Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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“You work your day doing something you’re not proud of, and you decompress at night with television and whisky”

the industrial economy seduced us into believing is that the deal was simple: You work your day doing something you’re not proud of, and you decompress at night with television and whisky, and on weekends you can go for a run. Right? Do that forever, and forty years from now you’re dead — that’s the deal. And we sold that deal to a lot of people.

– Seth Godin interviewed here

Can this be reduced to ‘neoliberal governmentality’? I don’t think so and yet I find myself extremely uncomfortable with the degree to which this extract personally resonated with me and the fact my first inclination was to post it in the ‘craft’ rather than theory section of my blog.

Nonetheless, I find it an inspiring sentiment: embracing creativity and embracing uncertainty go hand-in-hand, the impulse towards security is inevitably sclerotic, postponing creative fulfilment in the interests of material comfort is likely to prove deadening etc. There’s also a sense in which this accords with my understanding of buddhism i.e. we believe that if we work to arrange the pieces of our life into the ‘correct’ order then we will achieve a lasting happiness, however in doing so we further ensnare ourselves within illusory beliefs about the permanence of things and the permanence of our selves.

But I also can’t get away from how perfectly the ethos expressed fits the structural demands of the contemporary creative industries. No job security? Fine, it will just deaden your creative impulse anyway! Declining real wages? Who needs money anyway, if it constitutes a retreat from authenticity! The need to be continually flexible and to adapt to changing circumstances and demands? Great, it will help you be more alive.

I’m not happy with the idea of reducing this ethos to ‘neoliberal governmentality’ but I’m equally unhappy to accept it on its own terms. I’ve been reading an interesting book on Digital Labour recently, inspired by Autonomist Marxism, which seems well attuned to this dilemma but I’m not convinced they’ve resolved it. Their purported refusal to dismiss the ‘pleasures’ of digital labour while critiquing it seems little more than notional.

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