Chapter 1.Homo Faber and the Work of Cinema
CHAPTER 1 Homo Faber and the Work of Cinema Discourses on work from Plato to Marx and Engels Everybody seems to know what ‘work’ means, but this concept is difficult to pinpoint. As Maurice Godelier observes, in Indo-European languages, general terms such as the English verb ‘to work’ and the French ‘travailler’ entered dictionaries relatively late, replacing words that referred to varied types of activities, for example agricultural work and artisanal work. In most languages there are still two words used for similar activities; in English these are ‘work’ and ‘labour’. The word ‘labour’, derived from the Latin ‘laborare’, imparts a sense of pain. Work does not have negative connotations; work is regarded as ennobling, as in the phrase ‘right to work’. Labour is associated with physical effort, with toil and giving birth, while work can be manual, skilled, intellectual or artistic (Godelier 1980: 164–69; see also Arendt 1958: 79–174). Labour tends to be measurable, while work is not. Phrases such as ‘voluntary work’ and ‘charity work’ are common while ‘voluntary labour’ and ‘charity labour’ are extremely rare, suggesting that we equate labour with ‘paid employment’, while work can be both paid and unpaid. However, since the age of industrialisation, ‘paid employment’ is the dominating connotation of both work and labour (Joyce 1987: 1). Labour is also shorthand for ‘those who labour’, just as capital is shorthand for ‘those who live from their capital’. People need work to survive materially and socially, and to transform their environment – to exist and progress. However, the questions of how much work is needed, who should undertake the required tasks and how they should be organised are a matter of debate, conveyed in religious systems, philosophical works, folk tales and proverbs, as well as legal documents, economic treaties and managerial manuals.
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