Loving work: Drawing attention to pleasure and pain in the body of the cultural worker

Introduction

I need to say No. No to more time. No to more hours. (Actor within Marianne Flotron’s 2011 Film Work)

In Maire Bondesson’s film A Ruda Roadmovie (2002), ¹ a car drives through what looks to be a typical suburb of a European town (Ruda is a town in the South of Sweden). The camera is directed at the driver, a middle-aged local who starts to point out places en route as they pass our view through the car’s windscreen. As he describes the sites, however, the words ‘used to be’ prefix every location. The driver is in fact identifying all of the closed-down businesses, shops and services that once proliferated the high street. Simple, yet poignant, this alternative site-seeing tour maps the impact of neoliberal global production within the local. Significantly, the journey finishes at a large steel factory that faced the same sentence as the other workplaces in Ruda. Now closed, many of the workforce live a precarious employment life, with the option of working between two of the entertainment chain stores. Nearly 10 years later, a video installation by artist Marianne Flotron, titled Work (2011), ² takes place at a Dutch insurance company where we see the actor and psychologist Hector Artistizabal work with a group of staff using methods of the Theatre of the Oppressed. ³ The company prides itself on allowing its workers the flexibility and freedom to work when and where they want. The workshops with staff demonstrate the extent to which this ‘freedom’ is internalised and enjoyed. These two films capture the shifting landscape of work within which many people must negotiate. Work expands to envelop all aspects of life, whether one is employed or not. For if you are not performing like those in Flotron’s film in which enjoyment is harnessed for life/work exploitation you are caught within the precarity of short-term contracts: freelance, without the security of sick and holiday pay, or unemployed, constantly ‘working’ to be selected for waged labour, shattering hopes of a good life.

The struggle depicted within these films switches between the enjoyment of work and precarity of work as two aspects which pull the individual in different directions, resulting in a confusing of emotions, motivations and purpose towards work and its distinction from other aspects of life. The entanglement of work, life and enjoyment has been a topic we have been exploring through different means over the last 2 years in the practice-based research project Manual Labours. ⁴

Manual Labours explores the historical conditioning between the body and mind in the so-called immaterial labour conditions. Post-war labour transformations seek to capture and capitalise on cognitive rather than manual working. ⁵ The concept of immaterial labour developed and subsequently critiqued by autonomist Marxists relates broadly to the kind of work that produces immaterial goods such as service industries, knowledge economies and communications. There is a materiality to these goods (in terms of buildings, technologies, furniture, tools), and also a physicality to enable their delivery and dissemination. The cognitive labour of invention, problem solving, research, logistics and design, for example, are dependent on moving, feeling bodies. Equally, the manual labour of extracting minerals, building and testing equipment and maintenance of container ships carrying our computers, iphones and routers all involve the application of cognitive, emotional selves.

Manual Labours aims to identify and theorise the role that physical and emotional relationships to work can have in helping conceptualise current working conditions and critically establish ways to move beyond the individualised, fragmented worker. By exploring the ways in which people understand the work they do and drawing attention to these entwined body–brain experiences, we hope to understand the barriers and potentialities of connecting up these disparate bodies to organise collectively. Behind this methodology, is the intention to try and recognise emotional work and its unification with the body rather than its separation. The purpose is to reflect the synergy between the multiple physical and mental engagements of work throughout the day.

Manual Labours’ approach can be seen to be analogous to media industries researcher David Hesmondhalgh and cultural sociologist Sarah Baker’s (2011) position which draws on qualitative research to develop an understanding of the conditions of creative workers in a way that aims to contribute to debates and reforms in these sectors. Rather than take a post-structuralist approach which assumes that even supposedly autonomous workers are ‘entranced’ and ‘seduced’ by an ‘illusion of freedom’ and locked into a cycle of self-exploitation (p. 47), Hesmondhalgh and Baker are interested in locating what the experiences of autonomy, enjoyment and ‘good’ work might be. We take on board the complexities of experiences told to us through our research and try to tease out these embodied aspects in order to understand the physical and emotional implications of loving work.

Methodology

The title for this article ‘Loving Work’ offers a chance to look with particular focus on experiences and implications of enjoyment, commitment and passion for cultural work which have been shared and discussed during three workshops in February and March 2014 with 25 cultural workers based in Melbourne (W1), Stockholm (W2) and Helsinki (W3). These workshops were underpinned by four key questions: How do you understand the distinction between work and non-work? What components of work can we identify as enjoyable and does this relate to how we think about the body? Does your level of enjoyment of work correlate to a sense of ‘owning’ (or having responsibility for) your work? And does being paid for work effect this enjoyment?

Each question was drawn out through a specially designed exercise. The first exercise, ‘Work Chart’, allowed us to locate participants’ personal understandings of work. We asked each participant to reflect on their last week of work and map all of the different work activities, noting through visual means (a) what is the level of enjoyment of this activity, (b) how much time you spend in a week on this activity, (c) how is the body employed in this activity and (d) is this activity paid or unpaid. It is important to see the interrelated narrative of this work in order to develop a sophisticated understanding of the value systems of the wage, personal enjoyment and sense of ownership. This exercise and our Manual Labours research as a whole is about digging around in the calendrical make-up of someone’s day, acknowledging the different physical and mental states that a person may go through and to give time and attention to these. The aim is to make these emotional and physical effects visible and see what connections across an individual’s different types of work and across different workers can be drawn, bearing in mind Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg’s description of affect as ‘sticky, as collective, as contingency’ (Blackman, 2012: 4).

The second exercise ‘Body Diagrams’ then tried to correlate and delve deeper into the motivations for some of the distinctions drawn within the charts. Participants were asked to annotate the outline of a body according to their physical and emotional feelings towards their work activity. This was a way of charting the physiology of emotions, an act that locates the muscle memory of work and grants emotional experience from the qualitative characteristics of work in which one is encouraged to be flexible and adaptable. This exercise sought to introduce our bodily understanding of work as a way to examine physical relationships to the activity and ideas of enjoyment. Finally, we deepened this interrogation into the bodily connection to work and the potential for collectivising workplace challenges through ‘Body Mirroring’, an exercise where partners placed each other in the positions their body adopts during a working day. Working in pairs the participant takes turns observing their partner embody and animate their body at work.

Our methodology is informed through our training as artists and mobilises aesthetic and performative tools to find ways to gather, generate and share knowledge on the effect work has upon us. As sociologist Lisa Blackman reminds us when referring to how we can develop sophisticated methods for the understanding of affect: affect is, ‘not a thing but rather refers to processes of life and vitality which circulate and pass between bodies and which are difficult to capture or study in any conventional methodological sense’ (p. 4). The development of these different exercises sought to draw out the intertwined narratives of cultural work in order to develop a sharper understanding of how the value systems of the wage, personal enjoyment or ownership and levels of physicality affect our understanding of work. Finally all of the workshops revolved around group discussion which shared the individual results of the exercises, an element crucial to our aim for the workshops to be a site for collective consciousness raising around work.

This article follows the results of the different outlined exercises. We begin by introducing the ways in which the participants describe their experiences of cultural work, the experience of remunerated and hidden labour and what the body and mind are doing in these form of works, for example, in the act of administrating and contemplation. We then go on to reflect on the meaning of enjoyment and love of work in relation to these embodied work-life experiences. Through this analysis of the cultural worker’s body, we explore the prospect of collective knowledge and forms of organising that challenge the individuated, isolated figure to stretch out and reach other bodies in struggle.

What is cultural work?

I do not differentiate between cultural work and work. It is all one thing to me, I have sex and sex is a lot within my art practice. How do you differentiate? (W2)

When we invited people to take part in the workshop, we described the participant group as cultural workers. Yet what do we consider as cultural work and is there a clear definition of the type of labour cultural work employs? While each participant within the workshop identified with the term ‘cultural work’, there was a diverse and varied response to how the term classified their working life. It rather was used as an umbrella expression to capture a myriad of working roles, processes and contexts with people describing themselves as visual artists, craftswomen, curators, arts administrators and performers. The types of work listed by the workshop participants in the ‘work charts’ were as follows:

administration (including grant writing, pitches, promotion, web design, blogging), brainstorming, business planning, cleaning, constructing, crafts, creating, dreaming, editing video, educational/emotional support, engaging, event planning, exploration, gardening, going to shows, installing, making, mentoring, music, openings, organising, performance, physical training in studio, playing with ideas, preparing lessons, procrastination, production meetings, reading, reflection, researching, talks, teaching, thinking, training, travelling to classes, workshop facilitation and writing.

In this first exercise, a sense of entanglement became a key concern for participants. Particularly, in the session in Stockholm (W2), participants suggested that rather than differentiate an idea of ‘cultural labour’, it was preferable to discuss labour more broadly in order to map the whole working day, not just that time defined by a timesheet, location or a clock still lingering on the nostalgia of the 9–5. As many expressed, they were worried that making the distinction of what was, or was not cultural work would mean an impossible task of separating their own life economy which is intricately interrelated and linked. Feminist writer and activist Silvia Federici from the 1970s onwards has written about raising the visibility of women’s work tied to the home, arguing that in order to challenge the organisation of work under capitalism it was crucial to analyse all activity as a form of work. As she wrote in her seminal text of 1975 Wages Against Housework: ‘They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work. They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism. Every miscarriage is a work accident’ (Cox and Federici, 1975: 15). In placing all types of life activity, even that which we may feel is far from our workplace such as sex with a partner, or the cleaning of bedsheets, brings about a new perspective of our own individual life economies. What we categorise as ‘proper’ work plays into existing value systems which are bent on hiding and concealing other activity. Domestic work and reproduction are forms of work that all ‘proper’ work rely on.

This first exercise was the first time most of the participants had to break down exactly what economy the activities within their daily life were inscribed within and how this affected them personally. It was the start of a more in-depth investigation into what an idea of enjoyment, passion or love of work actually meant. A catch-all term such as enjoyment or love of work, for example, could hide a diverse array of work processes that are alienating, disenfranchising and motivated by values of status and cultural, social and economic obligation. Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011) refer to Robert Blauner’s (1964) work Freedom and Alienation in which he suggests that ‘work was rarely experienced as either entirely miserable or totally pleasurable’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011: p. 27). Based on Blauner’s theorisation of Marx’s alienated and unalienated labour, Hesmondhalgh and Baker expand the notions of ‘good and bad work’. Good work does not mean happiness, joy or pleasure, they say, instead, ‘we need other conceptions of good and bad work (or unalienated and alienated work), (which) in Blauner’s terms (would be) beyond happiness and pleasure’ (p. 28). They rework Blauner’s four categories of ‘bad work’ as involving ‘control by or dependence on others; boredom; isolation; low-self-esteem or shame; frustrated self-realisation, overwork and risk’, with good work being the converse: ‘autonomy, interest and involvement, sociality, self-esteem, self-realisation, work-life balance and security’, with the addition of good work involving the production of excellent goods and services that ‘promote aspects of the common good’ (p. 36).

Alongside the complication of what we mean by the term enjoyment, the word art within the workshops was sporadically swapped for cultural work or culture. By referring to art work or artistic work, the participants were using another umbrella term to collect their many motivations, perspectives and activities. It is important to note that the purpose of our research is not to set apart artistic practices and cultural work from other forms of work. Cultural work is rather a category which relates to the field that we as authors have predominantly worked in, and one in which different types of labour such as manual, cognitive, emotional and affective are often intensively intertwined. Thus, the focus within this article on cultural workers is rather to try and ascertain through experiential knowledge what are the daily perceptions and reflections of working this field? And how might the act of sharing this knowledge collectivise and politicise our work and challenge its current organisation?

The writer Ben Davis (2013) tries to clarify some of the different qualities of labour within cultural work in his ‘9.5 Theses on Art and Class’. He explains that unlike other types of creative labour ⁶ visual art has ‘no specific form of labour attached to it’ (6.4). This ties directly to responses within the workshop where reflections on both the work activity and the labour employed within that task had no specific ‘role’ attached. Rather an expanded notion of work is conjured that bleeds beyond the boundaries of a job with a contract, pay and set hours. The diverse activities that the participants engage in defined as work illustrate an expansion of working roles. It is possible to say that for those who had a job description, it never covered the variety of tasks performed. The widening of ‘work’ chimes with Chukhrov’s (2011) observation that ‘The bulk of immaterial workers make no use whatsoever of their higher education and are working outside their specialisation’ (p. 103). Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011) refer to the ‘proleterianisation’ (in the form of permanent insecurity) of middle-class, educated creative workers (p. 69). It became apparent from the responses from the workshop participants that it is the invisible, hidden, unpaid, totality of a week’s ‘work’ of the cultural worker that we needed to consider, where the described definitions and sites of ‘creativity’ and ‘work’ are porous and intersect with care, cleaning, complaining, for example.

Theorist Franco Berardi (2009) discusses the expansion of work with no defined boundaries, job description or hours, through analysing the separation of mental and manual work which has been part of the capitalist process to rationalise production (both immaterial and material) and maintain the subsumption of workers under the logic of capital. Labour moves from the domination of the physical body to the biopolitical penetration of the soul, which is arguably a type of ‘production much more intensive than the industrial one’ (Steyerl, 2009). The flexible, adaptable worker who works outside of one’s specialism is less to be read as a result of a failing of the labour market within the current economic situation, but rather a political project designed to ensure all are contracted into the work relation. This enables the infiltration of a much wider aspect of life to the logic of its present organisation. Kathi Weeks (2011) further points out in The Problem with Work, today’s employment of productive and manageable subjects is not only a desire for the employer, but – drawing on Michael Burawoy’s 1970s arguments – exploitable subjects are ‘made at the the point of production’ (p. 10). They are fashioned through the structured conditions of their employment and indeed unemployment, as Ivor Southwood (2011) describes in his examination of precarity and unemployment; ‘unemployment is turned into a pastiche of a job, complete with mock workplace, clocking in and out times, and manager to report to’ (p. 49).

While the workshops identified the struggles of enforced multi-tasking roles, it is within this expansive sphere of cultural work that encapsulates so many tasks, processes and sites of work that we see the potential for forms of collectivity and solidarity that could form across different sectors. An embodied sharing of understanding work challenges is made possible. Davis (2013) suggests that art should not be so isolated and instead needs to ‘transcend itself and purely “art world” concerns … by linking up with struggles outside of the sphere of the visual arts’ (9.1). However, we also acknowledge the different forms of work undertaken. Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011) are keen to focus on the specifics of creative work, recognising that this form of work is ‘especially’ or ‘primarily’ involved in the production of symbols and social meaning that are ‘aesthetic, expressive and/or informational’ (pp. 59–60). Yet, while it may be the case that ‘television workers’ are different from ‘call centre workers’, it is the confusing, shared, overlapping areas of bodies at work that we are interested in, that can be translated and mutually explored between different configurations and experiences of work. While the products may differ, the pleasures and complaints that the body experiences in these different configurations are, we argue, largely shared and worth highlighting.

In the last 5 years, there has been much emphasis on considering the relationship between art and work. Sternberg Press, for example, have published three anthologies (Aranda et al., 2011; Enqvist et al., 2012; Pasero and van den Berg, 2013) which pull together reflections from theorists, activists and artists that try to negotiate this position of the artist in post-Fordist production. The artist is often characterised as flexible, creative and through their passion for their practice, prepared to work in conditions without any formalised structures such as a salary, sick pay, holiday pay, pension, union rights and crucially often not even granted a wage beyond a symbolic fee. The artist becomes an idealised figure for the larger labour market and one the Dutch insurance company in Flotron’s video installation is reliant on. As Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011) state, because of intellectual property, revenues associated with ‘creativity’; cultural or creative work is considered particularly desirable in terms of exports and gross domestic product (GDP) (p. 2).

Alongside associating as cultural workers, many of the workshop participants identified (in terms of legal status) as being ‘freelance’ or ‘self-employed’, a position that they hoped would give them more time for their creative endeavours and a way in which they could seemingly own their means of production. However, the lack of control they have over aspects of their production and poor working conditions were also the focus of much debate within the workshops. If one were to categorise the participants of the workshops using another term that tried to encapsulate the numerous activities they were engaged in, we might use the term ‘cognitive’ or ‘immaterial’ workers. Yet, both of these titles dangerously separate, neglect and mutate the very material and physical work involved as detailed by participants above. As art theorist Keti Chukhrov (2011) reminds us, there is a ‘fatal division between routine, mechanical labour and the intellectual-creative and cultural space of middle-class life and activity’ (p. 104). ‘The “cognitariat” does not constitute a class’, she writes, ‘it is a social group that can include top managers […] and service-industry workers on short-term contracts’ (Chukhrov, 2011: 103). Returning to Davis’ 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, he locates art as a middle-class profession that serves ruling class values, in which the artist ‘self-directs’ their production. ‘The dream of being an artist is the dream of making a living off the products of one’s own mental or physical labor while fully being able to control and identify with that labor’ (3.2). He points out the inherent contradiction of individual self-expression with the need to make a living. On the one hand, art becomes ‘working-class’ when the creative worker sells their labour power and carries out ‘piecework’ for a wage. In this scenario, the worker has less of a stake in their labour; it is not an expression of their individuality in this sense (4.8). On the other hand, art is also viewed as separate from the need to make a living which Davis describes as when art becomes deprofessionalised (4.9). It is within this core contradiction that we can start to understand the confusing demarcations that go alongside cultural work in which the wage and an idea of professional identity follow no fixed rules and so ideas of ownership and control of working conditions are at a distance to the realities of work felt and shared by participants collectively. The number of different terms associated with work and roles while motivated to clarify the qualities of this work can actually serve to create confusing boundaries which devalue, hide and obscure components of this work. What is further highlighted is that the labour within cultural work which is promoted as self-directed creates severe challenges for how to organise collectively. As Davis goes on to point out, ‘middle-class workers have only the ability to shut down their own means of production’ (4.6).

Our study took to task some of these middle-class predispositions associated with cultural work. Can an argument be made that if we have a passion for work, we are only fit for exploitation under a capitalist organisation of work that thrives on maximising productivity and minimising costs? Or is there something more complex at play in loving work? And if so how might we problematise and strategise collectivity around these issues?

Remuneration and hidden labour

I was doing some work looking after children and they also had this secret promise in that work assuming you’d also teach them correct English, teach them good behaviour. (W2)

The wage, as Federici (2014) explains, has traditionally been analysed as the ‘dividing line between work and non-work’ (p. 29). However, as she points out, the unpaid work women perform within the home (or as a cultural worker perhaps) has totally escaped this analysis (Federici, 2014). During the first exercise, both unpaid and paid work were included in the charts and as one artist detailed, a large part of his work was ‘unpaid paid’, meaning the art practice through which he performs unpaid labour he continually pays for, in order to continue making projects, objects and productions. Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011) refer to Bernard Miege’s (1989) notion of ‘pseudo-independence’ in creative autonomy: ‘“artistic professionals” … themselves bear the costs of producing commodities that are high risk, likely to fail, and involve considerable costs’ (p. 57). They are subsidising the ‘high conception costs’ of their industry. This is one example of what we might call a neoliberalising of practices, moving towards a ‘mixed’ economy (Hoexter, 2012) of the life of the cultural worker, which is supported, protected and valued in a variety of combinations including paid employment, unpaid exchanges and symbolic future ‘pay-offs’. This economy cultivates fertile ground for the complicated stories of physical and emotional experiences and states that people go through in relation to the types of work they carry out, according to, for example, whether it is necessary labour ‘done for the money, a self-determined, uninvited action, doing something that triggers spontaneous decisions or a job that needs focused attention on a particular time-sensitive task’ (W1).

Ursula Pasero (2013) suggests that it is not an earned income that validates and confirms the identity of an artist: ‘it is safe to assume that for most artists, working for a living is something they primarily do in addition to practicing their art, and in many cases working for a living has long since become their principal activity’ (p. 152). This echoes Davis’ point 3.9 in which he identifies the split between notions of art as a profession and as vocation. In correlation to the comments from the workshop, the editors within the introduction to the volume, Are you Working Too Much? state: ‘So you secretly support your art work with your money job, even a high paying one. You are your own sugar daddy and trophy wife in a single package’ (Aranda et al., 2011: 7). Indeed, in the mapping done by the workshop participants in Melbourne, most of the work listed is not paid. One of the participants in Helsinki commented, ‘most of my labour is unpaid and I use unpaid deadlines for funding applications as a way to validate my own work and practice’. Here, enjoyment of work was a speculative consideration, held off until paid employment was secured.

In the Swedish workshop (W2), most participants were currently out of work and two types of payment were raised: payment for those unemployed and payment to those studying. These types of welfare are gifted on the condition that one has been working before (in the unemployed case) or will work (in the student case). Workers’ unemployment money is related to prior work position and so there maintains a certain similarity with the division and hierarchy of labour, it becomes translated to a ‘compensated wage’: unemployment too is not without work. One unemployed participant spends much of her time filling out ‘faux’ job applications in order to fulfil the state requirements. ⁷ And as another noted, studying also limits the type of work you are able to engage in. While the educational environment might seem to have some autonomy from current productive or market expectations, much like the experiences of workers within a factory, there is a particular set of processes and products you are encouraged to produce within that environment: ‘your work here isn’t free as you might wish to conceive but specifically tailored and distributed to the students via subjective feedback in “critics” situations’ (W2). For the majority of participants, their economy was not related to the execution of their creative practice but linked to their profile as a student or as unemployed. They felt that this form of wage limited their focus on what they described as their ‘enjoyed artistic practice’ (W2).

The body at work 1: administration, e-mail shoulder and frustrated self-realisation

Alongside the discussion around the structural organisation of work, when defining different tasks within cultural work, participants had a large proportion of their maps linked to the depth, breadth and intensity of administrative tasks. This component of work took between 2 hours a week for some people and up to 4 hours a day for others. Many discussed the enormity of emailing and communication and its drain on personal motivation and happiness, and described the activity as ‘solitary, sedentary, structured’ in which the body was forgotten. One participant noted the time spent ‘refreshing’ emails or waiting on communication as a continual drain of time and resources (W3). This feeling links to how writer Robert Hasan describes our contemporary moment, how we now live in a ‘24/7 networked society’, a term borrowed ‘from the purveyors of broadband computer services, (where) 24/7 means to be “always on” – always connected or connectable – and always available to work or consume’ (Hassan and Purser, 2007: 3).

In many of the drawings on the Body Maps, the middle of the body referred to sitting whether that be at a desk or a temporary work station such as the car or train. More specifically the annotations referred to: too much sitting, tension, numbness, pain, physical loss, lifting, balance, back curving, being submissive, holding space, lightness and being very crushed during meetings. In one there was written ‘chakra’ and another, ‘belly wake-up! Belly sleep now!’ (W1). In another: ‘urgent coffee poo’ and ‘stress bladder’ (W2). One participant noted a strategy to disrupt the sedentary aspect of desk-based work was to ‘always drink a lot of water as it induces a break in their work for them’ (W2). Around the shoulders many of the drawings referred to tension: computer tension, pain, email shoulders, hunch, physical and psychological weight but also referred to feeling productive and care work ‘happy exhaustion’ and ‘being accommodating’. Physical struggles like back slouching and rounded shoulders were seen as a direct result of anxiety emailing (Figures 1 and 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Body map illustrating physical and emotional relations to work by a participant in workshop 1 (Melbourne, March 2014).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Work chart illustrating physical and emotional relations to work by a participant in workshop 2 (Stockholm, March 2014).

The physical realities of growing administrative labour are expressed via a sense of control and confinement in the individual’s time, emotions and capacity for other work. The body reflects this in its tendency to hunch, crouch over and confine the limbs and abdomen. An article in the Economist on 18 January 2014 details in anticipation how many jobs will soon be automised (The Economist, 2014: 21). Drawing on anthropologist David Graeber (2013) and in extension Berardi, the article goes on to address what might it mean if the majority of the workforce is no longer engaged in work, occupied from 9 am to 5 pm at least? Would chaos ensue? The answer they predict is that whilst jobs that need to be done are being automated, other jobs are needed to occupy, discipline and control the worker, which, in David Graeber’s terms, means the creation of ‘bullshit jobs’. In relation to conversations within our workshops, much frustration was detailed in administrative work, an area that seems to continually balloon and occupy the worker, dragging them away from other more ‘creative’ work which occurs without the work-prop of the laptop. This shares Mark Fisher’s (2009) analysis of ‘new forms of bureaucracy’ that regulate and administrate the individual through self-auditing and self-surveillance where you, as the investor of your own labour power, become the distributor of your own disciplinary processes (p. 40). The expansion of ‘life administration’ (W3) as a control mechanism in the reorganisation of work links to Federici’s (2014) observation that, just as ‘technology within the home hasn’t emancipated the house-wife’, the automation of jobs across sectors has not resulted in a lowering of the working week. Concurrently, participants that were unemployed described that in order to receive a state-living allowance, you have to be signed up to full-time job hunt which, in the process of fabled applications and multiple rejections, is arguably a type of work a lot more intensive and emotional than is often acknowledged. As Southwood (2011) explains, ‘The new privatised version of unemployment has its own job description person specification and disciplinary framework, so that if you do not perform your jobseeking duties correctly you can be fired by your line manager’ (p. 57).

What is enjoyment?

Commitment could be said to be equivalent to speculative enjoyment – a belief that I will eventually get a paid job in the cultural sector. (W2)

Having explored the experiences and processes of cultural work, we now turn to the issue of enjoyment. The challenge of resisting the privileging of cognitive work over manual work, the grappling of one’s own life economy and the cycles of emotions connected to work. The physical effects of these anxieties and emotions within the body have led to developing a deeper conversation that addresses the complex idea of ‘enjoyment of work’. For, as the discussions and exercises have revealed, it is not possible to consider ‘enjoyment’ without first analysing one’s whole life entwinement with work. Hesmondhalgh and Baker’s (2011) prefer the terms ‘self-realisation’ and ‘autonomy’ to ‘enjoyment’. They break down autonomy (or self-determination) into workplace autonomy and creative autonomy. Self-realisation is linked to the idea of good work being ‘part of a life narrative in which current activities promise to lead into a desired and valued future’ (pp. 43–44).

The anarchist Camillo Berneri ([1938] 1983) in his 1938 essay, ‘The Problem of Work’ looks to the 19th C. physiologist Marco Rossi-Doria who suggests that ‘work must no longer be a torment and a source of ills, but a joy and an important factor in physical and moral health’ (p. 69). The anarchist Peter Kropotkin was similarly excited about finding pleasure in work: In collective work, he writes, ‘carried out with gay spirit to reach the desired goal – be it book, work of art or luxury article – each one will find the stimulus, the uplift necessary to make life pleasant’ (p. 69). Kropotkin was referring to the 19th Century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s prediction that when ‘every individual will be able to choose as his sphere of work that to which he is naturally inclined, work will no longer be labour and will become a joy for many’ (p. 72). Berneri suggests that ‘there are men in our society today who work longer hours without weariness; with, on the contrary, a deep sense of satisfaction. These are the scientists, thinkers, and the artists’ (p. 69).

These idealised notions of work could perhaps be reframed as part of the well-being at work agenda today, ⁸ which encourages increased productivity, efficiency and profits. These sentiments, however, were echoed in the workshops where a participant said when ‘I’m really enjoying it [I] almost forget there’s a deadline … and what you’ve had to give up to do it’ (W1). As predicted by Berneri, for those engaged in creative work there comes a complete immersion in the work. Another participant points to the contradiction in this drive and passion:

… your life tends to revolve around it … everything I do is art … it affects the way your whole life is and the people around you … I think that’s a problem maybe in some ways.. as well as it being a passion it can be a hinderance and quite stressful too I think. (W1)

Writing over 70 years after Berneri, in the introduction to, ‘Are you Working Too Much?’, the editors ask: ‘… why should so many talented and hyper-qualified artists submit themselves willingly to a field of work (that is, in art) that offers so little in return for such a huge amount of unremunerated labour?’ (Aranda et al., 2011: 6). The artist, they write, ‘is left to expend an enormous amount of professional energy in the doldrums of a murky pseudo-profession that absorbs work under the auspices of some kind of common belief in its higher value’ (Aranda et al., 2011), values which, as Davis (2013) reminds us, belong to the ruling class. Within the workshops, questions (which many had not had time to fully consider before) were asked between participants including: ‘What do I really gain from this?’ and ‘How do we question what we are producing as workers, how is it enabling us or limiting us?’ (W3). Rather than defending these questions with sentiments of enjoyment, many participants were left confused over the question, unable to articulate if their motivation had indeed derived from a positive emotion or not, or as one person stated ‘we struggled under this fundamental thing of whether we even enjoy what we are doing’ (W2).

Pasero (2013) points out that ‘… pursuing a career as an artist generally means authorising or empowering oneself to engage in a specific activity’ (p. 155). This is seen by other working people as an ‘eccentric activity that commands respect as a lifelong passion’ (Pasero, 2013). Similarly, during the workshops, participants compared their work with that of their associates and brought forth comments such as, ‘a lot of people, friends, don’t understand why I want to continue doing it’ (W1). Pasero (2013) goes on to state, ‘The great promise of liberation from drudgery and work was the emancipatory concept of “disposable time”’ (p. 163). William Morris’ socialist utopia, for example, involved the scrapping of capital and wages, and instead people would share work for livelihood and not profit. This would lead to a shorter day meaning ‘we shall have labour-power to spare’ (Morris, [1884] 1983: 43). This spare labour-power, ‘was supposed to allow one to activate buried needs and abilities outside the work society’ (Pasero, 2013: 155), however, as Pasero (2013), Chukhrov (2011), Berardi (2009) and Fisher (2009) point out, work and life have become more entwined and spare labour-power is put to work for the production of symbolic commodities, or as a means of control. While the labour may be ‘attractive’ and pleasurable, our love for it has melted the distinction between work and non-work as labour-power is spent on individualised self-improvement rather than the livelihood of society. The post-capitalist utopia has not arrived, we are too busy working on improving our own self-image and portfolio careers, competing with peers rather than connecting up with them. Davis (2013) again suggests that when ‘labourers democratically control the character of their own labour, and, as a consequence the terms of their own leisure’, echoing Morris’ utopian socialism, ‘it is only such a situation that offers the potential for the maximum flourishing of human artistic potential’ (9.4). Without ‘changing the material basis of society’, art’s full potential is unrealisable, destined to turn in circles, according to Davis (2013).

In Berardi’s text ‘Cognitarian Subjectivisation’ (in Aranda et al., 2011), he writes about the colonisation of time and the transformation of perceptions of time. He argues that the acceleration enabled by technology ‘leads to an impoverishment of experience. More information, less meaning. More information, less pleasure’ (p. 136). He suggests that a ‘process of desensitization is underway’. We don’t have enough time to enjoy things as we’re too busy planning the next. The never-ending funding applications, for example, were a heavy negative presence for some of the workshop participants, always feeling the pressure of securing the resources for the next project. For those reflecting on unsuccessful applications, it was suggested that maybe ‘your heart’s not in it’ and the funders can tell (W1). This invited the question, ‘Are we losing control, enjoyment and satisfaction when our sense of agency and integrity over the things we are doing is being threatened?’ This goes some way to complicate the notion of creative autonomy, as Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011) point out, autonomy is contradictory and ambivalent but there is still an aspiration that people embody (p. 65). Ushered in instead of enjoyment comes a sense of ownership, duty or responsibility; traits marked, as Weeks (2011) has explored, by the construction of a work ethic which creates an ‘important shift in expectations about what work is or what work should be’ along with ‘a distinctive conception of what it means to be a worker’ (p. 39). A different value system becomes activated that results in understandings that ‘if I see a sense of myself in a project I feel validated’ (W3). The freelance cultural worker does not necessarily own their means of production. As Davis (2013) puts it, this ‘middle-class’ individual has a ‘self-directed relationship to production’ (3.1). Erik Olin Wright (1997) similarly defines the middle-classes as ‘people who do not own their own means of production, who sell their labour power on a labour market, and yet do not see themselves as part of the working class’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011: 67). Rather than literally owning the means of production, it is an embodied feeling of self-determination in relation to production which is key to the cultural worker. Ownership and responsibility became key ‘value’ words for participants that inflected an idea of enjoyment or satisfaction but revealed itself as one way to further intensify working and shroud the reality that ownership was limited to a narrow space of mobility. That in fact, the power relation within freelance work still remains with the contracted employer or commissioner.

While the utopian socialist view of attractive work is based on the abolishment of inequality and Capital and therefore the economic emancipation of the worker, the current dominant system is very much based on economic viability and profitability as a marker of success. While it may look like the scientists, thinkers and artists are emancipated and enjoying themselves, they are operating in the same capitalist system as everyone else. To be driven by passion, to put your heart and soul into your work (demonstrated, for example, in romantic views of the artist), is now expected of all workers, not just artists, as Jack Canfield (2005) in his book The Success Principles points out: ‘If you love your work, if you enjoy it, you’re already a success’.

While there may be pleasure to be had in some aspects of work, a more common experience of the alienating effect of work is expressed through complaints, moans and perhaps at best indifference. Indeed, the comments from the workshops show that ‘enjoyment’ can mask a multitude of emotions and reservations about actions classified as work. While ‘pleasure’ might be associated with invention, the production of something new and its public manifestation, boredom or ‘pain’ is associated with many of the activities that surround this, such as funding applications and emails. Berneri ([1938] 1983) writes about the physical effects of boredom of work, as being ‘irregularities of circulation, and nutrition, sensibility to cold, diminishing of muscular tone, loss of appetite and weight’ (p. 62). Referring back to the workshops, in relation to administrative tasks participants expressed feelings of tension and numbness, where they are working alone and that these periods of work can involve being ‘bored and in pain’. The Body Mirroring exercise outlined these positions and the contortionist poses the body slips into when carrying out administrative tasks over long periods. Berneri was prophetic when he suggested,

Since any occupation is the more tiring the less interesting it is, it follows that everyone will become less tired, and will therefore work longer and more efficiently, when he is allowed to develop his activity in the field of his own choice. (pp. 71–72)

This was clearly reflected in the lengthy hours many participants put into their practice, but a more self-directed form of work does not necessarily lead to increased happiness, well-being or enjoyment. For example, one of the participants remarked,

Looking at my map – I don’t know how much I love the majority of the things that take up my time – in my creative/artistic practice, – there’s a lot of emails, a lot of production. I derive the most satisfaction when there’s a performance, and there’s the adrenaline, that’s the high, and the rest is just [getting to that point …] … it’s all the work to the lead up to that. I’m just wary of saying I love my work, I love part of it and the rest I don’t enjoy, and I don’t even really find that much satisfaction from it, but I do [it] because there’s something else there. (W1)

Another member of the workshop responds,

But you still keep doing it though … because when you get the high you forget all the other things … and when you’re in the doldrums you forget that actually this always happens at this point and it’s going to change and go up again, you could almost map it graphically, it’s the same each time more or less, it’s a cycle. (W1)

The inability to articulate what this ‘something else’ is that keeps this cycle going, highlighted the lack of critical tools available to the participants. This lack, we suggest, perpetuates a depoliticisation and individualisation of experiences that refrain from highlighting the over-arching organisation of work in which we each play a part. Our question is whether a renewed focus on the body can allow for a deeper understanding of both the hurdles and potentialities of collectivising and organising that the individualised body has struggled to overcome.

Berneri draws on a number of studies on work to explore the hatred for work (p. 63). A participant in research carried out by Adolf Levenstein in 1912, for example, stated: ‘Work is ended for the day. I feel an inward uplift and relaxation and would like to shout for joy’. Another reflects, ‘I force myself to take an interest in my work and yet I am unable to’ (p. 63). Berneri refers to replies sent to an enquiry made by the Philosophy and Allied Sciences Review in 1907, in which one can identify a difference between self-directed work and commissioned work. He suggests,

… any activity which follows a spontaneous impulse is pleasant. When on the other hand, an individual is obliged by external conditions to act in opposition to his natural tendencies, he exhausts himself in his effort of will on himself, with consequent suffering and lessened productive capacity. (p. 71)

This implies the cultural worker is a spontaneous impulsive, inventive, unstructured worker and yet we have seen from the workshops, the life of the cultural worker has many obligations and external conditions to contend with. However, something more nuanced is revealed when studying the enjoyment of work. A worker who purports to love their work is still exposed to, and thus internalises the culture of individualism where each worker is responsible for the investment and branding of their own labour power. Participants at the workshops reflected on what changed when aspects of their cultural work became their profession: ‘I’ve done so much before I studied art, art was just a thing I did, and then I studied art all of a sudden it becomes really stressful’. She goes on to say that she associates the unpaid work with ‘something more valuable, as if it’s more expressive of who I am and what I want to do’ (W1). This suggests the professionalisation of activity pursued for pleasure has significant implications.

During the workshops, there was also discussion about the relationship between ‘dream job and survival job’ and the issues with maintaining these as separate activities or merging them together. For one participant, it was important to ‘separate spatially my work and my non work life’ (W3). In this way, they were much quicker to be able to identify and detail what elements of work they enjoyed. As conversations were pushed to untangle some of the complexity of the notion of enjoyment, it became apparent to some that it was based on a mode of exchange. In order to do the thing you love doing, there is an element of compromise: ‘There’s a certain element of myself that I have to subdue or exploit’ (W3) in order to compensate and find time and resources for the activity you want to focus on. The conversations around how one might distinguish boundaries or use acts of exchange and compromise addressed practically how to negotiate the current world of work. There were experiences of both isolation and sociality with positive and negative associations with both the states. As Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011) reflect on their interviews with people working in music, magazine journalism and television industries, ‘even where people found careers that felt likely to offer some level of self-realisation, a balance between work and life, and an appropriate level of identification with occupation, felt hard to achieve for many’ (p. 158).

Conclusion: How might we continue to think these struggles collectively?

Working with others creates a different form of validity than on your own when you always feel you should be doing more. (W3)

We started this article referring to two artworks that visit the realities of daily work; for many this means being flexible, mobile and freelance – conditions that are embraced by some and suffered by others. By focusing on the types of work described by those in the workshops, loving your work is not necessarily all it is cracked up to be. The work the participants describe carrying out is varied and not all of it interesting or enjoyable, but aspects of it hold the promise of being ‘worthwhile’ in some way. However, cultural work’s amorphous character gathers these multifarious activities and lumps them together as enjoyable, when a closer looks reveals that joy has very little to do with it.

The majority of the actions described by the participants were things that surrounded, supported or distracted from the rare adrenaline-producing moments (of thought, performance, reflection). For the (un)employed multi-tasker, most of these activities come under the guise of cultural work, even if unpaid. Indeed, the activities themselves, broken down, might not be creative or cultural, as such, rather it is the creative/cultural body/mind that moves through them, experiencing and tackling them in turn, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. There was a sense of being pulled in different directions, often losing direction and ‘the power to do what I want’, ‘taking away time from other things that you might value’ to the extent that it is ‘no fun anymore’ (W1). The body reacts to and develops various strategies and postures to cope with these different states. There is a drive to keep working, non-stop, just in case the work turns out to be beneficial further down the line. The weariness of work is masked or counterbalanced by a (perhaps delayed or anticipated) feeling of satisfaction. In terms of productivity in self-employment or self-organised (seemingly non-utilitarian time), when you are your own boss, bad management is internalised and brought back in house.

As these activities get translated and sold as services, or support in kind for other people, there was a sense of selling out or moving further away from the spontaneity they once associated with this work when they were not trying to make a living from it. It felt different. The lack of critical tools to aid understanding of the nuances of how ‘work’ has changed for the participants fuelled discussion around more collective situations, such as the workshops themselves, in which common struggles and contradictions could be shared. Making visible the different physical and mental qualities of those invisible productive moments could be a way to alleviate stress and be more realistic in working, perhaps reduce workloads or expectations of constant productivity. The idea of collectivising around these problems was enthusiastically felt as the potential road for readdressing work’s current organisation. However, it was acknowledged that this collectivity was not only for a conversation between cultural workers (predominantly from Western, middle-class backgrounds) but rather could be the cultivation of another kind of ground where solidarity with other workers could begin. Davis’ thesis 4.6 reminds us that as freelance cultural workers, we are only able to shut down our own means of production, whilst it is an ‘organised working class [that] can shut down the ruling class’ means of production’. On a practical level, strategies such as giving the self more credit was one suggestion that would only be fruitful if this was thought about as a collective challenge. The competition cultivated within work means that the task of lowering one’s own expectations alone would be impossible; the world of work would still keep setting these expectations higher. It would only be challenged if we all said we were not going to work so much. One of the workshop participants, for example, suggested that while her instinct is to always do more, she feels the need to ‘pare back’ and ‘enjoy less’ while ‘balance in that less, this reward for effort without losing the joy’. She suggests that this way, ‘we might not all fizzle out so quickly’ which ‘might be better for the industry, because there’s a resilience and a passion that isn’t abused and then waning’ (W1). In extension, another strategy for challenging the constant attitude of ‘giving yourself a hard time’ or ‘never feeling like you’ve done enough’ was to ‘see how things are produced and what I produce’ (W3). ‘I feel it is a good day when I’ve been productive, when my work has become something’ (W2). The physical manifestation of often intangible processes and actions was seen as a route for reasserting the significance of these actions to not only yourself but the larger value system of work itself.

In the spirit of giving the self more credit, it should be noted that the development of this article formulated key spaces to reflect and share work experience. Conversations and discussing our work–life experiences is crucial to redefine collectively the conditions and value systems placed upon our activity. The workshops were the first time many had thought about the implications of their working in any great depth, including considering the implications of not discussing it with others. To return to a scene in Marianne Flotron’s film, Hector tells us that of 2000 workers, there was only one employee who agreed to participate in his workshop. One person who agreed to make time to reflect on the wider structures their work is embroiled within. If this film tells us one thing, it is the spaces and willingness to challenge the contemporary organisation of work which are continually diminishing. Blackman (2012) considers the question of communication between bodies in the crowd, as a communication that was ‘seen to defy fixed boundaries between the self and other, material and immaterial […]and operate in registers’ that are hard to ‘measure or verify’. Moving on she explains how these processes of communication were ‘felt affectively, where communication was seen to move or propel action, thought, emotion and feeling in ways which could not be contained by rational explanation’ (p. 27). The multifarious and invisible modes of bodily communication were echoed in the workshop discussions, in which collective consciousness raising around working conditions resonated through the group in many different ways other than articulated speech. The intent of exercises like Body Mirroring and shared mapping exercises hoped to emphasise the potential of these other modes of communication. Blackman questions ‘whether modes of individuation made possible by the crowd […]were simply recording such processes, verifying non-rational registers which were all around, or whether these sites were actually producing or creating psychic realties’ (p. 27). When applied to the workshops scenario, it was the face-to-face confrontation and bodily proximity of workers sharing in these reflections that seem to both share and produce new knowledges and realities on working life. It was this physically coming together that produced the possibility of a workforce of freelance home working cultural workers, that many participants, including ourselves, looked for (Figure 3).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Still from ‘Work’ (2011) by Marianne Flotron (53 Minutes, HDV).

As this article is worked upon by the authors, in England the first trade union for visual and applied artists since the dissolution of The Artists Union in 1984 is being launched. ⁹ This is a significant step in trying to ‘challenge the economic inequalities in the art world and to negotiate fair pay and better working conditions for artists’ (Artists’ Union England, 2014). This concrete example shares in Weeks’ proposal for a more collective address to the current organisation of work. Our project, Manual Labours, takes on Davis’ call for artists to link up with struggles beyond their own sphere as we develop workshops with complaints teams in different working environments such as a hospital, bank and local authority. Applying a more collective, embodied reorganisation could mean ‘loving work’ might not be based on the value system of economic valorisation. It might allow a reclaiming of enjoyment and build an infrastructure determined to recognise, re-order and reclaim work, and resist the premise that it is something to be pursued with joy at any cost.