The controversy is over whether intellectual labor is a lesser form of work, somehow less authentic, less useful, less moral. Manual work, especially the kind done by men, gets set up as "real" work, and everything else is done by spoiled pussies......
Doug
--------------
I guess I didn't really address this question, since I went off in another direction.
What do I really think? The best work (that is the work I like best) is in the dialectic between the hand and the mind, which is why I was interested in art, particularly sculpture and architecture. Of course that isn't how either of these are done any more.
I didn't follow who put this up, Yoshie or someone else, but it's a good example:
``Well, if they insist on `hard, difficult labor,' I suppose a socialist society can oblige them: create a special `temple of labor' -- modeled upon Zen temples in Japan, perhaps, but without any modern conveniences -- where they can spend their free time spiritualizing themselves through such tasks as cleaning, sweeping, carrying water, rearranging stone gardens, etc.''
Well, yes. But why not? It does sound better than scraping shit off the wheelchairs of the poor and desperate of Oakland. But consider what is required to build such a temple and surrounding gardens, and assume all work is to be done by hand with hand tools, then sign me up. I have no interest in ceremony or worship. My interest is in building it.
It has to start with finding a suitable location with a knowledge of the surrounding landscape (not downtown Oakland), the soil conditions, climate, the rhythms of seasonal change, native plants and animals and their habits. The location of possible building materials. Can you use existing features in the landscape, water, trees, rock formations? So the entire project is already a dialogue with the ecosystems and landscape, in short a dialectic with the earth. The dialogue begins before any building takes form. The form arises out of this dialectic. This isn't from Frank Lloyd Wright, Hegel or Marx, but from almost all traditional building from almost all pre-industrial societies.
Nobody probably understood the idea that the stone facades of ancient societies were obsessions with time, as labor in stone. Building this imaginary temple to Labor, isn't about the deification of labor, but about the dialectic between all the elements of its creation, the land formation, the eco-systems, the materials of construction, the found design from the interlacing of imaginary labor with material labor, a dialectic conducted in real time.
A traditional Zen rock garden is a expression of it, say Ryoan-ji in the Kyoto Imperial Palaces, from the Muromachi period. That is, these gardens arise from these conceptions and their interplay with the materials that form them. Whether this is the traditional Japanese conception of what these gardens are, I don't know. What I can give, is how I interpreted them and learned from them.
For Doug. Is this organistic clap trap? Yes. Although such claptrap with some nuance, it can be made to take in a considerable quantity of the world's cultural traditions. But take a look at Isamu Noguchi's work and imagine making it, try to resuscitate the forms through their historical antecedents and associations, like the gardens of Kyoto. A NOT very good example is the Sunken Garden for the Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza. Its only real virtue (if its still there, cleaned and functioning) is you can go see it. This in a certain critical sense is a good example of how monuments to Capital presume over the deep or long historical traditions that arise from Labor. Of course only bankers can afford to buy these things. But see, I am not interested in buying them or possessing them in that sense at all. I am interested in making them.
Chuck Grimes