Category Work
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Work and life
AS IF IN REPLY to this blog's April Fools Day contribution to working-from-home advice and St Valentine's Day questions about clerical companionship, Michael Koziol of the Sydney Morning Herald has written in favour of offices and workplaces:
I think we tend to undervalue the social experience of seeing our colleagues: the lift encounters, the desk-side chats, the coffee runs. I suppose if we happily discard those things now it will only go to show how little they really meant all along. But we'll miss them, I suspect. They're much better than staring at a screen.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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Working from home
IF THE TRANSITION TO mature industrial society entailed a severe restructuring of working habits—new disciplines, new incentives, and a new human nature upon which these incentives could bite effectively—how far is this related to changes in the inward notation of time?
Asked E.P. Thompson in the extremely famous journal article Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, and his answer (to spoil a half-century old social history argument) was 'quite a bit, and also Methodism'.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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Much Time And Little To Do
WHEN I STARTED THIS blog in 2011 I had recently been made redundant, and was retraining completely to enter a new field. Little did I know then that the stretch of unemployment and underemployment I was about to go through would be a lot longer than I expected. Even less did I consider the mental health implications of being so far from the world of regular routine work. The time has come again, though perversely, for the moment I’m still in a full-time job; social distancing (which is experienced by every jobseeker) has a way of turning into social isolation, and from isolation to exclusion.
Thankfully we have some literary practices left from the old world to guide us into the new. Get a blog.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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Clerical companionship
EDWARD LUTTWAK IN 1994 wrote a completely prescient article, dunking (in contemporary terms) on Francis Fukuyma. (It is pointed to by Ferdinand Mount in the most recent edition, writing about Brexit). It is exactly as startling as Mount says it is to recognise one’s own times in a two-decades old article; it is depressing to realise that job insecurity, the fundamental working condition of everyone in 2020, still has no meaningful-realistic political answer, on the political left or right. The most confronting sentence for me though, in the 26 year old article was the strange, aside, mention of a bit of workplace culture long forgotten:
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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Scythes
I NEVER REST IN recommending Alexander Langlands’ Craeft to people. It’s a book on traditional and pre-automation craft and maintenance, but also about how doing such activity, or not doing it, has a cognitive effect on how we interact with our physical world of objects and environment. Yes, it’s very middle-aged British man, but as one friend to whom I recommended put it, it’s easy to be spiritually a middle-aged British man, prepared to talk at length about tools, and bee keeping, and lime burning, and roof construction, and many other things. Counter to the last post on historical recreationism and its discontents, such people are entirely and convincingly sincere, in a way that I find compelling and almost physically appealing. I am therefore delighted to find (thanks to this thread) that there is a small but burgeoning corner of the Australian rural marketplace which is all about scything and scythes; the manual tool you know about from its association with Death, but which does the same job as a petrol brush cutter, snipper, or push mower, but quietly. Consider the answer—undeniable—from one site’s FAQ, to the question ‘why buy a scythe’:
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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Camera Repair
Brief reflection demonstrates that the vast majority of human labour, from laundry and trash removal to janitorial work and food preparation, is of this type: upkeep…
WE LIVE IN A society that elevates innovation and the creation of new commodities far beyond their maintenance or any thought of their service life. This is true of big objects like mobile phones, which have a specific obsolescence built into their design, and cannot be replaced once their glued-in batteries cease to retain a charge, as it is for big objects like the blocks of apartments made by our construction industry, for which a successful project is one that sells enough dwellings in a boom to cover the borrowed money to pay the builders, and lasts intact just long enough to pass the home warranty period.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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Chicken Roll
THE SPECTACLE IS NOT a sandwich, but a social relation mediated by sandwiches, or so Guy Debord didn’t say. A long week of ridiculous thinkpieces and social media wank, begun by shameless controversialist and charlatan Bernard Salt, just reinforces the prime role of foodstuff-as-ideology.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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UBI et orbi
‘CURSED IS THE GROUND BECAUSE of you,
Says God to Adam, after he and Eve have eaten the fruit,
in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread
until you return to the ground… [Genesis 3:17—19]The story of the casting-out or ‘Fall’, in which humans are given their divine punishment for knowledge, is one of our most familiar creation stories, in which God sets the terms of human existence unilaterally. Like a boss making a workplace agreement with themself, the story of the Fall is the original greenfields enterprise bargaining agreement. It’s a powerful morality tale which has informed our attitudes and assumptions about work for a very, very long time.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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The Para-Academic Handbook
Specialists in all manner of things, from the humanities to the social and biological sciences, the para-academic works alongside the traditional university, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice, usually a mixture of both. Frustrated by the lack of opportunities to research, create learning experiences or make a basic living within the university on our own terms, para-academics don’t seek out alternative careers in the face of an evaporated future, we just continue to do what we’ve always done: write, research, learn, think, and facilitate that process for others.
That sounds pretty familiar to me. Read the Para-Academic Handbook immediately.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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Liam corresponds
I’M PROUDLY A MEMBER of the NTEU, because on and off, I’m a casual academic, amongst other places, at the University of NSW. Generally they’re a pretty good union, but every now and then they drop some piece of communication to their members which sets me off. Boom! Papers go flying around my ‘office’, cups of tea get drunk, drafts get drafted. This morning the following made me breathe deeply and try to imagine calming blue surf while I was on my bus:
Posted · Author Liam Hogan