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Jameson in the NLR in 2004 on full employment and utopia:

Marx’s anti-humanism, then (to use another term for this position), or his structuralism, or even his constructivism, spells a great advance over More. But once we grasp utopianism in this way, we see that there are a variety of different ways to reinvent utopia—at least in this first sense of the elimination of this or that ‘root of all evil’, taken now as a structural rather than a psychological matter. These various possibilities can also be measured in practical-political ways. For example, if I ask myself what would today be the most radical demand to make on our own system—that demand which could not be fulfilled or satisfied without transforming the system beyond recognition, and which would at once usher in a society structurally distinct from this one in every conceivable way, from the psychological to the sociological, from the cultural to the political—it would be the demand for full employment, universal full employment around the globe. As the economic apologists for the system today have tirelessly instructed us, capitalism cannot flourish under full employment; it requires a reserve army of the unemployed in order to function and to avoid inflation. That first monkey-wrench of full employment would then be compounded by the universality of the requirement, inasmuch as capitalism also requires a frontier, and perpetual expansion, in order to sustain its inner dynamic. But at this point the utopianism of the demand becomes circular, for it is also clear, not only that the establishment of full employment would transform the system, but also that the system would have to be already transformed, in advance, in order for full employment to be established. I would not call this a vicious circle, exactly; but it certainly reveals the space of the utopian leap, the gap between our empirical present and the utopian arrangements of this imaginary future.

I can understand the anarchists’ resistance to the “jobs for all” demand in terms of their resistance to state-based solutions. I can’t, however, understand the casting of a demand like this one as “moderate,” “liberal,” or “Obama-ist.”

(And, yes, I understand that the OWS demand wouldn’t be “Jobs for All, Everywhere,” per Jameson’s paragraph.)

I know this sort of thing has been done before… But what a conceptually tangled if viscerally stirring ad spin here. The usual American car marketing jingoism gets translated into a half-coherent riff about uneven internal development and productivist aesthetics. Check out, for instance, the strange pseudo-Ruskinism mixed with rust belt exoticism in “Because when it comes to luxury, it’s as much about where it’s from as who it’s for.” As well as, of course, the tag line of the ad as a whole, “Imported from Detroit.”

Most of the other ads from last night are banal crap. * But in ones like Chrysler’s, complete with the somnolent semi-logic of lines like the above, it is interesting to see what they dream that we are or could be dreaming.

On the other hand, quite funny that Chrysler is increasingly owned by Fiat, and so a more accurate ad would be about the politics and finance of one post-industrial city buying another via the mediation of the US government….

* All that I’ve found that was even mildly interesting is the Audi spot that seemed to position itself as the car of choice for slightly less twittish upperclass twits. And I suppose there’s something to be said about the Motorola ad, itself a winking sendup of Apple’s very famous 1984-themed ad that aired in 1984.

Of course there is an interesting difference between the two versions. If the stakes of corporate conflict translated into consumer choice once was registered in terms of the political thematics of Orwell’s novel (the subversion of IBM as the subversion of the totalitarian state), now buying a MotoPad vs. an iPad is allegorized through the minor key romantic plot of the novel. And even in doing so, diminished stakes again: instead of a righteous fuck in the woods, the best we can hope for is a Youtube video goofily edited into an electronic Valentine’s Day Card which leads this Julia not to drop her overalls but merely to take out her earbuds.

From the NYT today.

Resolution: I will stop using the Sainsbury’s self-checkout machines, even if I finally have snooped the code that allows me to buy booze without waiting for “approval” from the employees. Here’s for maintaining the inefficiencies (and employment) involved in Actually Existing Human Presence!

Huh. Looks like I’m going to be going on strike next week. First time I’ve ever been involved in one of those. Luckily the union is (thus far) permitting us to run our exams… Was very worried about the idea of screwing up my students in service of the cause (exams aren’t easily rescheduled where I work… and they also make up just about all of my students’ marked profile… so it’s no trivial matter…)

I’m starting to have a feeling that things are about to get a wee bit pitched and contentious – even more they than already have been – in and around the UK higher education sector in the coming weeks before everyone goes home for summer break.

Was just talking tonight to my wife about how utterly disconnected I feel from politics. Not in the sense that my fundamental beliefs have changed or lightened – I’m still very much the same democratic socialist that I’ve always been. Just feel like I don’t have anything to say, any insight to contribute on that front – the front of politics writ large, politics played out on television and in the papers – anymore. Back in the early days of this blog (and the blog before that, in particular) I was constantly writing about the political churn, what was in the front sections of the papers, etc. Now, not so much.

But on the other hand… I’ve taken a small but significant step lately towards becoming more involved in my union, getting trained for further and grander participation in it. I am and have been haunted by the sense that people have me pegged out for university administration. I mean the upper bits – head of department, dean, whatever. I am the rare but true alpha male in a humanities department, one of those swaggering ex-athletes with a booming voice and an air of definitiveness about me when I speak in public. People like to be led by me, it seems. My dad was in management (erm, human resources) so there’s something about it all that makes sense.

But I’ll be damned before I go into it though – everyone knows that they carrot and stick you with a big salary and extracted promises to sort things out down on the farm, if you know what we mean. And I wouldn’t do that. But with the union – maybe there’s a place I can take all that half-oedipalized paternal training and put it to good use. And maybe in doing so, find for myself a place where my ever-more-humbled and generally-disenchanted political instinct can find somewhere new to set down roots. We’ll see…

Nice when a review can help out. Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism never uses the phrase “pseudo-marketization” or any variant thereupon. You can go amazon and search it this way and that and you’ll never find it. Neither will you find reference to “simulation” in this regard in his book. But these phrases have become touchstones, really the centerpieces, of interviews and talks in the wake of its release. It’s even more prominent in the talk I just linked to, but here’s some copyable print:

But the phrase ‘pseudo-marketisation’ is crucial — what we have in public services is an absurd simulation of market mechanisms rather the market as such, a kind of worst of all worlds scenario in which a simulated market goes alongside continuing surveillance and monitoring from state bodies.

Well, here’s me on the book, from the day of its official release back in December:

It’s not even the standard story about privatization that Mark is ultimately telling here, though it’s a related story. Rather, Capitalist Realism is ultimately focused on something else – the ways that public institutions that haven’t and likely won’t be privatized have been forced (have been forced to) to participate in simulated markets, where a rigorous regime of testing on a set of metrics replaces the invisible hand of the market. It’s a governmental gambit driven at once by a desire to reduce funding across the board and to convince voters that they are taking the efficacy of public institutions very seriously. Since it couldn’t / can’t actually expose some public institutions to market forces through opening competition or privatization, New Labour established (and continues to establish) pseudo-markets, fake market-like games, for public institutions to compete in in order to obtain funding.

Glad to be of help, I suppose. But perhaps in exchange for providing usefully clarifying language, he could agree to drop the gray vampire / troll stuff from now until the end of time? Because when he says that…

Grey Vampires don’t feed on energy directly, they feed on obstructing projects. The problem is that, often, they don’t know that they are doing this. (That’s one difference between them and a troll – trolls usually aren’t under any illusions about themselves, they just find spurious justifications for their activities.) There is very definitely a type of person who is a Grey Vampire – I’ve encountered a few, and, once their shield of sociability and charm falls away, they become revealed as horribly, tragically cursed, existentially blighted. But the Grey Vampire is also a subject position that (any)one can be lured into if you enter certain structures. Part of the reason I can’t hack it as an academic is that, in a university environment, I invariably find myself pincered between the troll and Grey Vampire positions. That’s why I sincerely admire anyone who can pursue a project in the academy.

… but then proceeds to co-opt the selfsame (ugh) vampire’s contribution without reference, it all starts to look a bit nervous and shifty, no?

I’m wondering what the beatdown that IT gave Alain de Botton has to do with this little piece of befuddlement, reported today by Robert McCrum in the Observer:

I hear that Alain de Botton is about to start work at Heathrow airport’s Terminal 5, for a new book, you understand. Apparently, the author of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work will serve behind the check-in desk for a whole week and deliver an account of the ordeal to his publisher, Profile, in time for publication in September. In keeping with the elevated tone of de Botton’s literary endeavours, he will be known as “writer in residence”. Let’s hope he finds the encounter with the travelling masses less irritating than his well-publicised feud with the blogosphere.

Kind of hilarious to think about the scenario that engendered this project. AdB stalking the better bits of London, absolutely infuriated that fucking bloggers have impugned his ability to understand and thus to describe work just because he’s never had to do a day of paid labour in his life. I mean, doesn’t a childhood of interacting with the help count for anything anymore? Stomp, stomp, stomp. Fuck it…. I’ll show them. I’ll sign on for a whole week and then they’ll know that I. mean. business.

You know – they should be thinking bigger with this. How about a whole series in which, for instance, AdB gets poverty by spending half-an-hour at a welfare benefits office. Or becomes a woman by sitting in a gynaecologist’s waiting room. He could tell us what illiteracy is like by wearing an eyepatch and trying to read. Or what it’s like be have AIDS in Africa by going to Boots without his Boots Advantage Card. Really no end to the possibilities here: homeless by sitting out in his garden past 10 PM. Falsely imprisoned by having his housekeeper lock him in his conservatory for fifteen minutes with the lights turned off.

Don’t have it at hand, and it seems to be a bit out of sync with the French version at Gutenberg, so working from (potentially projective) memory… But what was published by New Directions as Baudelaire’s Intimate Journals seemed to be effectively split into two parts, thematically. The first section presents a series of aphorisms and meditations, ever more dark and cynical as CB goes along, about the economics of interpersonal, especially sexual, relationships. That is to say, the darkness derives from the fact that they are economic, endless variations of whoredom and keptness in which either the male or female party can play either part.

The affectual atmospherics of this section, we can imagine, we can smell, were born in CB’s propensity for drink and the way that he arranged his sex life. Hellish stuff, but it only gets worse, as the second section of the book shifts focus from sex to work. A stream of self-chastisements, imploring himself over and over simply to get down to work, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

One must work, if not from inclination, at least out of despair – since it proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Despairing, neurotic work as the only thing better than the unholy finance of sex. To give this sort of thing space, to fill up pages of a notebook with nothing but promises that the work will be better tomorrow…. Do you see the strange math in the passage? The way that the “proof” works? I suppose one reading would be that close examination of work and amusement reveals that the former is more interesting. But I am feel sure that this is not at all what CB means. Rather, I think it’s the despair itself that settles the accounts – despair is less boring than amusement, in other words. In his rendition, and in the world that he describes, there’s only one general equivalent available, and it’s not money but pain.

Helen DeWitt seems to have been trying to defend Alain de Botton yesterday in a couple of posts on her blog. I’ll admit that it’s a little hard for me to see what she’s getting at – seems to me a lot of goalpost shifting going on there, whereas Caleb Crain’s initial review seems to me perfectly clear. DeWitt seems to want to fault Crain for not recognising that there are forms of work that aren’t compensated. I’m pretty sure he’d be on board with that, but it’s not what he’s getting at. He’s getting at the fact that AdB can’t stop condescending and generally sneering at the workers that he interviews / features in a book as they don’t live up to some sort of silkgloved idealisation that he arrives at by looking at work from a distance…. I see the problem, sure, with the first sentence, but that’s not really the point that’s up for grabs, is it? And her implicit argument that somehow Crain is more at fault for not naming Bourdieu (why Bourdieu in particular rather than any of the other many, many theorists of work?) than De Botton is baffling. Anyway, a bit hard to make sense of, all this. But on the other hand, this paragraph of DeWitt’s is easy to make sense of, and not only to make sense of, but to call it out as bullshit:

Every so often an academic reads several hundred examination scripts and is appalled by the ignorance, the tendentiousness, the lack of sophistication – and so tackles the problem by taking a paid sabbatical and writing a book showing what proper treatment of the subject looks like. What the academic does not do is show how the subject can properly be treated in a 4 45-minute 1000-word essays. Nor does the academic show how his mastery of the material is to be achieved by candidates who are holding down part-time jobs, who can’t buy books, who are kicked out of their halls of residence three times a year to make way for conferences. If one were to give all several hundred candidates a paid sabbatical, and if one were then to permit them to organize treatment of the subject on their own terms, at book length, a substantially higher number might be expected to achieve respectable results. If one simply locked each candidate up with a computer and gave him/her unlimited time to write to a specific word count, a substantially higher number might be expected to achieve respectable results. We don’t do that, so what we see is, unsurprisingly, that a small number of students can both learn under unfavourable conditions and display knowledge coherently under unfavourable conditions.

I understand that this is deployed as some sort of allegorical device, a parallel instance, but… WTF? Hard not to sense a bit of slippage from the footnoted academics mentioned and “the academic” as a generic breed. * But I know, we academics are sooo spoiled. Let me just assure you of a few things, readers:

a) the implied storyline here, despite the fact that DeWitt seems to know of an actual example of this sort of thing happening, is ridiculous. Just to be empirical about it, I’ll knock on my department head’s door today, tell her that I’m still feeling a bit frustrated about the exam scripts I marked a few weeks ago, and ask her if I can take next term off in order to write something that sets the little buggers right about a few things.

b) there are problems with academia, teaching, but the lack of compassion of instructors for students, lack of understanding for the busy lives they lead, is not one that stands out from the bunch. Believe me, we are in solidarity with the students on all of this – it only makes our lives and work harder when they are overworked, bookless, worried about administrative issues, empoverished, and lacking the appropriate amount of time it takes to finish their assignments properly.

c) “What the academic does not do is show how the subject can properly be treated in a 4 45-minute 1000-word essays.” Yes, I don’t spend tons of time writing about that because, in term, I spend oh about 10-15 hours of contact time actually doing that, face to face. And 10-15 hours contact time, as anyone in the business knows, comes along with 20-40 hours non-contact preparation time.

d) We don’t write our books out of frustration with our students. Sorry. I am not sure what was going on where and when DeWitt went to university, and I’m sure the assholery and general poshness runs a bit thicker at the Oxbridge places than elsewhere, but this is simply not the case anywhere I’ve ever been, and I’ve been a lot of places now, very posh and not so posh.

I’m not sure if DeWitt’s going for some sort of complicated performative endorsement of AdB’s blinders-on condescension here, but whatever it is it makes as little sense as either an element of her argument (if there is one… hard to know…) or as an “every so often” bit of jobsite portraiture.

* Where do we find the slippage in question? Note the present tense of the first sentence… and the fact that the two guys mentioned were teaching at the Oxford of yesteryear when they wrote their books, where sure there were poor kids, but probably not the basketcases in bulk needed to make the posh prof / pathetic student body scenario work in the way DeWitt needs it to….

Hmmm…. they’ve never used the R word before. But they did tonight.

Uh oh.

Expatriation leaves one oddly, frighteningly exposed. Getting laid off, ordinarily, doesn’t mean a plane ticket for less than 2 weeks hence, your kids out of school, barely time to say goodbye to friends, and everything you do daily done no more. Getting laid off, ordinarily, is bad enough.

Obviously, any anxiety or actual outcome has nothing on this situation.

Must. Write. Book. Sad to be thinking that way, the “let them kill the other guy first” sort of way. Fucking world!

From the journals, from the start of 1959:

The ugliness of New York. But I do like it here, even like Commentary. In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality – no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt… Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.

Except, of course, that TGE suggests that the last sentence should be reversed to read “Nothing except the frenzy of the bed, if that, and eating.” And I imagine she means real smells, the back-in-the-day real dirt, when the thing that stinks nowadays back in Gotham is something much more abstract. This sort of thing, for instance, the half-told story of the New New York and its Creative Industries.

Famed for its concentration of heavily subsidized 20-something residents — also nicknamed trust-funders or trustafarians — Williamsburg is showing signs of trouble. Parents whose money helped fuel one of the city’s most radical gentrifications in recent years have stopped buying their children new luxury condos, subsidizing rents and providing cash to spend at Bedford Avenue’s boutiques and coffee houses.

The concentration of people relying on family money in certain neighborhoods of New York – not just Williamsburg, though if you want to take a trip to see the ‘farians living in their native milieu, of course it is a good place to start – is extremely high. I don’t have figures, but there was a kind of standard deviation between job/salary and estimated cost of residence that make the state of play rather clear. When I sold my own apartment there, in 2005, I had four offers come in the first day it was shown. Three of the four were way, way over the asking price, and all three of those offers were formally made by family estates or by people who attached a very clarifying letter from their father’s broker in New Jersey.

It bears remembering that TGE incorporates a subtle and interesting reference to this situation. At one point, Chelsea explains that the reason she’s taken up the line of work that she has is because (and I paraphrase – don’t have time to find her exact words right now) she doesn’t or didn’t want to rely on her parents. The math’s not hard to do. Implicitly, the suggestion is that she could have relied on her parents, that they had the means to support her in the city. Her career as a high-end escort doesn’t originate in poverty, nor is it simply some sort of mindless / libidinalized cashgrab. Rather, if we’re all going to be on the anti-bburg-trust-fund bandwagon, and I’m sure we are and should be, Chelsea’s choice of a line of work represents a heroic refusal of exactly the sort of thing that the NYT article describes. Sure, she could have found something else to do, and lived elsewhere and otherwise… She’s like one of the “goodguys,” the recovering-fundees, who are meant to provide relief at the end of the trust fund article:

The culture of the area often mocks residents who depend on their families. Misha Calvert, 26, a writer who relied on her parents during her first year in the city, now has three roommates, works in freelance jobs and organizes parties to help keep her afloat while she writes plays and acts in films. There is a “giant stigma,” she said, for Williamsburg residents who are not financially independent.

“It takes the wind out of you if you’re not the independent, self-reliant artist you claim to be,” she said, “if you’re just daddy’s little girl.”

There’s a long, complicated, and in some senses counterintuitive story to be told about exactly what happened in New York from the mid-ninties onward. Giuliani (and his incredible good-fortune to be mayor during a prolonged bull market – nothing unbreaks the windows in NYC like a glut of finance sector bonuses), NYU, the coming of age of the progeny of a corporate managers of the post-Cold War surge of globalization and financialization, the inflation of a local real estate bubble that started well before the interest rates came down, and informalization of work in the wake of the rise of the unpaid internship, and the rise of what we might call hedged entrepreneurialism amongst the creative types. Lots more too, obviously…

I really liked The Girlfriend Experience, but this is perhaps attributable to the fact that I am ultra-invested in something that I am from now on going to call the infra-interesting. The infra-interesting, on the surface, looks a hell of a lot like the boring – and it can be very tricky indeed to make a distinction between the two or to develop an argument that relies on anything more than inference and intuition about why something is the former and not the latter.

I learned about the infra-interesting by reading novels. Flaubert is the once and ever champion of the form, spreading the banalities of an upside-down world so thick that the world itself turns right-side up, as if automagically…. or maybe it’s the other way around. But this particular quality has a long literary history. Some, like Lukacs at certain moments, seem to argue that the novel is nothing but a materialization of the infra-int… Or at least that’s what great novels do. And it’s a continuing story. Apparently, according to Claire Messud’s recent review in the NYRB (mostly behind paywall, sorry) suggests that Colm Toibin’s new Brooklyn belongs under this rubric too… I’ll let you know when my wife’s done with our copy and I can have a looksee.

The difference between infra-interesting and just plain boring pivots on an often-very-complex deployment of irony, which can turn a dessicated film, for instance, that deploys lots and lots of cliched speech, whose characters never quite achieve the exit-velocity of intriguing interiority, whose dramatic events aren’t quite dramatic enough and whose scenarios are rote, and whose settings are unostentatious, banal, and so on, from a boring one to a sublimely infra-interesting production. The problem, of course, is to describe the lever, the hitch, the catch that makes the boring into something else. How can we be sure, except inferentially, that Eyes Wide Shut isn’t simply an incredibly stupid film rather than a meta-reflexive work of perfectly adulterated satiric genius? And how can we be sure, when we listen to the delirious banalities spoken by the characters in Soderbergh’s new film, whether we’re listening to something conceived in the spirt of the pseudo-realist pander or the hardcore-realist bonfire of the vanities?

Meta-ness, of course, is one way to frame a film preemptively as infra- rather than uninteresting. And TGE is stocked to the ceiling with meta-ness. The frame gets broken several times, you know the story about the leading lady, and there’s lots of winking discourse all the way through to clue the audience in to what’s going on. Of course, this is the sort of thing that Flaubert did (along with lots of other cutting edge stylistic technology, to be sure). One of the better moments in this line, perhaps, comes when Chelsea is “reviewed” (that is to say fucked and then written about) by someone called “the Erotic Connoisseur,” the proprietor of a site that reviews escorts. We get the review itself in voiceover, just after the ostensible dramatic climax of the film:

With her smoky-eyes, dark straight hair, and perky little body, Chelsea would appear to have the potential to satisfy in the goth or girl-next-door modes. Alas, Chelsea seems intent on marketing herself as a “sophisticated escort.” With her flat affect, lack of culture, and her utter refusal to engage, Chelsea couldn’t even dazzle the likes of Forrest-Fucking-Gump. And that’s just where the problems begin. Just as her perky little tits seemed to literally shrink at my touch, so too did the connoisseur’s cock fail to launch at the clammy touch of her hand and the lukewarm and loose embrace of her mouth. To quote the great sage Jamie Gillis in Misty Beethoven, “this number is the nadir of passion.” A splendid time is absolutely not guaranteed for all.

The fact that the Connoisseur refers to his freebee sex with Chelsea as “review copy, as it were,” puts us on the right track. And further, of course, the fact that the review could hold valid not only for the character Chelsea, but probably for Sasha Gray herself (as IT puts it, she is known for “unnerving ability to look absent even (or especially) in the midst of some convoluted group penetration”) as well as for Soderbergh’s film, brings the meta in a thunderous way, is almost enough for the movie to achieve escape velocity into the Infra in a single talky bit.

But then again, meta-action is rarely enough anymore. Meta is all over the place – the shittiest film for the bored teenager market has that sort of thing in spades nowadays. Boring meta is still, or now, only just boring. It’s a base to touch, but it can’t make pseudo into hardcore all by itself nowadays, not without help.

So what is it then? Is it the fact that the film felt to me, as I watched it, like not only an illustration but even an expansion of Nina Power’s recent piece on  Nu-language (and Orwell), that does it? In the piece, she describes a recent “astonishing proliferation of coinages, buzzwords and neologisms. Rather than seeing a carefully controlled reduction in the number of officially sanctioned words, we are instead overwhelmed by wave upon wave of faddish expressions and tautologies – a kind of junk syntax in which there is no more reason for a word to be in one part of a phrase than another.” This language and its proliferation, according to Power, arrives via bureaucratic mandate – a mandate that is ultimately responsive only to the deeper mandate to seem productive despite the fact that no real production is taking place.

Sit in any meeting, whether at a company HQ or at a university, or be a participant in a focus group, and the discussion will invariably turn to questions of “benchmarking”, “quality assessment” and “blue-sky thinking” – as if one were sitting in sunny California rather than provincial England. People will “speak to” documents, forgetting that we generally speak to other human beings rather than to pieces of paper. “Clients”, whether they be students, consumers or voters, will be “consulted” as part of some “new initiative” or other. There will be “collaborations” and “partnerships” involving “stakeholders”. Participants will talk for hours and hours in an upbeat, aspirational way. And there will be coffee and biscuits, and people will congratulate one another at the end for such a “wonderfully productive session”. And yet nothing will really have been said. And certainly nothing will have been done – nothing good, at least. It’s not that we have to lie about production figures, as the Stalinist broadcasts by Orwell’s Big Brother did; rather that we have to compensate for the way we barely produce anything at all by becoming obsessed with “innovation”.

Nu-Language is, as she says, “an ominous word-cloud that drifts from one department to another, providing each of them with the illusion of activity and the false comforts of a discourse of dynamism that is incapable of recognising its own sterility.” But what’s really good about TGE, and why it both echoes Nina’s piece and provocatively focalises it into in a new and fruitful direction, is the fact that it demonstrates the spread of the “omninous world-cloud” beyond the meeting room, out into the realm of the officeless new economy of freelance worker. Becoming a yoga teacher, a magazine hack, or a high-end prostitute, it seems, doesn’t get you out of the mandate to repeat these sterilities – in fact, as we see again and again in the film, freelancing results in a deeper internalization of the same. No boss is looking because you are your own boss, but still your mouth moves and the same stuff trickled way, way down from CNBC and human resources consultants, Suze Ormand and the latest long-tailing, black-swanning pop business book.

But of course, this world of self-employment is in crisis – both in the film and the real world. (Serendipitously, the business section of the IHT on Saturday features a long piece about “The Self Employed Depression” – all those yoga teachers in Brooklyn faced with empty dojos and emptier wallets…) But on the other hand, the current economic downturn has only accentuated was was always already the case in the new economy of unteathered (that is, precarious, unbenefited, undercompensated) work. While the freelance prostitute has liberated herself from the protective tyranny of the pimp, freedom comes at the cost of the services of a reserve army of consultants and agents, web designers and moneyhandlers – who collectively take a piece of her or her earnings (in hourly fees and commissions) in order to hold off for as long as possible the inevitable loss of market share that she faces as she ages. Chelsea talks to her accountant about setting up her own retirement account, talks to consultants about diversifying her work into boutiquery as the clock is very much ticking down on her productive viability, and it’s hard to imagine that she has health insurance – though hers is a line of work where one would be well served to have a decent policy.

The precarity of work – especially when mixed with the tendency of that sort of work to fall under the rubrics of affective and/or communicative labor – is a particularly soil for the infra-interesting to grow. Stuck – as we all are in immaterial reaches of the economy, whether we have steady jobs or not – between the dual mandate to play things very safe and steady and constantly, incessant to rebrand and recast ourselves, to diversify our employable assets, and to handle rapid oscillations in market conditions and the tastes of the clients. And worst of all, because of the specific nature of this work, which depends upon in Chelsea’s case selling a fuck as desired, or engagement in yet another conversation about the market or the frigid wife at home as true – just as, for instance, the selling side of what I give my students is in the end based on the feeling of authentic engagement with which I endow my lectures or our conversations in my office – Chelsea, like all of us, ends up by market mandate going to work on herself, tweaking and retooling in order to summon up just one more drop of eau de presence for her customers to smell on her neck. If I were a prostitute (and I’m not sure, given what I’m saying, that I’m entirely not), I might have recourse to “personology” books as well… I too might consult a dice rolling system to trick myself into feeling just real enough about what has long since gone permanently flatline for the sake of keeping alive in my line of work.

But of course the problem is that the very strategies and discourse that we use to attempt to trick ourselves into creative / affectual productivity renders us incapable of the very productivity we seek to provoke. What comes of this, of course, is just the sort of tepid appeal, the enthusiastic benumbment, and mediocritized specialness that characterizes not only the film and the star of the film and the character that she plays, but further the culture at large from which it is drawn. The situation takes the shape of a vicious circle, a tragic trajectory. The infra-interesting, then, might best be characterized by the dramatic emplotment – almost always in tragic form – of the quest to render things interesting under conditions that would seem to prohibit such a development. Rather than simply watching a pornographic video and, you know, getting aroused, it is more like watching a video of someone watching a pornographic video and struggling, against all their boredom and jadedness and who knows, guilt, bad faith, psychophysical dysfuction, to get themselves aroused, to arouse themselves to the point of sexual functionality. It is perhaps a mark of our time that most of us know immediately, if darkly, which of the two options would be more, well, interesting to a contemporary audience of a certain demographic. Soderburgh himself certainly did way back in 1989 when he made his name on the back of another film preoccupied with vicious circles of impotence, desirelessness, frigidity, and talk.

Finally, the presentation of New York in the film underscores and echoes much of what I’ve said above. The film refuses to indulge in a single “landmark” centered shot from what I can remember, instead presenting a cascade of generic looking street scenes from what could be any of the various dining and drinking districts of the city. In particular, Soderburgh sets many of the sequences that take place in restaurants and bars – and there are a ton of these, flipping through the film quickly suggests that it’s made of almost nothing but sequences like these – with opening shots of the front of the restaurants in question like the one above or this one below.

I’ve been out of New York for almost four years now. I didn’t recognize any of these places in the film, and I wasn’t sure until I checked whether they were real places or fictional lookalikes. They are in fact real – or at least were, as one of the two pictured above is already out of business according to New York Magazine. But my non-recognition is probably in fact the point. A great deal of The Girlfriend Experience takes place in upper-middlebrow (upper middle-palate?) gastropubs and bistros – the film starts in one, and proceeds to fill itself with Chelsea’s appointments with clients, consultants, and friends that take place in a seemingly endless sequence of places just like these.

I’ve spent an enormous amount of time – even in London, even despite the fact that I barely get out anymore – in places just like these. In fact, there’s one that I think of as something like the platonic ideal of the form. The first time I walked into Canteen, the place tucked into the netherparts of the Royal Festival Hall facing Waterloo Station, I thought to myself that I should take a picture of the place, as this is what the world looked like for much of my adult life, but soon, perhaps, would look no more.

I am not sure I have the interior design knowledge to do the place justice, but this snippet from a review online might do the trick, and in more than one way:

In keeping with a traditional canteen, the tables and seating are low and simply styled. The seats covered in olive leather are punched Aertex style, menus and cutlery are stored in shelves edging the seating sections, a long bar lines one wall and the open plan kitchen complete with school canteen shelves for trays, the other. This is how you’d expect the executive dining room at IKEA HQ to be styled.

Anyway, why am I so fixated on these places, both in real life and in The Girlfriend Experience? They are collectively, I believe, not only one of the most characteristic spaces of the period we have just lived through, they are further (it follows) perfect spatial correlatives of the infra-interesting itself. The highend and dinnertime version of the would-be-freelancer’s seat at Starbucks, these thirdspaces fall ever deeper into derivativeness and genericness the harder they try to assert, ever so subtlely, their greyscale idiosyncrasy. Whereas the mid-to-highend world once only had low and high restaurants (the pizzeria and the french bisto) to choose from, now we can stumble along the long-since gentrified streets of our capital cities or even our suburban enclaves and find all manner of teak trimmed imitations of the “executive dining room at IKEA HQ” in which to exchange bureaubanalities with our coworkers, to overshare with our lovers and acquaintances, or to contemplate – though not all that long or hard – another bottle of Shiraz with which to drown out the idle Nu-talk that we can’t help but produce when cornered in a “seating section.” They are the scenes of our infra-interesting evenings, after a long days of typing or encouraging or fucking, where we break it all down into words that will leave no mark by the time we leave.

Try to think. What else is there to do but eat and drink at this late stage of the game? What was there to do at night, back as far as you can remember?

The Decline of New York is a popular meme at the moment, but Soderburgh was cannier than most when we painted this decline in the earth-and-Thai tones of the rise of gastropub. We order our groceries and books on-line, we steal our music and our movies. Sex we have wherever we can, but always in places appropriate to the task. But there is nothing left to buy on our better streets than brunch mimosas and glasses of overpriced (and probably supermarket bought) Rioja. But the restaurants are steadily closing. Even in the film, set before the election, they are emptier than they are full.

Ah, two weekdays mostly at home and suddenly the infarctional insanity of work is thrown into stark relief. This is so civilized, gawd. Wake up, walk my daughter to school (I’m usually on the bus an hour before she goes), sit at my kitchen table with newspapers and novels and coffee.

Anyway, here’s a nifty thing from the TLS about the earliest interviews with and articles about Philip Larkin to appear in the press….

I was particularly struck by Larkin’s loathing of work, including, I suspected, his job as a librarian, although he carefully did not specify this. We discussed his career and much of what he told me I included in my profile. He said that on going down from Oxford he could have taught or gone into the Civil Service. “I did not want to teach because I stammered and the Civil Service turned me down. I even considered journalism but I could not write to order.” I omitted, for obvious reasons, what he told me about his first job at Wellington in Shropshire. “I saw and applied for a job as librarian at Wellington”, he said.

“The last man had scrubbed the floor and stoked the boiler but I refused to do this. I was accepted nonetheless. This was a stupid choice that has determined the course of my life ever since but I didn’t have the courage to chuck it up. My two-and-three-quarter years at Wellington were the most unhappy of my life – and the most creative.”

(I did not know then that it was while he was at Wellington that he met and broke up with Ruth Bowman, the only woman to whom he was ever formally engaged.)

“I hate work. Libraries are a quite pleasant way of earning a living. Dismal prospects though! Jobs connected with books like publishing are not good for creative writing. That’s why libraries, all technical and administration, are so good.”

He added wistfully: “It’s too late to change now”, and, only half in jest:

“I’d like to have been a solid, uncomplicated, second-rate novelist producing a novel a year. And not ‘Crouch in the fo’c’sle, stubbly with goodness’. My only ambition now is to write more, to write better and to live without working, which is immensely distasteful to me. I’d like to earn enough to retire on from football pools, which I do every autumn.”

I asked him if that really was his only ambition. His answer was that, as he had spent most of his life in bedsitting rooms and was still in one (“the only life I have known”), he would also like to achieve his two private symbols of luxury, “my own lavatory and a daily copy of The Times”. Greatly daring, I asked him if he contemplated marriage (I knew nothing then of his tangled love life or of his difficulties with girls). He said he certainly intended to. “I’m not a confirmed bachelor but I rather enjoy the rattlesnake image.”

Ah, so you see? I’m starting to think, more and more each day, that these sort of stories are worth thinking about. Duh. OK – I’ll put it this way. Do you know when you teach lit (if you teach lit), we always end up starting out with some sort of capsule biographical description before heading on to the Heavy Work of close reading or whatever? Well, I’ve rejiggered my capsules to focus on this sort of story and not the other one. The story of “creativity” is the story of finding space, time, and market. It’s sort of a more materialist, matter-of-fact, less mystical-abyssal, Adornoism, btw btw btw, before anyone hits out at me for being, well, something about all of this.

Harumpf. Bonus poem time:

Myxomatosis

Caught in the center of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask.
I make a sharp reply,
Then clean my stick. I’m glad I can’t explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.

Nice, geez. Have never read that one before. And am facinated by mixy bunnies, so there you have it. But it’s also a decent enough poem about work, if you squint at it, no?

Recently promised myself (again) that I’d do only serious posts, no more self-reflection,  no more twittering. But just this last time:

Aforesaid friend mentioned in my last post arrived and spent the day today hanging around my office and the environs of my uni while I did what I had to do at work. When we were done, he said to me (I paraphrase a bit, but only a bit) man you do work fucking hard here huh?

I made him repeat this to my wife when we finally got to my place.

It’s true. I do. This system is way way more work-intensive than the US model. Academic work is always intensive, but this thing is pretty close to forty-hours-a-week of actual scheduled or semi-scheduled activities. I.e. reading and preparation, let alone research, don’t't count in the total.

Hmmm. Still a good trade to live where I do. And very happy to be employed at all, god.

In the Observer yesterday there was a feature that detailed what people do at their jobs all day. Annoyingly, it only features relatively interesting upper or upper-middle-class jobs (no 9.00 am I stand at the till and ring up groceries, 1.00 pm I take lunch 2.00 pm I stand at the till and ring up groceries, 6.00 pm I go home in other words). And at least one of them is hideously annoying. But they do have the rundown on a day in the life of a university teacher of English whose days sound like they are almost exactly like mine, adjusted for having kids and such.

7am Wake up to the Today programme. Go to the gym, followed by breakfast with my girlfriend, a theatre director and translator.

8.45am Walk to college, which takes about 45 minutes.

10am Give a 50-minute lecture. I do about two a week, at the moment it’s literature and the Second World War.

11am Have an hour-long “supervision”, a one-to-one (or two) tutorial with students about their essays. I do about 12 a week.

1.15pm Eat with the 60 other fellows of the college at high table. It’s a really good way to bond as a unit.

2.30pm Give a weekly seminar, on modernism and the short story.

4pm More supervisions and endless emailing, mostly with the 30 English students I’m responsible for, but also arranging library visits, organising symposiums and contacting the editor of a book I am writing on London’s bomb sites and the literature of wartime London. I also set entrance exams and interview prospective students in December and January.

5pm Work on my book – it’s my first. I try to clear one full day a week, but the reality is that the three eight-week terms pass in an intense, exciting blur, and holidays are for research and writing, preparing reading lists, lectures and seminars.

7pm Sometimes I eat in college, work late in my office and then catch last orders in the pub and debate with friends. If not, I walk home listening to my Welsh-language podcasts practising my vocab. My mother is Welsh but I grew up in Brighton, so I only speak a little.

8pm Prepare for tomorrow’s supervisions, reading all the essays I will be discussing. Practise lectures on my cat Tolly.

8.30pm Cook dinner. I enjoy cooking as a way of relaxing.

9.30pm More preparation. Then I’ll read in bed until I fall asleep at about midnight. I have countless books on the go at once. I like to read articles and journals around my subject, but also completely off-topic as well. As a child, I just wanted to read books and I’ve fallen into a career where I get paid to do that. Some days, I can’t quite believe it.

Not too far off, nope. Except tonight I’m still very much marking papers and it’s currently 12:24 AM.

Just saying. I do have a minor point to make about all of this – something about work and sanity, something about work and sanity and the near absense of consciousness due to overwork , and perhaps all of that in relation to strange utopias of hard work… What? There aren’t any? What about the new bloomusalem? – but there’s no time to make that point now.

Light blogging, relatively speaking, lately, and for that dear readers am very very sorry. You don’t want to hear me go into the details, and you don’t really have to unlike those I know in the pinkflesh earthside, but, ahem, just to make this whole thing more real for you, here’s what I’ve been up to:

- Cleaning up the topmost bedroom because my bestest pal from grad school is coming to stay for a bit. When we were young and not yet employed, I used to meet him every single Wednesday (I think it was Wednesday, right?) at places like this. Whichever of us could get there a bit early would go and occupy a table outside in advance and sit reading the Times until the other showed up. Golden days. In the picture below, it looks like it’s a cloudy NYC day but it still never gets that light in London.

dylan thomas had a bad night here

- Shaking Alain Badiou’s hand. Yep, yep. I know. You’re impressed. Thing is he’s bigger than I am, I think, which weirds me out. I am bigger than almost everyone, but not Badiou. Physically I mean. No! Not that sort of physically! You know what I mean, god, you guys! I later asked IT, apropos of I don’t know what, maybe it was this post,  if she thought I could take him. She took the fifth. Hmmmm…..

- Working like a maniac. Christ alive, it’s too much! All I do is mark papers and attend departmental meetings. One of my Ph.D. advisors, a guy who wrote a book on Benjamin et al that I know many of you have read, once told me as we walked somewhere after seminar that one of the worst things about academic work is that you never get to read. I responded that I was sure he was being a little hyperbolic. But as it turns out, my god, I don’t have time to read – or let’s see, wash myself, wash my clothes, eat properly, process complex personal epiphanies, read newspapers other than the londonpaper, call my mother, clean the litterboxes, or be civil to ex-students who knock unannounced on my office door.

It’s true what you hear, Americans, about academic life over here. It’s busier, and harder. The upside, of course, is that they don’t seem to fire people all that often. And if you’re lucky, you get to live in London.

- Going to a hauntology event. Which was nice, as it was underneath London Bridge. So under London bridge that you had to have your ID scanned at the door, I guess to make the BBC’s job easier afterwards if you were make the damn thing, erk, fall down. It reminded me, a bit, of nights that I used to have when I was childless (ooops, initially typed childish, ha!) in Brooklyn. That is to say, it made me feel middle-aged before my time. I told my therapist today about that feeling, and he said Yeah, I don’t picture you so much as a raver. I think you’re more a type for talking somewhere with a bottle of wine open. I love my therapist. He’s from Boston, btw. No raver am I! He’s right. I like me some good conversation.

Problem is, I was five years younger in Brooklyn, that is to say safely within the core demographic for such affairs. Now I am, suddenly and shockingly, older than most of the people who attend such events. Hmmmm…. And strangely I’m not depressed by this.

- Feeling even more middle-aged, but in a comfortable way, because everyone I know well, basically, is starting to get requests to appear on TV or radio. Including me, even. One of the Major American Networks is apparently trying to cast my wife as a talking-head in a Major Piece they’re doing on socialized medicine, the NHS and the like. My wife is a brilliant Overton Window player, which is probably the best thing, in terms of politcised hackery, that you can be.

I am happy to hear that the Major American Networks are working on Major Pieces on socialized medicine. I am thinking that they should film the birth of our second child via the costless services of the NHS at University College Hospital, especially the part where my wife pushes and I faint.

- Getting work. Mmmmm. Work. By which I mean writing work, of the non or only para-academic variety. I am covering the enormous Communism Conference for a fine American magazine / journal that you almost definitely read if you look at my site. And this summer I get to write a personal essay cum litcrit piece on sitting around in coffee places doing crosswords and the like that will be published by one of the Finer Left-Oriented Presses. (The table of contents of this collection reads like a who’s who of Interesting London, plus one guy from the Bronx, and, um, me…) And I have various stuff (on Lefebvre and other things) that I need to get to right away. This sort of work makes me very happy indeed…. Not that I don’t want to revise my monograph or anything….

- Watching Mad Men. It’s not the best thing ever, but it’s more than good enough to keep me entertained. Was thinking today that with this one – who is always the one to be pictured in newspaper items about the show – they are effectively bringing the big ass back after several decades in the desert of televised desire. All well and good, bring it back then…. All to the good, all very just and right.

Ah man, I have to go and read some student papers now… Exhausted, awful, but glad that I got in touch….

More bleak news on the academic job front, via the NY Times.

Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis. So a chill has set in at many higher education institutions, where partial or full-fledge hiring freezes have been imposed.

A survey by the American Historical Association, for example, found that the number of history departments recruiting new professors this year is down 15 percent, while the American Mathematical Association’s largest list of job postings has dropped more than 25 percent from last year.

“This is a year of no jobs,” said Catherine Stimpson, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. Ph.D.s are stacked up, she said, “like planes hovering over La Guardia.”

The anticipated wave of retirements by faculty members who are 60-something is likely to slow as retirement savings accounts and pensions wither, administrators and professors say. That means that some students who have finished postdoctoral fellowships and who expected to leave for faculty positions are staying put for another year, which in turn closes off an option for other graduate students coming up the ladder.

Glad to see that the Times has gotten one of the secret and small issues at play here – secret and small but bound to make this problem worse moving forward. In the USA, where there’s no manditory retirement (as there is here in the UK, and probably as there should be everywhere, but only if there are proper state pensions in place of course, which is not at all a given….) lots of the long tenured types who were headed toward retirement have had their stupid TIAA-CREF accounts shredded by the stock market dive. Their answer, of course, will be to defer retirement even longer than academics usually defer retirement, which is a long, long time.

At my last job, I had a choice between a state pension and a managed retirement account with TIAA-CREF. I really wanted to choose the former, really did for so many reasons, but with things the way they are in terms of mobility / precarity, it seemed (in the five minutes I was given to make the choice after some infotainment at the HR building) like a very bad bet to start a habit of accruing tiny little pension pots all over the USA… and as it turns out, not just the USA. So I took the non-pension. And wow, has it ever bled cash over the past year.

Well, at least if the academic job-market tanks everyone could just become freelance writers instead of boring academics. Erm… Francis Wilkinson, executive editor of The Week, suggests that writing may well be becoming – or already – exclusively the province of the rich:

It’s not obvious how young writers without accommodating, well-to-do parents or a trust from gramps make it these days. Surely they can’t spend a year or two blogging without pay until an audience evolves to nurture them. They’ll starve. Meantime, freelance rates for non-fluff magazine writing have barely risen in the past 15 years. And the chances of getting a job at a quality newspaper or a serious magazine are fast approaching zero.

There are exceptions, I know. There always are. But on the whole, the writing game seems likely to become even more a province of the upper middle class and flat-out wealthy than it is already. The offspring of the affluent, branded college degrees in hand, can afford to give it a go. But anyone hailing from more hardscrabble environs may find it too difficult to get traction before succumbing to the dismal economics of it all. (In contrast with another industry under siege—music—in which rising from the hood or the farm still seems plausible, even stereotypical.)

The Internet has brought the newspaper business to its knees. Some serious magazines are undergoing stress tests of their own. Maybe a certain kind of writing about the world, informed by underdog experience and lower-class perspective, will also prove to be a relic of the dead-tree era. Such writing wasn’t in great supply before. But movie stars, business executives, even accomplished authors all write for free these days. Why should some kid nobody’s ever heard of get paid?

It is a bit hard to understand, and the older I get (and the better circles that I move in) it only gets harder. A little while ago I was out for drinks with a relatively famous writer in multiple genres who had just spent an hour, among other things, baiting his academic audience with their failure to publish relevant work, to publish in the newspapers and the like. Despite the fact that he is, as I said, relatively famous, I doubt we’re talking about boatloads of money from the books and the increasingly rare journalism, and certainly not enough to support a lifestyle that at least resembles, if not betters, those of the academics that he was drinking with afterwards. I wanted to ask the unaskable question – the question about how this all worked, how with the family and the kids, the tennis games on Saturday mornings and the house in a decent part of the city – he kept it all together without tethering himself to a department and lectures and seminars, essays to mark and students to meet and sub-committees to sign on for. But of course, I did not ask. Though there are a few options, one does not really need to ask.

In America, it is hard to think of anyone remotely near my age who writes who is not an academic of one stripe or another. In the UK, it is slightly easier, I suppose because of the low cost of education and the free health care, and the fact that the pay scale seems to be slightly more humane than the one decscribed by Wilkinson above. But only slightly easier. Back home, I do or did know a few who went the intern to editorial assistant to subeditor to managing editor route, while writing on the side – a route fraught with perils of more than one stripe, but every once in awhile it works out. And of course there are a few exceptional cases where it can happen the way it should happen, occasionally even very deserving cases like this one. Or then again, some try other lines of work, but this usually comes to no good, I suppose because too much of your mind is elsewhere for to much of the time. At least when, say, a literary academic isn’t writing because his or her job is too demanding, she or he is still working through the operative questions and issues at least part of the time. Working as a bank teller or a store clerk or a lawyer or, dunno, an intinerant apple picker might well be a good source of material, but I can imagine (and remember) how intellectually depleting such work can be.

One feels a reflexive need to say at this point in this sort of post that it is important to remember that academics are only academics, writers are only writers, and that everyone else in the world has it worse. I am sure that is very true. But on the other hand, and without being a blinders-on technocrat about things, it does seem a bit worrying to thing about a world in which almost all would-be academics have to find something else to do, or else teach themselves crazy until writing is off the table, and where absolutely the only writing that gets done is done by the children of the idle rich. Of course, we’re already there and getting more there everyday.

I’d like to find a way to write about this. It’s interesting – given the choice between blurring the distinction between what we do and what everyone else does via “the modern office is the victorian factory” move and some sort of elderly-sounding defense of art and thought as the eyes and mind of the polity stance, my instincts are on the side of the latter. I am not a factory worker; I’m not really treated like one. It doesn’t take a very deep look into Victorian factory life to realise that this is true. On the other hand, it may be harder to produce and disseminate decent work now than it used to be. There’s some other way at this than the ways people are generally thinking about it, but I’ve been warned not to be so promisory in my posts, so no promises.

(I’ll come back to it later, soon…)