Working and Dwelling

"The private individual, who in the office has to deal with realities, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions. This necessity is all the more pressing since he has no intention of grafting onto his business interests a clear perception of his social function. In the arrangement of his private surroundings, he suppresses both of these concerns." -- Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

This split between working and dwelling, our professional life and acquaintances and our personal life and acquaintances, is becoming increasingly blurred. Granted many still speak of the split between work and play. We begin the week with the Monday morning blues bemoaning the end of the weekend and the playful time had by all; on Wednesday we are finally over the hump of the work week; and then thank god it's Friday! Despite these customary references to the split between work and play, professional life at work and private life at home, our growing dependency on communication technologies has enabled us both to bring our professional lives home and maintain our private affairs while at work. With cell phones, email and the internet we can easily, and often do, carry on our professional responsibilities while at home; and similarly while at work we will often check our personal email and facebook accounts, etc. While this may seem to be a positive turn of events by allowing workers to bring the "joyful" elements of their private lives to work or to work while enjoying their private, family life (hence minimizing, through what has been called weisure, the drudgery that results when work and play are kept separate), the continued measurement of the value of work by extensive, quantifiable means has ultimately meant that for most people the option not to work is not an option. To the contrary, techonological advancements have simply increased the opportunities to do more measurable work, and with the opportunity to do so comes the expectation to do so. Our infatuation with the technological means to stay in touch is simply the most recent manifestation of what Benjamin speaks of as the illusion which keeps us from seeing the social functions and relations that we sustain and that sustain us each day. To challenge the split between work and play, between working and dwelling, will entail the option to do work that is irreducible to extensive measuring, or that is not work towards an identifiable end, an end that is then used as the standard to measure the success and quality of the work itself. In the Taoist tradition this would be the work of not-doing (wu-wei); or, as Deleuze stresses the point in his essay on Melville, it would be to follow Bartleby's formula: 'I would prefer not to.'