Abstract
The Wages of Dreamwork is a new monograph by Stevphen Shukaitis and Joanna Figiel published by Minor Compositions, a small imprint focused on cultural studies, social theory and critical social studies. Both authors have also been part of the ephemera journal editorial collective.
In the preamble, the authors dedicate the book to David Graeber, the critical anthropologist who unexpectedly passed away in 2018. Graeber’s work has been hugely impactful, not only in academic circles but also very substantially among social movements such as Occupy and those involved in the Arab Spring. Many readers of Organization will be familiar with Graeber’s writing given its relevance to critical organisation studies issues including bureaucracy (Graeber, 2015a), work (Graeber, 2015b), value and debt (Graeber, 2011), as well as his wider anthropological critique of how relations of economic domination and political violence are woven into everyday social fabric. Throughout his academic work, Graeber proceeded from an irreverent anarchist standpoint in which the Marxist redemption of work is interrogated and refused: why should we work, if our work serves to reproduce a deeply inequitable and unrewarding system that is propped up by the threat of real violence?
Building on these theoretical foundations, and working in the same participative/activist tradition, Shukaitis and Figiel grasp this nettle, and turn their gaze to what we might do with our time if we were free to do as we please, that is, if we were not reliant on a wage from an employer. In this spirit the authors use the book cover illustration – a young boy involved in whittling some spare wood into a toy boat – to muse on the work that we do without having to be asked. This work follows our desire, and we do it for no reason but to enjoy the process and its outcomes.
As the authors note, such passionate ‘dreamwork’ has been co-opted under neoliberal capitalism into a disciplinary blueprint for all labour, where workers are expected to profess and perform their passionate attachment to their jobs, effecting a self-discipline that both hides managerialist intent and allows for labour intensification. Mainstream management scholarship has long been complicit in developing methods for deploying notions like passion, love and commitment to engineer deeper employee investment in work tasks and to legitimise both the intensification and extensification of work to serve corporate ends.
Beyond this critique of the neoliberal work ethic, the authors also show their autonomist commitment (p. 4) in their conceptualisation of the productive base of labour itself. Rather than locate the value of work merely in skills and effort, the authors point to the ways in which value is specifically socially and collectively created. Value is produced at various points and moments in any given social context, held within collective social relations and resources and artistic labour is a great example of how this happens in diffuse ways. The production of art relies on the building of communities, cultivating spaces and audiences – social labour that animates a shared imagination, disperses aesthetics and supports creative activity. Like other autonomist researchers, Shukaitis and Figiel conceptualise this using the notion of the social factory, where sociality is manufactured through common labour, community building and mutuality.
It is at this point that the authors pitch their central argument: ‘the wages of dreamwork is the death of the social’ (11). The first, perhaps surprising, inspiration here is clear from its reformulation of the biblical verse Romans 6:23: ‘the wages of sin is death’. Highlighting perhaps the symbolic prominence of work in morality, the authors point to a paradox whereby the more we look to our working lives for personal meaning and fulfilment, the more we isolate ourselves from vital community and political alliances. The second obvious allusion is to the 1970s ‘wages for housework’ campaign, which worked to make domestic labour visible and highlight its production of social value. The connection here is clear, as the social reproduction of labour is labour in itself, and its invisibility props up both capitalism and patriarchy. The wages of dreamwork (work in the social factory, as well as passionate/affective labour) is the death of the social (the capitalist appropriation of freely given social communitarian effort). The authors quote artist Joseph Beuys’ saying that as an artist he ‘knows no weekend’. This mantra returns throughout the book to emphasise how creative workers have long been required to develop passionate investments in their activities and personal identification with their outputs. Through this labour, workers simultaneously realise their own self-investment in work, a subjectivation that shores up the connection between work activity and one’s selfhood. This mirrors the self-disciplining practices that have come to be embedded in contemporary forms of workplace management, coupled with management discourses that extol the virtues of identifying deeply with one’s professional vocation (Peticca-Harris et al., 2015).
In their effort to highlight the enmeshing of the social in work, the authors discuss a number of historical social movements that spoke to this nexus. From the 1960s onwards, traditional forms of labour politics and union organising were enjoined by culturally driven initiatives that aimed to reshape organisations to enable greater authenticity in self-expression, and liberation from restrictive workplace cultures. Such artistic critique (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005) manifested itself for example in the ’68 student protests and the Situationist International, as well as the Italian operaismo movement. However, as the authors rightly point out, the resistance became co-opted over time and folded into forms of neoliberal governmentality.
An important question the authors do not fully address here is where we may expect new forms of resistance to come from. This absence is partly rooted in how the empirical case study features in the book, centring a vignette on makers’ communities of the fashionable Brick Lane area of London. This allows the authors to illustrate their argument with the real voices of a group of culture industry workers who formed part of a vanguard providing a creative sheen to an area that has since become a byword for the ‘art-washed’ gentrification of post-industrial urban neighbourhoods. This rich data affectingly communicates the experience of subjectivation through creative work that marks the lives of these workers, and ‘how the desire for meaning and fulfilment in forms of creative artistic and cultural labor ends up functioning as a disciplinary form for the cultural workers of the metropolitan factory’ (p. 221).
Despite the appropriation of their collective social labour through rising property values and an influx of tech companies, no effective organised resistance emerged from the Brick Lane cohort of creatives. Hardt and Negri’s (2000) theory of the multitude – the emergence of an autonomously organised alternative to the status quo – did not materialise in Shoreditch and the book’s theoretical meditations can be seen as a way of thinking through why this might be the case (p. 187). The authors pose the workerist contribution of class composition as a key technique by which researchers and activists can begin navigating out of this impasse. Through organising workers and building collective alternatives, modes of work and community may be constructed that escape the capitalist appropriation of established forms of sociality. Yet to make this case, the authors retreat back to examples from Italian workerism. More data and analysis from the case at hand would have been welcome in this regard. Indeed given the emphasis the authors place on the importance of class composition, it is perhaps a little surprising that they spend relatively scant time on technical composition, the skills base of the creative precariat. For a book about the labour of art and cultural work, we do not hear much about the productive capacity of these workers, their specific skills and how this links them as a ‘creative class’. It would have been valuable to get more ethnographic detail of the day-to-day working activities of the research participants, since the abilities that workers develop in the course of their labour are highly specific to their fields, and a key bridge to the social embeddedness of creative work in the city.
Creative workers develop aesthetic and conceptual abilities that relate to their craft, and these skills also allow them to connect with peers in a networked field of practice, move through shared social and physical spaces and build communities (Banks et al., 2013). This collective platform for cultural production relates directly to technical class composition which features as a central part of the conceptual edifice for this book. To understand how the productive capacities of creative workers relate to the potential for social and political transformation and critique, we need more rigorous, creative and critical research on what makes up this collective social base through which workers’ art and creative outputs become possible, both in the ability to produce them and in the formation of the audience base for their consumption. Here, there is also a need to better theorise the role of subjectivity and desire on the level of the individual creative worker, and how these become enlisted in collective forms of imagination and production/consumption. Additionally, creative fields are heavily reliant on intermediaries, and these intermediaries can play a decisive role in enabling or shutting down the emancipatory alternatives the authors describe (see also Pitts, 2020).
Despite its relative paucity of empirical analysis, this book provides a hugely valuable primer on autonomist and workerist ideas for management and organisation scholars, an in-depth look at the (self) management of creative labour and an erudite argument that the governance of creative labour has functioned as a laboratory for the wider management of work under neoliberalism.
