Commodity fetishism comes for our flesh
Precarious workers seem to have missed out on the end of history
“How can we share a meaningful sense of national identity when our jobs confer rights on some and actively take them away from others?”
This week at Public Seminar, Phyllis Jeffrey examines how the opportunity to have a life outside of work became an exclusive “perk,” and Lina Moe sheds light on the sobering realities of gig work in New York City. As Teresa Ghilarducci points out in an excerpt from her new book, Work, Retire, Repeat, “Time away from work is like water or the sun—a vital resource for human beings.”
Apart from our bodies, what else of ourselves can we buy, sell, and gleefully gobble up? Hannah Berman takes us behind the scenes of reality TV in a review of Cue the Sun! Taylor Stout considers the ecstasy and desperation of tomb raiders in La Chimera. And Emma Minor explores Becca Rothfeld’s exuberant defense of excess—clutter included.
Low-Paid Industries Rely on Gig Workers. Are They Actually Employees?
Lina Moe
The economic vulnerability of gig workers is part of what Arne L. Kalleberg has called “a new age of precarious work that represents a fundamental shift toward widespread uncertainty and insecurity.” Over the past three decades, American payroll jobs have fragmented and deteriorated into lower-paid, and less protected forms of work. These fissures have eroded financial security and wellbeing in working people’s lives.
La Chimera’s Tomb-Raiders Unearth the Intersections of Past and Present
Taylor Stout
These narratives of time travel have a mythical quality, but Rohrwacher grounds their fabulist elements in stark environmental degradation and class struggle. While La Chimera’s Etruscan artifacts from the tombs of the wealthy take on “inestimable value” thousands of years after their creation, the petty thieves of the present are just “tiny cogs in the wheel,” according to the art dealer who buys their stolen goods: “One day the rust will eat them away. Nothing will be left.”
[...] By layering past and present, Rohrwacher encourages us to think about our own lives in terms of larger themes of destruction and remembrance. What do we desecrate in our desperation to keep up with capitalism’s churn? Will any of our acts of love last as long as the Etruscan tombs?
Becca Rothfeld’s Essays in Praise of Excess
Emma Minor
A certain logic runs through each essay in All Things Are Too Small. Although achieving justice in society requires moderation and a sense of proportion, Rothfeld argues that we all ought to be maximalists in our cultural and private lives, to be as extravagant as possible in what we find beautiful—be it through enjoying art, exploring our sexuality and erotic desires, or wholly contending with our thoughts and emotions.