Darkness on the Edge of Town – Bruce Springsteen
This is so last week, but I finally got around to reading the recent piece by Matthew Crawford from the New York Times Magazine “The Case for Working With Your Hands” which apparently generated a pretty substantial buzz.
To be honest, I’m more than a little appalled at that fact. While there are certainly plenty of interesting things to be said about the relationships between knowledge production, labor, and the alienation of work, I don’t think Crawford said any of them. Instead, he offered a piece of – to my eyes – pure kitsch.
Despite one sentence at the beginning of the piece cautioning against portrayals of manual laborers which “idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail” Crawford then proceeds to do precisely that. What’s more, he does it all from a perverse perspective that attempts to be both intensely subjective (‘here’s my awesome story of how I got to be so awesome’) and subtly totalizing (‘my story doesn’t just have meaning for me, it turns out to actually say something Significant about life in the Modern World’).
After reading it, I was left asking a simple question. What exactly did Crawford tell us that has not already been said a thousand times before? Take, for example, Office Space – which communicated all the useful insights of this piece, AND managed to do it with sufficient humor to prevent it from immediately defaulting to a mawkish sentimentality. Crawford’s story, in contrast, treats work done on ‘real’ objects in the ‘real’ world as unfailingly redemptive, soul-enriching, ennobling.
It’s a world where even the bad things turn out to be ennobling:
Often as not, however, such crises do not end in redemption. Moments of elation are counterbalanced with failures, and these, too, are vivid, taking place right before your eyes. With stakes that are often high and immediate, the manual trades elicit heedful absorption in work. They are punctuated by moments of pleasure that take place against a darker backdrop: a keen awareness of catastrophe as an always-present possibility. The core experience is one of individual responsibility, supported by face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.
By virtue of its ‘realness’ this sort of work wipes away all the confusion created by the knowledge economy and lets us authentically be our ‘selves.’ What’s more, it’s the way that everyone can partake in this sort of thing that allows us to build a community. There’s no dissembling here. People speak in plain words and with honesty. In short, this sort of work wipes away the unacceptability of life – it returns us to the ‘real’ America.
But of course, that authentic world is just as much myth as is the world of economies built on knowledge rearrangements and the monotony of cubicles. The question is not which is more true. Rather, the question is what is at stake in telling this kind of story.
I’m reminded of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if, the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?
The senator had only one argument in his favor: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitude can share. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on grass, the motherland betrayed, first love.
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.
Crawford is writing about the second tear. His story is not merely a personal narrative. It is written with the injunction of all those who read: see how this makes my life more authentic! recognize the drudgery of your own life, of the society which we have built!
In short, it’s what you’d get if you took only the optimism from Springsteen and didn’t pair it with the faded loves and broken dreams. A world of ‘happily ever after,’ where there’s no darkness on the edge of town. It’s the caricature without any of the heft. It’s a story which purports to offer meaningfulness to life, but instead untethers it from all weight and burdens.
And that is what makes it kitsch. Not the idea that office work is alienating, but the sleight-of-hand used to tell one particular story and translate it into universality. It is in that translation that life loses all of its weight. To read this piece, and take it seriously, is to become lost in a morass of nihilism. Against a drudgery that exists out in the open – in cubicles and endless meetings about nothing and co-worker like Dwight Schrute – is counterposed a mythical escape. One where all of the pain and denial of life is negated.
It’s that negation that I have a problem with. It has nothing to do with the value of particular kinds of work or the way that we decide what constitutes meaning. It has everything to do with this sort of modern mythology, which is little more than an excuse for cultivating a dream of authenticity that cannot help but be dashed upon the rocks. As a piece of social commentary or political idea-making, Crawford’s point might well be useful. But as a matter of aesthetics, telling the story the way he does makes it nothing more than muzak – an evisceration of everything powerful to be found in such a project.