Tales from the Flexitariat: the Sadness of the Scientific Lamp Maker

I've seen him before. An older man, from another space-time when work and the rest of life remained distinctly separate, even for those for whom poverty forced to labour long and broken hours.

I come from these lines, the labouring masses. My people, on the whole, were working people. Cooks, waiters, clerks, typists, and a dancing girl, my English great-grandmother. Was this code for a prostitute I wondered, but my Pommie brother who's delved deep into working class culture tells me it could simply mean that she was a dancing girl.

The peasant heritage was illustrated by tales of my mother and her closest brother, Franco, shipped back from London in the 1920s to a family village in northern Italy. The ever-present hunger. Images of begging their grandmother for crusts of bread, which this kind woman would sometimes produce from her apron. This rural poverty had driven both my grandmother and grandfather from their respective villages to London, where they would eventually meet in Soho.

In one of our final late night kitchen table bonding sessions in London, Uncle Frank told me how he had been teased and called Pig Boy in this village. The relatives' home so cramped, he had been forced to sleep with the pigs. A warm expedient solution probably, but my uncle carried this humiliation for the rest of his life.

During one of life's mopey periods many years before I had heard my uncle's story, I had written some vignettes about an Italian pig farmer named Papa Z, who had tormented his young chattelled bride, his Gash Girl. Later, upon entering the 1990s rendering of cyberspace through the doorway of a rambling online world called LambdaMOO, I reprised this wretched tear-stained girl from her dead-end village life. Gash Girl transformed herself into a character whose exploits became known outside of the net via the techno-utopian currents criss-crossing media sectors in search of the new. The net was smaller back then, constructed of hamlets and towns rather than mega-cities.

For three years Gash Girl, the Puppet Mistress, explored deep screen play with distant paramours. The experiences shimmered with a fairytale quality, perhaps because the characters, and the unfolding/enfolding story lines they enacted, were constituted by the interplay of collective imaginations. We were creating a matrix of ideas. A contemporary Chaucer's Tale would play itself out night after night amongst a group of strangers making their individual pilgrimages through foreign lands. Tiny human puppets, a wolf with thirty-seven personalities disguised in a man's skin, an incestuous gender-switching vampire, all building textual realms in which their fantasies could be enacted through the magic dust of tele-presence.

I took Gash Girl's life at LambdaMOO seriously. My project was to project awareness into another psychic persona, and to explore if that persona could manifest her own drives, needs and desires, discrete from my own. It was an experiment, a game, manifest through collaborative writing, mainly with people who were unknown to me in my embodied life. And it was also work, although I did not yet realise this.

This type of work falls squarely into current notions around labour being put forward by various philosophers, sociologists, and economists. As it happens, for historical reasons many of these theorists are Italian. They distinguish the forms of cognitive labour dominant in today's postindustrial economies from the physical labour which typified earlier agricultural, mercantile, and industrial societies. The mute labour of Ford's factory-line becomes the communicative labour performed by the micro-serfs, the web monkeys, the call centre cold caller, the financial analyst, the journalist, consultant, academic, and so on.

As this mental labour deals with intangibles and ephemerals, it is tagged 'immaterial labour.' The workers form a precarious, casualised and disaggregated work force. Yesterday's proletariat becomes today's precariat. Flexi-workers en masse, en virtualised masse at least, forming the flexitariat. Artists and writers are part of this generalised insecurity, and perhaps have been for some time, at least in the post-Enlightenment West.

I think Ken Bolton was onto this a long time ago, revealed by his poems which reference another day spent toiling in the Experimental Art Foundation's salt mines, or, after a particularly wretched day, in the Gulag. Ken's communicative, cognitive labour expended in managing all the dark horses. The day job in the art book shop subsidising the poet's real work.

In their constitution of a new class, a class which is partially produced through the dense meshwork of today's global communication systems, the intercontinental precariat potentially hold enormous power. We are no longer the obedient People of Hobbes, but the anarchic multitude of Spinoza, and obedient to no man.

My people mainly worked for the man, whomever that man was. The known exception was my Italian grandfather. He had opened a cafe in Brixton, London, where his family worked like donkeys for him, the master. Padre Padrone set in the city, without the goat fucking. The donkeys watched him gamble away the financial products of their  labour until nothing was left, only debts, the orphanage, the streets, and the asylum. It was some legacy that the old man left behind. My life, as a so-called immaterial labourer, is one long coast down Easy Street compared to the experiences of those who came before me.

A few days ago I talked with that older man, the one from another time. As he doesn't know that I am speaking of him here, I will do him the courtesy of calling him X.  X marks the spot where I rip other people's stories and weave them into whichever Persian carpet I'm making this week. Recently I watched The Thief of Baghdad and saw myself reflected in that rascal ragamuffin. I can't help but steal, it's the way I am made. A friend describing one of his many jobs once said, “We all left when there was nothing left to steal.” Perhaps I could say that about my life, but I don't want to hex myself.

So anyway, X has recently retired from his trade of scientific lamp making. Thirty years of interpreting people's drawings to make precision instruments from glass, and designing and making the tools to craft these objects.

The distinction between material and immaterial labour increasingly bothers me. Perhaps it was the beauty and poetry of the word 'immaterial' that first compelled me. But to pit the bulls of material and immaterial against each other in the ring of binary coupling now makes less sense.

As the scientific lamp maker works with his hands, manual dexterity is fundamental. Eventually, if someone can pass through the initial stage of six months of fruitless bumbling, they are rewarded with not only technical ability but confidence. It's this confidence that enables the apprentice to keep moving forward, to make ever more precise material objects.

Communication is surely central to the processes of learning a 'manual' trade. Teachers not only show with their hands what is to be done, but must explain. This is not the 'mute' labour of the factory (and was labour really ever mute anyway?). It is the audible labour of the workshop, the shed, the studio, and the bench. Fingers and lips speaking, singing even, when obstacles are overcome.

Over the phone, X speaks of “a dying trade.”
I ask him how it feels to be the last of a lineage.
“I'm very sad really,” he tells me.

And I can feel his sadness over the copper wires.
“I've always wished to pass on my skills to somebody.”
And I can almost see that invisible child sitting at the work bench next to X, listening and watching as he handcrafts the tiny instruments out of hot glass molasses.

There is material in the immaterial.

And immaterial in the material.

All labour can be spoken, sung, whispered, screamed.

And we are not mute, even if we might be barking mad.