The Occupation of the Soul

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Notes

1. Jason Smith, translator of Jean-Luc Nancy, is assistant professor at the Graduate School of the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. See http://www.artcenter.edu/gradart/site/faculty/Jason_Smith/Jason_Smith.html.

2. See the Grundrisse passage known as the “Fragment on the machines”: “Nature builds no machines. … They are organs of the human brain, created by the human; the power of knowledge, objectified (34); and “Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself ” (61).

3. Part of the larger picture of a Prozac-fed labor force in the United States is the experience of pharmaceutical dependencies in the younger population. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, a study shows that 6,546,000 children, aged nineteen and under, are prescribed antipsychotics, and 9,614,000 are prescribed antidepressants. See other statistics for Asthma, ADHD, and Antihypertensive medications: Anna Wilde Mathew, “So Young and So Many Pills: More than 25% of Kids and Teens in the U.S. Take Prescriptions on a Regular Basis,” Wall Street Journal, Section D1, 28 December 2010. <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203731004576046073896475588.html>.

4. Paolo Soleri has devoted his life to creating and building models of sustainable urban architecture, which now, in the twenty-first century, are needed more than ever. See the Arcosanti Project website and links to “arcology” <http://www.arcosanti.org/theory/arcology/main.html>.

5. Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2009).