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Now available for direct ordering and/or free download…<br>
<br>
<b>The Wages of Dreamwork. Class Composition & the Social
Reproduction of Cultural Labor</b><br>
Stevphen Shukaitis & Joanna Figiel<br>
<br>
Surviving as a cultural or artistic worker in the city has never
been easy. Creative workers find themselves celebrated as engines of
economic growth, economic recovery and urban revitalization even as
the conditions for our continued survival becomes more precarious.
How can you make a living today in such a situation? That is, how to
hold together the demands of paying the rent and bills while
managing all the tasks necessary to support one’s practice? How to
manage the tensions between creating spaces for creativity and
imagination while working through the constraints posed by economic
conditions?<br>
<br>
In a more traditional workplace it is generally easy to distinguish
between those who planned and managed the labor process and those
who were involved in its executions: between the managers and the
managed. For creative workers these distinctions become increasingly
hard to make. Today the passionate and self-motivated labor of the
artisan increasingly becomes the model for a self-disciplining,
self-managed labor force that works harder, longer, and often for
less pay precisely because of its attachment to some degree of
personal fulfillment in forms of engaging work. And that ain’t no
way to make a living, having to struggle three times as hard for
just to have a sense of engagement in meaningful work.<br>
<br>
<i>The Wages of Dreamwork</i> investigates how cultural workers in
the modern metropolis manage these competing tensions and demands.
Does the cultural economy treat you as a tool? If so, perhaps it’s
time to rethink how to down tools in this metropolitan factory.<br>
<br>
<br>
<b>Bio:</b> Stevphen Shukaitis is Reader in Culture &
Organization at the University of Essex and is co-director of the
Centre for Commons Organizing, Values, Equalities and Resilience. He
is the author of <i>Imaginal Machines: Autonomy &
Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day</i> (2009), <i>The
Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor
After the Avant-Garde</i> (2016), <i>Combination Acts. Notes on
Collective Practice in the Undercommons</i> (2019). His research
focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social
movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic
labor.<br>
<br>
Joanna Figiel works and lives in Warszawa and London. Her research
focuses on the changing compositions of labor, precarity, and policy
in the creative and cultural sectors. Joanna also works as a
translator. She collaborates with Fundacja Bęc Zmiana, and in the
past she has worked with groups including the Citizen’s Forum for
Contemporary Art in Poland and the PWB in the UK, as well as the
Free/Slow University of Warsaw and the ArtLeaks collective.<br>
<br>
PDF available freely online:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1314">https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1314</a><br>
Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions site.<br>
<br>
Release to the book trade 24 November 2024<br>
<br>
Review copies available.
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