Dead Man Working

Today, as the streets of London are still smoldering, the truly unsettling question is: ‘what does a little girl want’?

As a number of thinkers including Nietzsche remind us, only kids can ignore power and thus reformat themselves in this fashion.

They take this from Nietzsche who said we must move from the camel who carries too much, to the lion who fights too much, to the child who simply lets go and starts to live again on its own terms.

We think it involves a process of de-working our bodies and social relations, separating life from that which has now colonized it. This means not mistaking the commonwealth that we produce together for capitalism. Not mistaking life and its conduct for work. Not mistaking the body and its sensibilities for a human resource. Not mistaking self-direction and its improvisational energies for the injunction to work or the boss function.

Here, we do well to reconsider the economist Albert O. Hirschman’s classic essay on the three key responses to the corporation: ‘loyalty’ (we remain truthful to the enterprise and internalize its commands), ‘voice’ (we protest the injustices of work by making our voices heard) and ‘exit’ (we simply withdraw from the relationship altogether). Of course, all of these responses are now untenable. Loyalty is outrageous. And protest, as we have seen, merely puts us on the radar for the next wave of downsizing, or even worse, identifies us as a prime candidate for the next round of promotions. Exit, finally, is marginally more tenable. The problem is where do we go? Now, for all intents and purposes we are the corporation. And how do you escape yourself?

When one of the author’s colleagues recently retired, he said that he sometimes dreamt of dying in a meeting, ‘because the transition from life to death would be absolutely minimal’.

For Graw this is ‘the pressure to use and, inevitably, instrumentalize your friendships; the pressure to communicate, to produce and glean information; the pressure to show up in person and to be present; the pressure to perform convincingly; the pressure to look good, to stay fit, to be one’s own product, to sell oneself, and to market one’s own life’.

In her recent essay ‘When Life Goes to Work’, Isabelle Graw deepens this connection between the artist and the post-industrial employee by demonstrating how Andy Warhol would now be considered the ideal worker. The flamboyant wig-wearing pop-artist is every progressive manager’s wet dream. He is anticonformist, socially skilled, and immensely creative. But more importantly, he displays a particular attitude towards work and life, one where the two are almost indistinguishable. Warhol hated relaxation as much as he hated vacations. ‘Even having fun meant working, since he used every social occasion (such as parties) in order to “get more portraits” or “more ideas” or to “sell more ads for Interview”’.

The dead man working, in this sense, is similar to the anonymous victim in James Cameron’s film Aliens. The doomed heroes discover the young woman encased in alienslime, being used to incubate and hatch terrible creatures. Presuming she is dead, we are horrified when she opens her eyes, quietly begging: ‘please kill me … please kill me!’ She demands a second death, a real death. Similarly, we can imagine the stockbroker on the underground late at night, silently humming a tune playing on his iPod: ‘suicide is painless’.

Rather than responding to the persistent command to work by engaging in healthy alternatives, it is here suggested that the only vacation we can realistically hope for is provided through illness. When we have been officially declared sick, equipped with a recognized doctor’s certificate, we are given a momentary break. For a second, we are left alone. As David Harvey observed, ‘sickness is defined under capitalism broadly as inability to work’. Yes, we can breathe, but this rest does not last for long. Most sicknesses too soon come to an end. The sad truth is that although this strategy might allow for a momentary break, it still is, like the floatation tank and adult babies, defined more by what it is not (the tyranny of work) than by its own positive qualities. As Lucas concludes, ‘if sickness is all we have, it offers little hope for meaningful resistance.’