Not All Productivity Is Toxic
Soundscape by Godefroy Dronsart. We suggest you listen as you read.
So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.
When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.
— from Wisława Szymborska, “No Title Required”
Anyone who’s spent time online since the start of the pandemic is no stranger to the discourse about “productivity.” Recently, an article in The National, an English-language newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, recommended that recent college graduates not “waste [their] time during Covid-19.” The article suggested that “When you get that job interview and the employer asks about how you coped in the pandemic, you should have a story to tell,” and further advised students to “keep busy and stay open to options, even unpaid ones.” Many found this article insensitive in terms of its disregard of the mental health repercussions of the pandemic, and for not accounting for the fact that some people cannot afford to take up unpaid positions. Yet this article is not unique, and encapsulates the general advice that has been circulating online about how to be productive during the pandemic.
Long before the pandemic started, being productive as opposed to lazy was considered a positive trait. In response to this “productivity discourse,” more left-leaning individuals often attribute this discourse to capitalist logics, stating that one doesn’t have to be productive, that it’s okay to be lazy, and that one must prioritize one’s mental health. The pandemic simply exacerbated the pressure to be productive, and, by extension, the response to this productivity discourse is louder than ever.
I find myself caught in a quagmire: I value productivity, but not because of capitalism. I like to complete my schoolwork, write literary criticism, and translate literature — produce something, be productive — not because it brings me any financial benefit. In fact, it doesn’t; I could be spending any extra time I have working a part-time job, or working on my interviewing skills to land a six-figure job.
Does my valuing of productivity make me inherently capitalist, entrenched in the logics of capitalism even when it doesn’t lead to (direct or immediate) economic gain?
In an essay entitled “Estranged Labour,” from The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx discusses how members of the working class become alienated from the products of their own labor.
“... the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. … The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. … The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.”
In essence, what Marx is telling us here is that when a worker produces an object, it is as if he transfers his life from himself into the object. But in that externalization process, as the object takes form as a result of the worker’s labor, the object becomes alien, or external, to the worker even though the worker himself made that object. But, why?
“Thus the more the worker by his labor appropriates the external world, sensuous nature [i.e., raw material], the more he deprives himself of the means of life in two respects: first, in that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be an object belonging to his labor – to be his labor’s means of life; and, second, in that it more and more ceases to be a means of life in the immediate sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker.
In both respects, therefore, the worker becomes a servant of his object, first, in that he receives an object of labor, i.e., in that he receives work, and, secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence.”
Marx here is quite subtle: he is arguing that as one labors, one experiences double alienation. In appropriating the “external world” — that is, using up the raw materials that serve as ingredients for the final object — the first feeling of alienation comes from the anxiety that in consuming these raw materials, there will no longer be enough raw materials to continue laboring. And the second form of alienation comes from the anxiety that in consuming these raw materials, there will no longer be enough raw materials to sustain oneself, since, after all, this object that the laborer is producing is not his own. For example, if a laborer is making a table from wood, he will be scared that there will no longer be wood, which would imply he would lose his job, and also will be scared that there will no longer be wood for him to make his own table, for himself and not as an object to be sold by the bourgeoisie.
The natural followup to all of this would be: is there any labor that is not alienating? And how does this theory hold up when we think of nonmaterial labor, outside the factory? What if one does not appropriate the external world and works in the service industry, for instance?
In Capital, Volume 1, Marx provides a concept that may complete our analysis. In a section entitled “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” Marx highlights the process by which an object becomes alien to the worker. An object is not a commodity, and therefore not alien to the worker who produced it, as long as its use-value is clearly defined and it is put to material use. To take the example of the table once again — which Marx himself uses — the table is not a commodity insofar as the table’s usefulness is apparent. However, as soon as the table is placed on the market, and priced, it is suddenly equated with everything else that has monetary — and abstract — value. It is thus “exchangeable” — both literally and figuratively—with other products on the market. And as a result of this exchangeability, the worker can no longer see the relationship between himself and the product of his labor, for it is no longer unique. In Marx’s words,
“A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.”
***
As bleak as this may sound, there is hope in all of this. If our work as thinkers, creators, and artists is not commodified, then I believe that our desire for productivity is something innate in human nature. We are inclined to use the tools at our disposal — words, images, pencils, cameras—to create something different, new, alien — yet unalienating. As Nietzsche once put it, the “drive to form metaphors” is “fundamental in man.” Of poets and poetry, Nietzsche further writes,
“The pretense and masquerade as if something completely new were now coming along is the main effect of the poetic artifices (meter, etc., and the accompanying religious excitement). […] They [poets] want uncertainty, because then the magician, intimation, and the great sentiments become possible again.”
Reading Nietzsche with Marx, this poetic impulse for uncertainty — for masquerading something known “as if something completely new” — is what defines the artist. The artist creates art that is alien (not in Marx’s sense, of course), and in doing so, is once again in touch with herself such that she is not alienated (in the Marxist sense). Art, then, is the artist’s creation of something unexpected.
Nonetheless, I do realize that we, after all, live within a capitalist system that we cannot escape. For how will we survive without money, without commodifying our labor — even if it is so dear to our hearts? If an artist dedicates her life to art, then the only way she can sustain herself in a capitalist system is through selling —commodifying — that art. But in giving an artwork a price, a number, the artist becomes alienated from her labor such that the artwork is just like the table discussed above — an object exchangeable for another one. Then, is there a solution? Does it even make sense for us to be artists, if, at the end of the day, our artworks become commodities? And I wonder: does awareness of this commodification make things seem better, or worse? Should we just live in a relatively oblivious state, making art, selling it, surviving?
Godefroy Dronsart’s Limp is based on the interplay of two levels: the Microsoft Excel manual, digitally cut-up and read by a text-to-speech software, and a droning piece improvised on one analog oscillator. As the manual text sweats out its agenda of discrete cells and digital gridding, the continuous analog signal slowly morphs from one state to another, unaware of any stepping, numerical constraints or professional readability.
Artwork by Simone Hadebe