In working through[1] Critique of Economic Reason (CER) to see how Gorz has managed to synthesise Weber, Habermas, and Arendt to think (with and beyond Marx) about the shit we’re in with our working lives and free time, it’s important consider how the terms job, work, and labour are used. ~Thanks for reading living together, somehow! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a re-post with an archival value to me. Context: In 2017 I wrote a reflection about work I had conducted in 2013 – about a list-making imbroglio that happened around The Wire’s End of Year lists, in 2011. …so: a very intricate frame-within-frame regress of temporalities, much as is implied by Ferraro’s cover, copy copy copied in the above screen shot. I’m hoping a few readers might ‘stumble across’ this and

This is one of those posts where I’ve tried to be semi-automatic about the writing. I didn’t really know the post was going to swerve in these directions, but just let it keep building and bifurcating, and am now going to just try to hit ‘post’ before I feel like it’s time to start moving commas around. This is definitely ‘groundwork’, these are unfinished thoughts and fragments;

To prepare readers, over summer I’ll be returning to complete the close read of Civilisation and Its Discontents (C&ID) I began in Jan-Feb. In order to re-orient myself (and perhaps you, dear reader), here’s some succinct extrapolations of what the first few chapters are about, followed by a short synopsis of the remaining chapters. 1 the oceanic feeling, and Rome: Freud begins by considering our existential situation and

Psychoanalysis has a chequered history treating psychosis and schizophrenia1, as well as autism2.

Zweig, in defence of Freud and drives: “I often mentioned the horrors of Hitler’s world and the war in those conversations with Freud. As a humane man, he was deeply distressed by that terrible outbreak of bestiality, but as a thinker he was not at all surprised.

Note to readers: this post runs long. I always adhere to Pascal’s quip, ‘I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time’. Please prepare yourself, or read as hastily as I’ve written;

In the last post, I followed Gorz’ contention that the utopia of industrial modernity, having its ‘bicentennial’ in the same year as Australia in ‘88, was disintegrating.

In 1988, I lived through a preoccupation with ‘The Bicentennial’, the uncritical nationalist celebration of two-hundred years since the arrival of a motley of convicts to what was then, as now, unconvincingly called New South Wales[1]. In the same year, André Gorz published his Critique of Economic Reason , regarded as his one of his three[2]masterpieces. These two events are only seemingly disparate.

~ In attempting a social explanation of the effects of the past on the present, we must deal with causality, space-time and sequence, and epistemology.

November-December is always a time where I tend toward introspection, and can be prone to ruminative reflections. There’s always a tipping point where reflexivity becomes an inward-coiling loop; one cannot ‘solve’ by the patterns that connect and the analysis of analysis of analysis. Right now I’ve been thinking about this blog.