A new job to unwork at

Hola

I’m
here if you want to gchat

We
were supposed to talk last friday and then… life happened

My
dearest babe,

I
can’t love you more. I hope you know.

I
also can’t wait to see the projects and adventures this year’s brings
to us

To
have met you is such a gift. Missing you from weird Madrid.

Feliz
año Nuevo and huge Besos and hugs

Political
projects that investigate possible emancipatory politics and question
traditional notions
of
activity
sexuality
family-configuration
life
expectations
and their dependence upon tradition and state definition

The
intersection of moodboard (both “real” and “fake”)
– notes to self – remuneration transaction (or the material traces
and supports thereof) – job for money – “your work”… is a
really rich terrain. I love the idea of using backs of checks as
notepads. It feels vaguely subversive– the invalid use of the form,
the sheer excess produced by inscribing anything other than your
name. Also I love Cookie and Cookie. WHAT
would they talk
about if they found themselves in such proximity in the flesh??

I
totally forgot that I was planning to have breakfast

We
are interested in thinking about work.
What is work?
How do we do it? What do we include and exclude within its
boundaries? Work can be so many things and so hard to pin down at the
same time. In trying to formulate some answers to these deceptively complicated
questions, we quickly come to face structural issues like the
conditions of artistic production in Los Angeles, the particular
histories of labor in this context, and production of surplus value
for capital owners. Of course, individual experiences with these
issues vary widely, and involve diverse strategies of support,
getting by, getting ahead, working the system, selling out, dropping
out, etc. Then there are the moments when one can’t quite be sure of
the line between productive and reproductive labor. And maybe now we
have a job that we know is work in
a strict sense,
but we have a sense that we haven’t worked
our asses off more
than when we were in school. But that doesn’t count as work… or
does it? Work organizes our lives, pays our rent, drives us insane,
and gives us many pleasures. As art workers, sometimes we feel our
work can be so pliable and expansive, and other times it’s just
absolutely inaccessible. Who can afford not to work? We don’t want to
rashly suggest that WORK = DEATH, but sometimes we wish we could
reject it altogether. Or perhaps that would drive us mad.

Hey

I don’t know why I didn’t read that part of the message.

Hi,

Just noticed that there may be a typo

i
remember the first time someone, actually [NAME] told me while
running around, or lying around, or some -ing around in [CITY NAME]
that if it were their decision they would abolish work altogether. I
remember I was baffled by that statement, slightly embarrassed
because they were also struggling with money and supporting
themselves (Obviously). Also not doing so bad.

Work
is a social and economic construct that determines the range of our
possibilities, the material reality of our present––time
availability, spatial mobility, range of socialization and material
rituals; from what we eat to how we dispose of our leisure time––as
well as our future survivability chances––retirement, pension or
lack thereof.

I’m
in [VERY EXPENSIVE CITY] at the moment though I’m renting a wee cabin
in [SOME REMOTE PLACE]—you know, just a few miles beyond [LESS
REMOTE PLACE]. Trying to figure out when I’m going back because I
have the wee domicile until December 1st but I’m in a weird limbo
state and don’t know what the hell I’m doing. But I’d love to do this
project with you.

That’s
the good thing about [SAME CITY NAME], we were sort of poor but we
could get by. The amount of time we had to exchange for money wasn’t
as much as in other places. It was a pretty good ratio in fact. Very
different than here (general place).

Now,
my life is kind of chaotic at the moment so can I ask you to fire off
a brief text to me when you email?[phone number]. I hope this will be
temporary—the need to text “read your damn email”—but I
have a hideous email/social media phobia wherein I literally won’t
look at them for 3 months; this has cost me countless problems like
publication offers, job offers, missed performances (hitherto unheard
of in my entire adult life since I began reading & performing)
and missing the death of my best friend’s mother. As I say I think
this need to text me is gradually coming to an end because
I’m actually in THERAPY for the malady which is as bad as some
people’s fear of flying, don’t ask me why.

When
[NAME] said they didn’t want to work EVER if they could choose to
do so I thought they were

a
spoiled brat
a bit of a dreamer
a bunch of a slacker
just generally
irresponsible

All
the mechanisms of self-policing at work. I couldn’t conceive a life
without WORK.

Anyway,
meanwhile, I’m getting caught up on email and will star this and mark
it as unread. So creepy to say yes to things (like something I was
supposed to do with Bradford this summer) then forget about them
entirely. Not like me at all but I was under tremendous stress last
year which apparently damaged my brain, such as it is…

It’s
not that my friend didn’t do things. Just that the realm of their
human activity didn’t lie exactly under the conditions that
legitimize those actions and reactions as remunerated labor aka WORK.
They were active in spotted queer community we were/are part of. We
tended bars at soli parties, taught people how to fix their own bikes
and computers, worked in the production of small experimental films,
took care of friends that were ill, dog sat. We also spent a lot of
time talking and biking and cooking and drinking beer, feeling the
energy that fueled our bodies and putting it into motion for whatever
cause. Whatever happened. Pogo.

TMI,
I know. But anyhoo, I’m thrilled to be asked, would love to do it,
and at the moment have no other commitments either real or imaginary.
Won’t make any, either.

The
attentive re-signifying of the energy, time and embodiment already
invested in the realization of work, opens up a space of political
and economic agency, propelled by the resources provided by art and
political action, which allows for a double de-alienation of the
labor invested in the undertaking of this remunerated labor.

In the clear, critical light of day, illusory administrators whisper of our need for institutions,
and all institutions are political, and all politics is correctional, so it seems we need
correctional institutions in the common, settling it, correcting us. But we won’t stand
corrected. Moreover, incorrect as we are there’s nothing wrong with us. We don’t want to
be correct and we won’t be corrected. Politics proposes to make us better, but we were
good already in the mutual debt that can never be made good. We owe it to each other to
falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination.
We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.

An abdication of political responsibility? OK. Whatever. We’re just anti-politically romantic
about actually existing social life. We aren’t responsible for politics. We are the general
antagonism to politics looming outside every attempt to politicise, every imposition of
self- governance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent
state and home sweet home. We are disruption and consent to disruption. We preserve
upheaval. Sent to fulfill by abolishing, to renew by unsettling, to open the enclosure
whose immeasurable venality is inversely proportionate to its actual area, we got politics
surrounded. We cannot represent ourselves. We can’t be represented.

My
friend was a writer. Is a writer. And a film editor. They made their
bare minimum with that. Bare minimum in [SAME CITY NAME AS BEFORE]
then was real bare. Also because there were so many other kind of
exchanges that were not abitered by government approved currency, but
remained in murky fields of friendship, camaraderie, sluttiness, quid
pro quo, and a fat etcetera of barter systems
and gifts and presents born from a sense of time vaguely detached
from the yoke of money.

My
glamorous bi-coastal lifestyle is in its nascent (delusional) stage,
much like my ability to cope.

At
the time I received that statement from my friend with STUPOR I
wasn’t really aware of these things, of the difference in the
materiality of time and its direct relationship to capital and the
direction and intentionality of our activities, of our actions and
emotions.

In
my attempt to dig into the unacknowledged realms of political action
that lay between the extremes of ideological declamation and everyday
experience, I ended up thinking about the economy
of ambition that
operates in our process of subjectivation as socialized individuals.

One of the conclusions they drew from the failures of the student-worker uprising was that the
revolution of the cultural sphere could not wait until after the workers’ revolution.

At the time when [SAME NAME] told me that I was looking for a J O B I was working at a gallery that was a perfect metonym of [SAME CITY] mainly
because it’s relationship to money was mostly delusional. They had some good
intentions but bad manners and they paid me shit but shit was rent [SHELTER]
and left me enough [the measure of discontent] to feed myself. Then my hustling
skills carried me nicely but tightly to the end of the month. But I was getting tired
of that. I wanted more. I wanted a job that would allow me to do more things.
What? I wasn’t sure about that.

I started a job at a gallery because I was tired of my precarious underpaid unstructured aimless situation. Also because living in [OTHER CITY] without working all the time can make one feel like a pariah. It wasn’t that I had finally decided to capitulate (or at least that’s the narrative I’m sticking to). I felt a manifold desire for recognition, a point around which to focus my energies, and some regular means to pay my bills. It was also a choice made out of disillusionment: feeling that I was working so hard in a specific environment and not getting anywhere, deciding to say “fuck it” and to work somewhere where I felt valued. I often feel like I’m performing, like I’m playing the deepest game. Is that naive? I still don’t really know what I want.

Ambition
is an ambiguous term, a substantive that does not always enjoy a
positive interpretation. It is good to be ambitious in the right
amount, but an excess of it can potentially become a social problem,
prompt to a punitive exclusion of the ambitious subject. At the same
time, there are ambitious communities, perhaps not necessarily
identified as such (meaning that those communities don’t
particularly perceive the term as characteristic of their identity),
but where the absence of this emotion/affect is understood as an
absolute handicap.

In
the arduous terrain of generalization, ambition is usually understood
as a dubious characteristic within leftist political groupings,
usually connected with greed, the desire for accumulation, and the
will to power necessary to achieve it. Therefore, the space in which
those desires for power-filled recognition get structured and
choreographed tend to be an opaque dimension of the individual’s
subjectivity, usually not fully disclosed in the social realm. The
“outing” of professional/career/political ambitions is usually
balanced with altruistic justifications tied to their ends that
signify the transitory means as mere steps towards a larger good for
a wider community. However, the power, potential and political weight
of these fantasies that strive to become realities, is certainly
crucial.

I
knew I wanted an IPHONE.

I
wanted an iPhone and I didn’t want to have to count cents every
time I bought something. I started to be very aware of how my DESIRE
was shaped and triggered
by the stuff people carried on them, that surrounded them. That
became more acute in [ANOTHER CITY NAME IN A RICHER COUNTRY WITH AN
INTENSE SENSE OF FASHION]. There the correlation between people’s
belongings and their social status and the weight of their presence
became clearer. Pardon my naïveté. This was years ago. However
that material transformation of the self through the collection of
commodities that identify us in particular social contexts hasn’t
ceased to amaze me. Also it hasn’t ceased or eased its presence.
It’s just different. Different contexts, different “needs”. Who
has a Prius?

Hi [Name]! God I sent a 5-million page text to you two weeks ago but now I think maybe I
sent it into the ether! Have mightmarish thing going on with [phone company]. YES
PLEASE RESEND! Sorry I was out of touch. Too hard to explain, I’m teaching right this
second- let me get to motel and get some sleep- im so glad to hear from you!

The
political signification of our ambitions opens up the dense political
space of nuanced negotiation that occurs when a recognizable ideology
has to confront the particularities of contingent existence, where
the compromises of political claims take place in response to the
incidences of a context. I have no idea where this is leading to, the
only thing I know is that I have run out of language to talk about my
political feelings, and that my struggle veers towards the
compilation of a vocabulary, spoken or performed, that allows me to
articulate my desires and experiences.

I
come from hard workers. A and B taught me to work hard to be free, to
love your job to be happy. The luckiest thing you can achieve is a
job you love to do because, my dear, you are going to have to do it
all your life for a bunch of years until you retire, if you are lucky
(I add). A and B live and work in Europe. Who knows where they will
die.

Bending
the limits of the labor agreement

In
this intention to a more honest approach to the gap between our
ideals an our actions comes when we will finally speak honestly about
how our desire for work trumps our political commitments––to the
most intimate level––regarding the conditions we are willing to
perpetuate and the kind of labor relations we would willfully endure.

When
I started school as a little willful kid I started a bit earlier
because turns out I talked a lot and saw my sister (older) leaving
every day and wondered where and war and thought it must be so FUN to
go to that place.

S C H O O L

And then she would come back home and
sit down with those thick books and write on ruled notebooks with
perfectly tempered and symmetric handwriting. All that looked pretty
appealing to me. So I asked and begged and declaimed that i wanted to
go to school and A was like “well if you so insist I guess you can
go you must be ready”.

After
2 weeks going to kindergarten, meeting the other kids and checking it
out I went back to A one evening and solemnly proclaimed that that
was fine but I already got it. Sure school was alright but I was done
with it. I didn’t really needed
to go the next day. A rose an eyebrow and answered “Babe, you only
have begun.”

I
wonder if it would be possible to formulate an option that would
productively appropriate the capitalist colonization of the
individual’ subjectivity and the contemporary anxiety over the
impossibility to divide working time from leisure. How could that
amalgam be perceptually transformed to work for the ‘precariat’
subject?

I
haven’t failed a test in my life.

I’ve
never missed a deadline.

I
was all my life an A student at the edge of expulsion for bad temper.
I was as a teacher’s pet as it gets I was just good at disguising
it. I also was always on that threshold called SKEPTICAL.

I
could take it but barely.

“Performativity
describes this turning of power against itself to produce alternative
modalities of power, to establish a kind of political contestation
that is not a “pure” opposition, a “transcendence” of
contemporary relations of power, but a difficult labor of forging a
future from resources inevitably impure. Bending
the limits of the labor agreement

It’s
funny how being in school or in the hierarchical circumstances of
work throw us back to that subjectivity of being a teenager. Of
forcefully fitting. Of having to bend our desires, our believes and
our opinions under the demands of a social structure of retribution
and reward that often DOES NOT MAKE ANY FUCKING SENSE.

C: Everyone involved in our projects came out with the feeling of being part of a temporary
community. The way in which the form of our projects was permeated by the politics that
mobilized them— I see this as a huge achievement. An exercise of coherence not easy to
realize at times.

A: I think that political permeation of form conveys affect and attention. I hope our work
can accomplish that kind of representation.

The
repurposing of labor towards a social and political goal entails the
investment of the individual within a system of solidarity that
undermines the ideological precepts championed by capitalist
hegemony: individualism, personal success, symbolic and economic
accumulation, and private sacrifice for the corporate cause.

The program must be open. We have to dig deeply to show how things have been
historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must
make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness, and deny its necessity.
We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces. To make a truly
unavoidable challenge of the question: what can we make work, what new game can we
invent?

Because
the person in charge is a human being imbued with power you have to
abide to. They can be great they can be smart they can be dumb as
fuck a fucking doorknob. Some times. Worst case scenarios. We all
have our own. They differ in degrees of vexation, difference tends to
be qualitative instead of quantitative. Still I feel like most of
what I do is looking for work. I apply I ponder I think I write i
talk I email I text I deliver I hustle I lift I drag I seduce I read
I show I finagle I perform I compromise my desires often but not as
often as in other places. And that action of compromising is ripe
with a feeling that it’s hard to describe but taste like the death
of love or freedom.