Johan Andreas Trovik
(Department of Politics, Princeton University)
Abstract:
The social and economic transformations brought about by the introduction of digital technologies have resuscitated old debates about the “end of work”. In the face of widespread anxiety at the prospect of the “end of work”, radical political theorists seize on these transformations to maintain the need for a new politics based on the demand to transcend work. What does this demand mean in the post-digital age? What are the potentials for a post-work political project in our time? In this paper, I follow the recent turn to social practices in critical theory to try to give some answers to these questions. Work, I argue, names a social practice with the purpose of maintaining a society’s form of life. Work emerged as a social practice during industrialism, with the emergence of the labour-market as a dominant social institution. Though there is no logical overlap between work and the market in labour, the labour-market is understood as organising the division of the activities comprising this practice. The digital revolution is significant because it has destabilized the dichotomy between activities that are and activities that are not “necessary” for the maintenance of our society’s form of life, to the point, I contend, where the distinction no longer makes sense. Post-work politics must take aim at further destabilizing the social practice of work. But post-work politics, I argue, must also demonstrate how the goods that today are associated with work, through being embedded in the social practice, can be realized elsewhere.
Johan Andreas Trovik is a student in the Department of Politics. In his dissertation research, he explores the idea of work as it figures in the discourse of welfare capitalism, in critiques of work and in both utopian and dystopian “post-work” imaginaries. In particular, recognizing how deeply the idea of work has taken hold of our understanding of democratic participation, and the modern ethical imagination more broadly, he is interested in investigating attempts to unsettle its hegemony. Trovik also has broad interests in the history of political thought, social philosophy and critical theory. Before coming to Princeton, Johan completed a B.A. in philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford.