Emptybottle.org

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game -- but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

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CTHEORY: A favorite example being William S. Burroughs in a Nike ad.

RU: You said it! Would I do a Nike ad? I would! And does that weaken my stance? It does!

CTHEORY: And do you care?

RU: I don't! Really, heroism is a spectator sport. f--k spectators. Anybody who doesn't factor a need to pay rent and to have pleasures into whatever expectations they have of anybody else can go to f--k. I hate expectations of any kind.

CTHEORY: Subversion never completely succeeds but neither does the attempt to squash it.

RU: Subversion by its nature parisitizes whatever it attempts to subvert. But subversion isn't really subversive any more. I mean, you can do the most outrageous sh-t, and people's ability to react is just flattened. The greatest hope for subversives is William Bennett and the Christian Coalition and all that. They are trying their best to make subversion subversive again... god bless 'em!

CTHEORY: You seem to be into paradox. Leading cyberculture while slamming it, practicing raw capitalism while critiquing it in the process. This paradox seems to run through much of the culture jamming stuff.

RU: Well, anybody who doesn't believe that we're trapped hasn't taken a good look around. We're trapped in a sort of mutating multinational corporate oligarchy that's not about to go away. We're trapped by the limitations of our species. We're trapped in time. At the same time identity, politics, and ethics have long turned liquid. It seems that what we have, at least among the sort of hip technophile population, is an experimental attitude. An experimental attitude is one of not knowing, otherwise it's not really experimental.

Also, most people try so hard to put their best face forward, right? I mean, if you're writing a righteous political statement on Monday and you're hyping your ass and talking to the lawyers on Tuesday, you're not going to emphasize Tuesday. You're not going to emphasize your own corruption. Except I tend to, because the deal is what's real. If I can make one claim, it's that I'm the most anti-purist motherf--ker around.

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