William Morris versus John Ruskin (was Re: Of Work and Pussy Cats)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Chuck Grimes wrote:

> Nobody probably understood the idea that the stone facades of ancient
> societies were obsessions with time, as labor in stone. Building this
> imaginary temple to Labor, isn't about the deification of labor, but
> about the dialectic between all the elements of its creation, the land
> formation, the eco-systems, the materials of construction, the found
> design from the interlacing of imaginary labor with material labor, a
> dialectic conducted in real time.
>
> A traditional Zen rock garden is a expression of it, say Ryoan-ji in
> the Kyoto Imperial Palaces, from the Muromachi period. That is, these
> gardens arise from these conceptions and their interplay with the
> materials that form them. Whether this is the traditional Japanese
> conception of what these gardens are, I don't know. What I can give,
> is how I interpreted them and learned from them.
>
> For Doug. Is this organistic clap trap? Yes. Although such claptrap
> with some nuance, it can be made to take in a considerable quantity of
> the world's cultural traditions. But take a look at Isamu Noguchi's
> work and imagine making it, try to resuscitate the forms through their
> historical antecedents and associations, like the gardens of Kyoto. A
> NOT very good example is the Sunken Garden for the Chase Manhattan
> Bank Plaza. Its only real virtue (if its still there, cleaned and
> functioning) is you can go see it. This in a certain critical sense is
> a good example of how monuments to Capital presume over the deep or
> long historical traditions that arise from Labor. Of course only
> bankers can afford to buy these things. But see, I am not interested
> in buying them or possessing them in that sense at all. I am
> interested in making them.

I wouldn't go so far as to call your opinion an "organicist
claptrap," but it does unpleasantly remind me of John Ruskin of whom
I am not fond.  If you like arts & crafts, would you be so kind as to
move at least into the direction of William Morris?  Morris's
writings are still afflicted with producerism (much of the
reflections of which I omitted from the essay "Useful Work versus
Useless Toil" copied below) as well as an ideology of "manliness";
still and all, Morris makes essentially correct points below:

*****   William Morris

Useful Work versus Useless Toil

The above title may strike some of my readers as strange.  It is
assumed by most people nowadays that all work is useful, and by most
well-to-do people that all work is desirable.  Most people,
well-to-do or not, believe that, even when a man is doing work which
appears to be useless, he is earning his livelihood by it -- he is
"employed," as the phrase goes; and most of those who are well-to-do
cheer on the happy worker with congratulations and praises, if he is
only "industrious" enough and deprives himself of all pleasure and
holidays in the scared cause of labour.  In short, it has become an
article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in
itself -- a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of
others.  But as to those on whom they live, I recommend them not to
take it on trust, but to look into the matter a little deeper.

Let us grant, first, that the race of man must either labour or
perish.  Nature does not give us our livelihood gratis; we must win
it by toil of some sort of degree.  Let us see, then, if she does not
give us some compensation for this compulsion to labour, since
certainly in other matters she takes care to make the acts necessary
to the continuance of life in the individual and the race not only
endurable, but even pleasurable.

You may be sure that she does so, that it is of the nature of man,
when he is not diseased, to take pleasure in his work under certain
conditions.  And, yet, we must say in the teeth of the hypocritical
praise of all labour, whatsoever it may be, of which I have made
mention, that there is some labour which is so far from being a
blessing that it is a curse; that it would be better for the
community and for the worker if the latter were to fold his hands and
refuse to work, and either die or let us pack him off to the
workhouse or prison -- which you will.

Here, you see, are two kinds of work -- one good, the other bad; one
not far removed from a blessing, a lightening of life; the other a
mere curse, a burden to life.

What is the difference between them, then?  This: one has hope in it,
the other has not.  It is manly to do the one kind of work, and manly
also to refuse to do the other.

What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work,
makes it worth doing?

It is threefold, I think -- hope of rest, hope of product, hope of
pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance
and of good quality; rest enough and good enough to be worth having;
product worth having by one who is neither a fool nor an ascetic;
pleasure enough for all for us to be conscious of it while we are at
work; not a mere habit, the loss of which we shall feel as a fidgety
man feels the loss of the bit of string he fidgets with.

I have put the hope of rest first because it is the simplest and most
natural part of our hope.  Whatever pleasure there is in some work,
there is certainly some pain in all work, the beast-like pain of
stirring up our slumbering energies to action, the beast-like dread
of change when things are pretty well with us; and the compensation
for this animal pain is animal rest.  We must feel while we are
working that the time will come when we shall not have to work.  Also
the rest, when it comes, must be long enough to allow us to enjoy it;
it must be longer than is merely necessary for us to recover the
strength we have expended in working, and it must be animal rest also
in this, that it must not be disturbed by anxiety, else we shall not
be able to enjoy it.  If we have this amount and kind of rest we
shall, so far, be no worse off than the beasts.

As to the hope of product, I have said that Nature compels us to work
for that.  It remains for us to look to it that we do really produce
something, and not nothing, or at least nothing that we want or are
allowed to use.  If we look to this and use our wills we shall, so
far, be better than machines.

The hope of pleasure in the work itself: how strange that hope must
seem to some of my readers -- to most of them!  Yet I think that to
all living things there is a pleasure in the exercise of their
energies, and that even beasts rejoice in being lithe and swift and
strong.  But a man at work, making something which he feels will
exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the
energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body.  Memory and
imagination help him as he works.  Not only his own thoughts, but the
thoughts of the men of past ages guide his hands; and, as a part of
the human race, he creates.  If we work thus we shall be men, and our
days will be happy and eventful.

Thus worthy work carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the
hope of pleasure in our using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure
in our daily creative skill.

All other work but this is worthless; it is slaves' work -- mere
toiling to live, that we may live to toil....

...And yet if there be any work which cannot be made other than
repulsive, either by the shortness of its duration or the
intermittency of its recurrence, or by the sense of special and
peculiar usefulness (and therefore honour) in the mind of the man who
performs it freely -- if there be any work which cannot be but a
torment to the worker, what then?  Well, then, let us see if the
heavens will fall on us if we leave it undone, for it were better
that they should.  The produce of such work cannot be worth the price
of it.

[The entire essay is found at
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/tmp/useful.htm>.]
*****

workers of the world, unite, & take it easy,

Yoshie