18 February 2009
the non-pleasures and sorrows of de botton
[I was going to put a picture of de Botton here, but I've only just recovered from being unwell. This instead is de Botton's conception of class.]
With my reviews editor cap on, I'm somewhat unfortunately not allowed to merely endlessly commission my dirty, filthy friends from Warwick to write blood-n-cum-spattered commentaries on the latest Bataille volume, or my militant-kulak-massacring friends to write point-by-point dictats on the best way to read Badiou. Occasionally I have to get people to review books like this. Now I don't know about you, but I find the idea of someone who doesn't have to work for a living (his father founded Global Asset Management - hopefully they've got about one left at this point) writing a book about work rather in, um, poor taste. And the blurb! Just listen to this:
'Equally intrigued by work's pleasures and its pains, Alain de Botton here heads out into the under-charted worlds of the office, the factory, the fishing fleet and the logistics centre, ears and eyes open to the beauty, interest and sheer strangeness of the modern workplace.'
The man is...intrigued?! What, like a captivity-raised squirrel suddenly let out in to the world for the first time, little sparkly opal eyes blinking at the overwhelming wonder and diversity of it all? Gasping at the, ahem, 'sheer strangeness' of the modern workplace?! I'm sure cleaners setting off on the 472 at 4am to get the first tube to Canary Wharf find their pitiful paycheck 'strange' and 'beautiful'. De Botton has written, apparently, a 'song for occupations'. Well that's good of him. Perhaps next time he'll write a waltz for torture or a sonata for wife-beating.
And as for this: 'We spend most of our waking lives at work - in occupations often chosen by our unthinking sixteen-year-old selves.' Has de Botton looked at changes in employment lately? The rise of precarity? Hell, the rise of unemployment? The idea that unthinking prole Johnny rises one day on the cusp of manhood saying 'blimey Govner, you know what I think I'll do today? I'll get me a job, make a real man of meself I will, at the steelplant or down t'mine' and then, looking back one day, an old and grizzled patriarch, realises that his whole life has been shaped by this one unthinking choice made in adolescence, his gnarled hands grasping the back of a chair wot he slaved hard to buy for his family...oh come on. De Botton no doubt sees the world in these terms. The dunderheaded locked-down masses slaving away with a dogged earthy kind of nobility, while he and his international elite chums flit about like latter-day dandies turning their hands to this 'intellectual' pursuit or another, sipping wine and pretending they've read Plato or whatever, but urgh, really, do we have to let him write about it?
[ad hominem attack quoted from wikipedia excised for reasons of moderate humanist guilt-feeling]
