A UBI is a form of collective care and helps undo the “maternal death drive” that is caused by a lack of care

At the end of The Problem with Work, Weeks’ argument drives towards the notion of a basic income and a call for shorter working hours. Calls for basic income have circulated since the sixteenth century,Footnote5 and in the contemporary period arguments about uncoupling income from the wage system have been part of national debate since the 1960’s in the U.S., and the 1980’s in Northern Europe. The idea behind the basic income is that a universal basic payment is made for participation in the production of value, above and beyond what wages can measure and reward. Weeks’ real innovation, however, which she mentions in the closing pages of the book, and therefore remains an intriguing opening rather than a fully worked through theory, is to rethink the common production of value, and substitute for value the common reproduction of life. The ‘life’ that Weeks substitutes for ‘value’ is the life alluded to in the colloquial phrase ‘get a life’. She acknowledges that ‘life’ does not lie outside of biopower, and is neither exterior to work, nor captured by the notion of life that proliferates in vitalist philosophies that emerge from a Spinozist tradition of thought. Rather ‘life’ refers to the notion of striving for a ‘full life’ that is ‘common to and shared with others without being the same as others’ (Weeks Citation2011, 232). A ‘full life’ would include, but not be subsumed by reproduction or work. By considering life as a counterpoint to value, she suggests a political project that might frame the antiwork critiques and postwork imaginaries represented by demands for basic income and shorter hours:

Perhaps more important from the point of view of my argument, the collective effort to get a life can serve as a way both to contest the existing terms of the work society and to struggle to build something new. (Weeks Citation2011, 233)

Postwork, as an extension of the refusal of work, is then ‘a utopianism that replaces socialism as the horizon of revolutionary possibility and speculation’. The call is not for more conventional ‘family time’, or the time to care and nurture others, but for the denaturalisation of both the 8-hour day, and the privatisation and gendering of reproductive labour. Weeks notes the collective endeavour in getting a life – lives are relational, and cannot be acquired, possessed or held onto at the level of the individual: ‘A life […] always exceeds what we have, and its getting is thus necessarily an incomplete process’ (Weeks Citation2011, 233). Postwork is a speculative horizon that resists closure or appropriation and remains committed to difference, futurity and excess.

The maternal death drive

Although Weeks does not explicitly situate her notion of ‘postwork’ within contemporary discussions of the problem of time, I think postwork is political to the extent that it suggests we re-think the relations between time, work, reproduction and care. Challenging the infiltration of work into every experience of time, as well as denaturalising the privatisation and gendering of care suggests the possibility of a social sphere in which we can all have a more fluid and shared relation to both work and reproduction, one in which time can be less ‘qualified’ in Stephen Wright’s sense, by the time of labour, thought in both its productive and reproductive modes. However, as Stella Sandford has noted, discussions about social reproduction tend to occlude the specific emotional labour of motherhood that is not subsumed by the more general tasks of domestic work and social reproduction, and have to do with the ways that the product of this labour comes to matter to the one labouring, and is no longer a question of ‘indifference’ that is at the heart of Marx’ analysis of labour in The Grundrisse (Sandford Citation2011). After all, mothering does not always feel fluid, transferable, or ‘full’. It can leave us feeling drained and empty, angry and depressed, and full of anxiety, in ways that may be difficult to share out. And yet this mattering can mean that we go back for more, whether under paid or unpaid conditions, and may drive the ways we choose to make ourselves available to the ‘again and again’ that is required to ‘get a life’. I am naming the particular repetitions of this return to the ‘again and again’ of the site of mattering, the ‘maternal death drive’. Lives tend to unfurl, in other words, in relation to other lives, and that unfurling requires the time that it takes for love and hate to come to be understood as residing together, in the same other. It is an understanding that constantly breaks down and has to be re-established, repetitively, again and again in the context of maternal care. Both mother and child come back, again and again, to the scene of love and hate. I would agree that we can and should collectivise care; we can and should denaturalise the gendering of that care; and we can and should pay everyone a basic income for their part in that care. However, what we earlier called ‘maternal care’ is not synonymous with a generic concept of care, but the name for the collective or public management of hate that emerges at the point that we can recognise that love and hate can be directed towards the same (maternal) object. The maternal death drive is then the name for the repetitive time that it takes for the emergence of a desire to repair the damage we have done to the other whom at that moment we realise we also love. It requires that someone will go on attempting to manage their own emotional states in relation to the emotional storm that accompanies ‘getting a life’.

It is here that I think the potential in the notion of ‘reparation’ emerges. Holding onto Weeks’ utopian vision is vital if we are to move beyond the ongoing divisions and privatisations of work and reproduction. There should be ‘reparation’ for the common reproduction of life in the form of the basic income. But in addition, I would augment this vision with a call for the recognition of the time that it takes for the emergence of the capacity for reparation in psychic life, for love and hate to have some proximity to one another in an ongoing motion of veering towards and away from one another that is the permanent reminder of their relation. Roszika Parker has argued for the recognition of holding together our love and hate for our children, and sees this as a developmental achievement for mothers that she thinks of as a maternal depressive position, separate from that established in our own infantile lives, and emerging through the specific experience of mothering (Parker Citation1995). What I am arguing for here is the recognition of a form of waiting time that is the condition for the establishment of reparation. If we return to the anecdote at the beginning of the article, there is the odd realisation that time has passed that can only be retroactively understood as having been the time of another’s unfolding. This time cannot at the time be grasped as ‘passing’. It is what allows that ambivalent gesture of the wave – a gesture that is both greeting and leaving. The wave symbolises the capacity for reparation – I have inevitably hurt what I also love, and I can bear it, and now it’s time to go, which is also a form of return. The postmaternal, in this reading, is animated by the maternal death drive, the capacity to wait, to bear time.