Dejours' article (see reference below) addresses the 'psychodynamics of work'. He notes in his opening lines that for many of his clients, work is inseparable from suffering. Oddly enough though, he also characterises work as being 'at the origin of intelligence and ingeniousness'. The chosen challenge for subjectivity sees outcomes in terms of self-fulfillment or mental pathology - but either way, it's a chosen attitude.
Work is always completed 'for someone' - it is completely constructed in social relation. 'It is the power to feel, to think, to invent'. From a psychodynamic perspective, work is encountered when the personality must confront a task that is subject to material and social constraints. Dejours proposes that there is no such thing as purely screwing-toothpaste-lids-onto-toothpaste-tubes kind of work. There is always a gap between the prescriptive and the concrete reality of a situation - work seeks to bridge it. The prescriptive cannot define the total of reality, so 'the real' must constantly be defined as what subjects must add to a task in order to complete it.
Here it becomes interesting - 'the real' therefore is defined in failure - the real manifests itself to the subject in resistance to procedure, or knowledge, the real is defined in a thwarting of control. The real manifests itself in an affectively unpleasant moment of realisation for the subject - frustration, discouragement, powerlessness.
This affective suffering becomes the point of departure - the concentration of subjectivity that it entails prefigures a period of expansion as the subject acts to surmount the resistance of reality. Suffering is at once a subjective impression of the world and the source of an attempt to conquer (conquer!) the world...suffering lies at the origin of the intelligence that sets out in search of the world,in order to challenge, transform, and increase itself....subjectivity itself is transformed, increased and revealed to itself. [Italics and exclamation are mine]
Gives me a new way to think about that poor, naked, emaciated, body nailed bloodily to a cross, really.
Dejours proposes that intellectual work in no way can be reduced to mere cognition - subjectivity is not a looming ghost, but rather is governed by a particular body and a unique corporality. The body is the locus of skill in work - sensitivity to the tasks to be deployed can only be attuned through the body. We create a dialogue with that with which we work - with people, with machines, we create a strange vitalist fantasy, of projection, of availability, of need.
The body that we use is not the biologists body - rather it is the corpspropriation, that which relates to Other, that feels, that re-acts. The erotic body is the one through which we engage with the world. Dissociation from this body equates to mental illness in our culture. While this body is visible to the world, the suffering within it is not. The unseen suffering is thus un-valued, in our culture.
As highlighted above, being intelligent always means being a step outside of the procedure and instruction - codes must be violated, normative organisation must be traversed, in order to achieve. This too, however, is an invisible, and thus un-valued [or perhaps, more correctly for my thinking, not-correctly valued] skill.
Is work a necessary condition for the emergence of subjectivity? In a way that parallels the emergence of a subject in relationship, subjectivity in love? I don't think so - Dejours proposes rather that the development of subjectivity comes about through the relationship between suffering and reality.
Dejours argues that in psychodynamic theory proposes a paradox of double centrality, in the existence in a subject of suffering and drives on one hand, and the reality of the world and the unconscious on another. Freud defines the instinct as 'a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of it's connection with the body'.
To tie this to the notion of work as Dejours has undertaken to analyse it, of poeisis, would require semantic ties to Traumarbeit (dream work) Trauerarbeit (work of mourning), Durcharbeiten (working through), Verdrangungsarbeit (work of repression), Arbeitsanforderung (work requirement), Verdichtungsarbeit (work of condensation) and so on.
This (above) places work and subjectivity in a consubstantial relationship - work in this way would allow that subjectivity be revealed to itself. Work then forms the transcendental condition for the revelation of absolute life. This brings the question of work into the realm of political theory.
Ordinary work, of course, does not present itself as a solipsistic relationship between self and self. Work is a social relationship - characterised by inequality, power and domination, expressed in a hierarchy. Work is the experience of resistance in a social world . To coordinate contradiction and conflict arising from the inevitability of personal style emerging from individual intelligence, the real organisation must be adjusted - out of the prescriptive organisation. Arriving at a collaborative effort implies worker commitment to disentangle deviations from procedures [whatever communally defined procedures might have been originally established, maybe]. Collective activity thus presumes a series of arguments, ideally oriented to efficiency, quality and social objective - a de facto compromise, that is at once both technical and social. Living together is not self-evident, it demands deontic activity.
So why do we self-limit our subjectivity in the name of collective will?
- violence from conflict demands it?
- the limited resources and invisibility in/of work demands that real work becomes visible. Judgment can be established when visibility is maximised.
The recognition of doing makes it possible to work with people we don't particularly seek for company. Cooperation may also function to ward off social solitude. Ultimately, rational compromise between individual subjectivity and collective action is possible in holding a centrality of work.
Back to the drawing board (literally! :) ) for me.
Ref:
Dejours, C. (2007). Subjectivity, Work and Action, Critical Horizons, 7, 45-62.
Online reading:
http://www.eap.philosophy-australia.com/issue_2/EAP2_THE_ENDURING_SIGNIFICANCE_OF_AXEL_HONNETH'S_CRITICAL_CONCEPTION_OF_WORK.pdf
http://www98.griffith.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/10072/1678/1/CLWRworkinglife.pdf
http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/res/article/viewFile/2465/2312
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