Positively Unemployed

Like many Canadian youths aged 18-30, most of us here at The Daily Wenzel spent much of the 1990s underemployed at barely above minimum wage. Those days seem almost a lifetime removed from the current wage experience where high school and college students are being tempted to drop-out or delay graduation with the promise of high wages and plentiful overtime. One of the side-effects of this underemployment was a severe disconnect between working and identity; a common pop cultural theme in movies such as Clerks, or songs such as Gas Huffer's "You Are Not Your Job". It was also one of the touchstone's to Wilco's breakthrough Being There. Many of us would sit through the six and half minutes of ambient guitar feedback layed over a roots structure, just to hear Jeff Tweedy whisper the line "positively unemployed" because that's how we viewed ourselves. Overeducated, underskilled, and underemployed, developing hobbies and interests that filled up the vast amount of time we weren't in school or working. Many of these hobbies had creative manifestations that offered their own credible answer to that most boring of cocktail parties, "What do you do?". Did we park cars for a living or were we unpublished writers, artists, and musicans, bolstered by our formal membership in a conceptual arts organization?

We were paid to park cars, but we lived for other things.

Thus, Ivan Illitch's The Right to Useful Unemployment attracted us even before we knew his history as a radical educational thinker, questioning the roles of schools in society (see his most famous work, De-Schooling Society). Illitch's sense of "useful unemployment" mirrors our own, in that he calls for a more convivial way of life, in which wealth, income, and technological advancements, do not prejudice the enjoyment of basic living. His example here is the car. The prevalence of automobiles means that it is increasingly difficult to walk to all the destinations one needs to accomplish daily tasks. Anyone living as a victim of urban sprawl in Calgary will understand this.

However, this has more to do with notions of relative poverty, and Illitch links this somewhat weakly to the idea of "unemployment". In the second half, where he develops his idea of useful unemployment more fully, we find that it is more the professional classes that he takes argument with. Echoing the work of Michel Foucault and, to a lesser extent, Guy Debord, Illitch rails against the way the establishment of professions, doctors, teachers, even certified mechanics, allows for the creation of a priveleged body of experts free to set the agenda within their relative domains. They alone (or in conjunction with government and industry) decide on proper proceedures, adequate structures and precautions, necessary curricula, etc. In Illitch's mind forming a College of university-trained and government licensed teachers or doctors, renders the informally trained, or folk-trained, versions not only illegal, but unemployed.

Originally published in 1973, we are left wondering the extent to which the current information revolution, with info-on-demand, as well as the growing post-modern accomdation with Foucault's power/knowledge argument, has changed some of the basic structure's of Illitch's argument.

Politics as Spectacle

While we are pleased to hear that the federal government announced today that it would support the phasing out of incandescent light bulbs as part of its strategies to cut greenhouse emissions, we were more disappointed by the coverage that the new climate change proposal received. Granted, the proposal officially comes out tomorrow, but nevertheless, it reminds us of the importance of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (see right-hand side link).

One of the key aspects to Debord's work was that in a society dominated by mass culture, that is a culture where goods are created and mass-prodeced solely for their commercial, as opposed to folk or cultural, value people live vicariously through their consumption. As the economy grows to dominate all aspects of everyday life, more daily events are turned into spectacles to be consumed passively by an audience. Increasingly, critics have argued that mass media is displaying more and more of these tendencies, specifically when it comes to politics. We hear less of the issues involved, and more on how the issues help politicians jockey for power. Thus, today the news focuses not on the government's new cliamte change policy, but on the circumstances that led to its being leaked prematurely.

Now we admit that The Daily Wenzel engages in its own fair share of speculative opinions, but we do try to provide links to the actual players or documents involved so that our readers can make up their own minds. However, that ought not to diminish the strength of our arguments. So, witness the coverage provided by CanWest/Global with that of the CBC, which does a slightly better job an explaining the proposal, but concentrates more on positioning the reaction of various interest groups.

Jean Baudrilliard is alive and well and living in Paris

We have just received word that influential post-modernist thinker Jean Baudrilliard has past away. His thoughts of media and the role of symbols in daily life will continue to influence our thinking nevertheless. One of Baudrilliard's key themes was the poverty of daily experience, matching up quite well with that of Guy Debord and the Situationists. An event, no matter how large or catastrophic, cannot be real unless it is directly experienced somehow. The increasing reliance on mediated images meant that more and more people experienced life second hand, and what passed for "real life" became more and more "unreal".

In keeping with his theories then, for us at The Daily Wenzel, Jean Baudrilliard is alive and well and living in Paris.

Marxism, Post-Marxists, and a slow realization that after everything you've just ended up back at the starting point . . .

Quite a while ago, most of us at The Daily Wenzel would have considered ourselves non-Marxists. While we sympathized with the plight of working classes and riled against the rich and the status quo, our Maxists friends seemed altogether too stuffy and intent on bringing about a paradigm that was outdated and historically flawed. If you keep insisting on asking the same questions, we thought, you were always going to arrive at the same answers. How do you come up with new answers? we wondered. Obviously, asking new questions was they key, but how do we know if the questions are really new and not just different by degree instead of kind? A change in context, we argued, would yield a new perspective with new questions, but what could create a new context we then asked?

Well, we paused and thought. Quite a few mid-morning cappucinnos were consumed, and eventually we felt that a real change in context could only come about by a change in the daily living conditions of people. People constructed context based on how they lived their lives, and so if they somehow changed the way they lived, they could change the questions they thought to ask. What enabled people to change their daily lives, mainly technology, but what fuelled technological change? The economy.

In that moment the image of our laughing Marxist friends loomed large overhead.

That was a few years ago and the technological development of society has continued to increase rapidily. People now commonly speak of living in an Information Age and we find ourselves coming back to our thought on what causes a change in daily life. Our original answer of the economy does not seem so powerful now, as we are coming to the realization that context is dependent on meaning, and the question we should have been asking is what gives daily life meaning? The answer to that varies by time and place. In the feudal age that Marx describes, it was religion. The industrial revolution enabled the economy to envelop all of society. In this so-called Information Age, it is not so much the information that is important, but the manipulation of it. What gives our lives meaning is the lives and meaning we see reflected back to us in the media.

Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle seems more relevant now than ever before.