Speculating on Our Own Time

A review of Lisa Adkins’s excellent Time of Money in the Los Angeles Review of Books, 23 October 2019.

DO YOU BELIEVE in life after work? At the start of a four-week academic strike in the United Kingdom in 2018, a union activist paired this question with graphics referencing Cher’s 1990s mega-hit “Believe” and shared the image with a few friends over email. By the end of the first week, their creation had spread to become the defining meme of the strike. From Facebook and Twitter, it migrated to IRL signs and could soon be glimpsed in news photos of pickets and marches up and down the country. On its face, the question pointed toward the threat to pensions at the heart of the dispute, by asking members to consider whether they still expected to be able to retire and what they would risk to protect that future. On a more utopian reading, the question also invited strikers — many of them temporary lecturers with no expectation of a pension even should the industrial action succeed — to look beyond the immediate concerns of the dispute and toward more radically open futures, including the possibility of a life after waged labor itself. [read more]