Rene Gabri,

Rene Gabri writes: It is October 14, 2010, on the writing of this brief biographical statement. I have just finished a workshop with students and  people seeking employment thinking together about the concept of work, labor, and action; distinctions outlined by Hannah Arendt in her book The Human Condition. Day by day, my conviction grows, that neither a biography nor a list of job accomplishments can come close to describing the life or vocation that seemingly evades me (us?). Unlike 30 years ago, we can no longer claim that we are separated from the work or labor we perform. Indeed, there is a separation, but the quality is not the same as the types of alienated labor associated with Fordism and even what was experienced in the postwar period into the ’60s. No doubt these kinds of labor and even more archaic forms of organizing production still remain, but the difference today is that the large profits come less from the surplus earned on the backs of this type of work and more in mining the everyday affective, creative, relational, linguistic, and cognitive capacities of individuals. Thus, our very capacity for politics, that is, our capacity to speak to others, and consider together what it means to live alongside other humans, is central to production. The task today is to consider how we can wrest these elemental conditions of politics (that is, our intellectual, linguistic, relational, and performative capacities) away from their unquestioned instrumentalization toward an almost sacred pursuit of profit (even if it risks planetary destruction). If the work (of art) was once seen as a portal or a means to measure the confines of our world, to find our place in it, then let us ask with Hannah Arendt, “What are we doing?”