“Fuck Work”

I don’t have time to write as much as I’d like because, ironically, I am off to Northern California for my brother’s wedding.

Like Alex, I am a Kipnis fan. I am“dead inside” about anything nearing the romantic lovey-dovey (just the sort of sister you’d like at your wedding), and at the same time hopellesly utopic and idealistic. Often, my criticism verges on the solipsistic and “uncritical” because I don’t get as much distance from the theoretical approaches (or people) that have influenced and touched me.

So I appreciate Kipnis’s lack of “intellectual rigour” and her willingness to demonstrate the problems with thinking exclusively along the lines of rigour and scholarly convention.

Kipnis writes:

“The best polemic against love would be to mimic the prose the erratic and overheated behavior of its hapless practitioners: the rushes and excesses, the inconsistent behavior and incohate longings, the moment-by-moment vascillations between self-doubt (what am I doing?) And utter uncertainty ( “You’re the one”), all in a quest of something transformative and unknowing…. We polemiscists too are propelled to (intellectual) promiscuity, rashness and blind risks and becoming the neighborhood pariah (or joke) just for thinking there could be reasons to expiriment without re-imagining things” (50).

In my mind, the critique that Kipnis is making (despite my objections to how she reaches some of her conclusions, which I’ll get to in a moment) works as a polemic, not just to appeal to a mainstream audience, but to reflect the kind of anxiety, anger, and alienation (as well as passion, devotion, and lovey-doveyness) that is produced for some people around romantic love, coupledom, and marriage. Kipnis makes the point well that knowledge formation happens in excessive, emotional, “unintellectual” ways of thinking and being in the world. Without a doubt, my first queer critique emerged not as a carefully thought out and planned intellectual argument, but probably as a polemical rant that included a few tears. To harp on a question we seem to always return to around issues of form: “Might we entertain the possibility that posing philosophical questions isn’t restricted to university campuses and learned tomes, that maybe its something everyone does in the course of everyday life– if not always in an entirely known fashion?… Acting out is what happens is what happens when knowledge or consciousness about something is foreclosed” (28)

And so Kipnis “acts-out” for us, and I kind of appreciate it, especially since I have attend my brother’s wedding this weekend, where bitter silence will be all the acting-out I do.

Where Kipnis misses her mark for me is around the question of couple economies, working, and what she calls “labor-intensive intimacy.” While I agree that “couple-economies too are governed – like our economic system itself– by scarcity, threat, and internalized prohibitions, held in place by those inecessant assurances that there are ‘no viable alternatives’,” I think that even as prohibitions are produced, so are desires and imaginative possibilities.

If we think beyond labor as necessarily goal oriented, wage-earning, and reproductive, what kinds of (alternative, criminal, queer, intellectual, etc. ) labors can we imagine as moving us toward some alternative? Since Kipnis’s understanding of labor rests on the assumption of normative time, can we imagine a queer labor that might exist in relationship to queer time? Kipnis is particularly interested in the greater potentiality of play, but isn’t there some work in play or play at work? Kipnis herself seem to suggest as much, even as she writes: “fuck work.” Or maybe I’m just a workaholic, but I don’t think so.

This is a point that Halberstam develops in A Queer Time and Place in relationship to queer subcultures: “…all kinds of people, especially in postmodernity, will and do opt to live outside of reproductive and familial time as well as on the edges of logics of labor and production. By doing so, they also often live outside the logic of capital accumulation: here we could consider ravers, club kids, HIV-positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed” (10).

Despite some issues with this passage, but I always come back to it is because it seems to be pushing us to think about the work “queer” does and the conditions that make that work possible, and that’s the question I’m kind of posing here: How does queer work in a way that critiques normative paradigms of labor that are invested in couple-economies, reproduction, wage-earning, and goal-reaching?

For instance, I’ve been interested in criminality, care-taking, interpretation, and fantasy as sites of “productivity” without necessarily thinking about a product.

“We’re scavengers and improvisers, constructing odd assemblages out of detritus and leftovers: a few scraps of time and some dormant emotions are stuck together to create something unforseen, to have new experiences. ” (117).

I don’t know… sounds like work to me. And maybe we can thinking about how such work, if not a way entirely out of the marriage-tomb, the 9-5, the reproductive and goal-oriented logics that seem to structure our lives, at least provides a way of acknowledging other intimacies and investments that often take a good deal of work and creativity to maintain in the face of the ideological pressures to “commit,” “settle down,” “find the one,” etc.

Ok, I’m out. Have a nice class!

Jen