Seminar.

I took the train to Tampere at 7 a.m. The sun was barely up. I had a few flashbacks. We were in Tampere a few years ago. You were fighting incessantly. I kept quiet. We had beers on the grass beside the river. Suddenly, you started to hum a melody from a commercial for an amusement park. I laughed so hard I had to lie down. You began fighting again. On the bus ride home, you and I cracked a few beers more. We had a profound philosophical discussion but I have no recollection whatsoever about what. Another flashback. A political congress. My first (and almost my last). It was boring as hell. Some got drunk after the first few hours. I didn't drink back then. I didn't know anything about shit but still - we were supposed to suggest members for a board. I made a fool of myself a thousand times and felt like an ass. The entire youth organization was standing outside a night club later that night. A few of the guys hollered, on the top of their lungs, "TEINILIHAAAA" (which is girlie meat). And that's that about social democracy.

Seminar. Theme: Work. When I arrived at the congress centre, I was suddenly sceptical. Who the hell arranges a philosophy thing in a conference centre? Maybe this wasn't a philosophy thing at all. Another matter indicated it wasn't. The absence of ponytails. I could not bear the thought that a fashion revolution is taking place within Finnish (male) philosophy. The first speaker, a prof.em. in educational science, talked about intelligence and creativity. My scepticism multiplied. He said vaguely controversial things about bureaucracy but otherwise his speech was simply a praise of work. But it got worse. A woman (dressed in typically Finnish-culturally-sophisticated-woman outfit: cloak). She is an artist. I can understand the line of reasoning of the conference organizers. "Let's invite an artist. That will give us an interesting talk about work." But you know what? This was awful. This woman did not have anything sensible to say about anything. Not art, not work, not even herself. I tried to zone out. I couldn't. She showed a bunch of puke-inducing powerpoint slides, she talked about how GREAT it is to work with something one likes and that we all can find something good in what we do if only we adjust our attitude. Bullshit! Even though the seminar was not aimed at a specific group of academics, there is simply no justification for this load of HIPPIE SHIT. What was most worrying of all this was not the lady herself, but the fact that the audience seemed to have enjoyed it. I cooled myself off outside - in the drizzle that made Tampere a very alluring place indeed.

The rest of the seminar was better. Even the ponytails showed up. Quiet sociological observations about the immaterialization of work were like honey to my ear. And a few interesting points were made. One of them concerned the different ways in which work is visible or invisible. One academic talked about work within the tourism industry, and how a lot of that work is somehow supposed to be invisible. The female worker who is paid to smile humbly at the customer, to assist the customer in such a way that he hardly notices it. Another academic talked about the way work has become more and more hard to describe. This was not accepted without protests. One person from the audience (with whom I spoke later) added the important point that it says a lot about US what work we consider to be "real work", work that is visible, accepted. She talked about the example of how people says about female trainees: "they don't actually work here...." In a very illuminating way, she pointed out the various meanings of talk about "real work" (the academic who bemoans that he hasn't done much "real work", the question whether a smile is "real work" etc., etc.). Another person in the audience, a burly man in a lumber jacket, was not hugely impressed by the idea that work has become increasingly immaterial and/or abstract. OF COURSE PEOPLE STILL WORK he hollered, and there is something important in his slightly indignant reaction. The "immaterialization" easily becomes an ideology, a perspective on work that blind us to stuff real people say and experience about their jobs. If you want to ascribe the notion of "immaterial work" to the person at the paper industry factory whose job is mainly about pressing some keys on the computer, this person might protest wildly. Maybe s/he doesn't conceive of her work as immaterial at all. Maybe she sees it as a manual shitwork that is very concrete: pressing the buttons.

Quite a few of the speakers talked about political rhetoric. How "work" was banned as a subversive word in right-wing politics, but how it has sneaked back into use, but with a very specific content. Work has become "a value". It is important to "work hard". And this has nothing to do with concrete aspects of work. The point of this political use of "work morale" is simply to shuffle people into the labor market under conditions that employees have no influence over (because, you know, work is valuable in itself). A vital aspect of keeping the labor market a place in which workers don't decide the rules is that there is a large group of unemployed people whose GREATEST DESIRE is to get an entrance into the labor market - to get a job whatever it is, whatever salary is paid, under whatever conditions.

Quiet a few of the speakers were in agreement about the bullshittiness of the politically elevated program of getting people to work more, prolong their years in the labor market. They said (I think) that this idea builds on an illosory static conception about "welfare" (=all the shit that we think that we need) and that the calculations politicians present are simply WRONG, ideologically charged mumbo-jumbo.

Listening to these people was a sobering experience - especially in relation to the two speakers who simply glorified work as some kind of personal virtue.