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The Immeasured Work of Artists and Mathematicians

Propositions about non-waged work, with artists & mathematicians

Panel: How do our beliefs about work affect the future of work?

Anticipation 2022 • ASU • 16 Nov 2022

Sha Xin Wei will ask what sorts of work that is neither wage-labor nor subsistence work would make life worth living?  Considering the work of mathematicians, movement artists and poets, we ask: what is made visible or invisible by neoliberal or economistic concepts of labor, work, and productivity.  Part of this could be explained as a measurement problem, but there is a more primordial matter, that economic activity is a distinct order from the symbolic, poetic, artistic, affective and political orders in our disenchanted age, and that one is not reducible to the other. We speculate about work that would make life worth living under other-worldly conditions.