ABSTRACT
So much of work-life can be about waiting: waiting to get going, waiting to clock-off, waiting for a tea break, waiting for a promotion, waiting for redundancy or retirement, waiting for holidays, waiting for the rush to be over, for the queue to shorten, for the crowds to die down, for the boss to leave, for the pay cheque to come through. Waiting to stop work so that you can do other things: soak tired muscles, fall asleep in front of the TV, cook tea, wash children, go to bed, get up again. The cyclical nature of everyday life is often expressed as a deadening cycle of redundant repetition: the Parisian’s ‘métro, boulot, dodo’ (commute, work, sleep) or the anarchist slogan ‘eat, sleep, work, consume, die’, formulate a list that is ongoing and never changing (apart from the final cessation of death). Lefebvre’s mordant summary of the relationship between work and leisure recognises just how ‘vicious’ such a cycle can be: ‘so we work to earn our leisure, and leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work. A vicious circle’ (Lefebvre 1991 [1958]: 40). And of course it is work that is pitched as the primary vicious element in the cycle. The deadening aspect of repetitive work-life is its lack of narrative possibilities and development (no quest, no transcendence): here it is now and forever, always the same. Such a perception of work-life is hardly unanimous. For some work is a
métier, a calling, a vocation, that can produce satisfactions that could never be completely erased by the alienating conditions of modern work-life. Between the factory worker and the company executive a host of incentives can function to make some cycles more exciting or bearable, or more deadeningly inhuman. Their distribution is uneven and unequal, often deployed in a manner designed so that one person’s prize is another’s punishment (the key to the executive washroom makes the ordinary washroom starker and even more unlovely; the extraordinary gap between the wage of one and the salary of another makes the lower wage appear even meaner). Yet while the wealthy professional might have more of a sense of forward motion than someone working ‘the line’, even the well heeled and the well remunerated can find the routine aspects of work-life deadening.1
