. The Social Factory The factory has no walls, it's all around, URL and IRL; “Hurry up with my damn croissants"
As industrial production has become mostly displaced to third world countries, business in the west is increasingly shifting towards knowledge production, marketing and trading of services. The assembly line is replaced by the network. The machine is internalized. Value is no longer extracted from labor time because production can't be isolated from other social activity. Call it a general economy, a rhizome, a co-operation between brains; everybody is producing and being produced, all the time.
Because working implies being connected, being connected means working. The prime questions of economy center on the production of subjectivity and the core product of this Social Factory is humans themselves. Individual creativity becomes the key potential for wealth and job creation. Your personality is a packaging, and your behaviors are actants of cultural moves. To talk is to produce, to have a voice is to have a product.
3. The Attention Economy Call of duty advanced warfare on speed; everyone's a DJ with chronic attention deficit
Overabundance of information creates a poverty of attention. Our brains are constantly bombarded by brands, pop stars, porn, gadgets, games, spam & glam. Ideas compete against each other in a state of constant guerrilla warfare, all against all. “The marketplace is not a ladder, it's a jungle gym”. And as you know from fashion, one day you're in. And the next day, you're out. Differentiate or die trying!
Knowledge only produces value if it is adopted. That is to say: any creative idea that is not imitated is socially non-existent and has no value. The value of knowledge is multiplied by its diffusion, the speed and range of its circulation. As a producer of ideas, you need to “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere”. And when your idea is adopted, it becomes public property and you must lose power over it: The reading/meaning of a socially present idea must become a network of multiple voices.
4. The Enterprise of the Self You're running on a treadmill, sweating, listening to the audiobook of ‘Infinite Jest'
It is only natural you feel a bit anxious, afraid of missing out. Adaptation and self-enhancement become the foremost strategies in upholding and survival under the status quo. The pause-button has been removed, the process is constant. You exercise, eat healthy, meditate, study, cultivate yourself. Everything serves the same purpose: optimizing effectivity. And where no regulations apply, your self-exploitation has no limits beyond your physical restrictions, and even those are bendable, life can be hacked.
As an atomised and specialized worker, you are now required to put your sensibilities, your passions, your knowledge and your social skills to work. You become highly adaptable, nomadic, rootless & restless, constantly multitasking & networking. You participate in defining cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and public opinion.
Action means performing. That is: the real substance of "who you are" can only be in the act: you doing, you performing, you becoming. It is through this performance of who you are that you manifest yourself as co-creator of the reality you inhabit, it is where your life becomes meaningful. Politicality doesn't exist anymore as a separate domain of action but flows through all layers of society and culture. Your actions are the direct manifestation of your politics.
Your “network-self” functions much like a cellular organism: it’s alive when it’s linked to its environment. If the ties are cut, if the links are broken, it dies. Your network, your contacts and your platforms define your your street (and web) cred, that is your social capital, that is your network power.
The corpus of works you’ve produced is only a preview of your self-work-in-process. So free your process-mind and your product-ass will follow! And forget the impossible demand for authentic authenticity, we are all actors now: the persona is a Mask, and just like in the Jim Carrey film, the Mask has its own life, its own desires, its own affects. This is who you are in the eyes of others. The avatar, the simulacra, the image of you. Fake it until you fake it (again).
5. Life as Work Make it. Own it.
Let's start by giving up the old antagonistic division between life and work. That is, "work" meaning remunerated time, and "life" meaning free-time for consumption, me-time for recreation, quality-time with the family, etc.
To Live is to be present; to Work is to produce an impact. There's no pause-button to either. This is the game we're already playing, whether we are willing to admit it or not. But the rules of this game are still changeable. We need new conceptions and vocabularies to re-evaluate and reshape the world we live in. If taken a step further, where could this development lead us? What possibilities could open up if we refuse to play by the book and seek to redefine the terrain of life and work?
This particular kidnapping of the concept of work starts from approaching work from the inside out: not to define work as choices between this or that normative package: a “graphic designer”, an “architect”, a “shoe seller”, an “artist”. Rather, the question is: What is the distinct imprint you're trying to achieve, by being here? What’s your life’s work?
"We prefer that people voice their grievances in the form of art. In fact, the more noise art makes, the better -- dissatisfaction circulates inside the arts, and the world can go on regardless. For the system of the world, art functions like a safety valve, taking the pressure of change away from the system’s integral structures." (Charles de Ganahl Koch, chief executive officer of Koch Industries)
In terms of art’s employment by society, art context is being pushed to the role of an isolation tank: free within, but disconnected from the system that runs the society itself. That’s why we’re mostly somewhere else. Life as Work is a company, a facilitation expert group, a think tank, an NGO, an activist front, a lobbying group… you name it, and we will be it.
During the week long LIFE as Work -workshop participants will work on themselves. They will be given the time, even the duty, to work on themselves, to fabricate meanings for their presence in the world. Welcome to the Instrumental Age.