Work, Disenchanted

There's a good review of Ben Barber's book Consumed up at Spiked. Josie Appleton makes the persuasive point that Barber spends too much time recoiling in the face of consumption's contemporary tackiness and not enough time considering why and how that tackiness is a desperate attempt to make up for the disenchantment of work.

The enthusiasm with which people shop contrasts with the lack of enthusiasm with which they work. The work part of the day [...] is too often experienced as just a drag. In many Western cities, people start to live for Friday nights and the weekends: they live not for their work, but for the time after when they can have fun and let loose. They work not to work, but to make money to enjoy life and forget about work.

[...] Barber elides many of the nuances in today’s consumerist culture. He elides the contradiction between work and play; and the way people often consume and then apologise for it; and the gap between anti-consumerist books and people’s satisfaction at shopping… In short, he elides all the twists and turns, the lures and the loathings of modern consumerist culture, which would altogether be a rich subject to investigate.

I think this is quite right. The argument I make in my SOCIETY piece [$ for now, sorry] is that bureaucracy is desperate to reenchant work by transferring the experience of our rewards for work into the workplace. Since those rewards are increasingly entirely social entertainments, bureaucracy attempts, through Human Resources absolutism, to make work feel or be primarily an entertaining social experience. Apropos of consumerism, one should ask at this point whether this project is doomed because our apparently social entertainments are really just hallucinatory fantasies we construct to make up for the reality of how asocial our play really has become -- with all our supposedly interactive recreations massively mediated, idealized, and illusory. Loneliness still rules; the man or woman in the crowd has simply (according to this line of argument) switched places from the train station or town square to Spring Break or the downtown club.

Comments

[7 5/8 LO]

At the same time, we need to resist the temptation Appleton points out: to throw away the idea that work should, or even can, be fulfilling in itself, and really ought to be just a matter of serving masters to justify one's existence.