The Artist and the Un-working of Work

Jasmine Guffond’s Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity was produced out of a collaboration with Zabriskie Bookshop in Berlin. Invited participants were asked to select a book from the Zabriskie collection to respond to. Guffond chose David Graeber’s ironically titled Debt: The First 5000 Years. During his career, sadly curtailed by his premature death in 2020, Graeber, a renowned anthropologist and outspoken anarchist strongly attached to the Occupy Wall Street movement, directed much debate to the centrality of work in capitalist societies. As he and an ever-increasing panoply of contemporary critics of neoliberalism’s mantra of endless production, endless competition, have pointed out, much of what passes for waged work these days is in fact, ‘bullshit’. Graeber’s equally ironically titled book Bullshit Jobs, deploys a wealth of research including numerous primary case studies, to illustrate his thesis that capitalism’s obsession with work is largely a ruse: many workers today are employed to do tasks they feel are meaningless and contribute nothing to society. Waged work, even highly remunerated at times, simply becomes a means of disciplining individuals, keeping them in their place day in and day out in order that they don’t find better (re: potentially subversive and/or creative) things to do.