Latest Posts (20 found)
A Working Library 1 weeks ago

Designed to be specialists

All industries and disciplines, over time, direct people into greater and greater specialization. Those who have been working on the web since the beginning have been able to see this trend first hand, as the practices and systems grew ever more complicated and it became impossible for one person to hold it all in their head. We sometimes talk of this level of increasing complexity and specialization as inevitable or natural, when it’s neither. Moreover, like many things involving work, specialization benefits some people and immiserates others. [There is an] extreme human and cultural misery to which not only the industry of advanced capitalism but above all its institutions, its education and its culture, have reduced the technical worker. This education, in its efforts to adapt the worker to his task in the shortest possible time, has given him the capacity for a minimum of independent activity. Out of fear of creating men [ sic ] who by virtue of the too “rich” development of their abilities would refuse to submit to the discipline of a too narrow task and to the industrial hierarchy, the effort has been made to stunt them from the beginning: they were designed to be competent but limited, active but docile, intelligent but ignorant outside of anything but their function, incapable of having a horizon beyond that of their task. In short, they were designed to be specialists. Impossible not to think here of the rise of labor unions in the tech industry and the subsequent rapid (and surely coincidental) deployment of so-called AI which—unlike nearly every prior technological development in software—arrived with mandates for its use and threats of punishment for the noncompliant. Elsewhere, Gorz talks of the trend of workers being reduced to “supervisors” of automated systems that are doing the work for them. But simply watching work happen, without any of the creative, autonomous activity that would occur if they were doing the work themselves, gives rise to a degree of boredom and stupefaction that can be physically painful and spiritually debilitating. Anyone who has experienced the pleasure of creative work is likely to greatly resist that reduction; better to create workers who have never known such things. There’s some use in distinguishing here between the worker who, having learned the skills of writing software over many years, now turns to so-called AI to assist her in that task; and the worker who will follow her some years hence and may never learn those skills, but will know only the work of supervision. The former, elder worker may find some interest or curiosity in applying her knowledge to this new technology, especially as the modes and methods for doing so are still being developed. But what of the worker who begins their work a decade from now, who has been specialized to do nothing more than ask for something? What will she know beyond that menial, dispiriting little task? What kind of people are we designing now? View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 1 weeks ago

The Waves

Six children—three girls and three boys—play in a garden by the sea. We follow them as they grow up, go to school, venture away from home, grieve the death of a friend, marry (or not), have children (or not). We do not see or hear their goings on but rather their inner monologues, the thoughts they could never have spoken but feel and know. More prose poem than novel, the writing posits that our inner lives are as rich and detailed as the world around us, perhaps more so. And that there is a continuity threaded through the differences and separations between us, a simultaneous distinctness and blurring of selves, both wave and particle, each headed for the shore. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 2 weeks ago

Pseudo-culture

Our present-day realm of state terror operates through abductions, murders, and content farms. ICE workers raise their cameras as often as they raise their guns, decked out in military gear like a kid trying on mom’s heels, camo stark against the snow, while their bosses confuse retweets for votes, likes for being liked. Don Moynihan dubs this a “ clicktatorship ,” a cursed word if there ever was one, no less for being accurate. André Gorz, writing more than half a century earlier, terms this “pseudo-culture,” a counterfeit culture that does not arise out of ways of living but seeks to impose itself upon it. Mass pseudo-culture, while producing passive and stupefying entertainments, amusements, and pastimes, does not and cannot satisfy the needs arising out of dispersion, solitude, and boredom. This pseudo-culture is less a consequence than a cause of the passivity and the impotence of the individual in a mass society. It is a device invented by monopoly capital to facilitate dictatorship over a mystified, docile, debased humanity, whose impulse of real violence must be redirected into imaginary channels. That is, the tractable audience does not give rise to the clictatorshop so much as the reverse; The Apprentice precedes the presidency. The programming creates a subject whose anger at billionaires who dominate and oppress is redirected towards immigrants who do neither. Fantastical stories are projected onto real bodies as they are dragged out of their homes. The placated, brainrotted viewer is expected to see only the projection, to imagine themselves into the role of kevlar-swaddled goon, even as they flop onto the couch in cheap sweats, furiously tapping buttons, the only muscles getting exercised the ones in their thumbs. Mass culture, a byproduct of commercial propaganda, has as implicit content a mass ethic: playing on, maintaining, and flattering ignorance, it encourages the ignorant to resent those who “know,” persuades them that the latter despises them, and encourages or provokes their contempt. This abject demagogy, one of whose elements—contempt for “intellectuals,” (a term which has become an insult not only in the US) and for culture—can be found in all fascist movements, professes no respect for exceptional individuals except insofar as their superiority can be accounted for by what they are, not by what they do : athletes, beauty queens, princely personages. This is because the superiority of being, physical or hereditary, can be taken as a product of the nature—of the soil, the race, the people, the nation—from which all individuals derive, and can thus reflect to them a natural bond of community with the hero, their own vicarious aristocracy, their original identity, reproclaimed in chauvinism. Into this model is planted the vacuous chatbot, which both further denigrates knowing (why bother knowing anything when it can know things for you) and pumps out nonsense on the regular and at such a scale that both knowledge and the skill of knowing are drowned out. What’s left are the signals of superiority, cast in both skin and hip, recast with fillers and leg-lengthening surgeries, because nature can’t be trusted either (she’s a woman, after all). All in service to chauvinism, a word whose original meaning was an absurd devotion to a fallen leader. The observers who bravely record a different perspective, not only a different camera angle, but a different intention and context, show us that there are other ways of seeing, other ways of being. They dash through the fourth wall, make plain that we are not merely audience but actor, as much able to take up space on stage as the masked extras parading before them. It’s not their cameras that do this work, although those are useful, but their minds, their spirits, their fierce hearts. Their belief that they can see and know what is before them, that they don’t need to be told what is happening but—when they lift their gaze away from their screens—can trust their own eyes. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 2 weeks ago

A Strategy for Labor

“A system that makes people work like zombies to produce useless, destructive, or self-destructive things has outlived its usefulness.” How to rouse people to defeat that system (i.e. capitalism) and build something better in its place, is the question André Gorz applies himself to here. Among his proposals is that of “non-reformist reform,” not reformism as a kind of gradualism or incrementalism—in which changes to the system are absorbed and reframed while the system carries on—but one that looks to that longed-for future and foreshadows its existence in the present. The strategy is echoed in the contemporary prison abolition movement, which refuses to be distracted by placating reforms that maintain an unequal balance of power. That his book is still relevant is our misfortune and our counsel all the same. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Patient urgency

“Again and again,” writes Hannah Proctor, I kept coming to the same conclusion, which provides no consolation at all: psychological experiences require patience while so much in the world demands urgency. Proctor calls this quality “patient urgency,” and returns to it throughout her work on burnout—a work that retrieves burnout from the skincare industrial complex and brings it back to a dialogue about how our efforts to change the world are so often, and so cruelly, defeated. She is admirably unwilling to define the phrase in tactical terms, calling it only, a sense of urgency for social transformation that can tolerate difficulties, differences, delay, objective gaps, and interpersonal strains. Importantly, this does not mean simply waiting about for social transformation—that old refrain that progress will happen in time, as if time was an ally working on our behalf. The urgency is in the present moment to act, even as we know those actions will need time to bear fruit, even when it’s unclear how or if they may do so. As I’ve sat with the idea, I’ve thought more and more of planting a tree: you need to plant it at the right time and in the right place, make sure it has enough water and light and compost, protect it from pests and people, but you must wait years for the first peach. Nothing will hurry it along. And really, you ought to plant a whole grove, or scatter seeds about wherever you can, without ever knowing which ones will be trampled or lost to drought or wind, and which ones will, against the odds, grow tall and strong and true. To have patient urgency is, I think, to know that you must plant those seeds, that you must prepare the soil , that these things cannot wait. That the future we hope for waits upon us, today. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 1 months ago

The Cancer Journals

Between 1978 and 1980, Audre Lorde wrote about her experience with breast cancer and mastectomy, connecting her trials and treatment to her own work and to the collective effort of liberation for all women. She bears a great deal of anger towards a medical system that prioritizes cosmetics and prosthetics at the cost of women’s ability to face their own mortality and vulnerability, to live considered lives. She locates a kind of regressive nostalgia in that effort, in turning women ever back to what they cannot return to, rather than supporting the difficult but necessary journey ahead. Lorde refused to turn back, and in doing so, charted a path for all of us to follow. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Loss of an ideal

The word “burnout” has taken on so many meanings, become a kind of casual and generic refrain that seems to apply to everyone all the time, a condition of malaise and overwork that afflicts whole generations. But when first conceived the term had a more specific connotation. Burnout in Freudenberger’s articles from this period is not just defined in terms of physical tiredness as a result of doing too many things; rather, it emerges from emotional investment in a cause and from the disappointments that arise when flaws in a political project become apparent. Freudenberger’s concept not only describes physical exhaustion but also acknowledges the need to deal with anger caused by grief brought about by the “loss of an ideal.” Burnout in the context of social justice projects thus often involves a process of mourning, according to Freudenberger. Returning to his earlier writings on burnout makes it clear that when understood as a malaise arising from politically committed activities, burnout cannot be equated with tiredness or stress. In other words, burnout was defined more in the context of what Hannah Proctor terms the emotional experience of political defeat. Exhaustion was a component of that experience, marked also by the grief, anger, resentment, and despair that arises when an effort to create meaningful change is frustrated. Herbert J. Freudenberger, one of the early theorists of burnout, drew from his own observations working with patients at the St. Mark’s Free Clinic in New York City in the 70s and 80s. But as he and others worked with the term, it transformed into something else: While in 1974 Freudenberger claimed that those most at risk of burning out were “the dedicated and the committed,” by 1989 he linked burnout to “the externally imposed societal values of achievement, acquisition of goods, power, monetary compensation and competition.” Burnout shifted its meaning: from a symptom experienced by people struggling to change society to one experienced by people trying too hard to succeed within it. This shift also shows up in Byung-Chul Han’s writing about burnout , in which the source of burnout is an “achievement society” that drives people towards a reflexive and all-consuming self-exploitation. But notice how that shift works: where before the notion of burnout was located within a communal and political project, now it becomes something we’re doing to ourselves, absent the still unchanged political and material conditions which gave rise to the original term. There’s a kind of commodification of burnout here, transferring the subject of burnout (and so of sympathy and potential support) from activists to executives, and the source from intolerable inequities to personal psychologies. Which is not to say that burned-out executives don’t exist, but that the use of the same word for two entirely different circumstances serves to undermine the political critique inherent in the word. The move is akin to the one made when imposter phenomena became imposter syndrome : where the former concerns an experience in the world (“phenomenon” meaning a thing which can be seen or observed), the latter is an invisible pathology, something that only occurs within someone’s psyche and is, to a large extent, their own problem to solve. The disparities of the system become internalized, the therapeutics personalized, the victims pathologized. And the system keeps doing what the system does. Bench Ansfield writes that Freudenberger borrowed the word burnout from his patients, who used it to describe someone suffering the long term effects of chronic drug use. But Freudenberger turned the word around, associating it not with drug use but with the burned out buildings that then peppered the Lower East Side, a neighborhood terrorized by landlords setting fire to their own buildings, eager for an insurance payout and happy to let their Black and brown tenants pay the price. “But it’s actually quite telling that Freudenberger saw himself and his burned-out coworkers as akin to burned-out buildings,” Ansfield writes. “Though he didn’t acknowledge it in his own exploration of the term, those torched buildings had generated value by being destroyed.” View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Burnout

Hannah Proctor visits the concept of burnout not only as the sense of exhaustion and apathy that we commonly associate with it, but as the experience of political defeat—the disappointment, despair, and grief that emerges when one becomes aware that the political project they have committed themselves to may not succeed. This version of burnout can’t be entirely resolved by rest or self-care that limits itself to the personal, but requires attention and consideration of public and communal practices, movements, and militancies. That is, recovery from political defeat is itself a political process. She argues for anti-adaptive healing—not healing that adapts the wounded to a broken world, but healing that transforms both the injured and the injurer, that looks to the possibility of a different world amidst the ruins of the present one. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Sisters of the Yam

bell hooks explores notions of self-care among communities of Black women, locating it alongside the work of grief, testimony, and reconciliation. Where so much of the self-care discourse is oriented around personal solutions to personal problems, hooks looks instead to practices of collective care and truth-telling that work to dismantle systems of oppression and domination. This is a communal, political, and radical approach to self-care, a corrective to the consumerized discourse of self-care that brings little relief and leaves the world unchanged. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Tyrannies and servilities

In an effort to understand the then-present state of women in the workplace, Virginia Woolf goes looking to the newspapers, where she finds a number of letters and articles declaiming that women have too much liberty, that they are taking jobs that men could do, and that they are neglecting their domestic duties in the process. She finds an immediate parallel to those complaints in other events of the day: There, in those quotations, is the egg of the very same work that we know under other names in other countries. There we have in embryo the creature, Dictator as we call him when he is Italian or German, who believes that he has the right whether given by God, Nature, sex or race is immaterial, to dictate to other human beings how they shall live; what they shall do. Let us quote again: “Homes are the real places of the women who are now compelling men to be idle. It is time the Government insisted upon giving work to more men, thus enabling them to marry the women they cannot now approach.” Place it beside another quotation: “There are two worlds in the life of the nation, the world of men and the world of women. Nature has done well to entrust the man with the care of his family and the nation. The woman’s world is her family, her husband, her children, and her home.” One is written in English, the other German. But where is the difference? Are they not both saying the same thing? Are they not both the voices of Dictators, whether they speak English or German, and are we not all agreed that the dictator when we meet him abroad is a very dangerous as well as a very ugly animal? And he is here among us, raising his ugly head, spitting his poison, small still, curled up like a caterpillar on a leaf, but in the heart of England. Is it not from this egg, to quote Mr Wells again, that “the practical obliteration of [our] freedom by Fascists or Nazis” will spring? The first quotation is from the Daily Telegraph ; the second is Hitler. (I would draw comparisons to the present moment, but they seem to draw themselves.) Woolf later concludes: It suggests that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other. That is, the tyranny of government is the tyranny of the workplace is the tyranny of the home. Each begets and creates the other. But perhaps that also suggests the reverse: pull the thread on one, and watch as they all come undone. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Annals of the Western Shore

In these three short novels, Le Guin takes us to the Western Shore, where people of magic and people of war and people of books all try to make their lives together. In Gifts , a young man comes to terms with his family’s heritage, the terrible power of unmaking. In Voices , a girl finds shelter in a library that harbors a secret presence. And in Power , a child raised as a slave must walk the perilous path to freedom, as the visions he doesn’t understand show him the way. In each novel, the people make the halting, deadly, and difficult journey of liberty, never sure if they will make it, carried along by the greatest power and gift any of them will ever know—the story. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 2 months ago

What books are for

In despair at a critical review, Virginia Woolf turned to her husband and asked, Well, then, what should she do about such abuse? Pay no attention, get on with her work. And if she couldn’t work, what then? If such attacks upset her so that she couldn’t write—what then, Mongoose, what then? Then she should read until she could write again; that’s what books were for. (“Mongoose” was the pet name Virginia used for Leonard; he called her “Mandrill.” Mitz is fiction, but it draws from the Woolf’s diaries and other contemporary sources and is, for my purposes, true enough. All prose is fiction , as Le Guin teaches us.) Virginia, of course, knew well the ways that reading could summon us to our own wills. Here a similar note is echoed in a passage in A Room of One’s Own : Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! This is one of the great joys of reading, and of reading novels in particular: that something in the novel resonates so deeply that you feel it vibrate down to your marrow, feel that spark of truth race across your veins. And that spark is, very often, a light by which we can write, the energy we need to put our own pen to paper, to evoke the fire that makes those premonitions visible, however darkly and briefly and tenuously. And yet: sometimes the words do not come. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin writes: As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep. Which is another way of saying, when you can’t write, read. When you can’t read, sleep. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 2 months ago

Searoad

This collection of interlocking stories tells of the people who live in a small town on the Oregon coast. They are young and old, hale and sick, some fleeing horrors and some looking for peace. Some have lived there all their lives, others are just passing through; still others leave and feel compelled to return. Searoad is in many ways a response to Virginia Woolf : its women wonder about rooms of their own, and about war; its men wonder about the women. All the while, the ocean pounds against the coast, wave after wave after wave, scooping up sand and leaving messages in its wake for anyone attentive enough to hear. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 2 months ago

Live at enmity with unreality

“What is meant by ‘reality’?” asks Virginia Woolf: It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us. So at least I infer from reading Lear or Emma or A la recherche du temps perdu. For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life. Those are the enviable people who live at enmity with unreality; and those are the pitiable people who are knocked on the head by the thing done without knowing or caring. So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not. Unreality here is not the imaginary or the fantastical—for these are what emerge from a living and real mind—but the manufactured and manipulative mirages that draw us away from our creative powers, the noisy illusions made to drown out our own perceptions and visions, that make it impossible to hear ourselves think. Reality, then, is that which heightens our awareness, attunes our consciousness to the living world so that we may resonate with it, so that we may experience the world as bare of its covering and in all its great intensity and vividness. To make unreality an enemy is to welcome reality as compatriot and comrade, as fellow in arms against a vacuousness that threatens to consume us as we—unwitting collaborators—choose to consume it. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 2 months ago

Mitz

In the summer of 1934, Leonard and Virginia Woolf adopted a marmoset named Mitz. The tiny, sickly monkey had been rescued from a junk store by a wealthy friend who was quite relieved when Leonard volunteered to care for it. Leonard nursed it back to health, and for the next several years, the marmoset went wherever he did—sitting upon his shoulder, or tucked into his jacket pocket. Sigrid Nunez’s story of Mitz is also the story of this famous literary couple, on the eve of the second World War, years bright with their work and with the delight of their small companion, yet darkened by that approaching shadow. To see their lives through the marmoset is to draw the line between colonial extraction and fascist expansion—twin horrors that create and feed upon each other, both seeming distant right up until the moment when they knock down your door. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 3 months ago

Where there is a wall

In Three Guineas , an essay that expands on her writing in A Room of One’s Own , Virginia Woolf responds to a letter asking her to lend her support to the effort to prevent war. She is writing in 1937, a moment when war is less an abstract notion than an insistent neighbor, knocking loudly on the door. She considers, in light of other requests made to her, whether or not education is an antidote to war-making. But in consulting history on the matter, she is forced to conclude the opposite: Need we collect more facts from history and biography to prove our statement that all attempt to influence the young against war through education they receive at universities must be abandoned? For do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it? Do they not prove that education, far from teaching the educated generosity and magnanimity, makes them on the contrary so anxious to keep their possessions, that “grandeur and power” of which the poet speaks, in their own hands, that they will use not force but much subtler methods than force when they are asked to share them? And are not force and possessiveness very closely connected with war? Woolf writes of the refusal on the part of most university professors to teach at the women’s colleges, of the fact that the women’s colleges are beggarly compared to those of their brothers, that women are still largely precluded from entering the universities. That is, far from the open arms one might associate with an institution committed to generosity or magnanimity, the university seems to have the qualities of a locked door. What would become of women if they acquired the key? And the facts which we have just extracted from biography seem to prove that the professions have a certain undeniable effect upon the professors. They make the people who practice them possessive, jealous of any infringement on their rights, and highly combative if anyone dares dispute them. Are we not right then in thinking that if we enter the same professions we shall acquire the same qualities? And do not such qualities lead to war? It is hard not to read this in light of the present-day assault on universities, of their effusive capitulation to an authoritarian power, of the huge sums of money that make paying such bribes possible—and of the wars being fought daily across our cities and streets. And, yes, on the one hand, the attack on higher education is a crime and a terrible loss, both for the students and professors, the researchers and scientists who are trampled in the process, and for humanity at large, who will no longer benefit from their great work. But so, too, is it a loss that education became so high, so much an enormous business, a place of credentials and prestige, of status and repute, grandeur and power. Anything that grows high must build up ramparts to defend itself, and where there is a wall there is—one day or another—a war. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 3 months ago

A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas

This pair of essays from Virginia Woolf explores women’s exclusion from the systems of education and work on two fronts: first by arguing that women’s creativity depends upon economic independence, and second—and perhaps more radically—by noting that their exclusion from the upper echelons of society affords women an opportunity to challenge the dangerous impulses towards possessiveness, domination, and war. A Room of One’s Own was written as women gained the right to suffrage in the UK; Three Guineas was written on the eve of World War II, as fascism spread across Europe. As a new fascist movement marches its way across multiple continents, Woolf’s writing is more trenchant than ever. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 3 months ago

Thingness

I am thinking again about this notion of “self-sameness” that Byung-Chul Han talks about in The Disappearance of Rituals . He writes: For Hannah Arendt it is the durability of things that gives them their “relative independence from men [ sic ].” They “have the function of stabilizing human life.” Their “objectivity lies in the fact that…men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table.” In life, things serve as stabilizing resting points. The table does not change—at least, it does not change at any time scale that is noticeable to the human who sits before it. I do not need to pay attention to the table, because nothing is happening with it that requires or even asks my attention. I can simply trust it. I can turn around and turn back, and even with my eyes on something else, I can reach for it and know it will be there, exactly where I left it. Screens, of course, lack any such sameness or stability. Screens are inconstant, unsame, unstable. A screen demands my attention—not only via the regular chirping of notifications, as hungry and unrelenting as a baby bird—but through that fundamental inconstancy: I know something may have changed since I last looked at it, know I cannot trust it to remain the same, to be steady or faithful. I must be vigilant towards a screen, always on alert, suspicious. And vigilance is exhausting. I will not add to the discourse about how we should spend less time with screens; you are as familiar with those patterns and arguments as anyone. I want to suggest instead that turning away from screens is turning towards something else. It is not an absence but a presence, not an empty hand but one with a hold on something solid and true. That is, a politics of refusal must be more than a closed door; it must be both a closing and an opening, both rejection and invitation. The refusal must contain its alternative, the other paths, the thing you are turning to while you turn away. And what you turn to must have that stabilizing presence, that thing ness, the restfulness of something you can trust. A rock that fits into your palm, a notebook, a bowl, a tree, a trail through the woods, a book (always a stack of books), a table, the chairs around it scraping the floor as your kin sit down to join you. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 3 months ago

Psychology of craft

One of the imperatives in contemporary, professional work culture is to “grow.” There is often a sense of height or largeness with that imperative, as if growth must be measured in your distance up the ladder, your territory across the way. In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman implores us to think rather of growing down , of growth not of branch but root, of becoming more grounded, sturdier, less able to be pushed around by the whims of others. Here that notion of growth shifts our relationship to work: As we said above concerning Hercules and as we saw above with Freud, work is usually imagined in terms of the ego and his muscles. Because Cartesian earth is still outward in visible reality, personality can only be made by a strong ego coping with tough problems in a world of hard facts. But the dream-work and the work on dreams returns work to the invisible earth, from literal reality to imaginative reality. Through dream-work we shift perspective from the heroic basis of consciousness to the poetic basis of consciousness, recognizing that every reality of whatever sort is first of all a fantasy image of the psyche. Dream-work is the locus of this interiorization of earth, effort, and ground; it is the first step in giving density, solidity, weight, gravity, seriousness, sensuousness, permanence, and depth to fantasy. We work on dreams not to strengthen the ego but to make psychic reality, to make life matter through death, to make soul by coagulating and intensifying the imagination. It may be clearer now why I call this work soul-making rather than analysis, psychotherapy, or the process of individuation. My emphasis is upon shaping, handling, and doing something with the psychic stuff. It is a psychology of craft rather than a psychology of growth. The question I hear is, what does it mean to see our work as craft rather than as growth? What are we shaping, handling, or doing something with? The metaphor of growth is one of hunger, consumption, acquisition—to acquire more pips on your collar, more titles after your name, more people under your domain. But craft asks instead, what are you doing ? What reality comes into being with your shaping and working? What is in your hands and in your heart? View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 4 months ago

Undersense

James Hillman does not want you to interpret your dreams: Analytical tearing apart is one thing, and conceptual interpretation another. We can have analysis without interpretation. Interpretations turn dream into its meaning. Dream is replaced with translation. But dissection cuts into the flesh and bone of the image, examining the tissue of its internal connections, and moves around among its bits, though the body of the dream is still on the table. We haven’t asked what does it mean, but who and what and how it is. That is, to interpret the dream is to exploit it, as a capitalist exploits a vein of coal, transforming those fossilized remains into a commodity, something that can be measured, evaluated, bought and sold. Hillman is demanding that you not turn the dream into something else but that you let it be what it is, that you approach it as keen and attentive observer, not trying to transform it but accepting it, acknowledging it, living with it. (As I read this, I had a sharp image of Rowan in The Lost Steersman , dissecting the body of a creature from the outer lands, finding organs and tissues whose purpose she could not fathom but could—and did— describe in intricate detail.) There’s an attitude here that I think can be expanded to any work in which observation, noticing, witnessing what is before us is privileged over trying to make it into something else. There is a fundamental humility to working in this way, to acknowledging that our understanding of the world around us is always incomplete. This is an incompleteness without judgment: not incomplete as inferior or flawed but incomplete as open-ended, infinite, wondrous. We can move in this direction by means of hermeneutics, following Plato’s idea of hyponoia , “undersense,” “deeper meaning,” which is an ancient way of putting Freud’s idea of “latent.” The search for undersense is what we express in common speech as the desire to understand. We want to get below what is going on and see its basis, its fundamentals, how and where it is grounded. The need to understand more deeply, this search for deeper grounding, is like a call from Hades to move toward his deeper intelligence. All these movements of hyponoia , leading toward an understanding that gains ground and makes matter, are work. Work is the making of matter, the movement of energy from one system to another. The work of making sense, of digging for undersense, is work that matters. I take undersense to mean, in part, a kind of feeling or exploration, of reaching your hands into the dirt, of tearing apart the body of the dream with no preconceived notions of what you will find. And not only dreams. The search for undersense is worthy also of the waking world, the world of daylight. In a world in which the creation and persistence of knowledge is threatened and fragile, we need under sense more than under standing , the exploration and observation that gains ground and makes matter. There’s an argument here for the kind of knowledge that you feel in your bones, that gets under your fingernails, that can’t be lifted away and perverted by a thieving bot. Knowledge that is steady, solid, rooted in the way roots hold tightly to the earth, defended from rain and flood, from being washed away with each passing storm. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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