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Will Kitchen, "Culture, Capital and Carnival: Modern Media and the Representation of Work" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Interviewer
Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode I'm talking to Will Kitchen about culture, capital and carnival, modern media and the representation of work. So welcome to the podcast.
- [02:06]
Will Kitchen
Thank you. Yes, it's great to be here.
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Interviewer
This is a fascinating book partially because it blends a really fascinating theoretical framework with quite a lot of, I guess, sort of contemporary media objects, artifacts, films, books, etc that people be familiar with. But also it's a book that tries to kind of connect theory and media examples with, I guess, kind of the everyday life and the everyday reality of people's workplaces and working lives. And I'm intrigued really to start with, what inspired you to write a book.
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Will Kitchen
Like this in terms of writing a book about the media representations of work? Really? Well, I guess there were A number of things involved in that decision. But perhaps the most important was the idea that work had become a topic that was turning up everywhere in terms of the way I started to view things. I started writing my PhD at Southampton a couple of years ago on Franz Liszt and cultural history. And that involved a lot of examining the figure of the virtuoso, the individual who is expected to go above and beyond to impress their audience, to offer a model of aspiration, and to achieve something superhuman through dedication. And as I began writing my second book on film and critical theory, these ideas became increasingly mixed up with studies of philosophy and economics and a broad range of textual analysis as well. And I was really interested in the cultural expectations that are placed upon modern individuals to be successful, productive, and proactive. And I started to see all of this reflected more and more in the books and films that I was engaging with in a more practical sense. I guess my own position as a precariously employed academic made me search for a way of creating a sort of logical bridge between my early research and PhD and some postdoctoral projects, which were very sort of deeply rooted in theory, philosophy and history and textual analysis, but trying to build a bridge to something easy to justify in terms of economic value as well. The search for an academic post was pretty key in shaping the direction that I wanted my research to go in in terms of looking at key value topics such as labor, social mobility, the social sciences, and also the direction my thoughts were taking when engaging with specific texts. So ultimately, I'm pretty proud that I managed to make this really unusual leap from something like Franz Liszt and film theory to exploring some more obviously impactful values around the modern labor economy. But I had to write three monographs in order to make that transition in a meaningful and natural way, and one that was satisfying for me, but I think I got there. Did it strike you as being an unusual narrative to follow? So it's.
- [05:04]
Interviewer
It's an interesting book because I think it blends a slightly. How to describe it? I was going to say kind of like left field or perhaps a theoretical framework that isn't the first one you see people reaching for in kind of media theory or actually, you know, media studies more generally. But then with a lot of, I guess, kind of popular media that lots and lots. I mean, we know literally lots and lots because some of the audience figures for. Some of the examples you've got are stratospherically kind of huge. And they're real sort of cultural moments that have crossed various countries. And I think actually that question of the sort of choice of theoretical framework is one that will help illustrate precisely what you've been saying of about the book's uniqueness. So you use this frame and you know, the title gestures to it of the Carnivalesque. And I'm intrigued by what that concept is, kind of where it comes from, who are some of the kind of key thinkers and why. I suppose it was your route into thinking about work.
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Will Kitchen
Yeah, well, the Carnivalesque in this context, for readers who don't know, refers to a critical concept by Michal Bakhtin. Literature students will be very familiar with this idea from classic books such as Rabelais and His World. And the Carnivalesque seemed appropriate to me. It's basically a name for a period of temporary social license where the normal relationships of value in society are inverted. Something a bit more structured than something like a temporary autonomous zone. Going back to Rabelais, original suggestions of memorable images like putting the cart before the ox, the jester sitting on the throne, or the king wearing a jester's hat. It's a concept that's really rooted in long form cultural traditions, European folklore. And it's basically a moment of topsy turvy logic that undermines the standard temporal relationships of the productive working calendar, the mirror image of things like harvest time. And so the Carnivalesque has been a pretty useful concept for people who explore social inversions, ideology, critical studies of pop culture representations. But it often seemed to me when I was doing background research on it, that it was quite a problematic concept and one that was sometimes, perhaps applied a bit naively in terms of how emancipatory some of these carnivalesque experiences really are in specific contexts. And it really struck home for me when I discovered Michael Andre Bernstein's approach in his 1992 book Bitter Carnival. And he's consolidated a sort of pre existing tendency which is already apparent in Bakhtin, to view the Carnivalesque as more of a conservative idea, a ritual of integration and catharsis that allows for potentially revolutionary energies to be displaced in harmless ways. So after discovering that idea, the book became an attempt to apply Bernstein's hypothesis to cultural representations of labor more generally through the general lens of economic sociology and Frankfurt School critical theory. And I suppose when you have these major texts that are very impactful and culturally widespread like the Office, you find a very explicit attempt to bring some of this carnival atmosphere into the workplace, to align these ambiguous political energies and ruptures with a recognizable sort of fantasy representation of our modern working lives. So that's the connection that made most sense to me when discovering it. I was very cautious, though, when writing this book to make sure that I applied the Carnivalesque and Barktin's ideas correctly. And so although Bernstein's book was sort of a guiding light through most of the project, I did want to make sure that it was suitably peer reviewed by Barkton experts. And I got in touch with people like Professor Sue Weiss at the University of Sheffield, who were very kind in checking the analysis, making sure there were no glaring inconsistencies in the way I applied some of his ideas. She wrote a standard book on Barkton, introducing Bactin back in 97. And I was really pleased that the peer reviewers had positive things to say about the approach I adopted and the use of Bernstein, which is not an approach that's typically used in Bakhtin studies. So I think that always getting additional peer review during a project development is very important, but especially with interdisciplinary topics like this. And I was pleased that it had a very solid theoretical foundation in the end.
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Interviewer
You mentioned the Office, and I think we'll come back to the Office later because it strikes me as one of the kind of media texts that's really at the kind of core of the book. But you've also mentioned that, I suppose, effort to really kind of be faithful to the theoretical framework, but also to try and, I guess, explain it properly. And one of the ways the book does that is by thinking through examples that I suppose are kind of well known, but not as well known as the Office. And as the book kind of goes through, there's a couple of things we might pick up on. And one of those, I think, comes quite early in the book with a discussion of Orwells. So I suppose in, in some ways media theory, media studies, we're very familiar with things like 1984, Animal Farm as being, you know, kind of almost like core text for some areas of thinking about how media works. But you look at Keep the Astra Flying, which I guess is less well known or well book, or, you know, it's maybe one that doesn't have the same popular resonance. And I'm intrigued as to how some of the ideas that you've been talking around, not. Not just the kind of carnivalesque, but, you know, you've gestured as well to the limits of, I suppose, kind of critical or revolutionary possibilities in some of the media texts you discuss. So where does that kind of play out in Keep the Aspidistra Flying?
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Will Kitchen
Well, yeah, there's no doubt that I Mean, looking at all, well, Studies, 1984 and Animal Farm have got their place in history pretty much assured really, due to the their scarily precedent interpretations of modern politics and culture. But I was really impressed when I first read Keep the Aspidistra Flying as well, and was very keen to write something about it. One of the most important books I read growing up was Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. And I will always consider that a bit of a bridge between the concerns of 19th century romanticism and modern culture as well. And Keep the Aspidistra Flying struck me as a really close relative of that book in terms of its literary approach and themes. Both books offer a very powerful psychological portrait of resentful characters who are tangled up in complex philosophical debates with themselves around freedom. And what Orwell brings to this is a kind of phenomenological awareness of the experience of wealth and poverty. So for people who haven't read it, Gordon Comstock, the protagonist of Orwell's novel, sees himself as an artist, but his life is filled with a kind of impotence caused by the experience of poverty and a moral refusal to sell out and earn money that he could easily earn another way. So that's a really interesting sort of moral dilemma he places himself in, similarly to the Dostoevsky as well. And texts like that and the comparative analysis with things like George Gissing and Henry James are also key comparisons because they all look at how the worldview of the creative artist is so often mixed up with economic resentment, envy or guilt. And these are really important topics for critical analysis of culture and labor today because they engage with that element of ambiguity, of sort of getting stuck in things and with all these representations of unattainable wealth on films and in TV and in adverts, that modern desire to make everyone take responsibility for their own financial condition and the feelings of guilt and resentment that arise are really resonant themes. And I wanted to apply them by mixing literary case study analysis with a background in Paktinian philosophy and also economic sociology as well. So again, I had the chapter peer reviewed and I'm pretty happy with it and the way it turned out. And I think that To Keep the Aspidistra Flying should be considered a classic text on the modern economy in just the same way animal farm in 1984 are for authoritarianism and surveillance culture. It was a very interesting chapter to write for me.
- [13:52]
Interviewer
You mentioned James and the kind of literary analysis that goes on in the book. One of the things you do with the lesson of the master Is, I guess, kind of analyze that text, but also use it to kind of run through several of the chapters. And again, you know, not that I'm. James is a very well known author, but maybe again, this might be one of the slightly kind of lesser known or not as famous texts by him. So why did you pick that and how, I guess, does it kind of exemplify some of the book's themes?
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Will Kitchen
Well, this was a pretty nerve wracking chapter to write actually, because I was convinced that someone else must have written about the idea before. The idea behind it is that Henry James's short story, the Lesson of the Master provides a sort of model and a name for a very common idea that cultural representations often employ. That they'll allow us to take a kind of carnivalesque pleasure in seeing a fictional person, someone wealthy, powerful or privileged, in some way brought down to our level or lower. So the story is of this young aspiring young writer who meets this successful novelist and wants to learn how to be a similarly successful artist. But the master's advice is to stop chasing the things that seem so enviable about his own life. The money, the family, contentment, the success. All these things he reckons are ruining his creativity and sapping the literary qualities that he prizes above everything else. The strange thing is that when the student takes the master's advice and renounces all these worldly cares and privilege in order to pursue his ideal, the story raises a very intriguing possibility that the advice was a trick designed to help the master steal something from the young writer. So the carnival left moment here is when someone who by all accounts we should envy due to their wealth or prestige is shown to be existing in a condition that we should pity after all, not envy. That's what the text will explain to us as its own lesson for us as viewers and readers. And there are loads of examples of this to be found across multimedia culture. Some of the examples in the chapter include Charles Foster Kane and Citizen Kane, Daniel Plainview and There Will Be Blood. And anyone you might see on a TV show like the Office who initially comes across as an impressive and enviable character, even if just on account of their managerial status and implied standard of living. Michael Scott, David Wallace, Jan Levinson. And then we get our moment of carnival, our own lesson of the master. We see what unpleasant humiliations and experiences these people have to go through to maintain their privileged situations. And we think, I'm glad I'm not like them. Basically, let's leave the rich to suffer being rich instead of Us. And what this trope does is it allows us to alleviate any guilt we might feel for not attaining such affluence ourselves. And what the Henry James story really does, I think, is to illustrate this tendency really well. But again, raising the possibility that this lesson, this pleasurable carnivalesque catharsis, is actually an ideological mystification, something that deserves to maintain inequality. So that kind of. This is a dangerous question to ask. Now the book is published, but were you aware of anyone else who had tried to pin down this kind of issue before?
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Interviewer
No, not at all. Not at all. But I have to admit my end of, I guess kind of media and comms and sociology isn't the kind of literary analysis end, so. But yeah, it was kind of new and intriguing as well. But I couldn't tell you sort of comprehensively whether this had been done, but I assume not. I'm sort of struck. We must have mentioned the office, like three or four times already. And it casts a kind of long shadow. But before we get into it, I think we might jump back earlier, if you don't mind. Into the book, we talked a lot about work, about labor. You've talked about the position of the artists and the creative. We've already had an example from the office. But it did strike me, now we're kind of into the conversation, we might have a think about what actually work, I guess, kind of is, and how you're thinking about it and how you're defining it. Is work something where, you know, the office is, I guess, the kind of classic example. Are you thinking more, you know, widely around, as you mentioned already, you know, questions of precarity and insecurity. What, I guess is the kind of version or idea of work that you. You'll get into with. With the book.
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Will Kitchen
Yeah, well, defining our terms is really tricky when talking about something as broad as this. Of course, the idea of work for me took shape as things came together during the reading and research, and it began to focus around a few key things. So first of all, I was exploring a lot of economic sociology and looking at what modern capitalism was as the main defining characteristic. And so modern capitalism, from what I put together, is defined by the rise of things like economic, rational. So the desire for all things to be calculated efficiently organized. The dissolution of feudal systems during the Reformation, the expansion of global markets, and the secularization of that Protestant work ethic described by Weber and Torni. Ideas of good and right being conflated with the prudent and the productive. And economic sociology was also vital in helping understand how this modern capitalism as a sort of framework for what kind of work is in this context can also be broken down into three useful periods, which is another very important structure in the book, I think. So there's the classical bureaucratic and neoliberal periods or regimes perhaps. So the classical regime is the situation that Marx would have recognized by the mid 19th century. The bureaucratic regime is the rigid modernization of labor methods associated with Taylor and Ford and the post war welfare state. And the neoliberal regime which is defined by the consolidation of global financial markets, the rise of immaterial labor, the dissolution of the hierarchical organization and its increased adoption of more countercultural ideas following May 1968, the rise of the flexible worker precarity, the undermining of stable career models and the rise of debt finance. And this is a pretty well known standard structure used by sociologists like Richard Sennett and Luke Boltanski. So although the book looks at modern capitalism in this broad sense, there are also important distinctions between these historical periods within that that different case studies react to and work. In this context I take to mean productive behavior that has its values influenced by the cultural metaphysics of this tiered modern capitalist system or worldview.
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Will Kitchen
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Will Kitchen
Uh, limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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Will Kitchen
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Will Kitchen
Did that approach come across clearly when reading the book?
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Interviewer
Yeah, very much so. And I think it's one thing that allows both the broader historical sweep in the book with some of the examples we've talked about, but obviously allows you to do critical analysis that goes beyond the Office. And we'll probably talk about some of the films that you get into in the later parts of the book. Because though we've been talking about these shifts in how capitalism deals with work, and, you know, we've already sort of gestured about the importance of the Office. I'm sort of intrigued by something that we maybe haven't touched on, which I guess is the kind of sense of, on the one hand, the potential of media to offer different visions and versions of society, but also, and again, you've mentioned this with kind of post 68 theorizations of how work might work, about how some of these alternatives effectively offer actually kind of continuity and a lack of revolutionary change. And there's a way of sort of framing this as a question, how does this play out in the Office? Because you've gestured towards the idea of having a kind of lack of sympathy with the bosses. But I was struck reading the chapter on the Office where you're talking about, actually, there's not much work that goes on in the Office. There seems to be a lot of play, a lot of fun, despite the fact that, you know, the site is meant to be a workplace. And then there's, you know, kind of various discussions of how different types of managers change as kind of casting changes as well. So, yeah, where does that sense of kind of potential, but perhaps potential thwarted figure in the Office?
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Will Kitchen
Well, I can't really remember when the Office really took center stage with this project, but it did seem to end up being a centerpiece for it. I'd imagine that image of Michael Scott on the COVID for a long time because it really seemed to sum everything up rather well. The emphasis on culturally recognizable representations of working life, the idea of political subversion around those carnival esque workplace atmospheres, and also retaining that element of seriousness as well. Michael Scott as the boss. That sense of authority which is upheld despite the various ways it's made to seem ridiculous or subversive. And I'd watched both versions of the Office many times, of course, and saw something really interesting going on in the American version. The fact that it's so prevalent and popular on Netflix and elsewhere made it an obvious choice running for so long as well. There's more room for evolution and development and enrichment of characters and introducing some interesting narrative developments that change its meaning as the show goes on. There's an Awful lot of discussion of the later seasons, actually, which I'm not quite sure how many people stick through to the end, but that's maybe a more individual matter for many people. It's still the definitive workplace sitcom, though. And it was really when I started to unpack that connection to Benjamin Franklin that things fell into place, really. So according to Max Weber, Franklin is the patron spirit of modern capitalism. And since the local pub in the American Office is named Paul Richards, it really seemed that Franklin was sort of a patron of the show as well. He turns up as a character in one episode. And you also get cameos in the show from people like Warren Buffett. And so the show's relationship with capitalism seemed like an obvious topic to explore in that sense. And in the chapter on the Office, I look at how a number of themes converge, really. This idea of the lesson of the master around boss figures, this idea of rituals of stamina, surviving trials to prove their worthiness, and carnivalesque energies being put to productive uses. I think the most illustrative aspect of the show and how it transforms some of these political moments is Jim's transformation over the course of nine seasons from a sympathetic workplace prankster to almost an entrepreneur, really. The show explains to us how all of Jim's creativity and individualism can be put to better use and how he can make a success of himself. Eventually, in the final seasons, he starts his own business. Very sort of aspirational achievement. And it's actually a rather similar conclusion to keep the Aspidistra flying, but with a very different tone, of course. Jim's subversive pranks then become retrospectively the proof that the audience needs that he could make good if he wanted to, just like Gordon Comstock could. So there's a lot of fascinating approaches to the Office with a show as big as that, over 200 episodes, I had to be a bit pragmatic and select a handful of themes that spoke most clearly to the book's overall approach. And my usual approach is structured around a detailed textual analysis, normally about 10,000 words for a two hour film. So this book included a few experiments with some alternative methods like that, but it added a good textual variety to the case studies involved, I think.
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Interviewer
I mean, on that textual variety, the next chapter, after this substantive Office chapter deals with. I almost said the Tom Cruise film, but it's obviously the Tom Hanks film, Captain Phillips. That would have been a very, very different film. And superficially, I don't think many people would connect them. You know, Captain Phillips, the story of ship that's taken over by Somali pirates. Tom Hanks playing the kind of the lead character through, to an extent to which we see the story, but also there's, you know, representations of. Of the pirates as well. And obviously the Office is, as you've said, you know, almost the kind of classic workplace sitcom. And I'm intrigued not just by what the comparison tells us, but where did you kind of get the comparison from in the first place?
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Will Kitchen
Well, it's an interesting connection between Captain Phillips and Dog Day Afternoon. This chapter initially formed part of a three text case study that was going to be a separate chapter, including a third text on Zulu, but involving a much broader range of texts involving the connection between the world of capitalist labor and military conflict. But I ended up taking the Zulu material out and developing that into a separate chapter which was published early last year. And so I ended up with these two comparative case studies. They're actually a very similar double bill, really. Captain Phillips and Dog Day Afternoon, these hostage dramas where these outsider figures attempt to get something from the world of legitimate social order and end up playing the game basically, knowingly or not, in order to survive by adopting some of the values of their antagonists. I use Dog Day Afternoon mainly as an introduction because it provides a really clear illustration of how the. The continuity of various political ideas can be undermined. So you got Sonny, the Al Pacino character, invades the bank as a kind of outsider hero. And he's closely linked to the counterculture through his associated values of, you know, liberal sexuality, critical attitudes towards police violence, Vietnam, and in. One of My favorite theorists at the moment is Jacques Rancier. And in Rancier's terms, he affects, by performing this bank robbery, a redistribution of the sensible. He disturbs the fabric of everyday political reality that determines who is visible and invisible and who has the right to an audience, basically. And through this ritual performance of a sort of carnivalesque inversion, a redistribution of the sensible, the powerless momentarily gaining power and visibility. We see how figures like these outsiders gradually adopt. Adopt many of the qualities which associate this liberal disruptive force with an emerging and conservative economic agency. Though in the chapter, I argue at the outset that Sonny becomes emblematic of this new leadership paradigm associated with the neoliberalism that was emerging in the wake of 1968. And Captain Phillips replaced this movement on a more global scale, basically with the Somali pirates. Dog Day Afternoon had been written about a lot. It's a bit of a standard text in film studies. So I wanted to use that as a springboard to mainly discuss A more recent film that continues that tradition with the role of Sonny being taken by the leader of the Somali pirates, but with a different degree of self consciousness about the role he plays as well.
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Interviewer
It's an interesting example there. And I think you've covered some of the kind of key ideas with Dogdef Afternoon. But I suppose that the kind of question that flows from that is, is there a critical moment in Captain Phillips?
- [31:34]
Will Kitchen
There are a couple of critical moments, I think, and they're doing different things at once. The fact that Musa identified the leader of the pirates, identifies himself as the captain, he's absorbing these sort of ideologies of labor that then become. To define his. The possibilities for that character and the responsibilities he adopts. It was really fascinating in that film to see how he's adopted into a kind of brotherhood of captains by the other senior leaders. In the film. You've got Captain Phillips, but also the leader of the U.S. navy, the leader of the Navy SEALs. They all try to influence Moose's behavior by buying into the fact that he sees himself as a leader. And so that sort of framework of responsibility and using it in a certain way was kind of an interesting theme I want to explore in the book. And that also has connections to the use of language, the use of authority and control, and the use of social ordering as well. Another key critical moment in the film is the. The assassination scene at the end when. And also when Phillips is traumatized afterwards, that adds a kind of brute force of violence into the. Into the text and shows how people who, in a very similar way to Dog Day Afternoon, the ending when. When his accomplice Sal is killed by the FBI, that moment of authoritarian power that whatever cannot be, whatever cannot be retained by the ideal of geocapitalism has to be eliminated, basically. So there are elements that can be salvaged from the behaviors that the rebels are displaying. And anything that can't be has to be sacrificed in a particularly violent and impactful way in a similar way to the. The political effect of a film like Bonnie and Clyde, for example.
- [33:18]
Interviewer
The final example in the book is about a different kind of workplace. In this case a kitchen. And it's one. The film Boiling Point that has, I suppose, a sort of more direct manifestation of some of the negative effects of contemporary capitalist work that are perhaps more kind of subtle and maybe hidden. The Office has moments, as you've said, over the kind of 200 or so episodes where you see the world of things like capitalist restructuring intrude into the sort of play space of the Office. Whereas Boiling Point is a real kind of. This is the worst kind of pun. But, you know, it's a pressure cooker film. You know, you get the. The kind of sense of the oppressiveness of the working environment. And superficially, at least, you know, you'd see that as being, you know, quite kind of critical. You know, the key character, Stephen Graham's character is, you know, pretty much kind of burnt out. I keep dropping these food puns. Sorry, individual. You can see the way that, you know, this work space, this career, this, you know, kind of set of practices has really, you know, kind of ruined him. And you'd think, you know, immediately, okay, this has got, you know, a kind of critical moment. Nor, I suppose, thinking about the kind of reversals that we've been. Been talking about would we, you know, again, superficially think of this as a. As a film that has that sort of carnival esque moment. But at the same time, you use the film to kind of say, actually there are, you know, possibilities and limits for kind of critique and emancipation. So where are they and where are these double moments in a film like Boiling Point?
- [35:24]
Will Kitchen
Yeah, Boiling Point was an interesting one for me. I wanted to write, first of all about something a bit more contemporary than my usual approaches. I'm by nature a bit of a historian, so I like to put a bit of distance between myself and what I'm studying. That gives a chance for the dust to settle and see things in a more nuanced perspective, perhaps. But I also wanted to challenge myself with this, with writing about something very contemporary, which also gives the book more an obvious relevance to the world today in the 2020s, workplace environments that people would recognize every day. And in a sense, Boiling Point came along as a good choice for me because it was a film that I needed to read. Very similarly to some case studies that I had in my previous book on the Lindsay Anderson and Arthur Penn and looking at, again, these very political, iconoclastic stories about life in the modern world of work, but also have something. Something stick about them, something that doesn't quite fit or prevents them from offering a fully rounded criticism of the capitalist worldview. And that was a method that I adopted for my last monograph where I'd complete a text and analysis of the film and then look very closely at how the film ends to see if some new element or ambiguity is introduced which changes its meaning. And thinking that Boiling Point, I was reminded of that method and decided to use it again. The idea of this false ending, the ending which undoes to some extent the overall coherence of the narrative, most of the film is a very powerful critique of modern labor relations. And the kind of environments that sustain modern capitalism. But the ending encourages us to find an individualistic solution to the narrative problems. Rather than anything collective or universal. And that's an interesting point to turn on. That goes right back to Soviet cinema as well. In terms of the politics of individual representation. In terms of class consciousness as well. What Boiling Point does is a very interesting tendency to create tensions. Between different forms or classes of labor. And noting moments of possibility on auction there. So you've got the managerial figures like the maitre d and the head chef. And then the sous chef. The skilled kitchen staff who prepare the sauces, the meat. And the unskilled kitchen staff at the back. Washing the dishes and taking the bins out. So there's a very focused film. And it establishes this sort of hierarchy. And sort of a geography of labor relations. And the film plays with that kind of aristocratic view of labor. Which elevates skilled over unskilled labor. And even skilled labor over the structures of ownership. Using things like craftsmanship as a marker in value. So there are a number of nuances the film plays with in that sense. And that sense of space. Created through the distinctive mobile camera style. Only using one shot throughout the whole film. The centrality of that camera style in creating the film's political meaning. Made it particularly interesting as well. And I used that as an opportunity to look back to Jacques Roncier and his approach to film. And make connections to his work on craftsmanship and 19th century labor. It ties a number of themes together in quite an interesting way. And so with these moments of opportunity on offer. You've got to see how this labor relationship system. Is shown to be having a negative impact on everyone. Every level of this hierarchical system. But then the central hermeneutic question that the film asks us. Why is everything going wrong in the restaurant on this particular night? It can either, as most of the film suggests, devolve on a question of. Or just an improperly organized way of conducting work in the modern world. Or is it down to some individual responsibility? Is it someone's particular fault? If the narrative solution devolves upon a particular individual problem. Then it sort of undermines whatever critical message the film might have. In a sense. I'm not going to play spoiler for anyone who hasn't seen the film. It goes to a really interesting place about why is everything going wrong? And you can either read it one way in terms of someone's individual choices. Causing this or a generally harmful way of organizing the way we work.
- [39:30]
Interviewer
We've covered a huge amount of the book, but at the same time, we've left quite a lot, actually, for people to go and read and to kind of think through both in terms of some of the ideas, the kind of theoretical contribution, but also in terms of some of the practical analysis of texts as well. And I'm intrigued, really, by where some of these ideas might develop beyond the book. I mean, you mentioned a couple of monographs and additional book chapters, but also, I guess, are there kind of key ideas you'd like to kind of take forward into future projects?
- [40:13]
Will Kitchen
Yeah, there are a number of areas that I'm considering exploring. One of the big connecting threads between the books I've done so far is Romanticism and how romanticism can be seen as a contemporary phenomenon. I mean, two of my favorite theorists are Jacquesier and Morse Peckham, and they have this fantastic approach to Romanticism that sees it as breeding the developments we then see in modernism and postmodernism. And I think there's a huge amount still to explore in this area area more specifically as well. Looking around Labour Studies, there are elements of this that I want to develop in future projects. I've been writing funding bids with AHRC at the University of Greenwich with Andrew King and Sheffield Hallam University with Anya Louis. And, yeah, we're not quite sure where those things are going to come off, but I'd love to write an additional monograph on the cultural representation of vision as a idea in labor studies and leadership studies. The transition between, again, looking at a very broad cultural history between religious studies, aesthetics and modern economics, the idea of vision that has transformed from one domain to another. I don't think anyone's really written the book we need on that topic, so that's another one I'd love to get stuck into one day.
- [41:36]
Interviewer
Sam.