Career

“The main reason for the contemporary evasion of Arendt’s critique of careerism … is that addressing it would force a confrontation with the dominant ethos of our time. In an era when capitalism is assumed to be not only efficient but also a source of freedom, the careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going tolerance and pluralism. Unlike the ideologue, whose great sin is to think too much and want too much from politics, the careerist is a genial caretaker of himself. He prefers the marketplace to the corridors of state power. He is realistic and pragmatic, not utopian or fanatic. That careerism may be as lethal as idealism, that ambition is an adjunct of barbarism, that some of the worst crimes are the result of ordinary vices rather than extraordinary ideas: these are the implications of Eichmann in Jerusalem …”

- Dragon Slayers, Cory Robin.

Occupy KPIs

So what the fuck has #Occupy done so far?

A rather lovely example of and rejoinder to advocacy evaluation.

White fetish dolls

To: Kathleen Donaghey and John Grey, News Queensland.

Dear Kathleen and John

I’m really shocked and saddened* by the presumption, in this article, that the views of Indigenous people about the racist nature of golliwog dolls can be called into question, and indeed disproved, by the stated feelings and/or opinions of white and other non-Indigenous Australians.

The racist stereotyping at work in the golliwog doll – in its name and its physical appearance – has been consistently revealed** by Indigenous and other non-white people in Anglo cultures such as Australia and Britain. Sally Morgan, for example, discusses it in the iconic Australian non-fiction book ‘My Place’. The Australian academic Millsom S. Henry-Waring has also made extensive researches that demonstrate the role of the golliwog in racism against Aboriginal people in Australia, both historically and in the present.

Citing and inciting a division over whether or not a clearly racist object is racist because it happens to be ‘popular’ and ‘loved’; and referring to it as a ‘casualty of the worldwide crusade against racism’; along with an image of a delighted child against a huge pile of the dolls, is cheap controversy-mongering. It is also dog-whistling racism.

Yours sincerely.

[* 'shocked and saddened' for rhetorical effect. Shocked, no; this is Australia. Saddened, well, more like trying to resist numbness.

** actually, white Australians reveal this racism every day; but seem to need Others to authenticate this revelation.]

Precision as a value

“Time and again, the military has claimed that advances in technology have finally made warfare predictable and precise. That was the promise of Igloo White in Vietnam, the video-game spectacle of the Gulf War, the war for Kosovo and the counter-guerrilla wars of the past ten years. Time and again, the military’s claims have been disproved.” – ‘Drones, baby, drones’, Andrew Cockburn 2012.

Australia, a safe haven for capital

“Now, the events occurring in Europe will also predate large capital movements, indeed they are, this extreme capital market volatility, not extreme I shouldn’t overstate it but there’s considerable market volatility at the moment, very important question. If the worse thing happens where does the capital go? It is quite possible of course on this occasion some of that capital will come into Australia, it is quite possible, it is quite possible on this occasion Australia will be seen as offering something of a safe haven for global capital movements.”- Ken Henry, May 2012.

Overhanging fruit, a tumblr

Back in the early noughties a housie and I were going to make a zine that showed the places in Adelaide where you could find fruit overhanging suburban and inner-urban fences. We had heard there was a law which allowed fruit hanging over fences to be scrumped and gleaned for/from the commons.

We never did get around to it – partly because we didn’t want to find out that there was no such law, partly because the housie did Romantic Wrong to a friend of mine and I felt the cumquats and chokoes weren’t reason enough for further close collaboration with the Wrongdoer.

As time has passed I’ve kept my eyes and mouth on projects such as Fallen Fruit and Feral Fruit Melbourne. They came together today with my RSI-ridden hands to start a tumblr, overhanging fruit. Its purpose is simply to collect images of food growing in the suburbs. You can submit! It’s just a little, visual move in the service of the question, “can we feed ourselves?”

Underlining

in Melissa Gregg‘s Work’s Intimacy:

“… the grammar of hunched shoulders, clandestine drinking cultures, and enforced leave….the present generation of academics must be among the first to see their lives and loves as potentially open to change.” : xii

“Labor politics has always rested on the notion that limits must be placed on the workday. In an era of presence bleed, the possibility of asserting absence from the workplace becomes a matter of intense concern. If the office exists in your phone, how is it possible to claim the right to be away from it for any length of time? Indeed, how do employees assert the right to avoid work-related contact if the bulk of their colleagues are friends? Labor activism is powerless to meet these challenges with its current vocabulary.” :14

“[A] classic post-industrial gentrification process capitalized on decommissioned freight districts in picturesque areas, turning the workplaces of an old economy into the domestic leisure space of the new. Extra bus services were needed to service the influx of residents commuting to the city for work, while online start-ups, media broadcasters, design and fashion businesses offered more conveniently located employment for the city’s nouveau riche. A steady rise in cafes and bars fueled the consumption habits of this cash-rich but time-poor professional clientele.” :28

“…Ross‘s (2008) argument that “creative” cities are successful to the extent that they garner erudite observations about bankable real estate hotspots for investors…. the lifestyle city imagined in these stories is a world where the aged, the unemployed, and the poor fail to register.” :29

“…workers acquiesce to a degree of diligence that is no way rationally rewarded. In their view, the problem is not that there is too much email; rather it is that email takes up time. And it is work time that is seen as the most precious time that email takes. A lack of institutional guidelines for email use in the organizations this study covered directly fed such ambiguous attitudes. Workers felt unable to “count” email communications as work because it had never been widely discussed in workload terms. This is in spite of its centrality to so many job roles.” : 53

“Aspiring professionals and educators with the opportunity to deploy cultural capital to secure both income and status have a particular responsibility to be self-reflexive about their own labor practices.” : 171

The worker

(further, more)

This figure of solidarity is a solid stumbling block for unionism. The somewhat protestant way in which we might be enjoined as workers (working families), congratulated on the hard work it takes to win, on our honesty and sacrifice, on the affective and political makeup that sets us apart from those who don’t join.

This is one impression made by the struggle of the non-worker (including the casual). It may also be how a system other than wages-for-labour becomes unimaginable at the same time as we ‘win’ a crucial redistribution of value, labour, work.

Union affect

As a kind of complement to this post, up at RAW/ROAR, a tentative thought on the emotions and/or affects of unionism and particularly the use of shame.

Shame has a well-known history in unionism, embodied perhaps in the heckling (or worse) of ‘scabs’. This use of shame has also underlined attacks on unionism by bosses and governments (who, of course, could never be accused of marginalising, bullying, or thugging…). It is an affect of the border in that sense, used to define collectives of people against others and to maintain our cultures and identities.

In many (increasingly post-unionised) work cultures now, though, which rely an awful lot on internalised guilt – particularly that of women – I expect shame is less useful than ever. Indeed, being able to say no to shame is a way of gaining some control over a toxic workload or the demands placed on the individual from the corporation. For that kind of resistance, collectivity and joy – feelings of substance that are also harnessed by (certain forms of) unionism – seem a much better emotional fit.

Begijnhof

Bruges, September 2011.

“accusations of heresy against the beguines were largely generated from a profound anxiety about their intellectual ambitions and their claims to a chaste life outside the cloister.” – Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies, 2003.