To fear, or not to fear, the Reaper? Pt.2

What is labor-time, and what the hell does turning towards death mean? These are the questions. Part 2.

In this episode we start unpacking the strategy of making "work," strange. We start with the psychological weight carried by deeply held beliefs and why a sense of disruption may be necessary before any critical examination of concepts like work. We touch a bit on Freud, Heidegger, and the joys of German compound nouns.

As promised, the link for David McRaney's conversation at Dragoncon 2014:
 https://youtu.be/SuPKUXz3edU?si=YwAc3dEZ809HwjVn 

Obligatory bibliography, or books you may also want to check out. I've not included links to purchase since, one, I recommend checking your local bookstore or library, and two, Amazon isn't about to go out of business because I didn't send them a few extra clicks.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Bantam Matrix. 1967
Heidegger, Martin, and David Farrell Krell. "The Question Concerning Technology," in Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964). New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008.
Heidegger, Martin, John Macquarrie, and Edward Robinson. Being and Time. Malden: Blackwell, 2013.
McRaney, David. You are not so smart : why you have too many friends on Facebook, why your memory is mostly fiction, and 46 other ways you're deluding yourself. Gotham Books/Penguin Group, New York. 2011

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other existential, phenomenological, mythological, ontological, and socio-political questions regarding Work (Life and Death). I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 3: To fear, or not to fear, the Reaper? How do we make work strange, and what the hell does turning towards death mean? These… are the questions. Pt. 2

Alright, time to get into the nuts and bolts of this ‘towards meaningful work’ argument-thing. As noted last week, we’re going to start unpacking what it means to ‘make work “strange.”’ But first, a little psychology as to why this even matters. Freud begins section IV of Beyond the Pleasure Principle with the following, “What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection.” Interestingly, here Freud starts stepping out of psychology per se and essentially into what we’d now call Philosophy of Mind; and what he’s doing is essentially caveating, as his primary audience was intended to be other psychologists. Also, interestingly, much of his speculation about the formation of the brain/mind has proven true in the century since this text was written. 

Now, why I say brain-slash-mind, hyper short version for anyone not familiar with the mind/body problem, Philosophy of Mind, this is essentially investigation into the idea of mind/body monism (it being one and the same thing) or dualism (their being 2 distinct things – the “mind” as consciousness, soul, spirit, etc. as distinct from the body, i.e., the brain; and modern Philosophy of Mind taking neuroscience and neurology very seriously along with epistemology (the philosophical study of ‘how we know’ and what is knowledge) and phenomenology (the philosophical study of the objectively real, taking account of the fact that any such study, by a human being, is conducted subjectively – now, if that sounds complicated, well, that’s because it is). The important takeaway here, for our purposes, is that, phenomenologically, consciousness is always “consciousness-of.”

Alright. Back to Freud.  

Frued points out that we humans, like all other animals, operate on the Pleasure Principle – that we move towards pleasure and away from pain – if you’ve heard that before and never read any psychology, you can thank Freud's son-in-law Edward Bernays, the so-called “Father of Public Relations” and propaganda pioneer, who ‘borrowed’ his famous father-in-law’s work and applied it to politics and business, redefining the point of both from providing solutions to needs and other problems, to manipulating the masses into believing they had needs and problems to begin with that the salesman can solve – now, I’m not trying to say this was a new idea, but what Bernays did was elevate it to a science.

In 2006 I briefly worked for a Toyota dealership, and sales training day one still included that line about people buy cars because they are either moving toward pleasure or away from pain. Sales 101, you’re not selling a product, you’re selling a solution. 

Okay, Freud notes that a major factor that distinguishes us from the rest of the animals is the Reality Principle; our ability to choose to defer pleasure in the moment for a (perceived) greater pleasure in the future. 

Now, while there’s plenty here of interest, and we’ll come back to this later, the real key for us right now though is in Frued’s speculation about how the brain is formed and how the brain functions. Specifically, he notes that the primary function of the brain is not, in fact, to process stimuli. Actually, it’s the opposite. If the primary function of the brain was to process stimuli, we couldn’t function as we’d be constantly overwhelmed by stimulation. Instead, as the brain forms, it, Freud suggests, forms a “crust,” an outer layer that becomes resistant to most stimuli, so that the brain can take in and process only what actually matters. It’s fine to see a forest, but I don’t need to “see” every tree or “hear” every bird – I do; however, need to see the bear moving through the woods or hear the wolf growling from the ridge, and that is what the brain is really good at doing. It filters. 

Alright, think of it in DnD terms, what Frued is pointing to is like the distinction between active and passive perception. If I’m just strolling through the dungeon without searching for traps, I’m pretty likely to trigger one. Now, even searching, I’m not guaranteed to spot one either, but if I’m looking for it, my odds of finding it are a lot higher. You can also draw some parallels here with the Roman poet Juvenal’s “bread and circuses” or Marx’ “opium of the people,” with the idea that if the powerful can appease, placate, or otherwise pacify the masses, then the masses are going to go on strolling through the dungeon without searching for traps, or even realizing they’re in the dungeon rather than the castle proper. 

Freud states, “This little fragment of living substance [the consciousness systems] is suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli.” This would be the “crust,” the dead part that was sacrificed to build up a tolerance to the outside stimuli so the inner part could function. “By it’s death,” Freud goes on, “the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate – unless, that is to say, stimuli reach it which are so strong that they break through the protective shield. Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli.” It’s important to note here that, for Freud, for the brain, pleasure is not “pleasurable stimuli” but rather the lack of stimuli; quiet, stillness, serenity. 

The Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle state that, as rule, we function as follows; 1. That we move toward pleasure and away from pain, and, 2. That, since we can imagine, project, ourselves into the future, we can accept pain and defer pleasure for a perceived (or believed) greater future pleasure, and, finally, that mental pleasure is to be conceived as something like serenity. 

Now, from this, and as can be generally observed in human behavior, we tend toward the path of least resistance. Now, of course there are exceptions to this, such as the pleasure that can be derived from overcoming challenges or those individuals that derive pleasure from conflict, and this is totally putting aside, entirely, for now anyway, questions of sadism and masochism, but, generally speaking, as a species-being, we tend toward least resistance, if, for no other reason, to reserve energy for those challenges and obstacles that cannot and/or ought not be avoided. 

There’s a second, and I think really interesting, bit of psychology/neuroscience/Philosophy of Mind to address here, but it’s way too much to unpack for now; but, in brief, it’s as regards the aesthetics of disruption in making the invisible, visible.

Back in 2014, I attended a panel at Dragoncon where the author David McRaney gave a presentation on his book, “You Are Not So Smart” about the gaps and flaws in how we think about and perceive the world (cognitive dissonance, survivorship bias, the backfire effect, etc.) – if you’re interested, you can watch the whole presentation on YouTube, and I highly recommend it, I’ll leave a link in the show notes. This panel inspired me to something of a precursor argument to “Towards Meaningful Work” regarding the Aesthetics of Disruption. Specifically, in investigating a kind of disruption, in art and in our general experience of the world, that is subtle, nuanced, and felt internally when the interaction of perception and cognition are confronted by stimuli that don’t necessarily comport with what (we think) we know about the world. If something like the “well documented” backfire effect, in which the response to encountering evidence that contradicts our beliefs is to believe more strongly in those potentially debunked beliefs, prevents changing our thinking about them, then making work strange is an absolutely critical starting point to rethinking, as a society, our deeply held beliefs about work. 

Now, with that set up, now we can get to the first strategy, the project of making ‘work’ strange.

Making work “strange,” seeks to address work in its instrumentality, in its equipmentality – and then break that equipmentality, in order to make what work is a visible subject of critique. To try to accomplish this, I leaned heavily on Martin Heidegger’s essays, The Question Concerning Technology, and The Origin of the Work of Art. Between them, Heidegger lays out a means for questioning what lies at the heart, the essence, of a thing which is not solely or simply what is. I believe this is also the case with work. 

But, before going any further, I need to address the elephant in the room, or, in this case, the Nazis.

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher that lived from 1889 to 1976, and began teaching at the University of Freiburg in 1919 (a year before the official founding of the NSDAP, the Nazi party) So, in 1933, 3 months after the appointment of Hitler to Chancellor of Germany, Heidegger gets elected to the position of Rector (the head of the college) and 2 weeks later joins the Nazi party. Now, you could fill a small library with everything that has been written on Nazism, Nazi Germany, and how Nazism insinuated itself into and utterly dominated German daily life, not to mention the horrors of WWII and the lasting impact of Nazism on nearly the entire the world; so, I’m limiting this section strictly to Heidegger. Heidegger resigned his position as rector in ’33, arguably because of his differences with the party, but, notably, did not withdraw from the party and signed a “vow of allegiance” (required, to be fair, of all German university professors at that time) to Hitler and the party, he was removed from teaching by the party in ‘44 (at 55 years old) when he was conscripted to be a ditch-digger as the Nazis were now losing the war. After the war, the French sought to block him from teaching at all as part of the denazification of the Allied occupation zone of Germany. Ultimately he was found guilty of low-level collaboration and no actions were taken against him. He gave an interview to Der Spiegel, a German news magazine, that he asked not be published until after his death, titled “Only a God can Save Us” in which he defended his position as, 1. There having been no alternative to complying with the Nazi regime – an argument to which French existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre would argue, of course there’s an alternative, it may suck, but death is an alternative to collaboration, or, ‘just following orders’ – and, 2., that his “double-speak” (using the word “movement” rather than “Nazism”) would be understood by his students as being opposed to Nazism. 

Alright, personally, I find it difficult to reconcile Heidegger’s emphasis in Being and Time on Being-in-the-world and Being-with-Others as being fundamental, and positively fundamental, to human Being – to “Dasein” (his term for a being for whom Being matters) – with anything other than passive complicity with a totalitarian ruling regime. That said, being an existentialist myself, I have to concede that there is always an alternative and that one can always choose not to comply, even if that resistance means death. Perhaps Heidegger really thought he could affect some kind of change from within as a high-ranking university professor, or perhaps, that was his own post-hoc revisionism. I do not believe Heidegger’s complicity can or ought to be forgiven, but I do not believe his work ought to be forgotten either. 

So… consider what Heidegger has to say about the definition of technology in the Question Concerning Technology; 

"According to ancient doctrine, the essence of a thing is considered to be what the thing is… Everyone knows the two statements that answer our question [concerning technology, of what it is]. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together."

The same, I believe, is true for work. Heidegger describes this definition of technology as both means and activity as the “instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.” But technology, like work and art, is more than it’s instrumental or anthropological definitions. Work, like technology and art – or, to use the Greek term, as Heidegger does, techné which contains both – is, another Greek term, which I am probably mispronouncing – and to my Greek friends, feel free to hit me up about this later - a poiesis, a bringing-forth, and as such, work is not a thing, it is what is done in its doing; yet, like a thing, and unlike a Being, there is an essence to work. Thus, work can have meaning immanent to it (contained entirely within it) distinct from any meaning attributed to it (especially by the employer’s valuation). 

Alright, quick aside as far as Heidegger’s choice of language, for the non-Philosophy student, a Philosophy student, at the least a Graduate student, of Heidegger’s time, was expected, at the least, to be fluent in Greek, Latin, German, and French, many upper tier universities still require some version of this at the graduate level, or at least, here in the US, a tested, reading comprehension level in two foreign languages central to the student’s research focus. You may have also noticed there are times I emphasize the word Being more or less. This is because Heidegger uses the word, in different places, as either a noun or verb, and often uses phrases like the being (verb) of Being (proper noun). Okay, this is pretty easy to spot in German since nouns are capitalized, but can run pretty vague in English, especially spoken English. 

Alright, time to dig in! The meaning of “work.” 

Take, for example, Heidegger’s description of the chalice and the silversmith in his description of the causa efficiens (the efficient cause, basically, causality): The silversmith, in crafting the chalice from silver reveals something about the essence of the silver, reveals something about the essence of the chalice, and reveals something about himself as well. Heidegger uses the term technê, in its Greek usage, to describe that which contains both art and craft and lies at the root of technology.  Work is a technology in this sense of technê, to the extent that it is both the means by which work is accomplished as well as the accomplished labor itself.  Yet work is also poiesis, as technê belongs to poiesis in that technê belongs to "bringing-forth" – to that extent, there is a certain amount of work, or at least work properly conceived, which is poetry. It is an uncovering, a disclosing, to use Heidegger’s terminology, of the truth of something, in the sense of poetics – a revelation.  Continuing along the path of questioning Heidegger raises concerning technology while concerning work, work as technê/poiesis reveals the truth of work – that work is a bringing-forth.  

Let’s unpack that a bit, starting with the silver chalice. The efficient cause here, the causality happening, is that a silversmith has caused a chalice to come into being. There’s also the causa materialis, the physical matter, the silver the chalice is made from; the causa formalis, the form, the shape, of the chalice; and the causa finalis, what the chalice will ultimately be used for (religious ceremony, demonstration of wealth and/or power, art object, etc.). One revelation regards the silver, its materiality; its luster, its hardness, its coloration, its malleability, its durability, etc., as well as its material value – which is purely subjective, the desirability as property, as art, as jewelry, as investment, as currency, etc.

The second revelation is as chalice, which is not just a form that we recognize as such, but also its utility, how it is used – and the questions that arise as an art object. Is a chalice that sits on a pedestal in a museum still a chalice if no one ever drinks from it? A favorite example of this problem one of my undergrad professors, Dr. Michael Kelly, used, was ‘if an object is its utility, a chair is something I sit on, so if I sit on my desk, is my desk now a chair?’ And welcome to phenomenology, the study of the objectivity of things from a human, and thus always subjective (note, this does not mean ‘purely opinion’) point of view.

The third revelation is of the silversmith. The chalice they’ve created is revelatory of their skill as a silversmith, as an artisan, as an artist, potentially, of their taste and style, likely of the geographical and cultural situatedness, etc. The efficient cause, is the crafting of the chalice, this, by itself, is enough to bring the chalice into existence, but by doing so, both the chalice and the silversmith do more than just make or be a chalice. 

Another consideration for work, in this mode of questioning, is whether or not work can be an enframing.

Enframing, as Heidegger describes in Question Concerning Technology, “means the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e. challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means the way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that is itself nothing technological”

Okay, so, I think I’m fairly safe to say that Heidegger’s writing is a bit esoteric, especially considering the preponderance, especially in contemporary American philosophy, of ‘plain language.’ When I was studying works by Heidegger in college I found I often needed to read and re-read passages more than a few times, and every now and then found reading him almost meditative. His wording often comes across as repetitive, on face value, but he’s trying to get to the ontology, the phenomenological being, of things, and so he often really digs into words, manipulating words and grammar to force the reader to reconsider what they think they know.

To get Heidegger, or Husserl and others for that matter, it definitely helps to have a rudimentary understanding of German language and grammar, German compound nouns and Heidegger’s, hmmm.. noun-ification of verbs. I do not, by any means, speak German, unless you count ordering, you know,  “wieners mit krautt und brot und bier,” but I had taken German in High School and in community college, and it certainly helped.

Side note for anyone considering an Art History major, the 2 primary source languages for early art history scholarship, Kunstwissenschaft (literally, art science) are German and French. Any native language will help you studying that culture’s art, but early “art history” is principally written in those two.

Now, let's dig through his word salad that defines enframing. Heidegger refers to “the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon…” Alright, well, what the hell does that mean? Enframing is a gathering together, alright, that’s simple enough. We’re not thinking solely about the frame, but the enframing, and not in the sense of framing a picture, but in the sense of gathering together what is to be focused on. Okay, the “setting-upon,” with a hyphen, “that sets upon…” Heidegger is continuously referring throughout the essay to technology as the mode of “bringing-forth,” again, with a hyphen, of revealing, but enframing appears to do precisely the opposite. Rather than bringing forth, it sets upon, more so, it is the setting-upon (hyphenated, the quality of the action of setting upon, no hyphen) that does the setting upon. Lets pop back to the chalice, the chalice is capable of bringing forth, revealing, disclosing, the essence of the chalice, but I can also set upon the chalice a particular meaning, or order it in a particular fashion. If I set the chalice up in an art gallery I present the chalice one way, but if I set it on a church altar, I set upon it a different possible set of meanings, though in both cases the chalice is still immanently capable of revealing the essence of the chalice however it is enframed. Now, as Heidegger is referring to Technology, what Technology is in its being, we’re not speaking of the essence of a chalice, as far as what is enframed or set upon, but humanity.

The translation continues, enframing “challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.” Now, to be fair, Heidegger doesn’t say, “challenges him, to reveal…,” he writes, literally, challenges, the real in the means of ordering, to reveal as inventory, or stock (and, forgive my pronunciation again, but, herausfordert, das Wirkliche…). Personally, I think the translation as “challenges him” (and other similar passages in the essay) is just way too subject-specific for Heidegger as he’s otherwise focused on the ontology of technology and individual subjectivity is moving in the wrong direction.  

So, enframing is the gathering together of that which has the quality of the setting-upon, that itself sets upon humanity, and, specifically, challenges to reveal the real, in the manner of ordering as a standing-reserve (an inventory). 

Okay, well, what does all of this talk about enframing have to do with work?

A critical problem in the Question Concerning Technology is that in order to Question concerning technology, we need a way to think about technology in a way that is free, to thought, of and from the essence technology, as we are “everywhere… unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.”

Basically, we cannot experience the essence of technology, so long as we “merely represent and pursue the technological, put up with it, or evade it.” I believe precisely the same can be said about work. We are doomed to fail a questioning concerning work, and the work ethic, so long as we merely represent or pursue work, put up with it, or evade it.

So long as we continue to hold work up as an object, we fail to see what it is enframing, as a means,  which is what we are doing.

One possible way to make the standing reserve of work, surplus labor, visible is through the refusal of work – we’ll come back to this in detail when we get to Kathi Weeks.

Now, another way is to try to imagine the end of work (as it exists today in the present labor economy) or particular work. Would it really mean the end of work, or productivity, or the end of the world if all the telemarketing and other bullshit jobs disappeared? If work was no longer economically required, would all of humanity just suddenly cease doing anything? Capitalism has itself only existed for a tiny fraction of human history, a and the bullshitization of jobs, in late capitalist economies, for barely a generation, so what reason is there anyone ought actually believe the ‘end of capitalism’ is the end of work, and beyond that, the end of human civilization? How, and why, did work get so inextricably intertwined with capitalism? 

Alright, last couple of thoughts on Heidegger for today. He references “human resources” (not HR departments, but humans as an economic resource) as evidence of man’s existence as standing-reserve, as inventory. It is in the fact that we can be ordered about, made to do, organized as a resource of production, that we are evidenced as the standing-reserve of work. As in Heidegger’s analysis of Van Gogh’s Peasant Shoes in the Origin of the Work of Art – an essay we’ll get to later, addressing work’s equipmentality is to essentially put work up for all to see it as a strange object – an object other than what it appears to be; after all, the shoes in the painting of shoes are not actually shoes, they’re just paint – it’s with the aim of forcing work to disclose itself, in what it really is; a means, not an end.

If Work is a bringing-forth, an enframing, then the question is what is any particular work bringing forth? Is it creating? Or merely bringing forth more work? Bullshit jobs align with the latter. They’re not work, they’re labor.

This may seem at first to be a semantic difference but is actually crucial to approaching work as a meaningful expenditure of energy; especially if work, within it, contains the consumption of labor-time.  To spend one’s life laboring, working without creating, is to labor in futility – to squander one’s time.

However, if we are to make the project of making work strange more than theory, then we require a second, parallel strategy to confront the work-ethic besides addressing the essence of work. The worker must also be brought face-to-face with the anxiety that ought to arise at the prospect of squandering one’s life in futile labor, anxiety strong enough to overcome the present faith in capitalism and the internalized work-ethic. The worker must turn towards death.  

Okay, next week we get into this second strategy, so stay tuned for more Heidegger. I’ll try to stay as succinct as I can, especially as this is starting to get a bit heavy. My prescription for Heidegger? Go for a walk, snuggle up with your pet, or pets, or tuck in to your preferred emotional support beverage. 

Alright. 

‘til next week.

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