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Okay I am taking it as read here that over the last, say, thirty years (roughly since the mid 70s), the meaning and practice of 'work' has changed radically throughout the industrialised world. I don't feel the need to defend this idea here, although I will if people disagree.
So anyway, last night I was at my reading group and we were talking about the fringe Marxist concept of 'workers enquiry'. One neat quote from the text (Steve Wright's Storming Heaven, quoting a guy named Alquati) was that in Italy in the 60s, the traditional left was now so often out of touch with working-class reality that 'sometimes it is enough to describe it... at the level of common sense and everyday language to produce a work of political and cultural interest'.
That resonated for everyone there, and not just with respect to class - I think I (only somewhat) hyperbolically said that one good autobiography meant more to me than a thousand queer theory articles. But some argument emerged about whether, today, we do have any descriptions of the current experience of work 'at the level of common sense and everyday language'. I replied that I think we do in a lot of ways, but they're not in areas that get classed as Political, so they're not recognised as descriptions of new experiences of work.
The example I suggested - talking out my arse to an extent, cause I don't know the field that well - was young adult fiction. Given the genre's thematisation of the conflict between desires for stability and independence, it kind of has to talk about the relations teens have to money - and that often comes out in descriptions of their jobs (that can be peripheral to the narrative, but are structurally integral to the story). (Obviously here I am talking about, for want of better term, 'quality' YA fiction. The bad shit is bad in part because it ignores these questions.)
The specific example I gave was Michelle Tea's new book, Rose of No Man's Land. Although it doesn't take up that much of the book, one of the main set pieces that forms the structure and anchor of the book's first half is the narrator getting and losing her first job, cashier in a tacky girls' clothing store. It struck me as an empirically and emotionally compelling description of what it's like to get a first job in a mall chainstore.
So I guess I'm interested in seeing whether a) people think the YA example holds much water and b) whether you think there are any other areas where compelling and politically useful descriptions of contemporary workers' experiences are happening. |
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