Love and Work: Affect and Ideology Beyond ‘The Great Resignation’
New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 2024 Number 112
Love and Work: Affect and Ideology Beyond ‘The Great Resignation’
Anna J. Secor, Derek Ruez, Daniel Cockayne pages 84-112
DOI: 10.3898/NewF:112.05.2024
Abstract
Taking the scene of ‘The Great Resignation’ in the USA and UK (2021-2023) as its starting point, this paper explores how love – with its promises and disappointments, its nurture and its destruction – is activated in relation to the ideologies of work that prop up capitalism’s world. Through critical engagement with the popular maxims of ‘do what you love’ and ‘work won’t love you back’, we trace the weave of love and work in the context of predominantly (but not only) high-status, employment-based work within the unevenly gendered, racialised and sexualised labour markets in the USA and the UK. We show how the call to love work or to recognise work’s lack, while ostensibly antithetical, both offer a key to understanding the promise and problem of work’s love. We argue that work’s love is productive of the capitalist world and the violences that accompany it and foreclose alternative possibilities. Through a critique of Arendt’s theorisation of the world, we conclude by showing how love and work are central to geographical imaginaries of worldliness, and to both the rejection and possibility of other worlds after (or within) colonial-capitalism’s abolition. Our analysis thus demonstrates how affect and ideology – that is, modes of feeling and forms of consciousness that (re)produce the material relations of capitalism’s world – at once reverse into and continue one another in work’s love.
To cite this article
Anna J. Secor, Derek Ruez, Daniel Cockayne (2024) Love and Work: Affect and Ideology Beyond ‘The Great Resignation’, New Formations, 2024(112), 84-112. https://doi.org/10.3898/NewF:112.05.2024