Constellation 4:
RE-WORKING
Not just employment, but orientation. A way of measuring worth through usefulness. A way of organising time around productivity. A way of relating to exhaustion as personal failure rather than a structural condition. By the time I entered the cultural sector, I had already internalised the idea that valuable people remain available.
Responsive.
Flexible.
Self-managing.
Capable of sustaining intensity indefinitely.
Cultural work intensifies this logic because labour becomes emotionally entangled with identity. We are told to love the work, to feel fortunate simply to participate, to understand artistic and cultural practice as a vocation rather than employment. As cultural theorist Rosalind Gill argues, contemporary creative labour often appears autonomous and fulfilling while concealing forms of self-exploitation that workers willingly reproduce. [1] Passion disguises exploitation because it encourages workers to internalise conditions they might otherwise refuse. The institution rarely needs to enforce overwork explicitly; desire performs the disciplining already.
I remember feeling guilty for resting even when exhausted.
As though slowing down represented moral weakness rather than physical necessity.
As though needing boundaries meant I lacked commitment.
The cultural sector rewards this confusion constantly.
Who answers emails late at night?
Who accepts unpaid opportunities strategically?
Who continues producing despite burnout?
Who remains visibly enthusiastic while quietly collapsing?
Work becomes performance before it becomes sustainability.
Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back articulates this clearly. Contemporary labour increasingly demands that workers derive identity, fulfilment, and self-worth from employment itself. [2] Workers are expected not only to perform tasks but to care deeply, continuously, and authentically. Within cultural work, this expectation becomes intensified because artistic production is framed as a calling. Yet vocation can become dangerous when institutions rely upon devotion to compensate for structural instability.
The neoliberal subject is expected to become an entrepreneur of the self. Ulrich Bröckling describes how contemporary subjects are encouraged to continuously optimise, improve, and manage themselves as ongoing projects. [3] Under these conditions, productivity ceases to be something one does and becomes something one is, rendering the self increasingly inseparable from labour.
The body absorbs instability unevenly. Some people can survive precarity more easily because they inherit financial support, social safety, institutional familiarity, or access in other ways. Others become permanently overextended simply attempting to remain present within the sector. Judith Butler distinguishes between precariousness, a shared condition of human interdependence, and precarity, the politically produced distribution of insecurity. Vulnerability is never experienced equally. Institutions participate in organising whose lives become protected, whose labour becomes expendable, and whose exhaustion is treated as inevitable. [4]
I think about how frequently accessibility conversations ignore labour conditions. Institutions may improve representation publicly while continuing to depend upon unsustainable work expectations privately. Sara Ahmed’s work on institutional diversity demonstrates how organisations often celebrate inclusion rhetorically while leaving underlying structures unchanged. [5] Flexibility remains something granted through exception rather than built into institutional design.
The institution celebrates creativity while often making a sustainable creative life impossible.
What kinds of work become imaginable once productivity stops functioning as moral identity?
The question unsettles me because productivity remains emotionally seductive. Achievement offers temporary stability within precarious systems.
Mark Fisher’s writing on neoliberal subjectivity repeatedly returns to this paradox: individuals experience exhaustion and anxiety as personal failure while remaining unable to locate the structural conditions producing them. [6] Neoliberalism encourages people to internalise systemic problems, transforming institutional pressures into private burdens.
Accessibility scholar Aimi Hamraie similarly argues that built environments and institutional systems are never neutral but are designed around assumptions about whose bodies, capacities, and ways of moving are expected to belong. [7] When labour structures privilege constant availability, speed, and flexibility, exclusion is produced long before any individual accommodation is requested.
Work can become a coping mechanism as much as a necessity, especially within uncertainty or when institutional legitimacy feels scarce.
In Laziness Does Not Exist, Devon Price critiques the moralisation of productivity. [8] I return to this argument because cultural work frequently disguises overwork as ambition, resilience, or passion rather than recognising it as a structural coercion. The fear of becoming replaceable keeps many people continually available beyond their capacity.
There is also shame attached to limitation, needing more time, fluctuating energy, or inconsistency. The ideal cultural worker remains endlessly adaptive and available.
Crip theory disrupts this fantasy.
Robert McRuer argues that contemporary institutions are organised around compulsory able-bodiedness, producing expectations of continuous productivity and adaptability that many bodies cannot sustain. [9] Alison Kafer similarly challenges normative assumptions about progress, independence, and futurity by foregrounding disabled experiences of time and relationality. [10]
Crip temporalities recognise that bodies move differently and independently through time. Productivity fluctuates and capacity shifts, rest becomes necessary and unpredictable.
Ellen Samuels describes “crip time” not simply as slowness, but as a fundamental reorganisation of temporal expectations. [11] Bodies move through time differently. Illness, care, fluctuating energy, access needs, and recovery reorganise the relationships between pace and productivity. Yet institutions remain organised around standardised expectations of outputs, speeds, and availability.
Re-working begins with the tension between the realities of working continuously and a body that cannot survive this pace.
The invisible labour surrounding cultural production: emotional mediation, access planning, networking, applications, self-marketing, project management, recovery after public engagement, endless emails, meetings, phone calls, and administrative work that rarely appear within institutional accounts of creative practice. Individuals become responsible for every aspect of their own sustainability while institutions continually externalise the risks of cultural labour.
The fragmentation reshapes subjectivity itself, people becoming projects who manage themselves endlessly, optimising schedules, curating visibility, and performing resilience. The individual becomes the workplace.
David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs critiques the absurdities of contemporary labour systems, yet cultural work presents a different contradiction. [12] The work itself often matters deeply, yet the conditions surrounding it remain profoundly unsustainable. Meaningful work does not protect workers from exploitation. Often, meaning becomes the mechanism through which exploitation operates. This is difficult to speak about honestly, because many of us still love aspects of our work, still want to make things collectively, still want to make space for encounters, reflection, experimentation, and exchange. The problem is not creativity, it’s extraction.
The institution frequently frames overwork as a temporary sacrifice required for future stability. Yet for many practitioners, this uncertainty and instability never ends. Temporary precarity becomes permanent infrastructure. Especially for disabled, racialised, queer, working-class, and care-dependent practitioners navigating systems never designed around collective accessibility.
Who gets to continue working creatively long term becomes deeply political. Not everyone survives these conditions evenly; some suffer exhaustion and disappear, others remain only by narrowing themselves around institutional expectations. Within cultural work, this becomes a question of whose careers can be sustained, whose exhaustion is accommodated, and whose withdrawal is quietly accepted as inevitable.
Burnout has a history. Hannah Proctors’s work on burnout is useful here because it describes exhaustion historically rather than psychologically. Burnout is not simply an individual failure; it emerges through political, economic, and social conditions that demand continuous expenditure without sufficient support. [13]
Re-working, therefore, cannot simply mean improving work-life balance individually; it requires structural transformation and the redistribution of rest and security.
The Care Collective argues that care must become an organising principle rather than an afterthought. [14] Similarly, disability justice frameworks emphasise interdependence over independence, recognising support, rest, and relationality as conditions of collective survival rather than signs of weakness.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney imagine study as something that takes place beyond institutional productivity, within forms of collective life organised around care, dependency, and fugitivity rather than competition. Their conception of the undercommons refuses the demand that value be measured through institutional recognition or economic output. [15] So much meaningful cultural work already happens within these unofficial spaces: shared documents, conversations after meetings, kitchens, bedrooms, reading groups, community spaces, and friendships that quietly sustain practice long after projects have ended.
What if cultural work were organised around sustainability rather than endurance?
What if rest counted as part of practice?
What if accessibility shaped labour structures fundamentally instead of reactively?
Re-working therefore cannot begin from fantasies of individual resilience. It begins by recognising that cultural work has always depended upon relationships of support, care, and interdependence, even when institutions refuse to acknowledge them.
I no longer believe work should occupy the centre of the self so fully. Not because it lacks meaning, but survival requires more than being productive. It requires friendship, care, stillness, dependency, and energy.
Perhaps re-working begins by refusing to place work at the centre of the self. Not because work lacks meaning, but because a meaningful life requires more than productivity. It requires friendship alongside ambition, care alongside practice, rest alongside making, and dependency without apology. Re-working is not the rejection of labour. It is the refusal to measure the value of a life by how efficiently it can be exhausted.
NOTES:
[1] Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, 'In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work', Theory, Culture & Society, 25.7–8 (2008)[2] Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone (London: Hurst, 2021).
[3] Ulrich Bröckling, The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject, trans. by Steven Black (London: Sage, 2016).
[4] Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
[5] Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
[6] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009).
[7] Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
[8] Devon Price, Laziness Does Not Exist (New York: Atria Books, 2021).
[9] Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
[10] Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
[11] Samuels, Ellen, 'Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time', Disability Studies Quarterly, 37.3 (2017).
[12] David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2018).
[13] Proctor, Hannah, Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (London: Verso, 2024).
[14] The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (London: Verso, 2020).
[15] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013).