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/344/ Don't Do The Work ft. Ben Hickman
🕑 Added 2023-05-30 14:51:55 +0000 UTCOn work stoppages and work-doings.
Ben Hickman, published poet and senior lecturer in English at the University of Kent, joins us to discuss his project on different understandings of work, or rather, The Work.
What is The Work and why is it so pernicious? Ben wrote a piece for Compact regarding how the American poet and radical professor Audre Lorde transformed the way we think about work. We talk through the differences between work and The Work, how it impacted radical activism, and how middle class work became all about self-exploration.
Ben talks through a new book project on work and how it is understood culturally through figures such as Jackson Pollock, among others. Plus, what is happening with industrial relations on UK campuses, and how has radical politics unfolded in the Labour Party over the last few years?
Reading:
- Stop Doing The Work, Ben Hickman, Compact
- “Atlantis Buried Outside”: Muriel Rukeyser, Myth, and the Crises of War, Ben Hickman, Criticism, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 2015)
Comments
DTC
Great conversation but I’m not sure how y’all haven’t read on the relationship between the abstract expressionists and the cia. Pollock was absolutely political. It’s been 16 years since I was taking aesthetics classes but this is well documented stuff. https://medium.com/@MichaelMcBride/how-jackson-pollock-and-the-cia-teamed-up-to-win-the-cold-war-6734c40f5b14
jkjkjkj
I think george is clearly right: for politics to be of use they have to be boring. Turning politics into infotainment as has been done over the past 20-30 years in the US has made the population immeasurably less Informed, more aggressive and has made debate and political reconciliation useless in terms of clarifying issues in detail and substance. People don’t understand politics outside of charicatures of bullet points and it allows media conglomerates to shape public opinion. And as regards the working class, it is effectively impossible to argue that they understand their interests in detail outside of vague generalities they don’t understand. Call it classist or disrespectful or whatever pleases you but the fact remains that much of the working class is genuinely uninformed as to how to make their interests actionable and so long as educated elites have the political canny to roll ideas out and message them properly, working class voters will continue to sign onto whatever sounds good because they can’t actually interrogate the issues in depth. There is much condescending amongst liberal elites towards the perceived interests of working class voters, but working class voters don’t do themselves any favors in terms of their ability to actually put forward a positive program
