work, ... and thoughts about suicide

This is a scattered archive of anti-work politics that sometimes brushes up against and overlaps with depression. It is experimental, as I want to trace and notice various pop cultural, artistic, and academic investigations that feel their way through our depressing (bio)political climate. It is one sided, but then again, we already know the ways in which people value the virtue of work. While surviving in our politically ‘walking dead’ present, where the next urgency always unfolds into the next (rapidly), (where) can depression serve? How does work continue to inflict itself, occupy lives, and shatter imagination and better (unknown) fantasies?  This blog will be accompanied with experimental writing, that is excited to amateurly dabble in run on sentences, fragmented thoughts, digressive rants, listless wanderings and wonderings, and daydreaming. And to try and be a bit polemical.    

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

daydreams in this sense induce desires for different futures, experimentst with ways to fulfill them, and enjoy their imagined satisfaction. daydreams are not utopias, but in them we might nonetheless catch a glimpse of the same Not-Yet-Conscious that animates utopian thinking; nascent expressions of political reason and imagination inspired by the desire for and will to new and better forms of life, even if only in this limited and-in bloc's estimation-unambitious form

Kathi weeks, ‘the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwar imaginaries’

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

daydreaming is often treated as an embarrassment, not only for the lack it represents-a lapse in concentration, a waste of time, an interruption of productive activity-but for what it reveals of our immoderate desires to be and have more, an excess of social desire comparable to the libidinal excesses that can fuel the sleeping dream

Kathi weeks, ‘the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwar imaginaries’

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

the not-yet-conscious-this capacity for thinking and wanting the future-can be discovered in a wide variety of practices and artifacts. One place where Bloch locates it, although only in incipient form, is in the act of daydreaming. Although many examples of mundane protoutopianism could be used to illustrate the argument about the ubiquity of utopian desires and imagination, the daydream seems a particularly appropriate instance to consider because, like utopia itself, it is so often doubly discredited as at once wasteful and trivial; a notoriously unproductive use of time-indeed, perhaps the epitome of an 'idle indulgence'-and , compared to the night dream, a superficial phenomenon without the same psychological heft and depth

Kathi weeks, ‘the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwar imaginaries’

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

Sometimes doing gender might be treated as part of doing the job; at other times doing the job is part of what it means to do gender

Kathi weeks, ‘the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwar imaginaries’

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

to say that work is organized by gender is to observe that it is a site where, at a minimum, we can find gender enforced, performed, and recreated. workplaces are often structured in relation to gendered norms and expectations. waged work and unwaged work alike continue to be structured by the productivity of gender-differentiated labor, including the gender division of both household roles and waged occupations

Kathi weeks, ‘the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwar imaginaries’

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

in other words, the wage relation generates not just income and capital, but disciplines individuals, governable subjects, worthy citizens, and responsible family members. indeed, given its centrality both to individuals' lives and to the social imaginary, work constitutes a particularly important site of interpellation into a range of subjectivities. It is for example, a key site of becoming classed

Kathi weeks, ‘the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwar imaginaries’

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

despite Marx's insistence  that waged work for those without other options is a system of 'forced labor', it remains for the most part an abstract mode of domination. In general, it is not the police or the threat of violence that force us to work, but rather a social system that ensures thet working is the only way that most of us can meet our basic needs

Kathi weeks, ‘the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwar imaginaries’

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

raising children with attributes that will secure them forms of employment that can match if not surpass the class of their parents is the gold standard of parenting. in addition, 'making people capable of working is,' as Nona Glazer notes, 'the central goal of schooling, a criterion of successful medical and psychiatric treatment, and an ostensible goal of most welfare policies and unemployment compensation programs.'

Kathi weeks, ‘the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwar imaginaries’

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

one is its reification: the fact that at present one must work to "earn a living" is taken as part of the natural order rather than as a social convention. consequently, as c. wright mills observes (in one of the epigraphs above), we tend to focus more on the problems with this or that job, or on their absence, than on work as a requirement, as a system, work as a way of life.

Kathi weeks, ‘the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwar imaginaries’

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

particularly when we include the time spent training, searching, and preparing for work, not to mention recovering from it-would suggest that the experience warrants more consideration. work is crucial not onlyy to those whose lives are centered around it, but also, in a society that expects people to work for wages, to those whoa re spelled or excluded from work and marginalized in relation to it. perhaps more significantly places of employmentt and spaces of work would seem to be supremely relevant to the very bread and butter of political science: as sites of decision making, they are structured by relations of power and authority, as hierarchical organizations , they raise issues of consent and obedience, as spaces of exclusion, they pose questions about membership and obligation.

Kathi weeks, ‘the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwar imaginaries’

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

what is perplexing is less the acceptance of the present reality that one must work to live than the willingness to live for work

Kathi weeks, ‘the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwar imaginaries’

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

and the overwork that often characterizes even the most privileged forms of employment-after all, even the best job is a problem when it monopolizes so much of life

Kathi weeks, ‘the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwar imaginaries’

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

Why do we work so long and so hard? The mystery here is not that we are required to work or that we are expected to devote so much time and energy to its pursuit, but  rather that there is not more active resistance to this state of affairs.

Kathi weeks, ‘the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwar imaginaries’ 

[humansoflatecapitalism]

[workandthoughtsaboutsuicide-blog]

In this chapter, I want to argue that norms surface as the surfaces of bodies; norms are a matter of impressions, of how bodies are ‘impressed upon’ by the world, as a world made up of others. In other words, such impressions are effects of labour; how bodies work and are worked upon shapes the surfaces of bodies. Regulative norms function in a way as ‘repet- itive strain injuries’ (RSIs). Through repeating some gestures and not others, or through being orientated in some directions and not others, bodies become contorted; they get twisted into shapes that enable some action only insofar as they restrict capacity for other kinds of action.

Queer feelings, the cultural politics of emotion

[coocoolah-deactivated20190601]

When any discourse is polarized, those not directly involved in the conflict tend to assume that the truth of the matter lies in the middle between the extremes of opinion expressed. This is a dangerous tendency that has often resulted in giving more credibility to messages of hate-mongering groups than they deserve.

Gayle S. Rubin, “Misguided, Dangerous, and Wrong” [1993] in Deviations (256)