To desert the workplace was the mot d’ordre of the 1970s, in Italy and elsewhere. This was the decade that brought to full fruition the protests of the 1960s, to become the fertile ground for full-fledged experimentations with new modes of work and life, against the work ethic and with it, against a society centered on productivity, respectability, and the nuclear family as the locus of reproduction (Weeks, 2011). The 1960s and 1970s were a time of contestation of these values and of the organization of time that had been put in place by Fordism from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, with its rigorous division of work and of leisure.
In Italy this multi-faceted refusal of work was put into practice in the factories of the industrial north, reaching its most intense moment in the “hot Autumn” of 1969, only to continue through the following decade with many more strikes, this time not only in factories but also increasingly in universities. The refusal of work was also at the center of the theoretical reflection of intellectuals such as Mario Tronti (Tronti, 1966), Antonio Negri (Hardt and Negri, 2000) and Paolo Virno (Virno, 1994), as well as in the feminist activism and writings of the members of the Wages for Housework movement, which demanded that women’s domestic labor be recognized as labor (James and Fortunati, 1981). By the end of the 1970s if not earlier, conditions had changed: 1973 brought the global oil crisis, extreme price inflation, the devaluation of the lira and an extended period of economic contraction and ‘austerity,’ all accompanied, particularly in Italy, by the repression of all of the adversarial movements, of workers, students, women and the unemployed that had emerged with the new class recomposition which had characterized the boom years. With the 1980s and 1990s, when a new global neoliberal zeitgeist worked to render everything and every aspect of human life marketable, and as work became increasingly scarce, the refusal of work in the terms of the 1970’s became by and large unthinkable. On the one hand, the scarcity of work leads to constant instability in the life of the worker. On the other hand, this precarization of life, in turn, produces an increasingly “flexible” worker who is willing to be fully identified with his or her work, whose very desire, as Franco Berardi affirms, «is invested in work» (Berardi, 2009, 21). Since the 1980s neoliberal globalizing consensus, the outsourcing of both factory labor and office work (such as call centers), the automation of work through computerization and more recently the arrival on the scene of artificial intelligence, working conditions have if anything worsened, and work has become everywhere insecure and more occasional. With the arrival of what has come to be known as “platform capitalism,” modelled on vast data extraction and networked effectiveness in particular, labor in some instances has reverted to something like the forms that characterized it in the Victorian period: once again workers (in the “gig economy”) are paid piecemeal and only for the tasks they actually perform. The “reserve army of the unemployed,” which Marx studied and considered an integral component of the capitalist labor force, structurally maintained by the system in order to the employed workers compliant and in line (Marx, 1997), is now a global phenomenon, and has in this expanded form taken the center stage, ready to work under any conditions and for any wages.
In this new economic and global cultural context, acts of the refusal of work have assumed different, unexpected and diverse forms, usually more individual than collective, and much more sporadic and limited in time. Above all, such refusal appears only intermittently. In this essay I wish to focus on two examples of how this intermittence has been represented in cinema and in a contemporary art installation: the German director Wim Wenders’ 2023 film about a worker in modern-day Japan, Perfect Days, and the Italian artist Gian Maria Tosatti’s art installation, chosen to represent Italy at the Venice Biennale d’Arte of 2022, History of Night and Destiny of the Comets. Both texts are centered on an act of refusal of work and of the work ethic as it is currently understood in the capitalist work system. These acts contradict the values of productivity, efficiency, and success by which we are asked to live. In Wenders’ film the protagonist gives up the neoliberal idea of work as a form of self-valorization and self-realization, and rather chooses to erase his value-producing self for a life that appears to be close to the values of Zen Buddhism. Yet the protagonist’s frugal and contented life is still thoroughly centered on his humble work, now transformed into a pacifying and fulfilling activity, in an act I wish to call the Zen of work.
Both in Perfect Days and in an earlier film Tokyo-ga (1982), Wim Wenders turns to Japan as a westerner in search of a country of the mind. Here, in the midst of the city’s hypermodernity, he searches for the images that master film maker Yasujiro Ozu, Wenders’ putative mentor, had captured half a century earlier, and that are, he discovers, now fast disappearing. Wenders looks for the traces of a pre-modern Japan and its Zen past in any sign he can recognize, and which he finds, for example, in the character “Mu” (“nothingness, the void”), that is etched on Ozu’s gravestone; he then attempts to exemplify such a value in the story of Hirayama, the hero and almost the sole character of Wender’s film Perfect Days. The film’s narrative focus on the Zen approach to modern work, and the location of such an approach in Japan, is reminiscent of various accounts by western intellectuals, from Phillipe Sollers and Julia Kristeva to Michel Foucault in the sixties and seventies, during their journeys in Asia. It intersects for example with Roland Barthes’ outline of the significance of the East in his book The Neutral, based on his lecture course at the Collège de France of 1977-78. For Barthes, both Zen Buddhism and Taoism are inscriptions of “the Neutral” «that which outplays the paradigm» (Barthes, 2005, p. 16) that is, what exceeds the western system of signification and its expansion into the doxa, commonsense, petty-bourgeois opinion naturalized as the truth. The quietude and “idleness” of Tao and the movement without a destination of Zen, both figures of “the Neutral,” defeat the western paradigm of effort and progress. Zen and Tao’s minimalism, which Barthes extensively valorizes, comes from a “reduction” of subjectivity, and a simplification of life to the point of destitution. This is not a search for spirituality, Barthes insists, as Zen does not recognize the difference between material and spiritual, nor is it a search for an “illumination,” which, despite its revolutionary significance for figures such as Walter Benjamin, still operates fully within the Enlightenment model. Satori, the moment of being that paradoxically finds its foundation on the void, illuminates nothing: it is, says Barthes, «the flash of a photograph one takes very carefully by having neglected to load the camera with film» (Barthes, 2005, p. 79). Both the void in Zen Buddhist minimalism, and the image of the camera without an agentic subject behind it, are very relevant for an analysis of what he suggests is an alternative Japanese approach to work which Wenders documents in the film Perfect Days.
Wenders’ film had its origins in a promotional documentary project. Takuma Takasaki, with whom Wenders wrote the film script, had invited the German director to make a video to publicize the seventeen new public toilets designed and built between 2020 and 2023 by different Japanese architects, and situated in parks in the Shibuya quarter of Tokyo. Wenders developed the original video into a full-length film in the style of slow cinema, where the pace is leisurely and very little happens. Hirayama, the protagonist, wakes up every morning to the same routine, rolls up his futon, washes, looks at the trees surrounding his apartment, buys canned coffee from a vending machine in the courtyard, and then drives miles through the morning city to go to work: he is the cleaner of all of the beautiful toilets in Shibuya.
Every day at lunchtime he sits on a bench in a park and, with a small 35mm camera, takes a photo of the top of the trees before him, which, once developed, he will carefully file in a box at his home. Each evening he eats in the same small restaurant, goes back to sleep at night and starts his routine all over again the morning after. His body is a carapace that contains and reinforces a void, the void of his own self. He endures and even enjoys the repetitiveness of his existence in what resembles an immersion into a form of ideal monastic life. Perfect Days gestures toward an unmodern existence, where pleasure and satisfaction are centered on a lack and an absence: what is missing are the push to produce and the pursuit of transactional human relationships.
Hirayama appears to have chosen this minimalist life. The film only hints to the circumstances of his choice, but in an interview, Wenders explains that Hirayama had been a rich and successful businessman who perhaps suffered from burnout or from an existential crisis. He wakes up one morning in a hotel room with a hangover, without knowing how he got there, and he understands that he doesn’t like his life. One morning, in his apartment, he wakes up to the beauty of a sunray reflected on the wall, and watches the play of light and shadow that the leaves of a tree project in his room, what the Japanese call komorebi.
Komorebi, Wenders tells us, was the original title of the film. In Wenders’ recreation of Hirayama’s back-story, the protagonist begins to cry at the sight of the tree-shadow, struck by its beauty: “Then he realizes that this was the answer to his existential crisis, to become somebody who notices that. He gives up his expensive car, his job, and becomes a gardener, and eventually the guardian of these toilets, because they are all in little parks. Somehow, they find Hirayama the ideal character to take care of them” (Rampell, 2024). It is important to notice how, in these last words, agency is transferred from the human subject to the trees and the toilets.
The protagonist’s story could be considered a form of atonement, but also, simply, the decision to change an identity founded on profitable work and social status: now, through his self-effacement, Hirayama becomes “somebody who notices that, the play of light and shadow on a wall”, and learns to live in the moment.
Hirayama’s life becomes, even in his prosaic way of proceeding, a succession of mini-satori, moments of homeostatic balance centered on the erasure of his old self for the plenitude of the now in contact with nature. Perhaps the most emblematic figure in the film who illustrates this contact is the homeless man who lives in a tent in a park, whom we see early in the film hugging a tree. Later, Hirayama will observe him standing in a pose that mimics tree branches. In another scene, the protagonist encounters the tree man assuming the same pose while he stands in the midst of city traffic, ignored by the crowd of passers-by. Hirayama looks at the homeless man almost as a portent, an apparition.
On many occasions Hirayama pays attention to other marginal figures besides the tree man: he engages with a small child stuck in one of the toilets who he discovers crying, or with his co-worker Takashi and his friend Aya, but he does so only at a distance, if not a physical, then a psychological one. By living simply, Hirayama makes his entire life a succession of ecstatic moments that suspend historical – individual and collective – time, as well as a deep and enduring connection with others. One of his few reciprocal human contacts, apart from that with his niece Keiko, takes place when he plays tic-tac-toe with a person he never meets: he finds the game drawn on a piece of paper semi-hidden behind the mirror of a toilet, he marks his move on the paper and hides it again where he found it, and the game goes on in this way for a few days. His real sense of being present is consigned to his photos and to his dreams, both of which take up the cinematic frame in black and white to show fragments of nature. At the center of nature stands the tree, the anchor in Hirayama’s life amidst the over-lit and overbuilt city.
In a small bookstore Hirayama buys a book by Aya Koda, titled Trees; he grows little tree saplings in his apartment. Even more important are the photos of trees he takes at lunchtime.
By simply pointing the camera toward the highest branches without looking into the aperture, he offers an example of the creation of images in the absence of the creator, the agentic subject that both Barthes and Zen find superfluous.
In this universe, the human presence is downplayed, thus evoking both the Eastern philosophies and the consequences of an environmental and technological apocalypse that may ultimately wipe humans off the face of the earth.
Hirayama’s being out of step with the life of the city is amplified by his being out of step with his own time: he uses analog devices, the camera, music-cassettes, books, as well as an outdated model of cell phone. He sails through Tokyo in his old, beaten blue van, listening to music from his youth, American songs about the pleasure of a lazy and unproductive life, from Lou Reed’s Perfect Day to the Rolling Stones’ Walking Through the Sleepy Life, from Ray Davis’ Summer Afternoon to Otis Redding’s Sitting on the Dock of the Bay (“I have nothing to live for, it looks like nothing is coming my way, so sitting on the dock of the bay, watching the tide roll away”). In fact, this doing nothing advocated by the songs he listens to, translates into Hirayama’s many activities. He has refused a productive life of luxury, and lives at the margin of the commonsense values of his time: move, rush, work, make money. Yet Hirayama’s life is not the life of a begging Buddhist monk, nor does he refuse to work. Rest and self-absence are reimagined through what he does in his daily routine and through work itself. The “nothingness” he has achieved requires the perfect balance of work and life, which he experiences in a continuum. De facto he works, he is part of the working class, and earns enough to pay for rent, food, and gas. Work is lived by the protagonist as a moment of fullness, a plenitude paradoxically centered on a void, so that work is as “reparative” as free time. In fact, work is better than free time: it is a heterotopia where the reality of life is suspended and compensated by his work of care. Work absorbs Hirayama’s energies and his very self to become an actual Zen moment, and as such it is redeemed and made desirable.
On the one hand, the film celebrates the everyday value and nobility of any type of work, as well as the small gestures that make life acceptable and worth-living, without the need for the heroic and the monumental. On the other hand, a Zen emptiness, supported by the fullness of a contented frugal life, is paradoxically realized by the return of the work ethic. The zenification of work implies an anaesthetizing and romanticizing effect, which Wenders carefully creates and wants to convey to his audience. Yet the representation of Hirayama’s contentment with his life and work makes for only a partial perspective upon the actual reality of labor. His embracing of, and acquiescence to, work makes him, from the point of view of management, an ideal worker. He never complains about his salary or about the overtime he is sometimes demanded, with almost no advance warning, to spend it. He works in almost complete isolation from other workers, with an autonomy that strikes the viewer as unlikely, and he appears to have fully internalized the rules governing his job. Hirayama is a blue-collar worker, yet the focus of the film is not in any way upon class, but instead is upon the worker as an individual: yet, despite this focus, the possible fatigue and exhaustion that such a demanding job might impose on the protagonist is never represented. His being out of step with the world appears to render him classless; it turns him into a cipher of tradition, rather than a man of his time. His representation in the film in these terms makes it difficult to define him as a working-class character. His chosen self-proletarianization is rendered invisible by the director: class difference is mentioned only once, by Hirayama’s sister, who arrives at his apartment to pick up her daughter in a huge Mercedes driven by a chauffeur, to ask her brother, with evident dismay, if he really cleans toilets. In this way the Zen of work in Perfect Days becomes a spectacle for the viewer, offering us a transformed image of hard work as an admirable and life-changing activity to be enjoyed by us vicariously and at a distance.
Towards the end of the film we see Hirayama once again driving his van along Tokyo’s freeways, listening to Nina Simone singing I Feel Good: he appears to emote and even to cry, in one of the few moments of the protagonist’s affective expression in the film. Yet Hirayama remains quite impenetrable: nothing in his case can be dug out and brought to the surface. The ending represents a characteristic moment of uncertainty and ambiguity. He had spent the previous evening with a friend who was seriously ill. Is Hirayama now crying for him? He smiles with his eyes full of tears while Nina Simone sings: “It’s a new day, it’s a new dawn, it’s a new life. And I feel good”. The sadness turns temporarily into a moment of joy, in sync with the song’s lyrics: “Freedom is mine and I know how I feel.” Have poverty and work become happiness and a path to freedom? But work in Perfect Days is only a means of escape, of exchanging one life for another: it is only the contradictory Zen of work that makes the protagonist feel and appear free.
Hirayama gives up money, prestige, and social status, but his life is still centered on work, presented simultaneously as a form of self-silencing and self-affirmation. Rather, the “adversarial” aspect of his identity appears during his free time, when he photographs the trees in the park, or lies supine to contemplate komorebi, activities that make him a “deserter” of any conventional life, integrated into the modern system of capital and labor. The intense contemplation and enjoyment of the play of light and shadow make Hirayama in a slight and quiet way a figure of refusal, albeit a refusal that can be only temporary and intermittent.
The same intermittence as a sign of an alter-life, utopian and graspable only in flashes, returns in Gian Maria Tosatti’s installation History of Night and Destiny of the Comets: here it is signaled in the final room of the complex installation by the dim and unstable light of fireflies. Tosatti’s fireflies cite, and are a tribute to, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s article Il vuoto di potere in Italia (qThe Vacuum of Power in Italy, often called “l’articolo delle lucciole”), published on February 1st 1975 in the newspaper Corriere della sera, as an indictment of the political class that had governed Italy since the end of World War II. Pasolini notices a continuity between historical Italian fascism (1922-1942) and the national political forms of the postwar period, still centered according to the author on the same values: “Church, homeland, family, obedience, order, money savings, morality” (Pasolini, 1975). These conservative values have been, he affirms, maintained through the period of the economic boom, the 1950s and early 1960s, when the Italian benessere had become an echo chamber for consumer culture. The new industrial development, mostly confined to the north, and new prosperity had brought with it massive cultural change. This change was signaled, for Pasolini, by the disappearance of the fireflies: “Because of the pollution, above all of the water in the countryside, the fireflies began to disappear. After a few years, the fireflies were not existing any longer” (Paolini, 1975). The prosperity brought by the economic development also brought with it a totalizing and homogenizing mode of life, that obscured, leveled, and ultimately erased “the pluralistic archaic quality of agricultural and paleo-industrial cultures”. With the erasure of these alternative, local cultures, along with their dialects, gestures, and values, the fireflies had disappeared likewise. In a true hijacking of the national imaginary, industrialization brought with it a corresponding consumer culture, centered on the desiring and acquiring of commodities. Pasolini acknowledged the impact of this traumatic anthropological turn, whose effects he recognized in the Italians themselves: “I have seen with my own senses how the coerced behavior of the power of consumer culture has recreated and deformed the conscience of the Italian people, till an irreversible degradation is achieved.” Pasolini defines this change as nothing less than “a genocide”, a loss that can only be mourned. The disappearance of the fireflies, figures of a vanishing nature and an also disappearing alternative popular culture, constitutes a watershed in Italian life and politics, marking a mutation of the national consciousness that not even fascism had achieved, since fascism, according to Pasolini, worked on the body of the nation, but left the consciousness of the masses untouched. Industrialization and the new culture of abundance and consumption represent a total capitulation to capitalism, which the State supports. The space of power, of political leadership, is empty, Pasolini suggests, exactly because the political class fails to grasp this epochal cultural change and is incapable of managing it: economic development brings only cultural devolution.
The disappearance of the fireflies acquires a new resonance today, at the time of ecological disaster, but for Pasolini it meant the disappearance and loss of the possibility to oppose and resist the dominant culture, one which prominently included the centrality and glorification of the work ethic, and was already becoming more and more monological. The consumer culture in which Pasolini had recognized a form of oppression, writes Georges Didi-Huberman, «has become a tool of a totalitarian barbarism, that confines life to the domination of the commodity, to economic exchange, and generalized tolerance» (Didi-Huberman, 2009, p. 30). What remained then, and even more today, is only the trace of a memory, difficult to discern: as Didi-Huberman affirms, the fireflies «are the metaphor of humanity par excellence, humanity reduced to the simple potential to send signals into the night» (Didi-Huberman, 2009, p. 21). The fireflies’ intermittent signals are always in danger of being made invisible by either darkness or by the violence of the spotlight that illuminates the venues of what Guy Debord defines as the Spectacle, the exasperated visuality of capitalism as image and final abstraction, and which Jonathan Crary describes as the overlit, always “on”, reality in which we live, a reality where darkness, the night and its dreams, have been abolished by this 24/7 totalizing violence (Crary, 2013). What had been dominant in the past becomes now residual and lost, announced only by the weak light of the fireflies before their disappearance for good.
The intermittence of the fireflies’ light, persisting notwithstanding everything, and transmitting signals of a humanity that refuses to be quenched, also evokes Walter Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit in Theses on the Philosophy of History. According to Benjamin, the memory of the vanquished and of the dead is maintained in ephemeral flashes, or in the equally unenduring flash of the dialectical image, where different temporalities coalesce for a moment, carrying the awareness of a long-erased wish for a different world. Both the flash of the “now-time” and the dialectical image, like the glimmering blinking of the fireflies, reveal how fragile and fleeting are the memory of the past and a different way of being human.
In Tosatti’s History of the Night and Destiny of the Comets, the loss Pasolini perceived in 1970s Italy is replicated on a planetary scale and assumes the contours of our present moment, when any resistance to the full subsumption of life to capital and its effects is more and more difficult to imagine. This is the time when a grey homogeneity is demanded and imposed by the neoliberal version of the work ethic, which turns everyone and everything into a means of capitalist valorization and teaches the individual to understand themselves fully as human capital. In Tosatti’s work, in the final dark space, the fireflies return as a sign of hope, but also of refusal.
History of the Night and Destiny of the Comets occupied the full expanse of the Italian Pavillion at the 2022 Venice Biennale of Art: this was the first time the entire space was dedicated to a single artist. The first locale of the installation is a large, disused industrial space, whose dusty machines are almost completely non-functioning.
The visitor walks through this space listening to the recording of factory noises and people at work. An old tourist poster of Peru is glued to a brick wall. Stairs then lead into a recreated domestic space, a now-vacated working class or petty-bourgeois home consisting of a deserted bedroom with a bed without its mattress, a chest of drawers, and a squalid living room: this too is another non-lived-in, abandoned space from which the occupants have apparently fled.
The only window of the apartment looks down on another workspace, which signifies the continuity between work and life, occupied by lines of individual tables each holding a sewing-machine. No worker is in sight in this new workspace that can be reached and explored thanks to another staircase. The noises of industrial work resonate here as well. After the sewing machines room, we move into another large industrial space, dully lit by neon. On one side, there is a long rectangular pool of water, its full extension lost in darkness, until little intermittent lights punctuate this night, dancing: the fireflies appear.
In the view of the curator of the exhibition, Eugenio Viola, History of Night and Destiny of the Comets represents Italy in the aftermath of industrialization and, against all hope, signifies the dream of a return to, and of, nature. “I would give all of the Montedison for a firefly”, wrote Pasolini at the end of his polemical 1975 Corriere della sera article. Today Montedison is gone, and with it the Italian post-war industrial dream. The return of the fireflies, suspended over the great expanse of dark water that closes Tosatti’s installation, hints to the ecological catastrophe at our horizon, but it also contains, like an ancient Greek tragedy, a cathartic element. “In the end, nature always takes over. And perhaps,” writes Viola for the poster that accompanies the installation, “The fireflies’ weak glimmer is the only thing that can bring an end to the present night” (my translation). I would like to suggest a further reading of Tosatti’s artwork, perhaps even more optimistic than Viola’s interpretation: the factory is not empty only because of the end of the industrial dream and of the Italian economic boom, but because the workers have left it, in an historical gesture of refusal. All the machines are switched off, the home is empty, the working posts deserted. Is this a wishful scenario? What happens in the aftermath of work? Tosatti provides no ready-made and final answer, only scattered images to perhaps jumpstart the visitor’s imagination. In Tosatti’s somber art, Pasolini’s fireflies reappear as emissaries of an elsewhere, capable of making light of the dark, a testimony to survival: they announce a postwork life, where the past points both to something lost, and at the same time to something to come. Their intermittence makes it impossible for their light to make fully visible a coherently defined utopia. No futurity is announced, but here and now, intermittent light that appears as a portent, the figuration of something hardly readable, an elusive glimmer here and there. The fireflies say that there is still somewhere else to go, something different to do, or not to do at all.
In Tosatti’s installation, the Zen of work of Perfect Days is replaced by a negation of work. It is significant that in History of Night and Destiny of the Comets not only the factory but also the home is now empty. None of these spaces is any longer in use: instead, they can only be visited as a museum, a remnant of the past. We don’t know what is to come, but it is nonetheless announced: not as a Zen satori, the supersession of history, but as a presence in the making, which the light of the fireflies allows us to see, and to desire.
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Maurizia Boscagli is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Santa Barbara, where she teaches 20th and 21st century literary and visual culture. Her research interests include modernism, the body, materialism, work, urban studies, nomadism and aesthetics of resistance. She is the author of Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century; and of Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects and Radical Materialism. She has co-edited with Enda Duffy the collection Joyce, Benjamin, and Magical Urbanism, and she has translated into English the philosopher Antonio Negri’s book Insurgencies. Constituent Power and the Modern State. She has just completed a new book manuscript on the refusal of work and the politics of not doing. At UC Santa Barbara she is the director of COMMA, The Center on Modern Culture, Materialism, and Aesthetics.