As summer holidays begin to fade from memory and the routine of work has well and truly traced its habitual pathway back into our daily lives, I got to thinking about work. When do we start and stop working? Not just for mini breaks or Christmas holidays, for parental leave or retirement, but also daily.
It seems that in many careers we are never fully switched off from our professional role. With technology bringing information and the ability to communicate into our private spaces more than ever previously, it is not unusual to check, and respond to work emails first and last thing; upon waking and before sleeping, in bed!
There have been studies conducted and advice offered about ‘no screen time’ before sleepy time so that we power down, switch off and rest properly. Then we can awake refreshed and ready to launch back into our chosen work all over again the next day. But at the same time, our contemporary society is giving us an altogether stronger message about being “on” all the time.
There are obvious benefits to the labour market if people work insane hours for the prestige, the profit, and the power. But it is not just corporate leaders working at 160 per cent!
Stanford Professor Sianne Ngai has spoken and written about the more mediocre aesthetic categories of the cute, the zany and the merely interesting, which respectively link to consumption, production, and circulation in our postmodern world.
Ngai writes,
The commodity aesthetic of cuteness, the discursive aesthetic of the interesting, and the performative aesthetic of zaniness help us get at some of the most important social dynamics underlying life in late capitalist society today.
The Cute, the Zany, and the Merely Interesting
The mundane aesthetic categories of cute, zany and interesting are taken seriously in a way that philosophers previously reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime. Yet why is this problematic?
Ngai speaks about how the zany has come to infiltrate our relationship with work such that labourers are asked to be enthusiastic, playful, creative, passionate, and yes, zany. Workers are asked to be hardworking, and to love it!
