Sold twice: a life kept in working order
No leisure for slaves
κατὰ γὰρ τὴν παροιμίαν, οὐ σχολὴ δούλοις.
“As the proverb has it, there is no leisure for slaves.”—Aristotle, Politics VII.15 A few lines earlier Aristotle has repeated that peace is the end of war and leisure the end of unleisure, σχολὴ δ᾽ ἀσχολίας (1334a14–16), where Jowett has “leisure of toil.”
For some years my leisure was one city block long, the walk from the office to my apartment. The road there ran through a high school in China, where sleep was rationed to five hours and the rest of the clock went to the books, and through a college where I slept every other night. A tall can of Red Bull, drunk in one go, did the waking; the coffee after it shook my hands, and I told my pianist friends it improved the trills.
Then a sponsored visa made me a “foreign indentured servant,” and most of my bosses took every chance to remind me that the green card ran through their hands. The phrase is J. D. Vance's. On October 8, 2026, announcing the suspension of Microsoft, Adobe, and several Indian IT firms from the labor-certification program through which employers sponsor green cards for H-1B workers, the Vice President said that companies “cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants,” and glossed the term: a worker on an H-1B is “completely subordinate to that company.” India's Ministry of External Affairs called the description deeply offensive the next day, for its colonial connotations; roughly 1.6 million Indians were shipped overseas as indentured labor between the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and 1917. See “JD Vance calls Indian workers ‘indentured servants’: What the term means and its history,” Economic Times, October 2026. The condition is older than the phrase. Nobody held my passport. The man who hired me made a point of paying me exactly what he paid an American a decade my junior. One line set my otherwise identical contract apart. He had written it in before I asked for anything and offered it as a favor: the sponsor may help. The modal verb was the whole arrangement: the help at his discretion, the need not. I got the message. You may be better, but you are compromised. The claimed fairness was the cruelty. Same pay, one collar.
Farther down the road, and down the hall from me, was a managing director who had come from nothing and stayed frugal, a tall Irishman with a temper who worked like a dog and wore his ruthlessness where you could see it. He drank the way he worked, and he was growing bitter with age. A life of it had left him little, not even that much money, and no one to drink with. His four children all graduated from the Ivy League, half of them legacies, and he had one rule for them: no investment bank. You ain't cut out for it; you guys are weak. You need to be animals. Animal was the highest compliment he had for anyone. He said I was one. It took me years to see he was wrong on both counts.
I took no vacation. An immigrant is already on one: the ultimate American experience, deluxe package. In my first job I worked every weekend and left around two in the morning. My boss banned reading and he banned the internet, the way a regime does, so that what you knew came from him or from nowhere. Still he had a complaint. But David, you are single. Why don't you live in the office? He was not joking. It was for my own good, he said. He had invested in me. He was an Olympic coach: either he made me better or I quit. The block was the last gap between the desk and the bed, and he wanted it shut. I did not argue.
Younger colleagues who heard the story had the word for it inside five seconds: abuse. I would have reported him. There was nothing to uncover. We worked on an open floor; all of it happened in public, and people just watched. The door was not locked. Nobody used it. Martin Seligman and Steven Maier, “Failure to Escape Traumatic Shock,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 74 (1967): 1–9. Dogs given shocks they could not escape later lay down in a box they could have left by stepping over a low barrier; the name the experimenters gave it was learned helplessness. At the time it had no name because, from inside, it had no outside: it was the culture of the bulge bracket, and Hollywood had shot it before we arrived, in a light that forgave everything: the vest and the Patek, the MD cursing the length of the floor, the associate asleep beneath his desk, the Asian quant in his corner, and through the night the Bloomberg terminal blinking like a city from a plane. We were extras in a film about ourselves, and we knew our marks. We had made it our own, and nobody had made it more his own than the man giving the orders.
He pretended to work as hard as he asked; most of the time he just watched, and went down for a cigarette, and came back up, and went down again. But he was under more strain than he let on. Once, worn past some limit, he asked me a question. Do you know why I do this voluntarily? One tear, no more. He did not sob, and the face it ran down was the saddest I have seen. Because I am a slave, and slaves don't choose. I listened attentively without a word. I had started late, after the PhD, and had never interned a day. I did not understand him then, and I still cannot say I do now. The slower cases are in Fatal strategies. Those days built something in me, as hard days do. I would like to think he saw a will in me and was curious to see it break, and that the curiosity was not all sadism; some of it was intellectual. It is a privilege, of a sort, to be put under that much pressure, though I will not thank a predator for the generosity of his time. He died a couple of years after I left, in his forties, of a heart attack. He was single and had no children, and his family kept to itself; none of us found a way to the funeral. Years later, at a reunion, in the ritual of going back over those days, a colleague who had been close to him, and had watched all of it, said it quietly, as if it were settled. David, you know you killed him. He was not quite the same after you.
People cannot toil without a break, and Aristotle would not let the break count as an end. He approved the motto of Anacharsis, play so that one may be serious: play is a kind of rest, and rest is taken for the sake of the activity it interrupts. Recuperation sits below work, and work below leisure. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X.6–7, in Ross's translation. The motto is παίζειν δ᾽ ὅπως σπουδάζῃ (paizein d' hopōs spoudazēi), and relaxation “is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity” (1176b33–1177a1). Aquinas kept the two rests apart: the requies that interrupts an activity before its end is reached, because working continuously is impossible, is ordered to the activity as to its end; vacatio autem est requies in fine ad quem ordinatur operatio, but leisure is rest in the end to which the activity is ordered (Sententia libri Ethicorum X, lect. 11, n. 2). The Greeks named the occupied life by what it lacked: ἀσχολία (ascholia), unleisure, is σχολή (scholē), leisure, behind a privative alpha; the word for leisure passed through Latin schola into English as school. Latin built negotium the same way, from nec, not, and otium, leisure, and left English the verb negotiate. The Chinese graphs offer another picture: leisure is a gate with the moon showing through it, a crack of light in a door shut for the night, and busyness is a heart pressed. 閒, leisure, is 門, gate, with 月, moon, inside it; the Shuowen (c. 100) defines it as a crack, and the Kangxi dictionary (1716) quotes Xu Kai's tenth-century explanation: a gate shut at night that still shows the moonlight has a gap in it. That leisure is a gap is the traditional reading of the graph, not a settled etymology of the word. 忙, busy, is 忄, heart, beside 亡, perish, which here gives only the sound; the Kangxi glosses it 心迫也, the heart pressed, and “a heart perishing” is folk etymology. Josef Pieper opened his defense of leisure on the same line of the Ethics and the same etymology. Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (Muße und Kult, 1948; trans. Alexander Dru, 1952), ch. I: “we are unleisurely in order to have leisure,” and “Greek only has the negative, a-scolia, just as Latin has neg-otium.” The claim is too strong for the vocabulary—Greek had ἔργον (ergon), work, and πόνος (ponos), toil—but exact for the condition of being occupied.
Aristotle's own settlement was brutal. The leisure of some rested on the necessity imposed on others; the household supplied the citizen with hours its women and slaves did not get on the same terms. The farming went to slaves, the ordering of the slaves to a steward, and the master went off to politics or philosophy. Aristotle, Politics, in Jowett's translation. VII.9, 1328b39–1329a2: the citizens of the best state are neither tradesmen nor farmers, “since leisure is necessary both for the development of virtue and the performance of political duties”; VII.10, 1330a25–31: the farmers should ideally be slaves, “not all of the same race and not spirited,” so that they work and do not revolt; I.7, 1255b33–37: the master's knowledge is “nothing great or wonderful,” so “those who are in a position which places them above toil have stewards who attend to their households while they occupy themselves with philosophy or with politics”; I.13, 1260a12–14: the slave has no deliberative faculty, the woman has it but ἄκυρον, without authority. Aristotle allowed one condition on which masters would need no slaves, at I.4, 1253b33–1254a1: “if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.” A green card that runs through the employer is a milder instrument of the same supply, and the hand it ran through was not free either. The question of ends deserves to outlive the class that could afford to ask it. What is the exertion making possible, and for whom?
The highest happiness of the Ethics is itself an activity, an ἐνέργεια (energeia), complete while it lasts and carrying no inventory. On energeia as an activity that carries no inventory, see Fatal strategies. Leisure is the room such an activity needs, where the question of what a life is for gets an answer other than its upkeep. The room can be full of exertion: a proof, a translation, a problem worked until it gives.
I had the ethic burned into me, and I still enjoy the intellectual athleticism, the endurance and the speed, simply because I am a collie; I do not ask it of anyone else. The collie was bred to work all day and is miserable when kept from it; the endurance is the pleasure. Remote work is the fashion in fintech. I see no point in it, and I am for it anyway, for a reason of my own: my best work is done sitting quietly alone in the office. What divides leisure from unleisure is the end the effort serves, and no count of hours settles it; mine prove nothing by themselves. An idle evening can be subordinate to tomorrow's performance, and a long day of chosen work can hold more freedom than the evening.
I left after two years, and soon I had a team of my own, at a place where coaching was the rage and a team of coaches was on retainer. The sessions came joint and individual, with peers and on the diagonal, in every combination the org chart allowed. Trust came first and transparency was radical, and sympathy was the principle that absorbed all harms: treat them as your younger brothers and sisters. I never had one. The coaches loved me; teachers usually do. The teachers are in Fatal strategies. I learned the therapy speech the way I had learned everything else, fast and to the test—empathy, vulnerability, no blame—until I could say you are not there to manage, you are there to support without hearing it. Underneath was a saving impulse. I would be, for the people under me, the boss I never had: open, candid, helpful. My first boss had done it for my own good too; he had also called himself a coach.
I followed problems in the work back to the habits of the people doing them, and kept going after the task itself was clear, on the theory that a mistake reached deep enough would stop recurring. It was admirable in my own mind, and it did not work. The explanation could be understood and the old arrangement remain. What I had taken for a bad habit was doing several jobs at once—earning approval, avoiding humiliation, keeping a fear quiet, making the day bearable—and press on one path, another took up its traffic. I could make the visible behavior disappear and the need for it more urgent somewhere I could not see. The broken parts are also load-bearing. I tried to describe this in Deep persuasion. You do not know everything that rests on the belief you have just corrected, and the clarity of your objection tells you nothing about what its acceptance will cost. The intention stays with you; the disturbance goes home with someone else, and some of it has your name on it. At work it is worse, because the mentor is also the judge. Advice from the hand that grades you is hard to put down, and a person may be answering the mentor and protecting his livelihood in the same sentence. When my first boss asked why I did not live in the office, the green card was in the room, and I answered by staying later. No wish of mine for an honest conversation can take that second task out of the room.
The task has changed shape since. A job is easier to promise than a career; we meet as contractors now, and it is fair to ask what leadership is for when there is no path to lead anyone along. Fatal strategies, on the contractor's era and what leadership is for in it. The old can no longer count on being the quicker. The young handle the newest tools better than we do, and the tribe's reason for deferring to its elders, that they had been there, seems to fail for the simplest reason: nobody has been there. One of the elders said so aloud this autumn. Hugo Duminil-Copin, “Un grave défaut d'alignement de l'IA en mathématiques, 28 jours plus tard”, the opening talk of the Société mathématique de France's webinar series on generative AI, October 2026. By his own account, every problem he had named in a talk, a paper, or a grant application had been solved by a machine in the space of a month, his doctoral students and postdocs were in a panic he understood, and a Lean proof that arrived on September 2 with no paper attached made him feel twice his age. He has published about 3,700 pages in his life; the machine's papers that cite him run to 3,500. The claims are his, made a few days after the announcements, and the proofs were still being read. The disruption confuses the guide more than the one asking the way. With no path to put them on, I got what the young had to bring instead, which was themselves: their vulnerability, their confusion. I had asked for it. I had made openness the virtue of the team and never said how much the relationship could bear; nobody had taught them the boundary, since how to work for someone was never a subject for school or for parents, and the coaching had taught me to dissolve it. I listened, attentively, because it was polite and because I would not turn away someone in what looked like real distress. I come from a generation that kept its jobs by forbearance, and both reasons were forbearance; neither was a judgment that listening would help. They talked, sometimes cried, and afterward found me unchanged, still the one who judges the work, and the close conversation had not made us close. Aren't you supposed to be my mentor? I never offered to be one. All they see is a young professor in khakis, patient and easy to talk to, and they do not know he is an animal. I ask no one for the grit that was asked of me, and that does not mean I understand its absence. The talk runs both ways: the ones who came to be heard are also seen, and when the mirror turns and shows them not quite what they claimed to be, they find the seeing hurtful. The disappointment was not all theirs to answer for. Listening is not harmless. To attend promises, without a word, that something will follow and that the pain has been understood, and I had not understood my first boss, and I had no way of knowing that their pain was what I understood pain to be. The Supreme Court hears a few dozen cases a year, and the choosing is most of the judging.
There are less innocent uses too, and they are not confined to the young. A boss who is not bossy looks like a soft spot, and the late messages find it. Do you want to hang out? I have watched unhappiness become the standing explanation for work left undone; the distress need not be invented for the exemption to be learned. In the age of Instagram a depression is a sign of depth and an anxiety is a currency for bonding, and the meaningful social interactions the platforms optimize for are the emotionally loaded ones. Facebook rebuilt its News Feed ranking around “meaningful social interactions,” MSI, in 2018, weighting comments, reshares, and emotion reactions above likes as the better measure of a bond; the company's own researchers found that the metric rewarded outrage and sensationalism. Keach Hagey and Jeff Horwitz, “Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead,” Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2021. A feeling can be real and still not settle what the job requires.
Over time I learned the virtue of limited intervention. I give the facts. I say how I see the trade-offs. When the work needs an instruction I keep it short, and when I prefer an approach I say why and leave the rest to the other person's judgment. I do not need agreement to grow into conversion. I have told them that the work is all I will ask them to account for, so how are you? can be answered workwise, okay, and left there. Difficulty outside the work can call for changes inside it, and we make them without a full account of the life being the price of the help. Retrospectives belong at work: we examine a failure, correct a decision, improve a method. Revising the models by which someone lives is a larger undertaking, with consequences that outlast the meeting, and I no longer take a problem in the work as permission to begin it. My shorthand is work.app: update the application at work, and leave the hardware and the firmware to a life whose purposes and company I do not get to assign. Access is not permission. It is not the graduate's treaty of separation—work is work, life is life—which is only armor. The treaty and the armor are from Bull herding and bullshitting. The treaty walls a life off from the world; work.app marks where my jurisdiction ends, at the gap my first boss wanted shut. The Adlerian name for the restraint is the separation of tasks: I offer what I know, make my responsibilities clear, and leave the other person's life project in his hands. Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked, “The Third Night: Discard Other People's Tasks.” This is their contemporary presentation of Adlerian psychology; the workplace application here is mine. I remain responsible for what my intervention does. I will not make someone else's transformation my project; nobody under me has to get better or quit. My first boss is still a weight on me, and I know he would have wanted to be. Maybe all he wanted was to matter in someone else's life. That is not right, for him or for me. When people meet chiefly through their roles, a depth goes out of the meeting, and I still feel the loss. Cognitive resignation, on that loss of depth. But the freedom to decline a deep conversation belongs to the depth I miss, and I cannot restore it by making myself harder to decline. I am not sure the apathy the institution has taught me is much better than the attention I had from him; he mostly watched, too. But I am more at peace with the unfinished conversation now. I can help make the next piece of work clearer and let the rest of the person go home.
I work hard, I deserve it
ἀσχολούμεθα γὰρ ἵνα σχολάζωμεν.
“We are unleisured so that we may be at leisure.”—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X.7 ἀσχολούμεθα (ascholoumetha) is a verb made on ἄσχολος (ascholos), without leisure, and “unleisured” keeps the root the Greek repeats. Ross has “we are busy that we may have leisure,” Rackham “we do business in order that we may have leisure”; Rackham himself uses “unleisured” for ἄσχολοι in the next sentence, at 1177b8.
What goes home is tired. The hours did it, the quota and the pace and the attention they took, and what arrives at the apartment is a man short of time, short of say, and short of anyone to tell, which is the depletion the market knows how to treat. This is not the toll of an hourly job, where the evening is short of money. It is the toll of the salaried one, where the evening is short of everything else, and a man with money and no time is the market's favorite patient. The free restoratives cost the one thing the day took, and they go unused: the sleep not slept, the walk not taken, the dinner not cooked, the friend not called, the quarrel not had, the question not asked. So the evening answers with a purchase, one for each. For the sleep, a mattress and a ring that scores it; for the walk, a massage and a class; for the dinner, the delivery; for the friend, a feed that is always awake and never asks how you are; for the quarrel, a therapist, who takes the other person out of the problem and hands back a symptom, yours alone and treatable by the hour; and for the question of what the hours were for, a watch that says: this. By morning the purchase is an obligation. The wage must continue, and the wage is the hours, and the hours are where it began. I work hard, I deserve it is the sentence said at the checkout, and it closes the loop: the deserving is earned by the hours and spent on what makes the hours bearable. A trader would know the position. Long and short the same name through the same dealer, the exposures net to nothing and the fees do not; the counterparty on both legs is one economy, which buys the day and sells the evening back, and the spread on the round trip is what keeps the arrangement standing.
THE CIRCUIT
┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐
│ the hours │ ──────────→ │ depletion │
│ quota, pace, │ │ time famine, │
│ attention │ │ powerlessness │
└──────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘
↑ │
│ ↓
┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐
│ obligation │ ←────────── │ purchase │
│ the wage must │ │ relief, speed, │
│ continue │ │ distinction │
└──────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘
Not every effort runs the circuit. Some ends its own recurrence and leaves nothing to redo; some renews it and leaves a larger claim on the same hours, until the principal product of a working life is a worker who must work harder to keep the conditions of working harder, and effort has an end that eats its means. Loving the work tells nobody which is which. We build machines that could cut the necessary labor, then theories to explain why the saved time must become more labor. We recover so that we can work; we work so that we can afford recovery. Pieper, publishing in the rubble of 1948, found the inversion inside the modern defense of leisure itself. The break from work had to plead recuperation, the strength the worker carried back to the job: in Dru's English, “a man is not only refreshed from work but for work.” Pieper, Leisure, ch. III, on leisure as a disposition distinct from both work and the pause taken for work's sake. In ch. I he calls the order in which leisure must earn its keep the world of “total work,” as Dru's analytical contents have it, though his text says “total labour”; the German table of contents has Der Anspruch der totalen Arbeitswelt. His own justification ran the other way, and it names the one thing the circuit cannot book.
“The point and the justification of leisure are not that the functionary should function faultlessly and without a breakdown, but that the functionary should continue to be a man—and that means that he should not be wholly absorbed in the clear-cut milieu of his strictly limited function; the point is also that he should retain the faculty of grasping the world as a whole and realizing his full potentialities as an entity meant to reach Wholeness.”
—Josef Pieper, Muße und Kult; Leisure: The Basis of Culture, ch. III Trans. Alexander Dru (London: Faber, 1952), ch. III, the chapter that sets leisure against the three senses of work, as activity, as toil, and as social function; the same chapter opens by insisting that leisure “is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a week-end or a vacation.”
Leisure as receptivity, contemplation, or celebration could not be defended on recuperative terms, since nothing it yielded went back to the workplace as an improved input. Pieper granted the refreshment and denied the justification. Rest's newer advocates are kinder, and make the argument he refused: sleep makes you sharper; exercise makes you resilient; friends protect you from burnout. The can of Red Bull made the same argument with the rest left out, refreshment for work and nothing else. The walk, the meal, and the friendship are permitted to matter because they keep the worker serviceable, and nobody asks what being serviceable is for.
Seine natürlichen Bedürfnisse selbst, wie Nahrung, Kleidung, Heizung, Wohnung usw., sind verschieden je nach den klimatischen und andren natürlichen Eigentümlichkeiten eines Landes. Andrerseits ist der Umfang sog. notwendiger Bedürfnisse, wie die Art ihrer Befriedigung, selbst ein historisches Produkt und hängt daher großenteils von der Kulturstufe eines Landes, unter andrem auch wesentlich davon ab, unter welchen Bedingungen, und daher mit welchen Gewohnheiten und Lebensansprüchen die Klasse der freien Arbeiter sich gebildet hat. Im Gegensatz zu den andren Waren enthält also die Wertbestimmung der Arbeitskraft ein historisches und moralisches Element.
“His natural wants, such as food, clothing, fuel, and housing, vary according to the climatic and other physical conditions of his country. On the other hand, the number and extent of his so-called necessary wants, as also the modes of satisfying them, are themselves the product of historical development, and depend therefore to a great extent on the degree of civilisation of a country, more particularly on the conditions under which, and consequently on the habits and degree of comfort in which, the class of free labourers has been formed. In contradistinction therefore to the case of other commodities, there enters into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral element.”—Karl Marx, Das Kapital I, Kap. 4.3; Capital I, ch. 6, “The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power”
Marx did not need to ask; he put the answer inside the wage. The seller of labor-power must keep appearing in the market, so he “must perpetuate himself,” and the price of what he sells includes the means by which he eats, sleeps, and comes back in the morning. The wage carries a maintenance clause, and custom sets the amount. Marx let “a historical and moral element” into it, so that subsistence differs by country and by period, and in an affluent working life the clause runs past bread to the purchases by which the week is made bearable: the subscription, the ring that scores the sleep, the long weekend. Marx, Das Kapital I (1867), Kap. 4.3, “Kauf und Verkauf der Arbeitskraft” (MEW 23, p. 185); the English is Capital I, ch. 6, trans. Moore and Aveling, ed. Engels (1887). The passage continues: “Nevertheless, in a given country, at a given period, the average quantity of the means of subsistence necessary for the labourer is practically known.” A page earlier is the sentence the mortality of the seller hangs on: “The owner of labour-power is mortal.” He noticed, too, the odd position of the employer, who wants his own workers paid as little as possible and everyone else's paid enough to buy what he makes, a wish coherent only in aggregate, and the aggregate is an economy obliged to sell its workers back their evenings at scale. Marx, Grundrisse (1857–58), Notebook IV: each capitalist treats his own workers as a cost and everyone else's as customers. Schor asked why the productivity gains of the postwar decades were taken almost entirely as income and not as time, when the arithmetic allowed either, and the answer came from both sides. Employers prefer fewer people working longer, since much of what a worker costs is fixed per head and not per hour; workers handed income instead of hours spend it at a level that then requires the hours; and work-and-spend locks from both ends. Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (1991), ch. 5, “The Insidious Cycle of Work-and-Spend.”
The firm depreciates the press. It capitalizes the purchase and charges a share of the cost against each year of the press's useful life; the worker it expenses. His wage is booked as the hours are bought, and his own wear, the sleep, the back, the heart, the attention, is booked nowhere, since the firm does not own him and carries him on no balance sheet. Chinese keeps both kinds of upkeep under one word, 保养, literally keep and nourish, which serves for the servicing of a machine and for the care a man takes of his own health, and the firm books only the first. 《国语辞典》, s.v. 保养 (zdic.net): 机械的修理、维护, the repair and upkeep of machinery, and 人的调养、保健, a person's recuperation and care of health. The wage, the leave, and the benefits cover part of the repair; the household absorbs the rest, after the working day, as private expense or as labor nobody pays for, and what the firm counts as a productive employee comes home as a man whose evening was spent before he arrived.
Aber in seinem maßlos blinden Trieb, seinem Werwolfs-Heißhunger nach Mehrarbeit, überrennt das Kapital nicht nur die moralischen, sondern auch die rein physischen Maximalschranken des Arbeitstags. Es usurpiert die Zeit für Wachstum, Entwicklung und gesunde Erhaltung des Körpers. Es raubt die Zeit, erheischt zum Verzehr von freier Luft und Sonnenlicht. Es knickert ab an der Mahlzeit und einverleibt sie womöglich dem Produktionsprozeß selbst, so daß dem Arbeiter als bloßem Produktionsmittel Speisen zugesetzt werden wie dem Dampfkessel Kohle und der Maschinerie Talg oder Öl. Den gesunden Schlaf für Sammlung, Erneuerung und Erfrischung der Lebenskraft reduziert es auf so viel Stunden Erstarrung, als die Wiederbelebung eines absolut erschöpften Organismus unentbehrlich macht. Statt daß die normale Erhaltung der Arbeitskraft hier die Schranke des Arbeitstags, bestimmt umgekehrt die größte täglich mögliche Verausgabung der Arbeitskraft, wie krankhaft gewaltsam und peinlich sie auch sei, die Schranke für die Rastzeit des Arbeiters. Das Kapital fragt nicht nach der Lebensdauer der Arbeitskraft.
“But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with the process of production itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reinforcement, and refreshment of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential. It is not the normal maintenance of the labour-power which is to determine the limits of the working-day; it is the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory, and painful it may be, which is to determine the limits of the labourers' period of repose. Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labour-power.”—Karl Marx, Das Kapital I, Kap. 8.5; Capital I, ch. 10, “The Working Day” Das Kapital I, Kap. 8, “Der Arbeitstag,” §5 (MEW 23, pp. 280–281); the English is Capital I, ch. 10, §5, trans. Moore and Aveling, ed. Engels (1887).
Marx had the ledger a century and a half ago, down to the coal and the grease. His word for what is left of sleep is torpor, Erstarrung, the hours of revival an exhausted organism makes essential, and what the working day usurps is the healthy maintenance of the body, gesunde Erhaltung, which is 保养 in another ledger. Federici, Vogel, and Bhattacharya kept the account the firm does not keep. Cooking, cleaning, nursing, and raising children sustain the capacity the wage buys, and much of that labor has historically been assigned to women without a wage of its own. Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (1975); Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (1983); Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory (2017), on the unpaid work, assigned largely to women, that produces and restores the labor-power the wage buys. Fraser took the dependence to the scale of the system and found a contradiction in it: accumulation relies on capacities for care that its own demands wear down, and when paid work presses harder on the household, the work of sustaining people is squeezed, privatized, or bought from someone else. Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care”, New Left Review 100 (2016), on accumulation's dependence on social reproduction and its tendency to destabilize it. The household that buys its leisure buys somebody's unleisure, and the professional's saved hour can be the courier's hurried one. Care has been moved across an account, and the pressure travels with it.
The idle hour has a price, and Franklin made it exact in 1748. A tradesman whose labor fetches ten shillings a day and who sits idle half of it has lost five shillings on top of the sixpence his diversion cost. Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a young Tradesman, written by an old One” (1748), in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (1961), 304–308: “Remember that Time is Money. He that can earn Ten Shillings a Day by his Labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that Day, tho' he spends but Sixpence during his Diversion or Idleness, ought not to reckon That the only Expence; he has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.” Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904–5; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, 1930), ch. 2, opens his provisional description of the spirit of capitalism with the passage, in a modernized text whose last lines come from “Necessary Hints to Those That Would Be Rich” (1736). Franklin's tradesman could have sold the idle half-day; a salaried man's evening is not for sale by the hour, so its shadow price is set by its scarcity rather than by his wage. The five shillings are the half-day at its shadow price, what the hours would have fetched had they been sold, and a demanding job raises the shadow price of the few hours it leaves. Linder saw the consequence in 1970: as the hour of labor grows more valuable so does the hour of leisure, and the rational response is to cram more goods into it, the harried leisure class drinking better wine faster. Staffan Linder, The Harried Leisure Class (1970): as the value of an hour rises, consumption becomes goods-intensive per unit of time, and leisure itself turns hurried. Perlow found the time famine inside the working day of a team of software engineers, made by the way their work was organized, and the evening inherits it. Leslie Perlow, “The Time Famine: Toward a Sociology of Work Time,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44 (1999), on the organizational production of time famine at work; the extension to the hours outside it is mine. Sleep, a walk, a cooked dinner, and a conversation that runs long cost little in money and a great deal in time and attention, so substitution follows, and it is rational. Dinner is delivered, and the fee is a lower bound on the shadow price of the hour it buys back; whoever pays for the hour has shown it is worth at least the fee to him. The job sets the shadow price and the seller sets the fee, and the purchase is made wherever the first is the larger. The massage buys back no hour. It repairs, by appointment, the back the walk would have kept.
THE MAINTENANCE ACCOUNT (保养)
wear (unbilled, paid in time) │ repair (billed, paid in money)
─────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────
the sleep not slept │ the mattress, the ring
the walk not taken │ the massage, the class
the dinner not cooked │ the delivery
the friend not called │ the subscription
the question not asked │ the watch
The last row cannot settle: the watch gives the unasked question a presentable answer. This is what the hours were for. Then a demanding job ends, or its pace lets up long enough, and the wanting goes quiet. The cart that was always half full sits empty. The watch that had been calling from a browser tab stops calling. The delivery app goes unopened, because there was time to buy an onion and an evening in which to cook it. Something that had felt like character, a taste for good things, a weakness for the upgrade, the sentence said at the checkout, turns out to have belonged to the situation. Leaving a job is an experiment with three confounds: the income changes, the colleagues disappear, the uncertainty rises, and nothing shows which of them the fading wants were answering. It can be run cleaner, and without the exit. A leave long enough for the depletion to clear, three weeks away from the lobby, sorts the wants into those that clear with it and those that stay, and only the second kind has earned a line in the budget. Either way the empty cart puts the question the working life keeps postponing. How much of this standard of living is a way of living, and how much is the cost of remaining capable of work? Economics has an answer ready. Stigler and Becker proposed treating tastes as stable and sending the explanation to prices, income, and consumption capital; on their account the price of an evening falls when the job stops taking it, and nothing in the man has to change. George Stigler and Gary Becker, “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum,” American Economic Review 67, no. 2 (1977): 76–90. Their methodological proposal is to explain changes in behavior through constraints and consumption capital rather than invoking changes in taste. That explains the dinner. It does not explain the watch, since the job had a hand in deciding what recognition and relief looked like, and which purchases stood for a life there was no time to inhabit. The asset-pricing literature went a step further and let utility depend on a reference level of past consumption, so that a standard once reached becomes the floor; but habit in those models is a slow stock, and its signature is the ratchet, consumption rising readily with income and falling grudgingly. George Constantinides, “Habit Formation: A Resolution of the Equity Premium Puzzle,” Journal of Political Economy 98 (1990); John Campbell and John Cochrane, “By Force of Habit,” Journal of Political Economy 107 (1999); James Duesenberry, Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior (1949), on consumption set against one's own previous peak. The treadmill is Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society” (1971). What follows the exit is not a slow decay from a high floor. It is faster and stranger, a symptom clearing when its cause is withdrawn, and a want with that profile is a compensation, not a preference.
The wanting had been the argument for the work: This is the life I want; this is what it costs; therefore these are the hours I must give. If the hours were helping to produce the wanting, the justification was circular, and the work was defended by the appetite it maintained. The worker's evening purchases are an account of what the day took from him, written in the language of preference. Consumption is the easiest fix for the problems of working, and it was never meant to fix them. A fix that cured would sell once, and a fix that failed would not sell twice; what sells is the fix that works just enough, enough to return the worker to the desk and not enough to let him stop wanting it there. Nobody designs the dose. The seller prefers the purchase that recurs to the one that ends the need; the employer prefers a relief that costs money to one that costs only time, since the first keeps the wage in force and the second does not; the worker prefers the remedy he can buy tonight to the one he would have to negotiate for; and three preferences, each reasonable alone, settle the dose where all three are met, which is maintenance: enough to keep the worker running, never enough to finish the repair. The fix is salt water. It slakes, and it is the reason for the next glass.
„Die Arbeit hingegen ist gehemmte Begierde, aufgehaltenes Verschwinden, oder sie bildet.“
“Work, on the other hand, is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing.”—G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, IV.A (Miller ¶ 195)
Productive has an exact sense in Marx, and it is not a compliment. A laborer is productive when he produces surplus value for capital, whatever else he produces. Marx's example is the schoolmaster, “a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor”; that the proprietor “has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.” Marx, Capital I, ch. 16, “Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value”, in the Moore and Aveling translation edited by Engels, on productive labor as a specific social relation of production, which the usefulness of the work does not settle. The classification describes capital; it does not rank anyone's work. The teaching factory still carries the name of σχολή, and its schoolmaster is unleisured in Aristotle's sense and productive in Marx's. The employer keeps one account and the worker another. A year of teaching is productive in the first because it enriched the proprietor, and in the second only if somebody learned something, the teacher included; working like a horse counts in the first and proves nothing in the second, and the evening spent cooking the onion produces surplus value for no one. The trade in compensations meets every measure it keeps. The app works, the delivery arrives, and what it produces is relief. Graeber called the postwar settlement compensatory consumerism, a job one does not believe in paid for with things one does not need, and the name outlives its condition, since the job can be believed in and the trade still run. David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), on the settlement he called compensatory consumerism. An apparatus that makes the pressure bearable is not one that lets anyone reorganize the hours behind it. The massage loosens the shoulders and leaves the worker who paid for it with exactly the say over tomorrow he had when he lay down.
The slave who ends holding the only current model of the world gets there by work, and Hegel sets the work against the master's desire. Fatal strategies follows the slave to that end. Desire consumes its object outright, and its satisfaction is “only a fleeting one,” gone with the thing; work holds the desire back, and what would have been used up takes a form that lasts. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807), IV.A, “Herrschaft und Knechtschaft” (Miller ¶¶ 195–196), on the formative work through which the slave, in another's service, finds himself in the thing he has shaped. The English here and in the epigraph is A. V. Miller's, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, 1977), p. 118; the link is to J. B. Baillie's translation, Phenomenology of Mind, “Lordship and Bondage”, which has “desire restrained and checked, evanescence delayed and postponed.” Hegel's desire is the pure negating of the object, not a shopper's appetite; the evening borrows the form. Hegel puts the formation inside domination, and rules out the comfortable equation of freedom with having everything done for one. The app sells the worker an hour on the master's side. Having spent the day forming things for a proprietor, he eats what somebody else has formed, and the satisfaction is the fleeting kind; the master enjoys the product, and the slave has had an education the enjoyment cannot buy.
Ohne die Zucht des Dienstes und Gehorsams bleibt die Furcht beim Formellen stehen und verbreitet sich nicht über die bewußte Wirklichkeit des Daseins. Ohne das Bilden bleibt die Furcht innerlich und stumm, und das Bewußtsein wird nicht für es selbst. Formiert das Bewußtsein ohne die erste absolute Furcht, so ist es nur eigener Sinn; denn seine Form oder Negativität ist nicht die Negativität an sich; und sein Formieren kann ihm daher nicht das Bewußtsein seiner als des Wesens geben. Hat es nicht die absolute Furcht, sondern nur einige Angst ausgestanden, so ist das negative Wesen ihm ein Äußerliches geblieben, seine Substanz ist von ihm nicht durch und durch angesteckt. Indem nicht alle Erfüllungen seines natürlichen Bewußtseins wankend geworden, gehört es an sich noch bestimmtem Sein an; der eigene Sinn ist Eigensinn, eine Freiheit, welche noch innerhalb der Knechtschaft stehenbleibt. So wenig ihm die reine Form zum Wesen werden kann, so wenig ist sie, als Ausbreitung über das Einzelne betrachtet, allgemeines Bilden, absoluter Begriff, sondern eine Geschicklichkeit, welche nur über einiges, nicht über die allgemeine Macht und das ganze gegenständliche Wesen mächtig ist.
“Without the discipline of service and obedience, fear remains at the formal stage, and does not extend to the known real world of existence. Without the formative activity, fear remains inward and mute, and consciousness does not become explicitly for itself. If consciousness fashions the thing without that initial absolute fear, it is only an empty self-centred attitude; for its form or negativity is not negativity per se, and therefore its formative activity cannot give it a consciousness of itself as essential being. If it has not experienced absolute fear but only some lesser dread, the negative being has remained for it something external, its substance has not been infected by it through and through. Since the entire contents of its natural consciousness have not been jeopardized, determinate being still in principle attaches to it; having a ‘mind of one's own’ is self-will, a freedom which is still enmeshed in servitude. Just as little as the pure form can become essential being for it, just as little is that form, regarded as extended to the particular, a universal formative activity, an absolute Notion; rather it is a skill which is master over some things, but not over the universal power and the whole of objective being.”—G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, IV.A (Miller ¶ 196) Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1977), p. 119, the close of “Lordship and Bondage”; the German is Werke, vol. 3 (Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 154–155. Hegel's three conditions, Furcht, Dienst, and Bilden, are fear, service, and the forming of the thing. The fear of death as “the absolute Lord,” in which the bondsman “has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations,” is ¶ 194; the pun is der eigene Sinn ist Eigensinn, a mind of one's own is obstinacy.
Fear, service, and the forming of the thing. I met them under other names: the collar, the open floor, and the work. The fear Hegel means is not fear of this or that, a bad review, a lost bonus, but the fear that seizes the whole being, which he calls the fear of death, the absolute master. In it everything fixed in a man trembles, and the trembling teaches him that he is none of the fixtures, not the title, not the apartment, not the deluxe package, only the one who can lose them. Nothing forms until the whole has been put at hazard. The Irishman had the doctrine in a plainer dialect, that animals are made by absolute fear, and he had come from nothing, which is where the trembling ends; his children had been born among the fixtures, and the floor is hard on furniture, which was the whole of his one rule. He was right about the fear. The collar was not death. It had death's one property, that everything goes at once: a bad year costs a citizen his bonus and costs the man on the collar the country, and with the country the apartment, the title, the decade, every fixture he has, all of them held on one condition, and the condition not his. The open floor was the discipline of service, a regime obeyed in public, where everyone could watch the jeopardy fall on somebody else and learn that nobody used the door. What the fear forces is a mind of one's own. The slave comes out of the trembling with one that is his, since nothing else survived to be mistaken for it. The one who has felt only some lesser dread keeps his furniture, and what he makes serves the furniture: a skill that is master of some things and not of the whole, and a mind of his own that is, in Hegel's pun, Eigensinn, obstinacy, a freedom that keeps inside the servitude. A culture that jeopardizes nothing is not the opposite of servitude. It is that freedom with the fear taken out, and the fear was the part that formed. Those born among the fixtures have been tested all their lives and never jeopardized, and the two are not the same: a test risks the furniture one piece at a time, the whole is never in question, and no mind of their own has had to appear, since nothing ever called for one. I have no hymn for the fire. What comes up after it was never planted, and it is stranger than what burned. My younger colleagues would have reported my boss, and they may be right; a vigilante of abuse can also be mistaken about what he is removing, since from outside the jeopardy that forms and the jeopardy that only breaks look exactly alike. So maybe I did kill him.
Hegel is exact about each condition without the others: without the service the fear stays formal and never reaches the working day; without the fear the work is only self-will, the form broken by someone who never kept it; and without the work the fear stays inward and mute, and comes out, when it comes out, as one tear, or as a theology. I had a colleague who worked in the dark. Lights off, blinds down, and in the middle of it a power suit in neon, lime or fuchsia, lit like a sign in a shut shop; she was small and fierce and loud, she swore and she prayed, and she carried a war to work, and not only the one on the floor. A flag hung behind her desk, and beneath it, printed and creased, a prayer for soldiers; the war was real and far away and often in the room; she spoke of its worst day by the date alone, the way one does at home, and took offense when a colleague had to ask what had happened on it. The floor, to her, was a field of great houses, alliances sworn and broken, curses laid and lifted, all of it raised and garrisoned in her head, where no one else could see the walls. You can be my friend, or you can be careful. This, to a man she barely knew and had never once seen outside the building. I did not understand the ask, and still less the need of it, and I declined with what tact I had. She had enough on me, she said, to destroy me many times over, which seemed an extravagance; once is customary. I told her to get some sleep, and that I would be a colleague to her, which is less than a bannerman and lasts longer. When someone who had crossed her came to grief, she said it like a psalm: God is a great God, and He strikes down whoever wrongs a poor immigrant. The certainty terrified me, and the comfort I understood. Hers was the fear of the whole, the immigrant's, and it had gone into nothing she made; the negative had stayed outside her, where it had to belong to someone, and she had given it to God, who struck her enemies and left her as she was. The absolute master kept outside is a theology; taken in and put to work, it is a craft. Chinese has a sentence for what she lacked, 受苦的人没有悲伤的权利, the one who suffers has no right to sorrow, and it reads as cruelty until Hegel and Heidegger are set beside it, when it reads as a method. Heidegger's word is Verschwiegenheit, reticence. The call of conscience says nothing; it calls in the mode of keeping silent, and resoluteness is a reticent readiness for the anxiety it calls one into; everything said in its place is Gerede, idle talk, the they's way of passing a thing along without ever having it. Sein und Zeit, §34, H. 164–165, on keeping silent, Schweigen, and reticence, Verschwiegenheit, as the modes of discourse that hear more than talk does; §35, H. 167–170, on Gerede, idle talk; §56, H. 273, where the call of conscience “discourses solely and constantly in the mode of keeping silent”; and §60, H. 296–297, where resoluteness is the reticent, anxiety-ready projection upon one's ownmost being-guilty. Complaint is a tactic, and it is priced like one, usually at the top of the sheet. It hands the fear to whoever will hold it, God, the floor, the grievance process, and what is handed over forms nothing; the one who keeps his sorrow keeps the fear where it can work on him, and the one who spends it has bought, with the only thing that could have made him, the right to be heard. Forbearance is the cheap tactic, and the one that most often changes a life. The jungle teaches it without a word, which is what the Irishman meant by animal: there is no one out there to complain to. My boss wept one tear and did not sob. The devout colleague kept the ledger in its grand form, with God for an auditor; most are kept smaller, and I have been shown a few. The young profess: Wherever you go, I will follow; or, another, I submit. The old confer: Everyone knows you are my guy; or, I take care of my people. Said that early, the line is a forecast. An imagination that offers it has run ahead of anything that has happened and will keep running, and had I taken the part, the later scenes, the slight, the betrayal, the reckoning, were already written, and were being rehearsed somewhere behind me while I was still learning my cue. The neck held out and the leash held out, and I hate them in equal parts. What soul wants bondage in either direction? What ego casts a man it has never met in a supporting role in its own melodrama? I do not know them. They have not cared to know me. What they hold out is a bond without the acquaintance, and that is the one test it fails: human bondage is not human bond. The first is Spinoza's name for a life at the mercy of its passions, and the anxious reach for it the way the tired reach for the cart, because it can be had tonight; the second is slow, made of time and of the risk of being refused, and we are forgetting how it is made. Spinoza, Ethica IV, “De servitute humana,” preface: Humanam impotentiam in moderandis et coercendis affectibus servitutem voco; homo enim affectibus obnoxius sui juris non est, sed fortunae, “Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage; for a man at the mercy of his emotions is not his own master, but belongs to fortune.” The same part's appendix, cap. XII, has the other word: men do best seseque iis vinculis astringere, quibus aptius de se omnibus unum efficiant, “to bind themselves together with such bonds as are most fitted to gather them all into unity,” and whatever strengthens friendship; servitus and vincula never meet. The collar comes off once. A man who has felt it go can tell a leash from a hand, whichever is offered first, and he is not naive about what the knowledge costs: the promotions that go to somebody's guy, the secrets that stop at the door of the man who belongs to no one. I have paid, and I am at peace with the price. Friendship from an office, like friendship from anywhere, is rare and takes its time, and whoever offers it in haste takes it back in haste. I have mourned the administered floor, where every tie is made safe enough to dissolve and no one is permitted to be necessary to anyone, and the ledger is what the thicker bonds came with: the houses, the oaths, the friend who must be watched. The mourning is in Cognitive resignation. Maugham took his title from that part of Spinoza and let his Philip out of the bondage into the simplest pattern a life can make, to be born, to work, to marry, to have children, and to die, which he had come to think the most perfect; the title he had wanted was Beauty from Ashes. W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915), ch. CXXII: “the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect”; the pattern is Cronshaw's Persian rug, ch. CVI. Maugham wanted Beauty from Ashes, from Isaiah 61:3, and found it taken. The book's other half, Mildred, is in Co-Brain. Boring may be a virtue.
Das Vorlaufen weicht der Unüberholbarkeit nicht aus wie das uneigentliche Sein zum Tode, sondern gibt sich frei für sie. Das vorlaufende Freiwerden für den eigenen Tod befreit von der Verlorenheit in die zufällig sich andrängenden Möglichkeiten, so zwar, daß es die faktischen Möglichkeiten, die der unüberholbaren vorgelagert sind, allererst eigentlich verstehen und wählen läßt. Das Vorlaufen erschließt der Existenz als äußerste Möglichkeit die Selbstaufgabe und zerbricht so jede Versteifung auf die je erreichte Existenz.
“Anticipation, however, unlike inauthentic Being-towards-death, does not evade the fact that death is not to be outstripped; instead, anticipation frees itself for accepting this. When, by anticipation, one becomes free for one's own death, one is liberated from one's lostness in those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one; and one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that possibility which is not to be outstripped. Anticipation discloses to existence that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up, and thus it shatters all one's tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached.”—Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §53 Sein und Zeit (1927), §53, H. 264; the English is Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1962), p. 308. Death as the possibility that is one's ownmost, non-relational, and not to be outstripped is §50, H. 250–251; the “constant tranquillization about death,” die ständige Beruhigung über den Tod, and the “they” that “does not permit us the courage for anxiety in the face of death” are §51, H. 253–254; Furcht and Angst are set apart in §30 and §40, H. 140–142 and 184–191; the “impassioned freedom towards death,” Freiheit zum Tode, closes §53, H. 266. 向死而生, living toward death, is what Chinese has made of Sein zum Tode, with the life left in the phrase; the philological rendering is 向死存在.
Heidegger put the same check at the end of the road and called the walk toward it Sein zum Tode, being-toward-death, 向死而生. Death for him is the one possibility that is eigenst, unbezüglich, unüberholbar: one's ownmost, since no one can take it over; non-relational, since it cuts every tie; not to be outstripped, since nothing lies beyond it to be reached instead. Everything in the right-hand column of the account fails all three tests. The package is relational, bought from someone and shown to someone; it is outstripped by next year's; and it is nobody's own, which is why it has to be replaced. Everyday life is an arrangement for not facing the one possibility that passes, and the arranger is das Man, the they, the public anyone whose grammar is the impersonal pronoun: man stirbt, one dies, in the end, some day, and for now one is unconcerned. The they keeps up a constant Beruhigung, a tranquillization about death, and does not permit the courage for Angst in the face of it; the market sells the tranquillizer by the bottle. Heidegger's Angst is not his Furcht. Fear is of something in the world, the review, the bonus, the layoff; anxiety has no such object, since what it is anxious before is being-in-the-world itself, and Hegel's absolute fear is the same thing under the other word: the two philosophers trade the terms and keep the distinction, the dread of this or that against the dread of the whole. The tranquillizer has a counter, Vorlaufen, running ahead, which the translators render as anticipation and which is not the expecting of death as an event but a running out ahead into it as a possibility, held open rather than waited for. The purchases are the possibilities that, in Heidegger's phrase, sich andrängen, press themselves upon one by accident, which is a description of a feed, and lostness in them, Verlorenheit, is the evening in the cart. Running ahead frees a man from that lostness and lets him choose, for the first time, among the possibilities that lie this side of the last one, and it shatters every Versteifung, every stiffening upon the existence he has reached, which is the standard of living and the deluxe package. Marx's word for what the day leaves of sleep was Erstarrung, torpor; Heidegger's for what the reached life becomes is Versteifung, stiffening, and the second rigidity is what the first was for. The uttermost possibility running ahead discloses is Selbstaufgabe, giving oneself up, the one deliverable the evening cannot bring to the door. Hegel's trembling and Heidegger's running ahead are the same check from two directions, one administered by a master and one taken up alone, in what Heidegger calls Freiheit zum Tode, freedom toward death, released from the illusions of the they; and the second is the one left to a man whose master is dead.
The check that lasts comes from an object that pushes back, and no flattering story about oneself moves it; reality can be flattered, and it is not altered. Code must run. The joint must hold. The explanation must survive the case it explains. That refusal is the part of the work worth loving: it is where intelligence turns into judgment, and the only friction that goes anywhere, since what passes between egos makes heat and nothing else. The resistances are from Good companies, where a workshop is a community disciplined by a resistant object; the traction and the heat, and the lodge in which the object and not the room judges the work, are the Bauhütte. The exertion gets an answer from outside itself. Something exists, works, or has become intelligible that did not before, and the worker is changed by having made it; there is a difference between the pleasure of having accomplished something and the relief of finally being permitted to consume. The question the workshop puts is what the work is making of you, and the object answers only half of it. It checks competence and says nothing about purpose: a program can work perfectly and make a pointless process faster, and the years a man spends sustaining an arrangement whose demands ought to be changed form him all the same. He comes out of them with the capacity to ask what the arrangement is for, and neither the capacity nor the pleasure of using it answers the question. Nor is recurrence the defect. The dinner cooked at home, the child's bath, and the friend who needs to talk come round again, and their coming round is part of their good; Fraser's account of care tells against any ranking in which the builder gets a world and the caregiver disappears. Recurring work divides by what it sustains, people and their possibilities or an apparatus trained to require the same intervention again: a repair is productive when it restores a real capacity, and it becomes a circuit of dependence when success enlarges the claim without enlarging the capacity to answer it.
Not every purchase is the dose. The cleaner's hours become an evening with one's children, the bicycle opens a town, the instrument becomes a practice that outlasts the job. Whillans and her colleagues found, across more than six thousand respondents in four countries, that people who spent money on time-saving services reported greater life satisfaction; sixty working adults in Vancouver, given forty dollars on each of two weekends to spend once on saving time and once on a thing, ended the time-saving day with more positive affect and less time stress; and of ninety-eight other working adults asked how they would spend a forty-dollar windfall, two percent thought of buying time. Ashley Whillans, Elizabeth Dunn, Paul Smeets, René Bekkers, and Michael Norton, “Buying Time Promotes Happiness”, PNAS 114, no. 32 (2017): 8523–8527: surveys of 6,271 respondents in the United States, Canada, Denmark, and the Netherlands; a field experiment in which 60 working adults in Vancouver spent $40 on each of two consecutive weekends; and a further 98 working adults asked about a hypothetical $40 windfall, of whom 2.0 percent named a time-saving purchase unprompted. The survey findings are correlational; the causal evidence is one time-saving purchase on one weekend, set against one material purchase on another, measured the same day, in one city. The same purchase loosens the circuit in one household and oils it in another, and the test is neither the price nor whether a market sold the hour, but what the hour becomes. Accountants wrote the rule for machines: an outlay that keeps an asset in ordinary operating condition is maintenance and is expensed; an outlay that extends its life or enlarges its capacity is an improvement and is capitalized. The hour bought back is the outlay. Spent on sleep, it is maintenance; spent on the instrument, an improvement; spent on the inbox, it has gone back to the office at no charge. The instrument is the hard case. Scitovsky divided the satisfactions into comfort, which removes a discomfort, and stimulation, whose richer kinds ask for a cultivated capacity, an ear for music, a feel for a craft, enough familiarity with cooking to enjoy the doing, and the capacity takes time to acquire, which is what the tired man is short of. Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy (1976), on comfort, stimulation, and the learned capacities required for rewarding forms of consumption. The job raises the demand for relief and closes, evening by evening, the school in which the other satisfactions are learned. A life grows expensive as its repertoire of cheap satisfactions grows hard to practice. The guitar stays in the shop because there would be no time to play it, and the next purchase promises an effect by Friday.
Rucker and Galinsky found that people made to feel powerless would pay more for goods associated with status, and that the association mattered: the object stood in for a quality its buyer had been made to feel he lacked. Derek Rucker and Adam Galinsky, “Desire to Acquire: Powerlessness and Compensatory Consumption”, Journal of Consumer Research 35 (2008). See also Naomi Mandel et al., “The Compensatory Consumer Behavior Model,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 27 (2017). These establish mechanisms, not the social diagnosis. Rick and his colleagues showed that making purchase decisions reduced residual sadness by restoring a sense of control. Scott Rick, Beatriz Pereira, and Katherine Burson, “The Benefits of Retail Therapy: Making Purchase Decisions Reduces Residual Sadness”, Journal of Consumer Psychology 24 (2014). It measures residual sadness, not the day that left it. Vohs and Faber found that self-regulation is a resource the day spends: people who have passed it making decisions and holding back responses buy more impulsively in the evening, and spend more when they do. Kathleen Vohs and Ronald Faber, “Spent Resources: Self-Regulatory Resource Availability Affects Impulse Buying,” Journal of Consumer Research 33 (2007). The purchase is doing several jobs, and most of them are done before the parcel arrives. Pressure is powerlessness on someone else's schedule, the quota a self-discrepancy renewed each morning, and the evening sadness with a credit card. At nine, after a day of decisions whose premises were set elsewhere, this one is mine is the pleasure. The checkout is an efficient little jurisdiction: one can act, receive confirmation, and be thanked. For the well-paid worker the jurisdiction includes luxuries. For the courier who brought the dinner, if his margin is thin, the same shortage of time raises the price of plain upkeep, and nothing he buys is a luxury. Each of them must finance a life whose conditions he has little power to set.
The system delivers the goods
“A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.”
—Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, ch. 1
The technical means that could release men from unnecessary toil are the means that keep them at it. Aristotle had allowed that if the shuttle could weave by itself, masters would need no slaves; the shuttle weaves by itself now, and the masters still keep servants. Aristotle, Politics I.4, 1253b33–1254a1: εἰ οὕτως αἱ κερκίδες ἐκέρκιζον αὐταὶ καὶ τὰ πλῆκτρα ἐκιθάριζεν, οὐδὲν ἂν ἔδει οὔτε τοῖς ἀρχιτέκτοσιν ὑπηρετῶν οὔτε τοῖς δεσπόταις δούλων, “if the shuttles wove by themselves and the plectra played the lyre, master craftsmen would need no servants and masters no slaves.” The instruments that obey a command or anticipate one, like the statues of Daedalus and the tripods of Hephaestus, are his picture of automation. Marcuse read automation as the possibility of qualitative change, a different society and not a richer edition of the present one, and watched the order that developed it contain what it made possible. The distinction carries his whole argument, and it is the one the throughput measure cannot see. A quantitative change is more of the same on the same terms, more goods, more hours of the same work, a higher standard of living; a qualitative change alters the terms, what counts as a necessity, who decides what is produced, what a life is for. Automation taken to its end was, for him, the second kind, waiting.
“Automation, once it became the process of material production, would revolutionize the whole society. The reification of human labor power, driven to perfection, would shatter the reified form by cutting the chain that ties the individual to the machinery—the mechanism through which his own labor enslaves him. Complete automation in the realm of necessity would open the dimension of free time as the one in which man's private and societal existence would constitute itself. This would be the historical transcendence toward a new civilization. […] Automation threatens to render possible the reversal of the relation between free time and working time: the possibility of working time becoming marginal and free time becoming full time. The result would be a radical transvaluation of values, and a mode of existence incompatible with the traditional culture. Advanced industrial society is in permanent mobilization against this possibility.”
—Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, ch. 2 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964), ch. 2, “The Closing of the Political Universe”, pp. 36–37 in the Beacon edition; the two passages are a page apart. The society that conquers “the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living,” and the technical apparatus that “determines a priori the product of the apparatus as well as the operations of servicing and extending it,” so that “technological rationality has become political rationality,” are the Introduction, pp. x and xv–xvi.
Permanent mobilization is the containment. The hours the machine releases are not released; they come back as more of the same, more output and new needs to absorb it, and the society that could have moved the working day to the margin keeps the day where it was and raises the wage instead. How this is done without anyone deciding it is, for Marcuse, the apparatus itself, which is not neutral. The technical means of production and distribution are not a set of tools a society may point where it likes but a system that settles in advance what is produced, what is needed, and what the servicing of it asks of the people who serve it, and technological rationality, the logic of running the apparatus well, becomes political rationality, the logic of keeping it. A society that conquers its centrifugal forces with technology rather than terror, on the strength of an overwhelming efficiency and a rising standard of living, has no need to forbid the alternative; it makes the alternative unthinkable by delivering the goods. In the circuit the worker pays for the containment. The engineer who eliminates a recurring failure has produced something the throughput measure cannot see, fewer occasions to show how much he can handle; there is a banquet that seats its guests by their burns, and the throughput measure is its seating plan. The banquet is from Bend the chimney. More goods, more throughput, and more purchasing power are successes inside an arrangement whose end has already been accepted, and the measure that counts them has no line for a necessity removed, a possibility opened, or a decision moved to the people who live with it.
Überall ist es bestellt, auf der Stelle zur Stelle zu stehen, und zwar zu stehen, um selbst bestellbar zu sein für ein weiteres Bestellen. Das so Bestellte hat seinen eigenen Stand. Wir nennen ihn den Bestand. […] Was im Sinne des Bestandes steht, steht uns nicht mehr als Gegenstand gegenüber. […] Die gängige Rede vom Menschenmaterial, vom Krankenmaterial einer Klinik spricht dafür. Der Förster, der im Wald das geschlagene Holz vermißt und anscheinend wie sein Großvater in der gleichen Weise dieselben Waldwege begeht, ist heute von der Holzverwertungsindustrie bestellt, ob er es weiß oder nicht. Er ist in die Bestellbarkeit von Zellulose bestellt, die ihrerseits durch den Bedarf an Papier herausgefordert ist, das den Zeitungen und illustrierten Magazinen zugestellt wird. Diese aber stellen die öffentliche Meinung daraufhin, das Gedruckte zu verschlingen, um für eine bestellte Meinungseinrichtung bestellbar zu werden.
“Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve. […] Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object. […] The current talk about human resources, about the supply of patients for a clinic, gives evidence of this. The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled timber and to all appearances walks the same forest path in the same way as did his grandfather is today commanded by profit-making in the lumber industry, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines. The latter, in their turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand.”—Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach der Technik Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik” (lecture, 1953), in Vorträge und Aufsätze (1954), GA 7, pp. 17–19; the English is “The Question Concerning Technology,” trans. William Lovitt (1977), pp. 17–18. The essence of technology as “nothing technological” opens the essay (p. 4); Ge-stell is defined on pp. 19–20; the danger, the “lord of the earth,” and man who “nowhere any longer encounters himself” are pp. 26–27; Hölderlin's Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch (from “Patmos”) is p. 28, and “questioning is the piety of thinking” is the last sentence, p. 35.
Heidegger had asked the prior question a decade before Marcuse, and answered that the essence of technology is nothing technological. It is a way the world is revealed, Entbergen, and the modern way reveals by challenging, Herausfordern: it sets upon the river to deliver power, the field to deliver yield, the man to deliver hours, and what it sets upon is unlocked, stored, distributed, switched about, and kept on call. Nothing revealed this way stands over against anyone as a thing, Gegenstand; it stands by, Bestand, which the translators render as standing-reserve and which means what a warehouse holds, stock, inventory, the standing supply: not a thing met but a quantity kept, and a stock is not rested but replenished. The maintenance account in his terms is the ledger of a human stock: wear is the drawdown, the evening the replenishment, and the department named for the resources administers the leave. The forester is the engineer on the open floor, ordered whether he knows it or not, and his chain runs the same way, from the hours through the throughput to the feed that sets opinion to swallowing what it prints so as to be orderable in turn; it is the circuit drawn at the scale of a society. Heidegger's name for the whole of it, the gathering of every setting-upon that finally sets upon the one doing the setting, is Ge-stell, enframing, which is not a machine, a policy, or a class, and which no one decided; Marcuse's apparatus that determines its product in advance is the Ge-stell seen from the factory. The danger, Heidegger says, is not the machines. It is the moment when man, the keeper of the stock, is taken as stock himself, and exalts himself meanwhile into the posture of lord of the earth, so that he seems to meet everywhere only himself and nowhere meets his own essence. What the stock cannot supply is the question. Heidegger ends with Hölderlin, wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch, but where the danger is, the saving power grows too, and his last sentence is that questioning is the piety of thinking. The question the circuit answers with a watch, what the hours were for, is the one he means, and the needs it supplies in the meantime are the ones Marcuse called false. His list of them opens on the evening.
“We may distinguish both true and false needs. ‘False’ are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.”
—Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, ch. 1 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, ch. 1, “The New Forms of Control”, p. 5 in the Beacon edition (1964); the epigraph is the chapter's first sentence, on p. 1. The chapter is on false needs and on the difficulty of judging needs under conditions that shape the capacity to judge; the sentence after the list calls the development and satisfaction of such needs heteronomous.
Euphoria in unhappiness is the dose seen from inside. Marcuse drew the category by origin and by effect, and the test is not whether the pleasure is real but what it reproduces: the upgrade pleases its owner and the trip relieves him, and people, he wrote a few pages on, “recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.” Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, ch. 1, p. 9 (Beacon, 1964). Each success is entered into evidence for the job, the job is hard, but look at what it gives me, and the worker has good reasons to keep the life he has, since its satisfactions are already written into his account of himself. Every purchase that makes the hours bearable canvasses for the job. The job has found its constituency in the man it wears out, and it is defended in the first person.
Marx counted what the worker must consume to be back at work in the morning; Marcuse asked how he comes to want the life he goes back to. He is paid in cash and consoled in kind. His weekend restores the capacity to bear a week whose terms he does not set, and each of his needs is met with something smaller than itself: recognition with a performance review, control with a choice among purchases, release with an appointment. Some effort is reality's; how much, by whom, and for what is an order's. In Eros and Civilization, nine years before One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse had called that order the performance principle, the organization of life around competitive performance, which presents the renunciations it requires as the demands of reality itself. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955), on the performance principle and surplus repression: the distinction between the constraints required by life together and the additional constraints required by a particular order of domination. Surplus repression is his term for the renunciation the order exacts beyond what life together requires, and the evening's purchases hide the seam: the surplus hour arrives with its pleasures attached, and a package that is partly enjoyable passes for the cost of living. The morning requires the worker's submission and the evening courts him. Horkheimer and Adorno found the evening's amusement fitting him for the morning, and found it made of the morning's own motions. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944; 1947; Dialectic of Enlightenment), “Kulturindustrie,” in English “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, on amusement as an escape from mechanized work that leaves the worker fit for it again.
Amusement ist die Verlängerung der Arbeit unterm Spätkapitalismus. Es wird von dem gesucht, der dem mechanisierten Arbeitsprozeß ausweichen will, um ihm von neuem gewachsen zu sein. Zugleich aber hat die Mechanisierung solche Macht über den Freizeitler und sein Glück, sie bestimmt so gründlich die Fabrikation der Amüsierwaren, daß er nichts anderes mehr erfahren kann als die Nachbilder des Arbeitsvorgangs selbst. Der vorgebliche Inhalt ist bloß verblaßter Vordergrund; was sich einprägt, ist die automatisierte Abfolge genormter Verrichtungen. Dem Arbeitsprozeß in Fabrik und Büro ist nur auszuweichen durch Angleichung an ihn in der Muße.
“Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanization has such power over a man's leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one's leisure time.”—Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, “Kulturindustrie” Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam, 1947), “Kulturindustrie: Aufklärung als Massenbetrug”; the English is Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (1972), p. 137. Adorno returned to the point alone in “Freizeit” (1969), where free time is “shackled to its opposite.”
Debord added the courtesy. His worker, “suddenly redeemed from the total contempt” that the organization and supervision of production show him, “finds himself every day, outside of production and in the guise of a consumer, seemingly treated as an adult, with zealous politeness.” Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), thesis 43, in the Black & Red translation (1977), which continues: “At this point the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker's ‘leisure and humanity,’ simply because now political economy can and must dominate these spheres as political economy.” The phrase in inner quotation marks is Debord quoting the young Marx; other translations word the thesis differently. The contempt belongs to production and the politeness to the counter, and they meet in the worker who tolerates the first because he can afford the second. Bell had both in one corporation, which wanted a man to work hard and defer his gratification, and sold him, through what it made and advertised, the pleasure of letting go: “One is to be ‘straight’ by day and a ‘swinger’ by night.” Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), ch. 1, pp. 71–72, where the business corporation wants an individual to “work hard, pursue a career, accept delayed gratification,” while “in its products and its advertisements, the corporation promotes pleasure, instant joy, relaxing and letting go.” The book's wider argument concerns consumer credit and the erosion of the older ascetic ethic. The often-quoted plural, “straight by day and swingers by night,” is from his foreword to a later edition. He watched credit ease the passage from day to night and the older ascetic ethic erode, and the contradiction lasts because each half feeds the other, discipline earning the purchasing power and the occasions for spending it, the spending bringing consolation and the reasons to keep the discipline. The contradiction has been given a schedule. At six the ascetic is released into the showroom, and by nine the showroom has made tomorrow's ascetic possible.
Marcuse worked the mechanism out on sexuality and culture, gratification permitted in a form that drains the desires that would exceed the established order, and what the permission leaves behind is his Happy Consciousness, which “reflects the belief that the real is rational, and that the established system, in spite of everything, delivers the goods.” Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, ch. 3, “The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation”, p. 79, on gratification that reconciles men to an order whose limits remain intact; the transcription linked here misprints as a period the comma that follows “in spite of everything” in the book. The extension to the checkout is mine. It does; the courier is at the door within the hour. At the checkout the larger sentence is traded for a smaller one, I need a different relation to my time for I need a holiday, and only the holiday is for sale. One-dimensionality is the state in which the larger sentence stops being sayable. Marcuse took the closing down into language: the established system writes the terms in which a dissatisfaction is understood, so that a remedy is administered and the order itself is never put in question, and a functional idiom identifies things with their present uses and leaves the alternatives hard to formulate. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, ch. 4, “The Closing of the Universe of Discourse”, on functionalized language and the contraction of critical meaning. In the idiom of the working week a demand for time is a productivity problem, exhaustion a recovery problem, solitude a travel preference, and freedom the range of options in the app. The faculty that judges the working life is not prohibited; its occasions are reorganized, as the cadenza's once were. Cognitive resignation, on the cadenza. A week of discontent goes by in that idiom, and in every sentence of it the hours are a fixed input; the worker fit to judge them is kept unleisured choosing among their compensations. The second dimension is judgment brought to the desk: what is worth making, which demands deserve to be met, what a successful intervention should allow to stop. The line between a bearable life and a worthwhile one does not run along the office wall. Under all three questions lies the oldest, what the exertion is for, and its modern answer comes with a booking reference.
« J'étais le maître absolu de ma vieille robe de chambre; je suis devenu l'esclave de la nouvelle. »
“I was the absolute master of my old dressing gown; I have become the slave of the new one.”—Denis Diderot, “Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre”
Galbraith's figure for the circuit, in 1958, was a squirrel. Whoever urges the importance of production to satisfy wants that production itself creates, he wrote, “is precisely in the position of the onlooker who applauds the efforts of the squirrel to keep abreast of the wheel that is propelled by his own efforts.” Hayek's reply, three years later, is the objection every account of manufactured wants has to survive: “The innate wants are probably confined to food, shelter, and sex. All the rest we learn to desire because we see others enjoying various things.” Music, painting, and literature, he added, would fail Galbraith's test as well. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958), ch. XI, “The Dependence Effect,” section II; Friedrich Hayek, “The Non Sequitur of the ‘Dependence Effect,’” Southern Economic Journal 27, no. 4 (1961): 346–48. In Galbraith's figure the squirrel is production and the onlooker is whoever urges its importance; Hayek grants the dependence as “perfectly true” and denies that it lowers the value of what is wanted. He wins the point. There is no untouched consumer behind the advertisements, any more than there is a private language behind the words we were taught, and to find a desire's history is to begin an inquiry into its value, not to end one. Marcuse saw the trouble and kept both horns: the individuals must judge their own needs in the end, though the conditions under which they judge are the ones in question, and still “no tribunal can justly arrogate to itself the right to decide which needs should be developed and satisfied.” Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, ch. 1, in the passage on judging true and false needs; the next sentence calls any such tribunal “reprehensible.” The tribunal is the mentor I tried to be, enlarged to the size of a society. Seeing how a man's wants were formed does not appoint me to replace them; my preferred life for him would arrive through the same unequal relation, with one more demand attached. The want is firmware, and firmware is updated at home, by its owner. What satisfying it enables, what keeps renewing it, and what its cost makes harder to pursue are his questions, and whether to put them is his task.
Le manque est aménagé, organisé, dans la production sociale. C'est la pratique du vide comme économie de marché, l'art d'une classe dominante : organiser le manque dans l'abondance de production, faire basculer tout le désir dans la grande peur de manquer, faire dépendre l'objet d'une production réelle qu'on suppose extérieure au désir (les exigences de la rationalité), tandis que la production du désir passe dans le fantasme (rien que le fantasme).
“Lack is created, planned, and organized in and through social production. The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one's needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy, nothing but fantasy.”—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L'Anti-Œdipe, I.3 L'Anti-Œdipe: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), ch. 1, §3, on desiring-production; the English is Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (1977), p. 28. The passage sits between two of the book's refusals: that desire is lack, and that production is organized on the basis of a prior need.
Deleuze and Guattari refuse the premise Hayek and Galbraith share, that a want is a lack waiting for its object, and turn the lack into a product: desire produces, and the market manufactures the emptiness desire is then said to be. The dose paragraph has no artist in it, three preferences and a settlement, and they name an artist, a dominant class, which is the one place this account and theirs part; an art does not need an artist to be practiced, and the great fear of not having one's needs satisfied is the thirst by another name. Deleuze, on his own, later gave the arrangement its tense. In the society of control one is never finished with anything, the firm and the training and the service being metastable states of one modulation, and the man of control is no longer the man enclosed but the man in debt. Gilles Deleuze, “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle,” L'autre journal 1 (May 1990); in English, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): “In the societies of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation,” and “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.” Never finished with anything is the maintenance that never completes the repair, and the man in debt is the worker whose wants were advanced to him against hours not yet worked.
The wanting that goes quiet after a demanding job is evidence of dependence, not of a truer self underneath. A desire that survives a holiday has acquired no certificate of authenticity, and one that fades was felt no less; the test is not on the object, since nothing about a massage chair makes it false, but on the derivative, on how the wanting moves with the pressure, and a want that goes away when the pain goes away was a painkiller. What fades was held up by conditions, and conditions are not the man who wanted it. They are a place to intervene. Other wants stay, because they belong to pleasure, curiosity, habit, or a social world that has not changed, and some of what stays is held up by the code. The code is Baudrillard's: goods are positions in a system of signs, and consumption is the work of differentiation by which people become legible to one another. Jean Baudrillard, La Société de consommation (1970) and Pour une critique de l'économie politique du signe (1972), on consumption as an organized relation among signs rather than the satisfaction of separate needs. Fatal strategies reads the same two books on the problem of value. Consumption on this reading is not the reward for production but its continuation in another material, under a fun morality that makes enjoyment a duty; the superego, in Lacan's reading, never said you must not, only Enjoy. Jacques Lacan, Encore (Seminar XX, 1972–73), opening session: nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego, whose imperative is Jouis! The fun morality is Baudrillard's, in La Société de consommation. The apartment, the school, the restaurant, and the holiday are entries in the code, and they report that one is doing well; doing well becomes costly enough to require the work whose success they report, and the Patek across the meeting table sets the standard without anyone recommending it. The job sets both the pressure and the audience. Hirsch priced the place at the front, which no rate of growth can give to everyone pursuing it; Frank, with Levine and Dijk, priced the cascade, in which a standard set near the top travels down the distribution; Schor priced the reference group, which widens and carries the ordinary with it. Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (1976); Robert H. Frank, Adam Seth Levine, and Oege Dijk, “Expenditure Cascades,” Review of Behavioral Economics 1 (2014); Juliet Schor, The Overspent American (1998). The cascade and the widened reference group are tendencies across a population; no single purchase displays either.
Wants have half-lives, as goods do, and they decay at two rates. Relief-seeking decays with its occasion; a standard of recognition lasts as long as what holds it up, the friends made at that salary, the club, the neighborhood, the lease, and none of these leaves with the job. The goods of fortune keep time by whoever has to go on conferring them, and the wants keep the same clock. Fatal strategies, on the half-life of fortune. Diderot's new gown was scarlet, and it revalued the room around it until possessions that had been adequate looked in need of replacement. Denis Diderot, “Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre” (first printed 1772); Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption (1988), ch. 8, which generalizes the complaint and names it the Diderot effect. The modern gown is a promotion. The long return runs through it: the raise changes the apartment, the apartment changes what belongs in it, and the resulting life requires the raise, until what began as an option settles into the cost of remaining oneself. Diderot had a gown to blame. Han's achievement subject has only himself: he is master and servant in one person, and every demand reaches him as I can do more. Byung-Chul Han, Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (2010; The Burnout Society, 2015), on the achievement subject, self-exploitation, and the coercive force of apparently unlimited possibility. Fatal strategies drew him the same way, master and servant in one person. My first boss had it in one sentence: voluntarily, because slaves don't choose. Read as a verdict on every pleasure in effort, Han's diagnosis overreaches, since Hegel's formative work can be freely loved; what decides is the authority over the exertion, the demands of a worthwhile object or a standard of performance that must expand even when the object is already served. The expanding standard comes home. The vacation is documented, the race entered, the meal reviewed, the sleep scored. Recovery acquires deliverables, and the receipts travel to the office on Monday. Co-Brain followed them there. The achievement subject files them with himself and audits his own rest, a weekend with KPIs. Absorption in something difficult would have rested him; his rest has to produce evidence that he is improving, and each activity opens one more account in which to fall behind. Leisure defended as recovery stays obedient to the job; leisure exhibited as achievement performs before its audience. Hochschild found the two places trading roles: the office offered recognition and ordered time, and the household became a second venue, crowded with tasks and pressed to be efficient. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (1997). The subtitle states her finding, which concerns the families she studied. In some professions unleisure has become a distinction, and the paid help that manages it, the cleaner, the delivery, the assistant who keeps the calendar full, belongs to the display. Turn Veblen around: the old leisure class displayed freedom from labor by wasting time visibly, and the modern professional displays freedom from emptiness by filling time visibly. The inversion is from Co-Brain. Bellezza, Paharia, and Keinan measured it: Americans granted more status to a man who works long hours and whose calendar is always full than to a man who does not work at all; Italians reversed the order. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), on conspicuous leisure; Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia, and Anat Keinan, “Conspicuous Consumption of Time,” Journal of Consumer Research 44, no. 1 (2017): 118–38, study 3. It is one vignette study, 112 Americans and 98 Italians rating a hypothetical 35-year-old who either works long hours with an always-full calendar or does not work at all, so the leisure tested is not working rather than working less; the authors compare ratings only within each country, and report a replication (n = 193) in a web appendix.
Arendt's consumers' society is the objection to the easy remedy, more free time: in a society of laborers, the hours released from labor go to consumption, because labor and consumption already set the terms in which a life is understood. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958), §17, “A Consumers' Society,” on a laboring society whose time released from labor remains organized around consumption. Arendt measured nobody's weekend; the section warns of a tendency. A long weekend leaves that formation where it found it, and the extra day goes to the same checkout; the distinction between an interval of recuperation and a life with other ends cannot be read off the calendar. The room gone mute has a seller at the door, and the seller has only access to offer. The mute room is from Fatal strategies. Rosa's order of dynamic stabilization, which must keep growing and accelerating to stay as it is, does not command resonance, the world answering back, by growing faster. Hartmut Rosa, Beschleunigung (2005; Social Acceleration, 2013), Resonanz (2016; Resonance, 2019), and Unverfügbarkeit (2018; The Uncontrollability of the World, 2020), on dynamic stabilization and on resonance as a relation that growth does not command. One buys the guitar at last and reserves the concert seat; nobody sells a guarantee that the music will matter tonight. The buyer who charges the purchase with delivering the relation meets its failure with more access, a second glass of salt water. At the desk the answer comes unbought: a problem that resists one's first solution, a material that requires a new technique, a collaborator whose objection changes the project. The available is Heidegger's stock again, inventory on call. The archive has become it, and the working self keeps its evening in stock, an hour to optimize, a reservation to keep, a body to have ready by Monday. Cognitive resignation watched the archive become standing-reserve. The world is at its disposal and hard to meet. Nothing at the checkout sells an occasion that asks a person to be present and promises no improvement to his account.
“Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”
—Karl Marx, Capital III, ch. 48
The criterion has to be usable at the desk. What is this work bringing into existence? Which capacities grow through it? Which necessities does its success reduce, and which obligations does it merely renew? The same questions reach the purchase, since the wage and what it buys are entered in one account. In a circuit that converts the worker's achievement into an expanding maintenance bill, the bill has first claim on the next achievement, ahead of any purpose he sets for it, and he goes on working hard and buying well and grows less able to decide what either is for. An ethic of escape becomes another package: buying less, leaving the job, and walking in the woods come complete with an audience and a price. The oxherding pictures do not end in the woods; the tenth, 入鄽垂手, Entering the Marketplace with Open Hands, leaves the practitioner barefoot where the selling is. The pictures stand at the head of Bull herding and bullshitting. The worker recovers judgment in the same place, if at all, inside the activities he loves and not in flight from them. A walk matters while it is being taken, and so does a problem while it is being solved; that each also restores him is a byproduct. Hirschman counted two responses open to a member of an organization, exit and voice, and called loyalty the attachment that bears on both. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), on leaving an organization, attempting to change it, and the attachment that affects both responses. In the circuit, purchased relief is what makes staying livable, and leaving shows which appetites were tied to the job, at the price of the income; neither touches the terms. The worker who speaks takes them up, the hours, the staffing, the pace, the evenings on call, the division of a productivity gain, and asks who sets the share of a life the work is allowed to claim.
The purchase answers first. It is a private decision taken at once, while a change in the working conditions requires negotiation with others, risks failure, and costs before it pays. The pronoun changes on the way to the checkout: how do we change the hours? is a question for a meeting, what do I buy to make them bearable? a question for nine in the evening, and only the second is answered the same night. Hirschman, twelve years later, watched the movement between disappointment in private consumption and renewed public involvement. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (1982); Wolfgang Streeck, “Citizens as Customers,” New Left Review 76 (2012), on the relation between consumer satisfaction and political participation. Hirschman's cycle concerns private consumption and public action in general. His consumers turn citizen once the disappointment has accumulated; before dissatisfaction with the hours gathers into a claim, the delivered dinner, the massage, and the long weekend at the end of the quarter settle it out of court, one grievance at a time, and the claimant pays. A recurring task is automated; a process becomes reliable; a junior colleague learns to resolve the ordinary case. Each releases capacity. Time is one dividend, the afternoon the task used to take; the others are fewer errors, a service open to more people, an understanding of why the process failed, and a larger say over how it runs. A firm pays them only if it books a solved problem as an achievement and not as an invitation to manufacture a successor, and a firm that wants nothing but its own expansion never does. Is the released capacity paid out, or mortgaged to a larger quota before it has been counted? The manager who handles an escalation himself relieves it and trains the organization to send him the next one; the delivery at nine, once it is the habit, relieves the evening and adds to what next month's wage must cover. Both are the salt water. The Buddhist word for craving is thirst, 渴愛, and the image that goes with it is of drinking seawater: the more you take, the more you need. 渴愛, tṛṣṇā (Pali taṇhā), craving, literally thirst, which the second of the four truths names as the origin of suffering; the seawater is the half-life of fortune in Fatal strategies. The automated task and the trained colleague are work of the other kind. After them the ordinary case is handled without another performance of rescue.
Strike the negatives from the wear column and it reads as a list of goods: the sleep slept, the walk taken, the dinner cooked, the friend called, the question asked. The workshop adds two of its own, the craft with no client and the instrument played badly. The workshop is in Fatal strategies. Within the conditions he has, the worker's task is to keep them from being wholly indexed to the wage or the role. A position with the wear and the repair both denominated in the wage has the same counterparty on both legs and no hedge, which is why the laid-off feel for a while that they have lost not only an income but the means of recovery, every means they had having been purchased. The hedge is a restorative the job does not pay for, in a currency the market does not issue, and its value is that it is uncorrelated: it cannot be bought, so it cannot be sold back, so it survives the job. Short of poverty and loss, the goods on the list survive a change of employer, a smaller income, and the departure of the audience before which success had to be exhibited, and in each of them he counts as something other than a productive function or a purchasing account. A friendship requires another person, who is free to answer otherwise; its fragility belongs to its worth, and no receipt discharges what it asks of him. Some work makes the same kind of claim, because its demands come from the undertaking and not from the quota: the joint that must hold, the code that must run. The audit takes a Sunday. List what you do to recover, and mark what costs money. If everything is marked, you are not resting; you are the firm's maintenance budget, outsourced to yourself.
Marx asked more of the working day than that a man enjoy it. Inside necessity he allowed freedom one form only, the associated producers regulating their interchange with nature rationally and “with the least expenditure of energy”; the freedom that is an end in itself begins beyond necessity, and its prerequisite is the shorter working day, the dividend paid in time, and paid to everyone. Marx, Capital III, ch. 48, “The Trinity Formula”, in the Progress Publishers translation of Engels's 1894 edition (Moscow, 1978 printing, p. 820), on the rational regulation of necessity and on human development beyond it, with a shorter working day as the basic prerequisite; the phrase quoted here and the epigraph come from one paragraph, which the epigraph closes. The corollary is mine: freely enjoying a task does not by itself abolish the social relation in which it is performed. Keynes forecast the fifteen-hour week and wrote, in the same essay, the clause that would void it: the needs felt only in comparison may have no ceiling. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930), which forecast the fifteen-hour week and, in the same breath, separated absolute needs from the relative kind that may be insatiable; Robert and Edward Skidelsky, How Much Is Enough? (2012), on why the forecast failed. His grandchildren work fifty-hour weeks to pay for what they were supposed to have the time to enjoy for free. Enjoying the work does not establish that freedom while its purposes and its proceeds are set elsewhere. But the enjoyment is no embarrassment to the critique. It is the capacity being sold twice. The useful purchase and the productive intervention are read the same way, by what remains once the immediate effect has passed. Where the cart empties, the watch stops calling from its browser tab, and there is an evening in which to cook the onion, the quiet is a crude instrument, and it reads true: part of the working self's budget was a maintenance schedule, and the schedule had written its own case for the hours. The wants that go cost the worker nothing of himself. What the quiet can leave audible is a wish to work otherwise, to write the rule instead of catching the escalation, and to make a thing that still works on the evening nobody is available.
We are unleisured so that we may be at leisure, and the plural still holds. Where a working life accounts for itself chiefly in the money required to restore the man who earns it, only the order has turned: we are at leisure so that we may be unleisured again, and the interval is charged. The wanting was the bill.