Christian Weihrauch, 2024
It’s my Monday, which is Sunday, and this morning’s repast is an expired organic sourdough English muffin with expired extra creamy unsalted butter and ‘four fruits’ jam from a jar with a dented lid. Despite product copy about legacy farms and vineyard-ripened fruits, this is not a healthy breakfast. I feel like a Grey Gardens riches-to-rags lymphatic aristocrat, sallow and weary.
My very kind and conflict-averse Taurean colleague tells me he works four days a week but will ask to work three. “I’d rather dumpster dive with a smile on my face.” Inspired by his genius, I ask my manager if I, too, may work fewer hours, or the same number of hours condensed into fewer days, or fewer days. Naturally, the answer is no. Why? Because saying no feels good to those in power, light sadism the dopamine equivalent of 92% cacao Total Eclipse fair-trade chocolate. There’s also a rule by which the part-time drudge may add hours, but the full-time drudge may not subtract hours—dada disciplinary logic of the modern American workplace.
My first paycheck is eleven hundred dollars. I transfer it in its entirety to the landlord.
Then I spend the weekend in an angry, irritable funk. I’m too tired to do anything I enjoy. I go for a sullen walk around my neighborhood, practically kicking children’s toys like Martha in The Honeymoon Killers, listening to an indefatigably cheerful multi-millionaire life coach prattle on about goals. Goals are stupid, I think, kicking a rock.
“My goals for the future anchor me to the direction and the plan, but it’s the day-to-day showing up that makes the quality of my life now so [satisfying.]...when I’m inviting you to dream bigger, and you’re discouraged by the bigger dream, it’s because you’re too focused on the result, and getting it too fast, and measuring yourself too much. And not feeling into the life that the process of achieving the dream [and trusting yourself] can create for you.”
I had walked through the forest to the clearing with my favorite willow trees, through the meadow, around the marsh—there was feces everywhere. I was dancing over and around mounds of feces, listening hard. Either the new crop of renters weren’t cleaning up their dogs’ mess, or wild animals had emerged from the brush to shit out in the open, or both. In any case, it came to me right away that my ‘big goal fun’ (hideous) would be replacing this tour of low wage work with writing. Six months of publishing a post every Wednesday, five hundred paid subscribers. Clear as a bell it came, followed by terror that I’ll have to do unmentionable things like learn marketing, erect paywalls, and write tweets.
A YouTube boy, casual and floppy holding his lavalier, feet unpardonably crossed on the desk, a pistol (??) beside his MacBook, says, “an excellent marketer who is a mediocre artist will beat an excellent artist who is a mediocre marketer.”
Ugh.
Yet I’ve dismissed potential solutions too quickly, from snotty disdain disguised as integrity. My favorite contemporary anarchist theorist, Franco Berardi, writes in the final chapter —“What Should We Do When Nothing Can Be Done?”—of Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide:
“Why did I write such a horrible book? I started writing this text almost in a state of rapture, half-consciously, dragged by a sort of excitement and curiosity, and primarily driven by the perception that here, in these dark subjects, there is something peculiar to the spirit of our time.
Did I write this book out of an intention to denounce the nihilistic effects that omnipresent competition and aggressiveness are bringing about in the contemporary psychosphere? Well, yes and no.
The evil that financial capitalism is wreaking on the lives of working people is largely known, and delivering catastropic warnings generally offers little help. People already know that their well-being will be threatened and their lifestyle worsen as long as the engine of financial capitalism continues to run at full steam against the interests of society as a whole. What they do not know is how to stop this train of devastation, now that all the traditional forms of protest and democratic expression have been neutralized.
So denunciation is feeding frustration and leading nowhere.
In place of denunciation, what is needed is a line of flight.”
I’m on tenterhooks waiting to read what the line of flight is.
“Money is our shelter, the only way we have to access life. But at the same time, if you want money you have to renounce life.”
Well put. But what’s the line of flight?
“In the last few decades, artistic sensibility has been paralysed by a sense of paranoiac enchantment: psychic frailty, fear of precariousness and the premonition of a catastrophe that is impossible to avoid...now all this paranoia has to be disposed of...dystopia has to be faced and dissolved by irony.
If paranoia ‘knows well,’ we need a method of ignorance. We need to assume some distance from what seems to be inscribed as an imminent-immanent tendency in the present cartography of events...we need to correct dystopia with irony, because irony (far from being cynical alliance with power) is the excess of language that opens the door to the infinity of the possible.”
His suggested line of flight is...irony? Perhaps academics are not the people to look to for answers.
“Revolt against power is necessary even if we may not know how to win.”
But is the revolt simply ironic distance? Berardi suggests we give up large-scale political hope (the book was published in 2015 lol), and I can only surmise he sort of means: grow your food and compile your doomer kit, vote against bald-faced fascism and nuclear annihilation, but do it because you want to, not because you think it will do any good.
I really don’t know—Italians are so grandiose—but this is my proposal. Set a big goal with me. Something that will change who you are and how you live your life. A goal the pursuit and realization of which represents a revolt against power in whatever form it dogs you.
I asked my sweetie for a bedtime story. “Once upon a time, a cook fell in love with a dishwasher....” he began, and then I fell asleep and missed the story of our future. This morning I wondered what I’d want our fairy tale to be, and couldn’t think of anything except more of the same—with half the number of working hours.
Berardi writes:
“The financial dictatorship is...the domination of...mathematical ferocity on living and conscious organisms.
That is why we need to produce and to circulate chaoides, that is, tools for the conceptual elaboration both of the surrounding and of the internalized chaos.
A chaoide is a form of enunciation (artistic, poetic, political, scientific) which is able to open the linguistic flows to different rhythms and to different frames of interpretation.
Chaosmosis means reactivation of the body of social solidarity, reactivation of imagination, a new dimension for human evolution, beyond the limited horizon of economic growth.”
Andiamo!
A post every Wednesday! One out of four paywalled! Please don’t strain yourself reading them all, but please do call in with your vocational questions and concerns.
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In computer science there’s a famous phrase “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. It may be that for a system to remain humane there must be one or more unoptimized elements. The rub is that capitalist competition is not completely avoidable so the number of elements that can remain unoptimized is low. There are a ton of consequences to this fact. Any noble project tends to become a fundraising effort very quickly; breathing spaces from market competition depend on support from wealthy individuals and must therefore revolve around their concerns; etc
First?!