Abstract
In one of the more memorable exchanges between Batman and Robin in the 1960s television series, Robin says to Batman ‘You were right … we might have been killed’, to which in a typical dead pan voice the latter replies, ‘Or worse’. Some might argue that a fate worse than death is sitting through The Dark Knight Rises only to discover that it really is that reactionary. What Carl Cederstrom and Peter Fleming have in mind, though, is a life that has become totally absorbed into the work relation. Using primary and secondary sources, the book is organized to show how everything from dreams through to laughter and political ethics are oriented to work. As they explain:
In an eccentric and extreme society like ours, working has assumed a universal presence—a ‘worker society’ in the worst sense of the term—where even the unemployed and children find themselves obsessed with it. This viral-like logic of the corporation has even spread into our most intimate pastimes, precipitating a novel and inescapable cultural malaise, writ-large by a complete, irreversible and ominous dead end. (Cederstrom and Fleming, 2012: 2)
Franco ‘Biffo’ Berardi (2011: 24), a veteran of the Italian autonomist movement, declares in After the Future that ours is the ‘century with no future’. He premises this statement on the idea that time itself has been colonized. Cederstrom and Fleming (2012: 1) begin their book in this apocalyptic tone, citing Berardi’s YouTube lullaby ‘Waiting for the Tsunami’ in which the latter says: ‘before the tsunami hits, you know how it is? The sea recedes, leaving a dead desert in which only cynicism and dejection remains’. The problem with this metaphor, according to the authors, is the inevitability of an end a tsunami signals. An apocalypse at least holds out hope for redemption and renewal. There is no such convenience for a workforce deadened by a perpetual and pointless exercise in marshalling every aspect of their character in the service of capital. There is no respite from such an endeavour, it is a total war on the human subjectivity that has killed the imagination and thereby the prospects of a way out. This, of course, resonates with Marx’s broader notion of alienation in which work does not simply alienate us from one another it also more fundamentally alienates us from the vital dispositions and capacities that distinguish human life from other species. What the authors describe is an intensification of alienation to the point where there is not the space, time nor even the mental energy to escape the predicament all of us are in, even those in the most elevated of occupations:
The academic today dutifully writes his lectures on a Sunday night, explores new ideas while half asleep, arrives at class punctually, trains himself in the art of writing, reading, and communicating. (p. 13)
The author of this particular sentence goes on to note the irony of writing the book on a ‘very sunny Easter Friday’ (p. 13). This is a more obvious example of how in their words ‘hierarchies of regulation have been horizontalised’, but to what extent do such examples exemplify the condition of the labour force in general? A problem with Hardt and Negri’s Empire, a touchstone to their thesis, is the tendency to identify any form of activity that even in the loosest sense serves the interest of capital as an unqualified exploitation. It is unqualified in the sense of lacking the precision of Marx’s concept concerning the use that capital makes of labour in the abstract for the purposes of securing profit. With Hardt and Negri, as for Cederstrom and Fleming, exploitation is more loosely connected to the production of docile bodies through forms of biopolitical control. While Michel Foucault identified disciplinary regimes at an institutional level, for Gilles Deleuze power is more dispersed and control far more encompassing having no particular location and in this sense ‘deterritorialized’. It is in this more insidious way that for Hardt and Negri and Cederstrom and Fleming the workplace has woven itself into every aspect of our lives. By such logic, writing a book such as Dead Man Working at the weekend becomes the equivalent of, say, working in a call centre or even at a stretch on the production line at Foxxconn, the plant making Apple products in China. Mercifully, Dead Man Working is not a treatise on ‘immaterial labour’ nor does it elaborate on the finer points of Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Such as there is this interpretation of capitalist relations underlying their argument, it is an implicit one. What the book does amply show is the extent to which across many professions every waking and sleeping hour is absorbed with thoughts, anxieties and activities related to work. Like Gregor Samsa of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, we have all awoken from a night of uneasy dreams only to find ourselves transformed as it were into large but helpless insects. This metaphor of alienation fits their argument that the dividing line is no longer between capital and labour but rather ‘capital and life’ (p. 7).
Lacan makes the point that there is no such thing as a free choice, that every injunction, even to do as we please, opens up a whole series of questions of what precisely those making the command want from us. In other words, we never do things simply ‘for ourselves’, as social beings we are always in degrees doing things for others. Being told to clock in at 9am is qualitatively different to being told to ‘enjoy yourself’ which comes with a whole set of anxieties as to what precisely is being expected of us. When it is the employer making demands whether to ‘have fun’ or even to ‘be ethical’, it is their idea of fun or ethics, indeed what it means to be ‘human’, that matters. As Cederstrom and Fleming, paraphrasing Lacan put it, ‘The gift of freedom … swiftly becomes a gift of shit’ (p. 41). Here, capitalism’s face is caked thick with the colours of human life, self-expression, playfulness, creativity and compassion. As Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) among others have noted, such is the popularity of what is now called corporate social responsibility that prospective employees are expected to display the same miserable daub as attested to in Fleming’s (2009) study of employees at ‘Sunray’ call centre. This is one of the examples the authors use to show how enjoyment but also principles typically associated with the left have become workplace injunctions. Sunray, for example, describes its own practice as ‘free range’ compared to that of the ‘battery’ hen-style working environment typical of other call centres. The injunction operationalizes what it disavows, compelling employees to do the same job but also to enjoy it. Personal feelings and emotions, pleasures and pains, help create an expressive apparatus that business thrives on, the disarming effects of which are further enhanced by anti-capitalist sentiments that many companies now endorse.
Cederstrom and Fleming (2012: 38) fleetingly touch on what they call ‘exposure capitalism’ regarding how everything about us is now on display but also judged. With this ‘existential exposure’, they say, ‘comes a dreadful anxiety’. This would be a useful point for the authors to expand on and extend, perhaps, for example, by drawing comparisons between work, consumption and the narcissism of Facebook, celebrity culture and so forth. This would nicely connect with their personification of the dead man working in the figure of Andy Warhol. Forever exposed, always in an occupation, Warhol, a man incapable of taking time off, was denied an early death when an assassination attempt on his life was botched. His wistful desire that the assassin had succeeded so as to get death over with returns to the point the authors open the book with, that we are all caught in a living death. For academics this is exemplified by the endless task of publishing articles of so little import that few people actually read them, their only value seemingly in the points they accrue in research assessment exercises. Cederstrom and Fleming should at least be able to avoid this predicament in that their book is engaging, accessible and has the profile likely to ensure it is read by more than just a handful of like-minded colleagues.
The book concludes with an analogy to the floatation tank, a device that deprives the senses for the experience of ultimate relaxation. But even this has been rationalized for the workplace. As the company Floatworks, cited by the authors, explain:
A float session is guaranteed to eliminate stress, leaving you with a clear mind to concentrate 100% on the matter in hand. It increases creativity, the ability to solve problems, concentration span, personal motivation and energy levels. (Cedertrom and Fleming, 2012: 51)
In the vein of Aldous Huxley, Cederstrom and Fleming’s book is a classic dystopian text. It shows a mirror to our condition and says that if we do nothing to change it the image will be fixed and frozen in time, like that of a zombie. If the dead man working signals the impossibility of the kind of revolution Marx envisaged, it should also be noted that the crises tendencies of capitalism that Marx described hold out some hope of an end in sight. Capitalism appears to be going through its own living death and surely if there is one thing we can predict during this period of converging crises—socio-economic, political, cultural and ecological—is that there will be change. The worst I would suggest that can happen now is that governments somehow muddle through the crisis and we return to ‘business as usual’. It is this possibility that adds poignancy to the authors’ argument.
The very nature of capitalism demands that the pursuit of profit takes precedence over life including the environment upon which the future of capitalism ultimately depends. But it is the fact that not everything has been commodified that makes capitalist expansion possible. As the authors’ say in reference to Paulo Virno, ‘it is only that which is non-exploited, non-controlled and freely expressed which can provide the raw material for ‘cognitive capitalism’ today’ (Cedertrom and Fleming, 2012: 16). Putting it in Deleuzian terms, the capitalist ‘axiomatic’ thrives on decoded flows of desire, a desire endlessly captured into commodity production and consumption. On several occasions Cederstrom and Fleming allude to the worker’s awareness that capitalism is detrimental to life, but I am not sure this means anything. ‘Capitalism’ has become something of an empty signifier, its laws of motion rarely identified or understood and the relations themselves obfuscated by the personalization of politics. Capital finds it so easy to wear the clothes of ‘anti-capitalism’ because the underlying contradictions that essentially bar corporations from being ‘ethical’ are rarely identified and understood. This is where critical theory comes in as a tool for explaining where the problem lies and identifying the means by which capitalism can be forcibly overcome. As critical theorists we can give the common feelings that the authors speak about an identity by clarifying what capitalism is, what it does and how by that reckoning it impacts on all our lives in ways that I suspect many of us can barely imagine.
Cederstrom and Fleming are clear about the need to get rid of capitalism. However, by claiming that the division is now between capitalism and life rather than capital and labour the dialectic of their argument remains hidden. The book makes a convincing argument about the total absorption of life into work. It follows, therefore, that we are all workers whether in paid employment or not and this relation to the labour market, as Marx recognized, is what everyone except the capitalist class has in common. It is a missed opportunity, in my view, that the authors did not develop their propositions for action from this understanding and instead argued for a more abstract symbolic suicide as per Hardt and Negri’s call ‘don’t try to save yourself – in fact, your self has to be sacrificed!’ (Cedertrom and Fleming, 2012: 71) Has this not already happened by their reckoning? What, after all is a dead man working other than a man without substance? Rather than get rid of our selves or a certain idea of what the self is, perhaps we should arguably be looking to introduce the positive substance of class solidarity in the ‘void’ of this kind of subject. Unless collective, an individual withdrawal from the work relation would simply lead to unemployment, a fate worse than having a paid job.
Unencumbered by the formulations of standard academic writing, Cederstrom and Fleming have produced a sustained and provocative critique of an all-encompassing workplace that is likely to appeal to a far broader readership than is typical of books on such topics. Dead Man Working is of real value both within the academic field the authors write but more crucially outside the rarefied circles such analyses and argumentation is usually pitched to. Judged according to the publisher Zer0 Books’ own criteria of publishing material that is ‘intellectual without being academic, popular without being ponderous’, Cederstrom and Fleming’s book is a triumph. It is also worth noting that more than any other book I can think of this is great source material for inspiring students embarking in the field of organizational studies.