Just friends: In his essay for The Harper Review, David Futscher Pereira asks: “what happened to friendship?” Once marked by the Church with a formal rite of “spiritual kinship,” it seems that in today’s secular liberal society, friendship has become something more amorphous, casual, and free from responsibility. What are the consequences of such a change? Futscher Pereira examines the musings on platonic relationships of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Rousseau’s On the Origin of Languages, Alan Bray’s The Friend, as well as 90s sitcom Friends. Though some of the ancients prized friendship as one of life’s highest goods, Futscher Pereira observes how declarations of friendship today hovers beneath romance—nobody wants to be “just friends.” Liberalism does not “inherently promote or encourage friendship,” Futscher writes, but it does permit us the freedom “to choose to cherish it ourselves.” He concludes that perhaps, then, “there is hope for friendship still.”
Declan Rexer, senior editor
It’s in the cards: In a castle deep in the woods, a group of strangers comes together. Wearied by their travels, they sit down to eat, their hosts having spread a sumptuous repast before them. When our nameless narrator raises his glass to salute the company, he finds that he and everyone around the table has been deprived of speech as if by a malefic spell. Dismayed, the company resigns itself to an evening of awkward silence, until the host clears the table and sets down a pack of tarot cards. The guests take his meaning: one after the other, the travelers create sequences of cards, each mosaic telling the stories of their lives, loves, and trials.
Published in 1972, award-winning author Italo Calvino’s novella The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a triumph of imaginative narrative. Through the plot device of the tarot cards, Calvino interrogates problems of meaning, certainty, and our ability to understand not just each other but also ourselves. By the novel’s end, the reader is forced to confront a disturbing problem of epistemology: that our lives are made up of random symbols devoid of inherent meaning. We can interpret these symbols however we wish, but our interpretations can be as arbitrary as the symbols themselves.
Published in 1972, award-winning author Italo Calvino’s novella The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a triumph of imaginative narrative. Through the plot device of the tarot cards, Calvino interrogates problems of meaning, certainty, and our ability to understand not just each other but also ourselves. By the novel’s end, the reader is forced to confront a disturbing problem of epistemology: that our lives are made up of random symbols devoid of inherent meaning. We can interpret these symbols however we wish, but our interpretations can be as arbitrary as the symbols themselves.
Will Dudley, contributing editor
Working hard or hardly working?: You have recently been spending a lot of your time pitying yourself, biting your nails, and fixating on your computer screen with a list of applications in front of you. You are applying to be a “growth strategist,” a “head of synergy,” a “brand evangelist.” These jobs may appear meaningless, but everyone knows that they are imbued with meaning through the ancillary apparatus of the US workforce.
That’s according to David Graeber’s theory of “Bullshit Jobs,” a “work rant” about a suite of jobs that came to dominate the labor pool over the course of the past century. Graeber recalled that, in 1930, renowned American economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that Americans would only have to work a 15-hour work week by the end of the century, thanks to technological progress. Instead, work weeks have expanded, and so have the possible roles “needed” for a functioning corporate environment. Although the existence of such jobs is antithetical to the goals of capitalism, “it’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working,” Graeber wrote. Graeber did not see the economic incentive of this model, but he argued that it served a “moral and political” purpose: it enabled the ruling class to declare work as “a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing.”
I diagnose this rant to any UChicago soul who is searching for vindication—at least in its literary form—while also searching for a job or a summer internship. You can pick up your prescription in “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant,” published in Strike! magazine’s August 2013 issue.
That’s according to David Graeber’s theory of “Bullshit Jobs,” a “work rant” about a suite of jobs that came to dominate the labor pool over the course of the past century. Graeber recalled that, in 1930, renowned American economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that Americans would only have to work a 15-hour work week by the end of the century, thanks to technological progress. Instead, work weeks have expanded, and so have the possible roles “needed” for a functioning corporate environment. Although the existence of such jobs is antithetical to the goals of capitalism, “it’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working,” Graeber wrote. Graeber did not see the economic incentive of this model, but he argued that it served a “moral and political” purpose: it enabled the ruling class to declare work as “a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing.”
I diagnose this rant to any UChicago soul who is searching for vindication—at least in its literary form—while also searching for a job or a summer internship. You can pick up your prescription in “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant,” published in Strike! magazine’s August 2013 issue.
Elena Eisenstadt, contributing editor
Image: Georges Seurat, A Man Leaning on a Parapet, oil on wood, 1881 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).