[Commlist] New book: The Wages of Dreamwork. Class Composition & the Social Reproduction of Cultural Labor

Now available for direct ordering and/or free download…

*The Wages of Dreamwork. Class Composition & the Social Reproduction of 
Cultural Labor*
Stevphen Shukaitis & Joanna Figiel

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?

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.

/The Wages of Dreamwork/ 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.


*Bio:* 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 
/Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of 
Everyday Day/ (2009), /The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics 
and Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde/ (2016), /Combination Acts. 
Notes on Collective Practice in the Undercommons/ (2019). His research 
focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements 
and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor.

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.

PDF available freely online: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1314
Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions site.
Release to the book trade 24 November 2024


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