the hegemony of busy

Music: Antony and the Johnsons: The Crying Light(2009)

In the past weeks a number of folks have asked, "how are you doing?" My usual response---until I rethought it today---was "busy." It's the kind of answer that could be read as if I believe as if I'm the only one who is busy, since in our culture the word busy usually implies one has so much to do that she cannot, for example, answer her email in a timely fashion (where "her" means a certain Josh). To say one is busy is either to say, "I can't be bothered" or "I am too busy for my own good." I mean the latter when I use the term, since I was taught (I cannot remember when or how) that telling some "I'm busy" is only an appropriate response to a child.

To wit: to describe oneself as "busy" is to tempt a kind of arrogance. It implicates a certain relationship to others that is less than ideal. If you're truly busy---as in intensely focused on writing deadlines and trying to keep your promises---it might be better to say "overwhelmed" or "treading water" or something that doesn't implicate a relation.

Part of the reason I thought to blog about this is that I've been noticing lately that Hotmail has a new campaign, probably ahead of a new rollout for its frequently hacked webmail program. It's called, "the New Busy." I noticed a billboard advertisement driving home for dinner: "The New Busy think 9 to 5 is a Cute Idea." Other slogans include, "The New Busy don't need a desk to get it done," and "The New Busy make beavers look lazy." On the Hotmail webpage amidst all these statements that collapse every waking hour into work---what manager wouldn't like to have staff available 24-7?---there are a few masking and contradictory slogans: "the New Busy are not the too busy" and "the New Busy make pancakes into exotic animal shapes" are examples. Now, who is this advertising team kidding? If the New Busy---code for people who work for a living---don't need desks and think 9 to 5 is a cute idea, then they are, in my opinion, way too busy.

I know a lot of people who emulate this class of New Busy. They check their iPhone email constantly at the dinner table while you're sitting right there, in the flesh, ready to have a meaningful conversation.

Of course, there are many kinds of labor---community building and friendships are important kinds of labor, to be sure. But what this campaign is truly reflecting is the kind of nomadic capitalism described by Juliet B. Schor over the last decade. It is not general labor, but working labor---labor toward the accumulation of capital for someone else. As she predicted in her classic study, The Overworked American, U.S. workers put in about as much time laboring for "the man" as folks did back in the 1920s---until the depression, of course. Oh, wait . . . doh! Déjà vu, baby. Well, people work as much as folks did in the 20s if they can get work (and most especially if they are educators, since much of the labor of education---like that of the arts and creative endeavors---seems invisible). When you factor in the kind of emotional or affective labor folks do for free (writing reviews for products on Amazon.com, for example), the New Busy starts to look a lot like The New Worked-To-Death.

Various "slow-" movements---slow food, slow poetry, slow bloggitry---are a response to this New Busy on an aesthetic and affective plane. "Busy" seems almost synonymous with "fast" or "immediate." "Busy" is no longer just a relational term for "I ain't got time for you," because it seems to have sacrificed the Other for naked speed.

The New Busy is your skimming this blog post because it is way too long. Why are you waisting your time reading this? You should be writing your term paper and grading.

I mean, just reading the billboard advertisements for the New Busy evoked first a feeling of guilt, then anger, then exhaustion (have you ever seen a beaver at work? They're not only relentless, but destructive and mean). Like most academics, what I've been reading lately also colors my thinking, and so I remember asking myself what Raymond Williams would think about The New Busy billboard. Williams' observations about what he termed "private mobility" have got me thinking a lot about what the "Information Superhighway" has done to automobility and domesticity, what the Internet has done to sanctuary.

Sanctuary seems to mean, today, the absence of a screen.

HGTV is also the New Busy. I have a current rubber-necking obsession with Property Virgins and House Hunters. Homes have always been showcases, but I would argue they have now become new zones of publicity. The rage seems to be for stainless steel appliances in the kitchen---the signature of a restaurant, a quasi-public place of . . . business. A place of the busy. Couple after couple has "entertaining" on the top of the homebound desires, of course, as if what their home looks like to the visiting horde (camera crews included) is more important than their children's bedrooms. "Open concept" floor plans are all the rage to better accommodate the "modern family's busy lifestyle."

Of course, I could also go on a tear about how the family car is now fitted with LCD screens and DVD players, but I'll leave off the commercialization of the domestic for now.

I think Williams would be especially critical of the New Busy campaign because it reflects the way public's interest (that is, accumulation)---civil society-cum-commerical society---has completely erased zones of domesticity. The commercial public has completely colonized private zones of being such that the workplace and home space have collapsed. The New Busy is a time of phantom domesticity and the spectral home.

It goes without saying that many of us have dispositions perfectly suited to the New Busy. Ever since I can remember "chilling out" involved some sort of work, whether it was studying a video game to get to the next level, or watching television. If I'm watching television, I'm doing housework or folding laundry or ironing or watering the plants.

I've been thinking about all this busyness lately because of the impending promotion. For the past two weekends I have taken time off to work at partying, first for the May Day celebration, and then this past weekend for Jen's "Tenure Tiara" party and a fun concert at Numbers with friends in Houston. I tried to forget my work and submerge the guilty in Beam and ogling Geisha ladies on stage. Even so, I was right back at the computer typing come Monday morning, and I read and typed all day today as well. I found myself thinking, "if only I had stayed home this weekend to write, then . . . ."

Suddenly the appeal of church starts to make a bit more sense, but not so much for Jesus. Or rather, because of Jesus. Did he not live a life of love a leisure? Miracles are not labor.

One problem, of course, is that I enjoy researching and writing, two things that are ironically harder to do with the New Busy.

I suppose, then, this aesthetic of the New Busy, funded by an ideology that increasingly capitalizes on every human thought and movement, is here to stay. Perhaps, then, the fight I need to mount---that we need to mount---is against the new temporalities that come with the New Busy. Is there a way to work on speed? Instead of pumping and pimping psychostimulants, can we dope up these New Busy people with some metaphorical Mary Jane and Bob Marley?

Well, I'm rambling. It's my blog and I'll ramble if I want to. I'm starting to realize why I've been on an ambient music kick for the last couple of years---why slow music with rambling melodies going nowhere have been the desired ear wig. I'm fighting the New Busy with slow. I think I want to join this movement of slow, somehow. But how? How to slow down?

With tenure, I hope to fight the New Busy with more vacations. And camping. When the weather cools off, who wants to go camping? Let's fight the New Busy with the Retro Slow. I dunno. I start tonight with sleeping. So, gotta go go go.