A long time ago, as a hopeful undergrad, I bought a copy of each of Eric Hobsbawm's "Age of" books. As a young, white, middle-class man, something about the taxonomic certainty of the titles appealed, embodying as they did a sort of imperial drive to categorise. Dividing up European history into four ages - of … Continue reading Thoughts on Thompson
Both ‘work’ and ‘job’ are key words today. Neither had its prominence three hundred years ago. Both are still untranslatable from European languages into many others. Most languages never have one single word to designate all activities that are considered useful. Some languages happen to have a word for activities demanding pay. This word usually … Continue reading The Book I’m Currently Writing, Take 3
Having finished the two Foucault lecture series I wanted to read, I’ve moved on to critique of Foucault. Gentle critique, it must be said, in that the book I’m now reading is Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller’s Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Rose and Miller have been working in the governmentality … Continue reading On the Neoliberal employment bargain
I want to pick up where last week’s post left off, because there were a few more titbits from Birth of Biopolitics that will have bearing on what I’m trying to do. After he makes the claim that Marx’s theory of labour power rendered the worker inert, Foucault moves on to talk about the idea … Continue reading Foucault, Arendt, Human Capital, and Consumption.
So, after my last post, I’ve been given the green light to keep publishing on the blog. It was all a bit of a formality in the end, but given how much synergy there is between the day to day of my job and the stuff I’ve been reading on Governmentality, it was a worthwhile … Continue reading Foucault on Work
A few months ago I posted a working definition of work. I've been becoming more and more unhappy with it as time's worn on. It's far too materialist, for starters. It won't deal with the psychic or emotional effects of work on our lives. As Steven Salaita puts it in his recent post on post-academic … Continue reading Work is an Ordering Principle
One of the perils of this sort of blogging is that you don't ever really get to go back and add stuff in, that's less blogging and more drafting, and is as such reserved for the writing process proper. Nevertheless, these two tidbits add some depth to prevous posts. For my post on Graeber's Bullshit … Continue reading Two Codas
