The End of Work

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What is the status of "work" today? This course takes up the history and current crisis of the idea of work by focusing on its philosophy and its aesthetic representation. We are at the cusp of a civilizational shift that has work at its center: the implacable rise of automation and artificial intelligence suggests that by the next decade there will be many, many more people than there will be jobs. And yet why should we think of this as a crisis at all? Since work's emergence as a modern idea, dreams of human emancipation have revolved around the liberation from the toil that it implies. John Maynard Keynes, the foundational bard of post-Depression capitalism, saw in the free market the opportunity to reduce "work" to a few hours per week; a century later the World Health Organization has identified "overwork" as a public health crisis, with its most consequential symptom—"death by overwork"—common enough to be reducible to a concept, what in Japan is called karoshi. And a major world language reminds us that negócio, the modern frame for all work, is precisely a negation: of ócio, idleness, leisure, pleasure. Nation-states themselves take on as a major function of their administrative existence the regulation of who can work within their borders, and entire regions of the world—such as Latin America, which will be of special interest in this course—are thought about in the popular imagination as warehouses of work, the mano de obra of the global economy. In posing the question "what is work?", this course will move to some basic concepualizations of its form (Marx, Freyre, Keynes, Lévi-Strauss, Arendt, Sennet, Ehrenreich, Graeber, etc) to a set of topics where work is at stake, for example: work and inequality; forced work (e.g. slavery); work and (im)migration; work and race; unremunerated work (‘house work'); sex work; violence work; work as commodity; work and identity; global divisions of labor; the end of work. As a way of getting into these topics, we will draw on their problematization in contemporary film, including works by, for example, Mendonça, Herzog, Reygadas, Rivero, González Iñárritu, Martel, Cuarón, Joon-ho, Loach, Reichardt, Zhao. Language of instruction is English. Comparative work is encouraged.