Shit that you gotta deal with

Godard in Vivre Sa Vie, his film about a prostitute, quotes Montaigne's line "lend yourself to others, give yourself to yourself." To be sure, in capitalist society, most work is alienated in a way that cannot be analogized to a gift economy. And prostitutes operate on a money economy, though the 'John' generally treats the sex as a gift (and men in patriarchal society tend to expect women to be giving to them), and so most prostitutes will try to humor the men by making it seem like a gift. But the prostitute's basic problem is indeed an apt metaphor for (and a relatively extreme figure of) the basic problem of work in capitalist society. It embodies for most workers some contradiction between necessity (you work because you need the money to live) and something like desire (the employer expects you to like your job, to want to do it for its own sake, and to show enthusiasm, often in ways that are patently absurd though scarcely avoided for that, like the demand that one "always fulfill the expectation to exceed the expectations"; that is, to make one's labor power or ability to work freely available to the employer's need for surplus value). For artistic workers, there is a contradiction between labor done to make money, and the creative work they live for. Everyone I know who is an artist lives this contradictory situation as if it were a mere paradox: the work you do for pay is like shit you do to make money, but everyone's got to do it. Your sense of identity becomes important partly as a tool of inner resistance, whereby you remind yourself that an artist is what you "really" are, and so, in a sense, what you do that "really" counts, that counts in some other way than that given by exchange value and monetization. It is true of art that it operates within this contradiction, while non-creative work is essentially conditions a life distributed between different possibilities. Artworks are valued on the market, but everyone in the art world knows that the monetary sale value of the work is not the measure of its artistic value; that is instead dependent on meaning, which is why art buyers and sellers are generally dependent on art critics, scholars, and curators. The contradiction between production for exchange value and a value thought intrinsic to the object, associable perhaps to use-value in the case of commodities, though art works are not objects of use in the way that other commodities are, is internal to the artwork in a way that is different for ordinary commodities and services, where valuation by the market is less problematic. So everyone I know is like Godard's prostitute, and is like the worker who has two lives. Your boss at the job probably doesn't want you to be thinking about that; they may or not be comfortable with the fact that it is the case for you. The demand for shows of absurd total commitment and 'availability' of people employed as workers to capital's needs for them to produce the products and services the company is in business to profitably provide, these demands reveal how capitalism tries to disavow this. Like with the shows of enthusiasm that one is often expected to engage in, especially in America, and, interestingly, usually more important the more dull the job actually is and the greater the disparity between what people are supposed to do and anything that they might do or want to do that would be much ore truly interesting. "My identity is as a worker with value-producing labor power who constantly realizes and gives more than he is, more than he can, who is in excess of his own reality, who as such is potentiality or possibility in its pure state": no purer expression of the essence of exploitation is possible. Everyone I know must go into the water, get their feet wet, and start swimming out there while disavowing the fact that it's not just a body of water but also a cesspool. From a creative worker's point of view, the question is always the quantity of shit you have to deal with. A hierarchy of desirability of their employment of skilled workers might be constructed on the principle that the "best" and luckiest deal effectively with small amounts of shit, and the most lowly workers with a lot of shit. Workers today have to manage their own lives, and managing a life partly means dealing with shit in a field of realities or possibilities that might, though it need not, include some real beauty.