School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemSeeking Arrangement: Essays on Work( 2019)This thesis is about work and collectivity under post-Fordism. It examines social and artistic forms that loosely organise reproductive labour outside of formal institutions. Polyamorous relationships are conducted on a spectrum from spontaneous to Google-calendared to commune to cult. A secret men’s club is comprised of working-class unionists who ban politics from discussion at their meetings. The nightclub is celebrated as a utopian melting pot, but exacerbates as much as alleviates workaday alienation. I explore these sites across five essays; in the sixth and final essay, I turn to the form of the essay itself, arguing that contemporary hybrid nonfiction derives from and expresses its precarised conditions of production in syntax and structure. If post-Fordism is most readily associated with the collapse of work into leisure, as well as the destruction of workplace- and class-solidarity, the polyamorous relationship, the nightclub, the men’s club, and the essay not only take this collapse for granted, but grow from it and reproduce it. They exist in an ambivalent zone of resistance and complicity that runs parallel to, and separate from, organised solidarity. In doing so, they usefully refract contemporary debates around leisure, automation, reproductive labour, and aesthetic production. The creative component of this thesis is comprised of the six essays outlined above. The critical section contains an introduction, a literature review, and exegetical statement contextualising my use of the essay form and my research on post-Fordism.