If You Liked School, You'll Love Work

All the pre-reviews of Irvine Welsh's new short story collection, IF YOU LIKED SCHOOL, YOU'LL LOVE WORK, are raves. No one does gallows humor better than the author of TRAINSPOTTING and, as someone who never much liked school until I went to college, I couldn't resist preordering a book with this title. Since it hasn't been published yet, I have the luxury of making up what I think the stories will be about. I know Welsh is going to be brutally satirical at the expense of Ugly Americans (those boorish, provincial types who have come to represent us, badly, around the world). I know he's going to be brutally satirical about the bourgeoise (amongst which I must sadly include . . . moi). The only other thing I know is that title sums up just about everything I'm interested in right now. Routinized school, routinized work----and the way the former prepares one for the latter. The increasing disparity between rich and poor which, ultimately, makes it even more important to have an underclass willing to work for terrible wages, largely as the serving and service classes (and that includes sweatshop labor on computer chips). The dreary, the mindless, the dull dull dull . . . where satire is perhaps the only response because one feels too powerless for anything like creative, critical, collective action. All that is, for me, embedded in that brilliant title. And if I am now going to reveal myself to be a hopeless optimist, I would say what motivates me, in the various projects I am doing now involving creative forms of learning, is not just that I care about kids but I care about what those kids grow up to be, what kind of society they are part of, whether they have the energy to be leaders or not. All those exuberant, defiant subaltern kids that Hebdige wrote about long ago, all those "subcultures,"and then, well, it turns out that the youth defiance leads to adult disillusionment, poverty, anger without resolution. Can't go there. (About the same time as Hebdige, Paul Willis wrote one of the best books on the cycles of rebellion and repetition, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Even forty years later, it's still a brilliant book).

Class. That's such an interesting and important issue. Recently there's been lots of talk about the "creative class." But the creative class doesn't have to be just the bourgeoise. I guess that is why I was so enthralled with the glimpses I had of otaku culture in Japan, the outcast technokids, many of them virtually homeless, but with their creative zeal, their barter system outside a normal capitalist system of circulation, their identities and ferocity despite being branded lazy, indifferent, lethargic, hopeless. Wouldn't it be great if more and more people in society could love school . . . and then love the work that came later? Wouldn't it be great if we could recreate school (and work) as places of real imagination, innovation, fulfillment, creativity, equity, and inspiration? And then we would have to do the same with labor, seeing what we could do to ensure that work was the kind Freud extols. Lieben und Arbeiten, Love and Work, what Freud says are the two ingredients necessary for happiness. Generous love, creative work. A lot to ask for, yes. But it is not too much--it is never too much--for us to wish for.