Work, play and boredom - Ephemera

ephemera 11(4): 466-481 Work = work " work: In defence of play
articles Sophie-Thérèse Krempl and Timon Beyes
concept of work in order to stress, on the one hand, the freedom-related and, on the
other hand, the forced character of work and to formulate his critique of political
economy on this basis. Work, for Marx, is the deficit-related form of human praxis until
it has overcome its alienated character (Marx, 2005). In principle, this opens up the
option of a non-alienated praxis that just as in philosophy – in the sense of the
Feuerbach theses – is practically applicable and not only just ‘scholastic’ (Marx, 1978:
5); however, only if work, like philosophy, has a revolutionary function. Only this
praxis has socially constitutive power, as the overcoming of the contradiction is its
incessant condition: The state of alienated work must be overcome. Suffice it to say
that, first, if the natural hold of work is its eternal characteristic, then it is questionable
if the danger of alienation can ever be averted; and second, that the transition from
alienated to non-alienated labour has to be achieved through a non-alienated praxis
(Arndt and Lefèvre, 1983: 24) – which, for the time being, reiterates the contradictory
constitution of work.
It seems reasonable, then, to view this conflicting relationship – especially under the
perspective of today’s work relations – in another manner. That does not mean that one
has to deny the Marxist difference between alienated and non-alienated labour. It also
does not mean repudiating the difference between the use-value and exchange-value of
work. Rather, it means that this dichotomy should be understood as inherently
paradoxical. For it is this view that allows us to understand Marx’s insistence on the
contradiction between the use-value and exchange-value of work. The latter comes
about through, on the one hand, the monetary valuation and, on the other hand, the
ability of money to produce an added value without needing a use-value. If meaningcreation
becomes a telos of work, then it does not only produce an exploitable monetary
added value, but also brings forth another added value: meaning. Furthermore, the usevalue
of work can always be used in a manner other than for direct usage or
consumption; therefore it has the possibility to be misused for other purposes as well.
The exchange value of work, that which gives my product an equivalent, but externally
applied value, is – within a strictly materialistic understanding – the only ‘legitimate’
form of corruption of the use-value of work. Capital is the decisive economic factor that
corrupts work as it relativizes the value equivalency relation. But the corruptibility or
the misuse of the use-value of work lies within the ‘essence’ of work itself, as its value
attribution is not fixed but variable. The use-value is at the mercy of both ‘right’ as well
as ‘wrong’ uses from the very start and one can only hope that one does not lose
everything in the ‘market of equivalencies’:
This is not simply a bad thing, even if the use-value is always at risk of losing its soul in the
commodity. The commodity is a born ‘cynic’ because it effaces differences, but although it is
congenitally leveling (…) this original cynicism was already being prepared in use-value (…).
(Derrida, 1994: 162, orig. emphasis)
There is thus an indivisibility of economy and subject constitution in dealing with the
contradiction of work. The contradiction cannot be simply chopped up into its
individual parts and the tension in which the subject is situated cannot simply be
removed. Marx makes work’s double relation and the corresponding alienation into a
criterion of illegitimacy and finds the reason for the necessary overcoming of the
paradox therein. But when we consider how this ambivalence comes about, a field
opens up in which alienation cannot be overcome; instead, it has to be grasped as the
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