An
idiosyncratic mixtape based on an impromptu listening seminar held at
Labour Camp, part of Paul
Chaney’s Critical
Camps series at Kestle Barton, traces the relationship between
work and eroticism through popular song.
Starting
with a bucolic idyll of self-suffiency where labour is not yet
separated from life, continuing with traditional English folk song in
which collective pleasure is embedded in and resonates with the
cyclical patterns of agricultural labour, the mix then traverses the
industrial revolution, where the new mechanical tools are at first
reinscribed into this postpagan cosmology of jouissance, going on to
chart the divergence of pleasure and labour as their intertwining
shifts, in early popular mass entertainment media, into mere
burlesque and innuendo; remembering colonial slave labour and the
appropriation of its affect and expression in Western popular music;
arriving at the refusal of exploitation, the separation of work and
love into mutual exclusivity, the culminating existential frustration
of the commuter; and the thanatropic joy of being absorbed into the
machine. It ends in the present day with the queasy rapture of a
libidinal economy in which work and pleasure are once more
integrated, but this time according to new meshings in which human
desire no longer resonates with meadow and the cosmos, but is
re-engineered and modulated by a fluid media apparatus.
