Work

Work has mechanized the body like it imposed the reality of its mechanisms on the world it transformed.

The world changed fundamentally with the Neolithic revolution: it evolved away from a symbiosis of the natural and the human, and was flipped upside down by taking, for the foundation of its progress and civilization, a specialized activity which destroyed that primordial unity, exhausted nature by denaturing its resources, and generalized a system of constraints that made men into slaves.

There’s the great result of all our pride of having done things impossible for animals — we’ve immediately forbidden ourselves access to creation, which makes up the human genius!

Economic Mechanization

By substituting itself for creative potential, work penetrates into evolution with a formidable force of fragmentation. Beneath the shock-wave of repetitive gestures, lucrative behaviors, servile and tyrannical morals, the richness of being is dislocated into the rubbish pile of ideas and objects, crushed and sorted by the mechanisms of having.

The necessity of producing and consuming material and spiritual goods holds back the reality of desires, denies it in the name of a reality forged by the economy. What’s hacked to pieces, reduced to a bunch of cogs, is nothing less than a living totality, where the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms are melted down in the crucible of nature to create a new species, gifted with the power of creating in its own right.

History shows, with a growing precision, how work perfects the mechanization of the individual and of society to the extent that commodities extend their grip on the earth and the body.

There’s something artisanal in the original hammering of enjoyment, and in orgies, riots, massacres, where it bursts forth as soon as the regulatory work of the king, priest, functionary, plebian, or slave lets up. There’s an industrial universality in the moments of revolutionary furor that lend the consciousness of an imminent social change to the letting off of steam of oppressed passions. But what a disenchantment comes about, also universal, when it becomes apparent that revolutions have done nothing but translate the passage of a given economic stage to another, and that the new freedoms do not at all include the freedom to enjoy orgastically.

Only work, which transforms the world, has been the motor of a progress which has propagated everywhere the defeat of the human and the image of its victory. Ever since the obligation to produce was prolonged in the consumer persuasion, work has become an object simultaneously of horror and satisfaction. Its omnipresence leaves not a single island of pristine nature on the surface of the earth — even the Amazon succumbs — and there is no passion that isn’t frozen over in the boredom of its cadence, even in the deepest recesses of humanity. The commodity has so completely exploited the energies of earthly and individual life, all the way to the limit, that a great languor has killed all our Croatans, our Broceliandes, all our dreamlands, as well as the marvelous desire to fall in love with life there.

Whoever refuses to participate in this world gets bogged down in the habits and repetitions of his or her own tolling bells. All his or her talk becomes, like his or her existence, nothing but a funeral orison. From here on out our destiny must put down its chips against the growth of consented-to death, and for the life we must create.

The Castration of Desires

Work separates man from self-enjoyment. Such is the separation that gives rise to all the others.

The desirous man has been hunted out of his body by the worker he’s become. The economy has only been able to take power by economizing life, transforming libidinal energy into work-energy, putting prohibitions on enjoyment, on the natural freeness wherein desires are fulfilled and reborn ceaselessly.

The impulses of the body — the primary needs of feeding oneself, moving, expressing oneself, playing, and giving in to sexual pleasure — have been regimented by a war of conquest which has obsessed over profit and power. It’s a war which, though it in no way concerned them, nonetheless got to them even in their will to escape it.

Cut off from his or her desires for accomplishment, the individual sees nothing but the multiple modalities of death. Work is a comfortable suicide, a very social hypocrisy: it starts out with the negation of the essence of life, and routine does the rest.

If such a precise castration did not take place at the heart of childhood, do you really think so many generations would have willingly permitted themselves to become servants of so many secular tyrannies?

Abstraction

The division of labor has created the master/slave dichotomy both in the individual and in society.

The power of the heavens, of the master, and of the State begins as soon as the body, obeying economic imperatives, renounces its enjoyments.

Work, which separates men from themselves, is also divided in two, split up into intellectual activity and manual activity. The process inscribes itself into the logic of exploitation of the earth and its substrata.

The organization of work, of sowing, of harvesting, distributes time over a series of constraints, a seasonal calendar that governs the community’s attention, like irrigation across a network of canals, the distribution of water, the weather forecasts. Each season brings its share of problems to resolve: the preparation of the earth, the resistance of the materials, the extraction of raw materials, the improvement of techniques, the observation of stars, geometry in space.

Things only are arranged according to the greatest efficiency on the condition that they are looked at from above, like from these towers and promontories that weigh the world down with consequences, from the privileges accorded to organizers and usurped by them, transforming constructions which were initially functional into monuments of tyranny: cairns, mastabas, pyramids, dungeons.

The fabrication of more and more numerous tools, the treatment of minerals, the clear-cutting of forests, the multiplication of specialized tasks, to which is added the need to defend against the lust of neighbors those places where a new fortune shone; everything worked together to concentrate in a few heads a knowledge that issued from a practice that was first common to all.

Gradually torn from the hands of the practitioners, knowledge has risen like a fog over the earth to condense in the heavens and fall back down as if it emanated from the gods. Experiences common to all are abstractly brought together in a few heads who made a secret and a mystery out of them. There’s hardly been a time when the commandments of knowledge became the decrees handed down by Power.

Temporal and Spiritual Power

From the mastery of space, time, waters, and exchanges, sallied forth the motley crew of priests and kings. The thunderclap of orders and the lightning of commandments crash down from beyond, setting up down here the sacrifice of the body to work and the equalizing power of price, the universal Logos of a coin that circulates everywhere and imposes everywhere its equivalency, bringing us the miracle of stamping the seal of “equal” on oil-producing lands and on the ten thousand Indians to be expelled from them.

Work does not only function as the basis for the world’s economy, it divides it up, in the image of its own divisions, into a celestial economy, a pure and hypocritical domain of mind over matter.

At the summit of the hierarchical pyramid is God, putting a halo around the priest-kings, until the leveling that the first trembles in the industrial machinery imposed on the archaic edifice of the world in 1789.

Degeneration of the Earth and of the Body

While the masters were inventing a celestial ancestry for themselves in order to pillage the earth in the name of the gods, the body curls up like the community, upon which are set down the walls and borders of property.

What a degeneration they’ve dared imposed on these bodies of ours, without which people cannot exist, which are the place of all sensations, all knowledge, all delectations and all pains, this luminous center of tangible realities, foundry wherein the alchemy of the three kingdoms transmutes the sensibility of the crystal, vegetable, and animal, in the human faculty of accomplishing the great work of nature!

They have reduced the body to two functional principles, to two hypertrophied organs — a head that commands, and a hand that obeys. The rest has the calculated value of meat on the butcher’s cutting board: the heart, reserved not for the futility of love but for the courage of arms and tools; the stomach, made to sustain physical effort, and which gets unpleasantly upset after partaking of the pleasures of eating; the urinary and genital organs, used for reproduction and evacuation, and the voluptuous usage of which is seen as the cause of sin, suffering and sickness.

See what happens to enjoyments when we get a few moments of leisure to satisfy our desires for happiness scheduled for us by business, once the mechanisms of the body-at-work have gone through their motions.

The Part Death Plays

Work is the lucrative exploitation of earthly and human nature. Denaturing is the price of its production.

When work makes way for the gathering together of resources offered to human ingenuity by the earth, the water, the forests, the wind, the sun, the moon, the seasons, it substitutes a violent relationship for the symbiotic relationship between men and nature. The environment and the life that issues from it are demeaned in the lineup of conquered nations, which must be ceaselessly reconquered. The producer treats them as sly enemies, as rebellious ones.

Yes, nature has indeed met the same fate as women: admirable as objects, despicable as subjects. Woman has been raped, crumpled up, wrecked, divided into properties, juridically mortified, exhausted to the point of sterilization. Her body is broken against the comings and goings of the muscles, against the redundancies of the mind — is this not the triumph of civilization against the “low instincts”, that is, the quest for pleasure?

We know how many of the virtues that govern happiness have propagated the taste for destroying as well as for destroying oneself. When the factory of universal labor does not absorb libidinal energy entirely, what’s left over overflows in conflicts of interest and power which the “Causes” — as diverse as they are held sacred — go about promenading from flag to flag. However, human nature exhausts itself too, and the hedonism which reduces the satisfaction of desires to the consumption of frozen pleasures is quite the contemporary of the moribund forests, the rivers without fish, and the nuclear miasma.

Work has so completely separated man from nature and from his own nature that nothing living can invest itself in the economy without being a partisan of Death. It is well known that there are other roads that could be taken, and that freeness, which long ago began being taxed by unreality, must from here on out be the reality we create.