[iDC] Re; The Ethics of Leisure
Brian Holmes
brian.holmes at wanadoo.fr
Wed Jan 10 04:55:09 EST 2007
Jean Burgess wrote:
> inspired by the recent holidays, what about the right to 'useless
> unemployment' - forms of leisure that require an investment in time but
> leave no commodities behind - time spent reading books, say?
There are long, discreet, wonderful and mostly unsung traditions of
useless unemployment, penniless daydreaming, sabotage for the hell of it
and exodus which are perhaps the one thing that productivist bourgeois
and technocratic society - the society that produced the whole rights
discourse - cannot swallow, Bartelby preferred not to, Rimbaud walked
all the way to the river and didn't even drink, and Marx's nephew Paul
Lafargue knew exactly what he was aiming for when he wrote "The Right to
Laziness," definitely among the things in heaven and earth that are not
in Horatio Alger's philosophy!
Closer to our time and even beyond the midnight toiling of the "Zero
Work" collective, there are the various strands of the French jobless
movement whom I used to see demonstrating amongst the huge union throngs
in 1995 under the ironic anti-work banner WE DEMAND A SHIT JOB FOR
PEANUTS. Some of them formed a collective entitled Monday in the Sun and
during the height of the jobless protests in 1997 they used to go around
in groups of thirty or forty to restaurants in Paris and invite
themselves to a delicious meal, sometimes in the cafeterias of leftist
universities it would have looked too bad to make a fuss, and sometimes
in fancy places where inevitably the whole free lunch or dinner had the
relish of a possible meeting with the police! But at that level everyone
knows that jail, too, is for free. I found some spare time to translate
a couple of their texts recounting the paradoxes of not wanting to work
in a society where they don't even let you do it anyway, but demand that
you beg for the chance, for a wonderful book called WE ARE EVERYWHERE,
but unfortunately as I look over to my shelf I find that book which was
once such a great dream is now wearing the branded face of a commodity
which I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to buy, so I am gonna fish
around in the dead memories of trashed hard drives and see if I can't
find that stuff and send it to yall,
best, Brian
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