HCCW: The Refusal of Work: Scarcity, Affect, Laziness

Maurizia Boscagli
English
UC Santa Barbara

This seminar, led by Maurizia Boscagli, UC Santa Barbara, studied the nexus of work and happiness today, at a time when work has changed into new forms (immaterial, cognitive, affective), and has become scarce. If the contemporary precarity and scarcity of work are the reasons for the most widespread psychopathy of post-Fordism and depression, what does the refusal of work (from Jules Lafargue’s celebration of laziness to Italian Autonomism’s experiences with a life against the routine of productive and leisure time during the 1970s) promise? Can the “aesthetic” quality of this life against work, which echoes both the aristocratic distance of the dandy and the opposition of the political agitator (the Surrealists, the Situationists) become the means to new social relations, to new economic forms, to a new understanding of happiness? Can the refusal of work illuminate in new ways the work we do in the humanities in today’s academy?
Students in the seminar engaged in weekly discussions of readings and films that touched on neoliberalism, immaterial work, feminist viewpoints on precarious labor, and student debt, among many others. In addition to the seminar, students participated in a two-day conference entitled “Commoning Precarity: No Work, Refusal, Autonomy” that included graduate student presentations and invited speakers such as Kathie Weeks (Duke University) and Douglas Kellner (UCLA).