Doing stuff
The television show “Deadliest Catch” depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another, “Dirty Jobs,” shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. “Dilbert,” “The Office” and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs…
m.c.:
Like Matthew Crawford, Robert Pirsig, the author of “Zen and the Art of Motercycle Maintainence” was a philosophy grad student at the Univ. Chicago for a time. The book tackles some of the issues of working with your mind vs. working with your hands. One passage I remember is when he is debating one of the faculty the concept of what is True & what is Good are at odds. I think this comes directly from Plato, Socrates probably would’t have subscribed to this idea, imo. From Plato perhaps straight to Machiavelli(but wait he committed the sin of letting the cat out of the bag by telling everyone!)
Democracy can’t live very long(like a patient without Oxygen) without a lot of Truth….
4 June 2009, 12:15 pmDa Buffalo Amongst wolves:
I live in a town 90 miles South of San Francisco where they treat you like a vagrant if your work entails getting dirty or working with your hands. The city made a concerted efforts over the last thirty years or so to eliminate anything but ‘shopping mall’ type ‘face work’ work and build only expensive ($2000/mo) housing for the computer industry workers who never, except perhaps a short window from the late 80s to mid-90s, forced almost all the local lower working class and working poor to leave, along with many of their own children.
This isn’t the ONLY place in America where that’s happened. Research Triangle Park and the region around it in Stan’s neck of the woods has most likely experienced the same type of, dast I say? (dast! dast!)
Class War.
4 June 2009, 6:05 pmMichael Anderson:
And now the class war has come full circle, as the followers of the “knowledge economy” (they could be considered the “journeymen” of the field) are being cut loose to drift.
A fine article, Stan…the demon liberal NYT does have its redeeming moments! I have done a lot of odd jobs in my “life” (I won’t say “career”) as a musician trying to make a living (and trying not be a “star”); taught myself some things about carpentry, auto mechanics, plumbing, and woodworking (took the much-maligned shop class in high school), out of sheer economic necessity.
I found this article a redeeming look at the currently out-of-favor “well rounded” education—teaching your brain how to “think about how you think”, know your subject (scholarship again), and doing something real with it. This type of life and thinking, of course, is a threat to those Corporatist critters who want to keep us in an ignorant slave mentality.
You certainly won’t get it at Hah-vahd.
Owned a British motorcycle for some years, a BSA—it WAS an exercise in patience and attention to detail. I prided myself that no one could steal it on the quick, because I was the only one who knew the procedure to kick-start it correctly.
5 June 2009, 12:10 pmKim Sky:
this story is close to my heart. for most of my adult life, most of it. in the beginning of my working history, i was a farm laborer and then up the scale (as minimum wage is lower for farm labor) to dish washing, all through university — dish washer, got to know my Hobart well.
Then, the discovery of computer work, and computer programming.
I always have wondered, how can this be a job, what in the heck am i doing, what is this insane place where we take lunch breaks, eat lots of food and return for more insanity. What in the hell?
This world has been so phyco for my soul that i escape, travel the world, do anything, hitchhike, live on the streets, whatever –> seeking “reality”.
It’s a bizarre world we live in. If I could have my way I’d turn the world upside down, honor the lowest, the farm laborer FIRST, he’s the one that feeds us and gets paid the least. Then progress up the scale, reversing all of it. The people with the best jobs getting paid the least.
5 June 2009, 12:40 pmJames M:
On the topic of “estranged labor”:
I used to produce video “news” segments for a company that interviewed tech entrepreneurs — typically young startup-founders, of the type who frequent wine bars and aim for billionaire retirements in their early thirties … some of them big names, owners of web properties we’ve all heard of. Some were also doing smaller-league stuff, like making little time-wasting iPhone game apps, things like that.
But with all of them, in every interview, this term kept popping up: “Exit Strategy.” As in, what’s your exit strategy for this business? At first I thought, what are we, entangled in a foreign occupation here? What are they talking about?
Eventually I picked up what they meant. The exit strategy has to do with the amount of money you want to cash out with when you sell your business to a bigger fish – a google or microsoft or whomever; you set a target amount and make your moves accordingly. The exit strategy, I also came to learn, is something you calculate at the very beginning, when you’re making your business plan. In the corporate parlance, it is “integral to the founding vision of the company.”
And I thought, am I weird to be the only one who’s flabbergasted by this notion? This idea that one founds a company not for the purpose of providing a useful service (if it happens, it happens as a side effect,) but for the main goal of one day selling out to another company? And that this is (usually with these folks) consideration number one from the get-go? Such dogwaggery is everywhere evident and of course fundamental to capitalism … but I guess it was just its stark and bald-faced presentation to me that came as a shock.
Obviously most of us have to abide by this logic, with lesser payouts – we take jobs whose usefulness in the greater scope of things is questionable at best; we participate, straight-faced, in quotidian absurdities (and with this job, the absurdities abounded …) for a paycheck.
Right now, I am in the process of seeking out more meaningful work.
Anyway, this was a wonderfully insightful article … thanks for linking it.
6 June 2009, 2:24 pmm.c.:
In the 1990′s, one of the major periodicals,(I think it was a monthly, Harpers or the Atlantic?) published two essays side-by-side by professors from CCNY & the Univ. Virginia, about the state of higher education in the U.S. I don’t remember their names and I haven’t refound the articles but a few points I do remember. The CCNY prof. wrote that most of his students were part-time evening, recent immigrants, minority, and working class hungry to learn. In contrast, the UVA students for the most part were white, upper & upper-middle class, politically apathetic, many members of fraterities & sorities with hefty membership fees. Not dumb but ambitious in a smugly materialistic way(YUPPIE), nor the type to question authority. They might make good jury members but wouldn’t likely rock the boat. The prof. went on to say that when he was a student in the 60′s, campus environments were noticeably different.
If anyone can find the issue, I would be grateful to reread them in their entirety.
7 June 2009, 3:07 pmAllen Lynn:
I come from a working class family. I grew up helping my father and uncles do all manner of manual labor; masonry, carpentry, grave digging, landscaping, etc. I ended up getting a BA on the GI Bill and an MA through a Peace Corps Fellowship. Now I’m working on a PhD with funding from an assistantship. You don’t have to be rich to be here, just monetarily creative. And while I am amazed by the intellectual sharpness of many of the professors running around this place, there is nothing funnier than watching some of these geniuses trying to pour piss out of a boot (with the instructions on the heel). Whatever happened to the idea of a Renaissance (wo)man? I think that the concept of multi-tasking needs to be reworked. Why not promote multi-usefullness? We’d get alot more piss out of the boot.
8 June 2009, 7:59 amStan:
The word is “generalist.” We are too specialized, we get just a piece of some totality that we know how to do, which disables us outside the context of Big Boss and a room full of specialists. Some people liked that because a lot of specialization for the middle class involved (until recently) a well-paying gig in a nice air-conditioned place where you still smell like bath soap at the end of the day. The downside, apart from having to go to the gym after work if you want to continue to “market” yourself as a sexual commodity or stave off a future case of diabetes, is that the work is mind-numbing and dissociated from the bodies of actual humans, and there is no space for creativity. We are trained for this — numbing minds and bodies, and stifling initiative and creativity — in an institution called public schooling, with its six-hour-a-day seats for kids (!) and the Pavlov bells that ring throughout the day compelling us to herd ourselves to the next set of seats.
Ding. It is also the sound that signals the end of your treadmill session, so you can go do your obligatory ab-work.
There is a scene in the film, Michael Clayton, where Karen Crowler (sp?), the corporate general counsel for a Monsanto-like weed-killer corp, is alone in a corporate gym, tearing along to nowhere on a treadmill, as two professional henchmen are doing espionage and murder to give her a win in a multi-billion dollar lawsuit. Her character in that movie is one that strikes me as demon-possessed… her overwhelming ambition to succeed (at a man’s game, where she is the only woman) puts her in touch with the hit-man who appears almost like a Faustian intermediary. Alone, she appears to vacillate between being a meat puppet for her next performance, and being overcome with anxious sweating, indigestion, and the terror of one possessed.
Captivity remains my own favorite metaphor for our condition; we are the devil’s hostages, trapped in a kind of Bosch-world of un-naturalness, driving and medicating and performing and having our jaws bounced open-and-shut like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
9 June 2009, 5:02 amSean:
I love the reference to Michael Clayton, Stan. As a former corporate lawyer who quit for many of the reasons suggested by the primary essay and the comments here, I saw too many familiar things in Tilda Swinton’s character that you mentioned. Ken Howard’s character was a lot like the “exit strategy” people mentioned in James M’s post above. What matters in the majority of American corporate (and non-corporate) businesses is profit, not utility. We get boatloads of excuses offered by “economists,” shills whose role it is to defend and justify predatory practices and dehumanizing jobs. The average American can’t sift through all that, most opt to punt and just accept the “economist” as an expert of sorts, and then just keep plodding along in a dehumanizing job simply because it offers money. To question the system, or any aspect thereof? It’s heretical to many!
9 June 2009, 2:26 pmmatt:
I’m sorry, but however much i want to divorce Crawford’s insightful observations on Gen-Y oblivion and in some cases outright narcissism, he’s still a Harvard Phd. having fun with toys, all the while trying to identify with some kind of Proletariat mysticism he gets from having the PRIVILAGE to work on motorcylces. whoop-dee-doo. I’ve been a butcher for seven years now, following my graduation from WCU (earning a degree in Anthropology). My best freind Rob is a Lieutenant Firefighter who’s worked in an adjacent metal shop for going on 9 years. We’ve finally saved up enough money to go to China for a year, somehting Mr. Crawford could have done on a sabbatical. The truth is Crawford is a condescending ass. I assure you, Rob, me , and others in our position would kill for a chance at a higher paying job where we twiddle our thumbs for 8 plus hours. You can shove your working class romanticism, Mr. Crawford, you should be thankful you have the resources to write a book, teach, publish, and pretend to be an Average Joe on the side. The song “Holiday in Cambodia” was specifically written for folks like you.
22 July 2009, 9:19 pm