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Professional Subjectivity and the Attenuation of Character in J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David Babcock
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Abstract

Contemporary accounts of professionalism often gloss over a crucial ambiguity. On one hand, professional has long denoted a privileged class position, distinguishing the trained specialist from the interchangeable wage laborer. On the other hand, it has come to convey an existential pursuit of fulfillment through one's work, which extends in principle to all workers regardless of class. This essay shows how J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K (1983) puts pressure on this contradictory logic by situating it in the crisis of a biopolitical state, late-apartheid South Africa. In this state, with its dual mandate of welfare and security, character is impoverished, caught between the search for professional fulfillment and the barbaric violence that conditions every economic relation in the state structure. This tension generates alternative possibilities for the portrayal of character, however, as we see in the enigmatic persona of Michael K.

Type
Special Topic: Work Coordinated by Vicky Unruh
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 4: Special Topic Work , October 2012 , pp. 890 - 904
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

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