ART and RESEARCH

breakfreeboy

Alma van de Burgwal, Pienk de Gaay Fortman, Andreas Noyer, Teun Grondman, Yvonne 't Hoen

Inside a special research unit of the Board of Trade—so one divines—communicative workers try to grasp how a corporate body, setting foot in the elusive, spooky marketplace, can have worklessness as its framework, no ground save the abyss of the inactive company’s doing nothing. Their hypothesis is an économie désœuvrée, a general economy where all production and energetics are always already unworked and, as such, its workings are in fact a dolce far niente. Their wholesome intention is to accelerate idleness, to divest intensities from energetics (which is to keep to their potential, not exhaust them in activity). The workers’ own need for speed results, however, in a boom and bust—all according to plan (*nervous laugh*)—but even then, as workers, they can but become self-identical with their work, their words always put to work, governing them. Outside, in the heat of the desert, a lounge lizard lies motionless, only to interrupt the process in an aimless, sovereign sprawl of hypervelocity, burrowing its chirps in an ungovernable unemployment. Overworked, finding this strange little being (which isn’t particularly joyful) under their shirt, some workers say, “Whomst’d’ve thought I could be en train de lézarder now, fully-automatedly, luxuriously? Heh.” …