What is Work?

Michel Serres, Talmud, and Life-Work

“I no longer see a difference between the bee and the architect.”—Michael Serres

Michel Serres says that “work is the struggle against noise.” (In French, the word is parasite.)

To work is to remove the static that obscures the message; the interruptions that detract from the meal. To work is to sort the useful out from the useless.

In Serres’s expansive definition, work is indistinguishable from life itself. There is nothing that is not work.

Locke’s definition is a bit more straightforward—to mix oneself up with what is given (nature) such that one adds value to it and transforms it. Work is the process by which I come to own my materials.

Jewish law defines work (malacha) in opposition to rest (shabbat). Most forms of work involve changing the substance of the underlying thing (i.e., turning dough into bread). But the first category of work discussed in the Talmud is carrying—which just means changing a thing’s context. It is likewise considered work to travel a great distance on Shabbat (the implication being that doing so is a kind of self-work.)

The scientific definition of work focuses less on output than input: work is energy spent or consumed.

Philosophical definitions of work seem far from the everyday (and economic) experience of it, where work is thought of in terms of employment, wages, work hours. In the more colloquial sense, work is only what one is paid for.

A philosophical sense of work is evident in phrases like “handwork,” “artwork,” and “life-work.”

What is work to you—and how do you relate the everyday sense of work to the existential sense of work as change or transformation?

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