Peripathetic, p.19
Peripathetic, page 19
It makes sense. A book can cost $32.99 at the bookstore upon release only for it to be found in the one-dollar bargain bin a few months later. Or it can be resurrected as a cult classic decades after the writer has died, or in some cases, shortly after a writer’s demise. For a short period of time while writing this book I thought if I worked x number of hours every day, something productive would happen. I’d write 1000 words a day in the eight hours I allocated myself. The brain is a machine. Punch in, punch out. Go to sleep and stop thinking about it until the next day. Of course I was proven wrong. There were many sentences I could never have crafted, ruminations I would have never come to, if I simply sat at my desk and wrote. I had to live, too. I had to think. I had to do nothing. I could have understood this via Paul LaFargue, who exhorted in his 1883 treatise The Right to Be Lazy:
Cannot the laborers understand that by overworking themselves they exhaust their own strength and that of their progeny, that they are used up and long before their time come to be incapable of any work at all, that absorbed and brutalised by this single vice they are no longer men but pieces of men, that they kill within themselves all beautiful faculties, to leave nothing alive and flourishing except the furious madness for work.
Art-making contains a routine-less spontaneity that keeps me coming back. Work does not contain an incentive that makes me desire to return. And yet, as Fisher writes, ‘full-time employment precludes the engagement in long-form projects’.
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In Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness, her searing critique of the ‘do what you love’ culture so commonly espoused and aspired to in the age of self-promotion egged on by the impulses and mechanisms that make up social media, Miya Tokumitsu observes that the mentality ‘allows us to valorise elite workers, those who choose to overwork, and ignore those who have to overwork’. This is why the aforementioned $32 000 felt so breezy. It may be that these amounts became mine to possess – in their full glory – immediately, without it being spread across weeks and months, but it’s almost very certainly that it’s a sum of money that gives me this choice to overwork. This is on top of the fact that there’s a need to overwork in an ecosystem that simultaneously brags about equality and diversity while undermining them in the same breath. Under these circumstances it’s no wonder that the blame invariably circles back to the self.
For David Graeber, who in his book of the same name viewed what he called ‘bullshit jobs’ – that is, jobs surrounded by honour and prestige; respected by professionals, well-paid, and treated as high achievers – as ‘dummy jobs that are effectively made up’, these are arenas of ‘hopelessness, depression, and self-loathing’. One can sort middle managers and compliance officers in this category. Quality control inspectors. Someone working ‘social media comms’ at a large mining corporation or a bank. The existence of bullshit jobs simply exists to undergird the necessity of ‘shit jobs’ – that is, ‘jobs that are blue-collar and pay by the hour’ – so feudalism can remake itself. When we think about the gig economy, and how art-making is increasingly joining its ranks, the idea of knowledge work being that of belonging to the upper classes is increasingly becoming defunct. For many decades now, as Maurizio Lazzaratto writes in Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work, ‘… the artist became a model of “human capital” because he embodied the “freedom” to create’. When liberation and the pursuit of capital become mutually exclusive, it’s no wonder that this same ‘freedom’ is succumbing to the neoliberal logic of planned obsolescence. You can be liberated only if you adhere to prescribed ways of being.
Through this logic, upward mobility can be acquired through education and literacy, directly through institutions or otherwise, a space in which you can simultaneously be amongst the precariat and bourgeoisie. In this catastrophic era, art-making sits in that destabilising space between ‘bullshit job’ and ‘shit job’, its subjective nature perpetuating a kind of inane, roundabout subjectivity that demands no answers but yet leaks into all our material lives regardless whether we are buying or selling. All she needed was to continue to make it work. To have enough, so as to be able to keep doing the work. To keep chasing that hopeless fun, where curiosity finds a home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As Amitava Kumar writes in his own acknowledgments, and whose novel Immigrant, Montana was one of the inspirations behind this book, ‘Memory is real but it is not accurate. It is arguable that history is not accurate either; however this isn’t the place to stage that particular debate.’
This book is dedicated to Joe and Ming, without whom it could never have been written. It is your all-encompassing yet uncloying love and care that provided me with the safety and fulfilment that accompanied me while I finished this project. Thank you for sharing this bizarre life with me.
Thanks to my friends, chosen family and comrades: Ed-Honk, Uncle Mishu, Liz Dingus, Danlin, Lara, Auntie Natsu, French, Ball, Sia, Shoshana, Nina, Viv, Evdogs, Rosie and Mike – you keep me alive whether you know it or not. Thank you for being challenging and intriguing forces in my life, as well as sources of political and intellectual stimulation. This book is also dedicated to all my friends in the global DIY underground who are constant grounding presences, and for always reminding me what home looks like no matter how frequently we see each other.
Thank you to my band ESP Mayhem for being the clownish rascals that you are. Hee haw! And to my ex-bandmates in Grimalkin and Spiteward for giving me an outlet for pranks and fury alongside your own.
Thank you to all the people who maintain outlets such as Libgen, Monoskop and Internet Archive – I would not have been able to read many of the cited texts without your efforts. Thank you to KT, H-dog and Bez for sharing your uni logins with me throughout the years.
Thanks to the friends and confidantes I have made along the way via this strange ecosystem called ‘the writing industry’: Eda Gunaydin, Jon Tjhia, Timmah Ball, Sonia Nair, Aimee Knight, Max Easton and Leah Jing McIntosh – you help me feel less insane.
Thank you to the Slow Currents Writing Workshop for collegial support and encouragement. It is wonderful to be able to workshop our work in culturally safe spaces. Many thanks to Leah Jing McIntosh and Rosabel Tan for spearheading this initiative and bringing us together.
Thank you to the arts workers, peers and editors who have encouraged and supported my practice in big and small ways: I’m sure you know who you are.
Thank you to the staff and grant assessors at these places: City of Melbourne, City of Yarra, Creative Victoria and Regional Arts Victoria. Without funding I would have had taken far longer to write this book, which is to say I’d probably have given up altogether.
Some of the essays in this book have previously appeared in the following publications:
—‘Shit Jobs’ first appeared as a zine titled To All the Shit Jobs I’ve Worked Before: thank you Sticky Institute for organising the annual Festival of the Photocopier; the zine may not have been made otherwise. Thank you to all the people who showed interest as well.
—‘Who’s Your Normie?’ first appeared in Liminal’s digital chapbook ‘Perfection’ in 2018. With thanks to Leah Jing McIntosh for commissioning and editing.
—‘Speed Tests’ first appeared in The Lifted Brow #73: Digital Intimacies. Thank you to Jini Maxwell and Hassan Abul for commissioning and editing.
—‘By Signalling Nothing I Remain Opaque’ first appeared in Liquid Architecture’s print publication WORKBOOK as part of a project titled ‘disorganising’. With thanks to Xen Nhà for commissioning and editing, and Sarah Gory for copyediting. Special thanks to designers Zenobia Ahmed and Alexandra Margetic for the tedious formating of the piece.
—‘Lingua Franca’ first appeared in Portside Review’s ‘Indian Ocean’ issue. Thank you to Robert Wood and Camha Pham for commissioning and editing.
Thank you to Reg Abos for coming up with such a striking cover that I can live with. And to Elena Gomez for an incredible editing experience – to have you go through my work with your big brain and sharp editorial eye is a gift.
This book would not have come together without the hard work of the team at NewSouth Publishing. Thank you Paul O’Beirne, Rosina Di Marzo, Katherine Rajwar and Joumana Awad – your expertise is invaluable. Thanks also to designer Josephine Pajor-Markus and proofreader, Janine Flew.
Finally, tremendous and heartfelt thanks to my publisher Harriet McInerney for believing in my work – this book, in this form, would not have the luxury of existing if not for her support and enthusiasm. Thank you for being a solid presence throughout and for always being communicative, encouraging, conscientious and patient.
Peripathetic was largely written on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, with some of it on unceded Nacotchtank land, Turtle Island. It always was, and always will be, Indigenous land. Resistance against colonialism and imperialism will prevail.
Cher Tan, Peripathetic
