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Very busy just now: Globalization and harriedness in Ishiguro's The Unconsoled
Comparative Literature, Fall 2001 by Robbins, Bruce
This zero-sum logic does not seem any more persuasive when it is aimed at humanitarian NGOs (non-governmental organizations) working transnationally, whatever other critiques may apply. Thus the interesting doubling up of anti-- professionalism and anti-cosmopolitanism, whether in famine relief or in Ishiguro, provides an occasion when common sense seems to stand in double need of adjustment. That is the first hypothesis here. The second is that, thanks to this same doubling or mutual reinforcement, ambivalence about work also expresses ambivalence about globalization. In other words, the doubling is a perceptual convenience making it possible to work through the meaning of the latter in terms of the former.
For most of us in the metropolis it is extraordinarily difficult most of the time to register the existence of the global or transnational domain as a matter of personal significance. If we can see it, we can't hold it in focus for very long or assimilate it to the other things we spend our days doing and caring about. And if it is not part of our everyday actions and anxieties, then it will not become part of our fiction. This is the gist of Salman Rushdie's bon mot about the English not understanding their history because so much of it has happened elsewhere. And it is the point Raymond Williams's interviewers make, in the volume Politics and Letters, when they remind Williams that even the English social novel of the 1840s had virtually nothing to say about the Irish famine, which was a direct consequence of how English society was organized, and a consequence happening only a stone's throw from England's shores. The empire was not part of the "structure of feeling," hence not easy or convenient material for the novel (164-65). We cannot assume in advance that the international division of labor will somehow inevitably show up in the cultural expressions of the metropolis, even when much of what goes on in the metropolis is arguably determined by its place in that division of labor. So if a window on such determinations does unexpectedly open up, if even a narrow slice of the logic connecting metropolis and periphery suddenly becomes visible, it's in our interest to have a look.
The "very busy just now" moment in Remains of the Day offers us such a window not only because it represents the close historical link between professionalism and cosmopolitanism, but also because it stages the intrusion of work into the intimate sphere of the family, and because this somewhat anachronistic intrusion has an obvious basis in the late twentieth-century integration of capitalism on a global scale. What we now perceive as everyday harriedness, the perpetual time deficit and time anxiety associated with what National Public Radio has been calling "the juggling act" results in large part from the so-called "restructuring" of companies, the preference for part-time or "flexible" labor and "just-- in-time" production, the systemic acceleration of innovation and cultivation of insecurity in the pursuit of short-term profit that has been called "flexible accumulation" or "post-Fordism." None of this will be news to anyone. Post-Fordism's harried style, speeded-up pace, and sense of being beset by too many tasks and too little time is not limited to the denizens of the new 24/7 digital sweatshops or to stockbrokers pressured to follow the markets in a dizzying multitude of time zones. Control of time has become a scarce and highly valuable commodity for almost everybody, and lacking that control has all sorts of repercussions for gender relations and the quality of family life. Basic acts of citizenship like voting come to seem heroic, and activism almost superhuman. Insecurity about the future, both immediate and distant, becomes a political issue of almost the same order of importance as wages. Especially in families with children where both adults work, as is now the rule, all this harriedness means a new level of generalized stress. On the model of post-Fordism and post-Marxism and all the other posts of our time, we might rebaptize this period "post-Haste."
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