How of What / The Imposition

discussions of "work" that disregard its fundamental nature as the extraction of value from bodies are of limited interest to me.
--J Clover

I'm not the best source to come to for perspectives on the history of work. I don't know how we have gotten to where we are now from our hunting and gathering days, though I have a vague outline of an event chain. This chain passes through some grueling times, times when the work was grueling for some but not for others, other times when there was hardly any work at all, and then some better times perhaps. Even now, we may feel the shadowy grip of medieval structure, a kind of audacity of property owner classes to keep large segments of the population bound to their cubicles and factory posts, predominantly through fear. At such a time when so much can get done with little human effort, it seems more cruel that some of us to be expected to give so much for so little, and lately the rift between the worlds inhabited by social classes is at an all-time width.

At the same time, we don't dislike work, we rather like it, if it appeals to us. But let me explain.
When I use the term, work, I don't mean the imposition that is put upon us, this state we find ourselves in brought about by the culmination of many factors, in which a huge obligatory effforts are handed off to us to perform. It's been that way since we drifted from our simple self-sustaining hamlets and had become part of larger communities that were drawn together to protect us.

What I mean by work is not the imposition, but the way we meet it. With every what we are offered, we give back a how. This is a most significant point. We don't all just work the same way, we are offered a task, and we solve it our own way. This is true even when the task requires very precise duplication of a set routine, as in certain types of factory work, or open heart surgery.

Whatever it is we do in that encounter is generally a hodgepodge of things we learned since we were very young. There are so many little pieces, so much taken for granted, that it's impossible to trace. For instance, when communicating with speech are writing -- which is a big part of most of our work -- we don't have to bother with how we understand the meaning of each word, or the syntax, just as many of us don't have to bother with how we know how to type on a keyboard, or walk, for that matter, or merely stand up. Work involves all these things, and much more, in various complex arrangements.

Processes that are not work also involve very similar arrangements. It's very hard, on this level, to tell things that are work from things that are not work, such as art. We might say that work is purely our encounter with the imposition.

But it's also arguable that leisure and even art can be thought of at times as encounters with the imposition as well. We play hard, to survive working hard. We might write poems to stand up to it, or flush it out of our systems.

There is really no definitive boundary. People play when they work, and work when they play, and it would be hard to find a moment while working when someone wasn't being creative in some way or other, at least as creative as many of the poems you'll find in most of the popular journals, either on the Internet, or on the shelves of bookstores and fancy magazine shops.

To really understand the difference between work and art, for our purposes, you will have to make an accounting of both, and we begin on a very somatic level. Let yourself take on the postures and feelings of both experiences, one after another. What does it feel like when you are working, as in a typical sense of work, and the same with doing art? Compare the physical sensations of both, the parts of the body these sensations inhabit, the way you breathe and carry yourself.

This is generally much easier with some coaching, or in a mild hypnotic state, but see what you can manage.

If you can begin to articulate the differences between these two states, your working state and your artworking state, you have not only begun to understand on a purely formal level, let's call it actual, what a work process is vs. what an art process is. You have also begun your initial steps at integrating the two.

In other words, things may soon begin to get very confusing.