It’s always an event when Richard Sennett publishes, even though I have problems with the gloominess of his take on the effects of information capitalism on peoples’ lives. I’m halfway through his new book, The Culture of the New Capitalism, so I won’t comment definitively – but a friend has read it, Madeleine Bunting, who basically agrees with Sennett. Here’s a representative quote:
What Sennett seems to be suggesting is that, in much of the workplace, there are no longer any rules. It's the chancer, the trickster, the chameleon, the illusionist on the hunt for the big break who flourishes. The rest of us, insecure and anxious, just hope to scrape together a sense of connectedness sufficient to keep loneliness, disorientation and meaninglessness from the door.
Passages like this – which seems to indict play values (chance, trickiness, chameleonic, illusory) as the unraveller of stable work cultures – make me realise just how far ahead of the consensus my arguments for a play ethic are. Can we still only conceive of purposeful, meaningful activity as that which occurs within public or private organisations, for which we exchange labour for wages? The mobile internet hints at a more ‘commonist’ society, which can support innovation and self-directed activity in many different locations – at home, in the street, as we travel.
But the idea that social regulation could support this fluid style of producing and making – say with a social wage or income supplements, or free communication channels – is far off. If even the best writers and thinkers (Bunting and Sennett) cannot themselves abandon those semi-military metaphors of bureaucracy and organisation, cannot escape Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of convention, then a players’ society will have to emerge from the margins. The metaphysics of the work ethic still grips the minds of Anglo-American public intellectuals too tightly.
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