The dead zone. posted by Richard Seymour

What is with the phrase "work-life balance"? In my view, there is an awful lot with it, for what is implied is that one's work - which takes up perhaps a third of the day (plus travel time), and the better part of the day at that - is not a part of one's life. It is true: work is death. It is grinding stupidity, compounded by futility. It is Sisyphus endlessly rolling the ball up the hill, only to watch it roll all the way back down.

But we are encouraged to find enjoyment in this endless repetition, both a secret pleasure in the ritual, and supplementary allotments of enjoyment in the many durable and unendurable goods that, although we know how they are made, we treat as if they appear from some magical mountain or grotto. The reification of the commodity form (a commodity is a relationship between people and objects, ie a fact and not a thing) involves treating objects as if they were alive, imbued with magic. The money form is a relation between people, but we treat it as if the paper and metal that serves as a marker of value transubstantiates into DVDs, wine, chicken breast, irons, noodles, books - any amount of things. The collapse of notional values on the stock market generates panic - the economy is in freefall even though not a single factory has burned down, not a power station has ceased producing and not one river has stopped flowing. The material world seems for all the world to be directed by magical, non-corporeal forces, which implant themselves in every object we encounter.

Alright then. Emerging from work, the dead zone, we slowly revive our mortified limbs. We awaken our frozen nerves and ganglions. And we go shopping for spirituality , which is religion denuded of the only thing that matters about it - its form. You can have the various mythos, the sensation of Otherness, of unplugging from the necromantic ritual of daily death, but you need not bother with the fanatical commitment, nor with belief, nor with faith, nor even with moral seriousness. In other words, subtract from religion precisely what is most demanding and most necessary, and you have a nebulous pulp, a pleasing miasma in which every bright consumer radiates with a beautiful soul.

The walking dead, whose limbs and nerves and ganglions never did recover, seek assurance that they are alive through such New Age chimeras. And the only rational response to such a spectacle is to affirm the possibility of life after death, to say "Let the dead bury the dead, we shall live!"

Right. Back into cold storage, I'm off to work.