Sublime

While leisure has gone out of fashion, a new class has emerged—a class of people who don’t work for money. They are paid, but payment is not the point. They work for a sense of fulfillment, for the rewards of the work itself. Pay is incidental, though it serves, Galbraith notes, as an “index of prestige.” And prestige, along with respect, is a

‘most of human history was spent in hunter-gatherer communities. And in these kinds of communities today—there aren’t many of them—you find a degree of cooperativeness, an absence of alienation that is unheard of in modern society. To ignore our social heredity is a serious mistake. There is a human capacity for good-natured cooperation that is

Labor is required for value to be produced and capital accumulated, but that labor, as we’ve noted, is all too often likely to rebel against the process. Labor, after all, is us: messy, desiring, hungry, lonely, angry, frustrated human beings. We may be free to quit our jobs and find ones that we like better, as the mantra goes, but in practice

Many emotions signal the secret hopes, fears, and expectations with which we actively greet any news, any occurrence. It is this signal function that is impaired when the private management of feeling is socially engineered and transformed into emotional labor for a wage.

Indeed, if one imagines these two threads in capitalist culture—instrumental/rational and expressive/affective—as the strands in a rope twisted tighter and tighter, then the rope began to double up and curl back onto itself as rational calculations were proposed for the intimate sphere and, as I will show, expressive and affective approaches were