The panel seeks to emphasize the diversity of engagements with the concept of work. It consists of four shorter papers, each lasting no more than fifteen minutes. This limit will be strictly enforced and participants strongly encouraged to allow the greatest possible space for discussion.
The session begins with Ben Clarke’s paper, which serves as an introduction to the panel. Engaging with idea of post-capitalism and theorists from Chantal Mouffe to Slavoj Žižek, it argues that developments in the means and organization of production demand a revised understanding and representation of work. It rejects the idea that this means abandoning a materialist notion of class, arguing instead that new technologies and structures of capital requires a broader understanding of labour that enables the integration of unrecognized, precarious, and surplus labour within radical theory. Clarke insists that literature is essential to this process and to constructing new solidarities. He illustrates this by considering Andrea Dunbar’s explorations of women’s emotional and sexual labour and Irvine Welsh’s images of the lumpenproletariat, both of which extend the concept of work and the working-class, opening a space for new forms of representation and political practice.
The panel continues with John David Zuern’s analysis of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland, recent interventions into a sharply polarized public debate on the American working class. The memoirs differ markedly in their assessment of the extent to which working-class people are personally responsible for their circumstances. This difference stems from their understanding of the underlying causes of poverty and precarity, with Vance emphasizing individual accountability and Smarsh insisting on the impact of structural inequality, especially on the lives of working-class women. As memoirs of individuals who achieved considerable success despite significant obstacles both can be interpreted as what Gilmore calls “neoliberal life narratives.” Zuern acknowledges that critique yet points to how these authors’ differing perspectives on the affective and moral dimensions of low-wage employment, under-employment, and unemployment in post-Fordist America offer critical insights into the ways neoliberal ideology shapes working-class people’s perception of themselves in relation to their work and, crucially, public perceptions of workers’ rights and responsibilities.
The third paper, by Emily Rich, uses two early twentieth-century texts, James Hanley’s The Last Voyage and Frank Tilsley’s The Plebian’s Progress, to intervene in current debates about what Marx called surplus population. Both authors depict unemployed characters descending into madness, which they construct as the inverse of class struggle and the only available form of resistance. Rich argues that they depict insanity as a reasonable response to unbearable material conditions, an act of individual rebellion, but also trace its origins to the character’s psychological attachment to their roles as workers, which defines their subjectivities. Their insanity reveals the intensity of their identification with capital. The workers in both texts have no way of reproducing themselves but to reproduce capital, and thus no way to lessen their misery but to seek work. When they remain unemployed, their only recourse is to turn their rebellion inward, destroying themselves rather than capital. The texts’ bleak view of the fate of surplus populations has implications for understanding current deindustrialization, precarity, and informal labor. Rich concludes by positing riot as a form of collective action based on proletarian rather than worker identity that might offer a way forward for present surplus rebellions.
The final paper, by Thomas Winningham, extends the discussion to clerical work, exploring the idea of unproductive labor through an analysis of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. The text describes a failed IRS recruitment video, for which administrators at the fictionalized IRS regional office ordered auditors to reflect on their work history and experiences. The project rapidly loses direction and becomes wildly expensive before eventually being shelved. Although almost everyone involve recognizes the failings of the project, their day-to-day work is so loathsome that nobody informs management, hoping instead spend as much time away from their desks as possible. Wallace suggests that these kinds of projects are so common as to be nearly invisible in the contemporary office. From employee self-reviews to hours of mandatory video trainings, employees spend increasing amounts of time in unproductive forms of labor and jobs that could be eliminated entirely. Their ironic stance toward the project is one strategy of resistance but does nothing to undermine institutional hierarchies or free them from the tedium of their daily experience. Winningham uses Graeber's studies of bureaucracy and meaningless work to explore the ways in which Wallace extends our understanding of unproductive corporate labor. He argues that although this seems to signal administrative incompetence it serves to reify established hierarchies and reinforce the power of management.