Part 1: Mindfulness/Wellness
by Tedd Siegel
“Affective disorders are a kind of captured discontent.”
— Marc Fisher
“Politics as therapy, changing the world one individual at a time, doesn’t make the world less brutally competitive and unequal, it helps people cope with these conditions.”
— Ronald Purser
“Mindfulness is actually establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.”
— Slavoj Žižek
Self-Optimization & the Politics of Refusal
If work today has really “got you down,” you are not alone. In the U.S., lots of boomers, well-past working age, chase seasonal retail, and wonder how they could have worked so hard and have so little to show for it…
by Tedd Siegel
“…the old hierarchies that defined “skilled” and “unskilled” seem to be dissolving. Some hold out for further changes, anticipating the introduction of low-carbon jobs to replace those lost, or a universal basic income, or rethinking the value of labour altogether.”
— Nesrine Malik, Guardian Columnist, May 2018
I gotta ramble on, sing my song
Gotta work my way around the world baby, baby
Ramble on, yeah
— Led Zeppelin, Ramble On
Is it even possible to have a clear understanding of the difference between labor and work?
In her famous book, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt tells…
by Steve Heikkila
The viral magnifying glass enlarges the characteristics of our contradictions and of our limitations. It is a reality principle that collides with the pleasure principle. Death is its companion.
–Jean-Luc Nancy
We must live with the awareness that conflicts between life and freedom may occur…even if we uphold both universal principles, we cannot observe both of them unconditionally in many highly sensitive situations.
–Agnes Heller, Beyond Justice
On February 27th, days after authorities in Lombardy and Veneto invoked Italy’s first quarantine measures in an effort to stem the tide of the COVID-19 pandemic, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben…
by Tedd Siegel
“We inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative.”
–Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
“The principle of political action that I am suggesting is that the rhythmic and spiral nature of time should be affirmed.”
–Arthur Waskow, Toward a Jubilee Economy & Ecology in the Modern World
Capitalism never misses an opportunity to tell us that the functioning of the free market is the very pinnacle of human freedom. …
by Tedd Siegel
Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism’s ostensible realism turns out to be nothing of the sort.
— Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
The struggle for an equitable distribution of time and power to be useful to self and others outside employment…has been effectively paralyzed.
— Ivan Illich, The Right to Useful Unemployment
The Useless Philosopher-President of Ireland
In a speech to a group of students gathered for a reception at Áras an Uachtaráin earlier this year, the diminutive, soft-spoken, and hugely popular president of Ireland…
by Steve Heikkila
I’ve been researching the corrosive effects of America’s for-profit election industry on democracy in recent months (see the piece I posted in October entitled The Election Industry versus Democracy). One of the more insightful works I’ve read on the subject is political scientist Adam Sheingate’s 2015 book Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy.
In this book Sheingate details how American electoral politics have been transformed into a multi-billion dollar, for-profit industry. This commercialization was facilitated, he argues, by “[l]ikening the act of voting to a matter of…
by Tedd Siegel
“Every age…needs a Diogenes.”— Jean-Baptiste Le Rond d’Alembert
“Listen: We are here on earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”— Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake (1997)
In this present series of articles, I am exploring far-reaching implications of what I believe to be an increasingly broad-based societal realization: that the overall conditions of “work-as-we-know-it” are becoming quite intolerable.
As it turns out, explaining what I mean by “refusing work-as-we-know-it,” and showing why the standard “Panglossian” neoliberal objections are not terribly compelling (shame on you, nobody has ever had it so good!) …
by Tedd Siegel
The copies, the copies,” said I hurriedly.
We are going to examine them, there —
and I held towards him the fourth quadruplicate.
I would prefer not to,” he said, and gently disappeared behind the screen.
–The Lawyer, Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville
Work
Turn to the left
Work
Now turn to the right
Work
Sashay, shantay
RuPaul, Supermodel (You Better Work)
Something quite momentous is happening with respect to our collective experience of work — or what, following Peter Fleming, I like to call “work-as-we-know-it,” for reasons that will become clear later.
Septuagenarian baby boomers in…
by Steve Heikkila
The electorate is not too stupid or too tired to control the political system. It is merely too poor.” –Thomas Ferguson
In a post-Citizens United political ‘marketplace’ where money = speech, ‘free’ speech has become remarkably expensive. According to The Center for Responsible Politics, a non-partisan money-in-politics watchdog group, the total cost of elections for the 2016 U.S. election cycle was $6.5 Billion. Borrell Associates, an advertising industry market data and research agency, puts the figure at $9.8 Billion and expects that figure to balloon to $11.7 Billion for the 2020 election cycle. That’s a lot of…
By Steve Heikkila
“Nazism led to the gas chambers, communism led to the gulags, and neoliberalism leads to soup kitchens.” — Paul Verhaeghe, Says Who? The Struggle for Authority in a Market-Based Society
Surely you recall the fairytale’s narrative logic from childhood. Goldilocks tresspasses in the cottage of a family of bears. First she tries on Papa Bear’s politics, but Papa Bear’s politics are too right. Then she tries Momma Bear’s politics, but Momma Bear’s politics are too left. Finally, Goldilocks tries Baby Bear’s politics, and Baby Bear’s politics are juuuuuuuuust right. …
In Dark Times
Following the 2016 presidential election, people seemed to be saying these words repetitively — “clearly, we’re living in dark times.” indarktimes.com
