Look Busy: Chrematistics, Simulated Labor, and Signing for Time

This essay examines the modern temporization of labor to ask: what happens to the human subject that, in signing the labor contract, resigns their "self" to time? It begins by considering comments made by the "actors" in Jean-Luc Godard's Six fois deux / Sur et sous la communication (1976) as an interstice between labor, subjectivity, and capital, to argue for a confluence between all forms of inscription. It then shows how iterability, the infinite interpretability of inscription, offers a possibility of irrepressible difference, one that can never be timed out of laboring subjectivities or the writing that gives them.