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. [1] 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.
Doubly ironic about our society’s fixation with productivity and work is the fact that with the massive financialisation of the economy, most profits now are derived from rents and debt, with genuine production contributing a lamentably low percentage. This variety of capitalism favoured by the neoliberal markets that dominate global exchange, has rightly been referred to as ‘rentier capitalism.’ [2] It is a system that channels ever greater profits to an ever-concentrated minority of the ultra-wealthy (around 0.01%). [3] Of course, those with the means to profit via these means, effectively doing nothing except mobilising their existing wealth, have no problem with this situation. In fact, it’s likely they see this as evidence of their natural superiority, their role as modern-day feudal lords assured. [4]
Unfortunately, traditional leftists also often fall into the trap of valorising the fetish of work as an ideal often over and above its actual necessity. Indeed, one of the best ways to irritate members of the economic right or left is to question the necessity of work as preordained. For the former, work is what proves the superiority of the boss over the worker, while for the latter work is the primary means by which an individual self-actualises their social potential. Alas, particularly with the rise and rise of various types of automation - a trend that will only expand exponentially - clinging to traditional left valorisation of work seems less and less credible. Besides, given the opportunity it is practically inevitable that many blue-collar workers around the world - especially those toiling in so-called ‘third world’ countries producing components for the luxury gadgets of the ‘relaxed and comfortable’ West - would prefer not to engage in habitually backbreaking and degrading activities.
If rentier capitalism is ‘socialism for the rich’ [5] why, beyond the epidemic of precarity foisted on workers by economic elites, would workers not want to do less and actually enjoy their lives, “why do people fight for their exploitation as if it was liberation?” [6] Moreover, it is a basic fact that democratic principles of equal representation do not pertain to the fundamental reality of the wage relation in which bosses have all the power and the final say. ‘Non-work’ does not mean the disappearance of all work (a ludicrous notion) but having the genuine option to choose meaningful work. It also means a situation where less pleasant but necessary work is shared throughout society and not just dumped on under-classes.
The paradox of Guffond’s Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity is the fact that the artist’s own productive labour created it. Unforced creative labour for ‘no other reason’ however seems to escape the bondage of mere work. Indeed, the fact that art is a job that isn’t one [7] has the potential to provoke resentment and jealousy in others. This is because for some, particularly certain varieties of conservatives, art is not ‘real work’ with the artist portrayed as just ‘mucking around’, a privileged timewaster with pretensions particularly within Anglocentric cultures. Yet this ‘timewasting’ aspect is also part of art’s power to provide alternative models for work that are affective, engaging, not only life-altering but life-affirming. Art as work is demonised by those who diminish its value for its unreliable profitability and lack of statistically quantifiable outcomes (beyond onerous neoliberal-induced accounts of ‘best of’, ‘most liked’, or ‘most profitable’, in the end the only thing that system can comprehend). At the same time, paradoxically, art’s singularity is what entices collectors who want some of the (in)action: if you are wealthy and still feel burdened and unfree at least you can buy representations of freedom.
And what of the music? Well, for one thing, Guffond refers to her composition as muzak, which it clearly isn’t. This relationship is central because muzak is essentially a functional musical form. It arose as the pseudo-science of ‘stimulus progression’ and is associated with the first subscription radio network. ‘Stimulus progression’ alternated fifteen minutes of muzak with fifteen minutes of silence. It followed a pattern beginning with a ‘low stimulus’ tune and over a series of six progressions, ended with a more up-beat one. Muzak was conceived as a utility to ‘benignly’ enhance worker productivity, the idea being that a sedate worker lulled into a false sense of comfort will work more efficiently.
So called ‘elevator music’ would be deployed over the years to theoretically elicit a state of calm in public spaces, including, appropriately, in lifts. More insidious about muzak within a burgeoning corporate-capitalist world, was the implicit need for an enveloping if not embalming, calm. If you were angry or frustrated at work, it was your fault and not the fault of the working conditions (and/or colleagues) you had to endure. With muzak there was no excuse for being ‘up tight’, the world was universally good and prosperity just around the corner. Even more sinister was the use of muzak in other corrective institutions like asylums where it was believed conflict-less tunes would produce unconflicted ‘healthy’ patients.
Today variations of muzak persist on several levels. On Spotify for example, an extractive platform notorious for minimising artist income associated with ‘plays’ of their music, subscribers may access, or ‘curate’, and programme, specific playlists corresponding to different moods, occasions, and times for the day. You can create, or access pre-programmed ‘moods’ for waking, walking, working, working out, relaxing, a romantic evening, a dinner party, or any other situation. Thus, as in many other instances of the way work works in neoliberal society, labour and leisure become indistinguishable, one is simply coextensive with the other. In a culture everywhere saturated with capitalist imperatives, it is no longer enough to pacify people’s minds and bodies at work, now one’s whole life is the object of controlled purposeful mediation. In the public arena too, predominantly in tele-visual form on big screens in train stations for example, the muzak of ads and commercial endorsements frequently fills the air: where there isn’t exposure to some form of external stimulus, some saccharine or ‘exciting’ distraction designed to provoke consumption, one can only fear what people might do or think.
More than muzak, tellingly in Japan during the bubble years of the Japanese ‘economic miracle’ (long passed), environmental music, kankyō ongaku, was produced for shopping centres and other public settings. The sophistication of this specific genre of ambient music saw a strange utopian attempt - understandable perhaps in lieu of the severity of post-WW II trauma and privation in that country - to conflate ethereal music with consumerism. Some of this music still plays in the locations for which it was written. Guffond’s ambient ‘muzak’ on the other hand, with its drifting horn and harp modulations interweaving foreground and background, is just too down-tempo for upbeat spending. Unlike ‘official’ muzak too, which is unerringly static in its feigned optimism, Guffond’s piece rises and falls in melancholic strains, expanding and contracting and broken occasionally by subtle discordant interruptions that momentarily puncture its overall organicism. If this is muzak it is possibly muzak for the end of the world, thoughtfully seeking transcendence through implied questioning after all avenues for shopping have been exhausted.
Alex Gawronski, Oct 2023
Review of Jasmine Guffond’s Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity published at SNO (Sydney Non Objective) online, Sydney, Australia - https://www.sno.org.au/snosound
[1] This exchange was facilitated by Berlin based Australian artist Felicity Mangan.
[2] See, Brett Christophers, Rentier Capitalism: Who owns the Economy and Who Pays for It? (Verso, NY/London), 2020.
[3] See, Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, (Allen Lane/ Penguin Books, London/NY), 2018.
[4] Yannis Varoufakis, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, (Penguin, London/NY), 2023.
[5] See, Yannis Varoufakis, ‘Is This the End of Socialism for the Rich?’, The Atlantic, 10/10/2022.
[6] Baruch Spinoza quoted in Jason Read, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work, (Verso, London/NY), 2023.
[7] Art is “like a phantom profession, one that permits the artist to simultaneously work and not work, to have ‘real’ job, and a fictional job. And nothing is more subversive than showing other workers the pleasure of not engaging in productive labour”, Jacques Rancière quoted in Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, (Pluto Press, London), 2011, p-152.