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What’s up guys, Jared here to talk about
pop culture’s greatest call-to-arms for
slackers, Office Space.
The beloved 1999 film about hating your job,
your boss and your early morning commute has
inspired and comforted the souls of many a
bored administrative assistant.
At first glance, Office Space seems to be
a hilarious ode to white collar laziness and
Michael Bolton.
"Micheal...Bolton?"
"That's me" "Wow, is that your real name?"
"Yeah"
But we think there’s something else going
on that may explain why the film has remained
relevant for over 20 years.
It’s because Office Space embodies what
some believe to be the most radical form of
revolution-and we don’t mean arson.
Let’s find out what all of this has to do
with a Dan Harmon lookalike in this week’s
Wisecrack Edition on The Philosophy of Office
Space.
And Spoilers ahead for Office Space and a
19th-century short story by Herman Melville.
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And now, back to the show.
Alright guys, let’s go in to a little recap.
Peter Gibbons is a dissatisfied programmer
at an oppressively generic tech firm, where
he spends his days getting nagged by his boss.
At his girlfriend’s request, he agrees to
see an “occupational hypnotherapist” who
puts Peter in a trance and then promptly dies
of a heart attack.
Peter’s left in a state of blissful non-give-a-fuckery,
which he then pairs with flip-flops and heads
into the office.
When the firm’s new consultants meet a suddenly-chillaxed
Peter, they’re so impressed by his boss-like
attitude that they literally make him one.
"So you're gonna fire Micheal and Samir and
you're gonna give me more money?"
"Wow"
Once Peter’s promoted, he and his buddies
plot to rob their company and things go a
little nuts.
Now, for the purposes of this video we’re
not going to be talking much about the scam
that fuels the second half of the film.
Rather, we’re focusing on the film’s legacy
as a cultural artifact that speaks to employee
disaffection and general workplace ambivalence.
People don’t proudly display an Office Space
poster to express their desire to steal millions
from their corporate overlords- well maybe
that-but mostly to encapsulate their fantasy
of showing their boss how little they care.
To understand why Office Space is so intoxicating,
we need to take a super-brief look at the
history of the office as a social construct.
But not the physical office, but say, “The
Office of the Mayor.”
As philosopher Giorgio Agamben recounts in
his book Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty,
the idea of the office really began with the
institutionalization of the Catholic church.
If a priest tells you to do 100 Hail Marys,
well that could be just some rando arbitrarily
making up a number.
But coming from a guy holding an official
office with ties to the official church, it
gives his order more legitimacy.
Which is all well and good, but this construct
of the office has had rippling effects.
Scholar Benjamin Lewis Robinson builds off
Agamben by suggesting that, from the beginning,
this imbued the culture of work with a spiritual
and transcendent element.
By early modern history, Robinson writes,
“the notion of the efficacy of the office
was generalized into a moral concept that
defined the very agency of human beings.”
Doing your work wasn’t just about a paycheck,
it was about duty and purpose.
In other words, your very “you-ness” is
defined by what you do for work, and how effectively
you do it.
Now, This may seem like a given, but that
just shows how thoroughly our society buys
into the idea.
In this way, our very conception of ourselves
is defined by our obligations as employees,
which sucks.
The phenomenon of a person’s work subsuming
their identity is pretty clearly illustrated
in Office Space when Peter is casually asked
by his boss to work not just one, but both
days of the weekend.
"I'm gonna need you to go ahead and come in
tomorrow, so if you could be here around 9
that would be great, m'kay?
Oh-oh and I almost forgot ah- I'm also gonna
need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday
too, kay?"
Because why would he have a life outside of
his job?
Similarly, for his soon-to-be-boo Joanna,
every part of her identity is regulated by
her waitressing job.
Her “flair,” or assortment of buttons
and patches might seem to be showcasing her
personality.
But, we soon learn that such displays of individuality
are actually mandated by her boss.
"We need to talk about your flair" "Really?
I have 15 pieces on" "Well 15 is the minuimum,
okay?"
Here, her very performance of selfhood is
tightly controlled by her job.
So we have this monolithic definition of the
office as a place where we not only accomplish
our life’s work, but our lives as such.
Is it any wonder we might come to resent the
very institution?
Indeed, the slacker lifestyle didn’t begin
with your cool incense-burning aunt.
In fact, we see a distinctly-Office-Spacian-brand
of slacktivism fermenting in author Herman
Melville’s iconic 1848 short story, “Bartleby
the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,”
which we have opted to illustrate vis-a-vis
a delightfully corny 1969 short film adaptation
because, those eyebrows…
Melville’s story chronicles, through the
eyes of a bewildered lawyer, the exploits
of his newest employee, a scribe named Bartleby,
who, after working industriously for several
weeks copying lengthy law documents, suddenly
decides that he doesn’t feel like it anymore.
His vernacular choice has become immortalized
in literature and pop culture.
When asked to do anything he doesn’t want
to do, Bartleby simply says “I'd prefer
not to.”
This starts with not wanting to proofread
his copy, then escalates to refusing to copy
at all, and eventually culminates in him refusing
to leave the law office, where he just plain
prefers to hang out all night while quietly
staring out the window.
The similarities between Bartleby and Peter’s
initial narratives are not insignificant.
Both are low-level employees working for passive-aggressive
bosses.
Both labor in claustrophobic solitude doing
work they don’t care about.
Both appear to have a distaste for bureaucracy
And both will eventually seek solace in the
great outdoors, to varying degrees of happiness,
but we’ll get to that later.
Most importantly, both turn their offices
upside down when they decide to stop working.
But let’s start by looking at their defining
characteristic: The choice not to work.
According to Robinson, Bartleby’s refusal
to act is not a “mere inaction.”
Rather, by “preferring” not to act, Bartleby
ventures from sheer passivity into what he
calls a “second-order passivity” which
is “performed in its ineffectiveness.”
He, and Peter as well, choose to be useless,
in the very place where effectiveness is the
highest calling.
So inexplicable is Peter’s behavior, and
his apparent unwillingness to do his damn
job, that the uncomprehending, chummy consultants
decide it must be evidence of superiority:
He is, indeed, too good for his work, and
thus should be promoted.
Peter’s inaction becomes even more radical
when considered with the culture of office
politics.
As Robinson puts it, “The modern office
is the space that ensures that it is easy
to do one’s duty” free from the burden
of your conscience or the consequences of
your actions.
When your work is inherently disengaging,
he adds, “petty conflicts and trivial confrontations
seem to take on epic proportions.”
This, he notes would eventually manifest delightfully
as “office politics,” or the cultural
science of why the HELL Cassidy chews her
Greek salad so damn loud.
Office politics are on full display in Office
Space, whether in the form of Peter’s boss
claiming the best parking spot, or poor Milton
being separated from his beloved stapler and
relegated to increasingly worse desk assignments.
By refusing to engage in or even recognize
office politics - as when Peter steals his
boss’s precious parking spot, stops dressing
up, and comes in when he feels like it - a
newly-zen Peter acts like an anarchist agitating
against the very institution of the office.
Bartleby and Peter bring something else profound
to the office, as identified in the famous
last line of Melville’s story.
After Bartleby inevitably starves to death
in prison after preferring not to eat, his
former boss exclaims: “Ah Bartleby.
Ah humanity.”
Robinson argues that this line can be read
as a recognition of the fact that Bartleby,
in all his perverse peculiarity, is “what
humanity would look like in an office, were
it ever to make such an appearance.”
In other words, for an office to function,
it must strip us of said humanity.
In Bartleby’s refusal to do boring grunt
work, his desire to do nothing and his complete
rejection of the mundanities of office life,
he displays an unwillingness to suppress his
human desires for the sake of official duties.
Similarly, tranced-out Peter seems to embody
the selfish, pleasure-seeking impulses that
unite us in humanity - he acts on base human
desires in a world where everyone else simply
ignores or represses them beneath a veneer
of earnest good will and productivity.
A human version of Peter looks like a guy
who actually dates someone he likes, a guy
who watches kung fu movies, a guy who smashes
a faulty printer just for the heck of it.
It’s worth noting that these two slackers
are backed by one influential philosopher
- Slavoj Zizek.
Zizek is a major proponent of Bartleby’s
style of Political Action, and is one of modernity’s
biggest advocates for saying “I would prefer
not to” to… well, everything.
Indeed, inaction, he argues, can be incredibly
active.
Zizek wrote in his book Violence that, “Sometimes
doing nothing is the most violent thing to
do.”
If this sounds ridiculous, you’ve clearly
never been ghosted.
But why is Zizek wearing the jersey of literature’s
greatest slacker?
To understand that, we first need to contextualize
Zizek’s perspective on contemporary society.
His argument goes like this: We live in a
world of economic and political deadlock where
multinational corporations have all the power
and change feels low key impossible.
This is the net result of the 20th century,
which was a time of intense action - various
countries experimented with socialism, facism,
communism, hippie-ism, bad-hair-ism [80s],
every ism they could think of.
It brought change, much of it not great, and
resulted in our present day world.
In Zizek’s mind, all that action may have
been misguided, or as he puts it “maybe
we tried to change the world too quickly.”
And so we’re stuck with status quo capitalism,
rampant inequality, the Amazon on fire, and
Cassidy not shutting up about essential oils.
Along those lines, Zizek tends to think that,
despite capitalism’s numerous flaws, we
don’t yet have an alternative worth actualizing.
As a result, any activity that we do take
is not only doomed to fail, but actually risks
aiding the powers that be.
Zizek warns against engaging in “localised
acts whose ultimate function is to make the
system run more smoothly.”
He cautions that, rather than fearing passivity,
we should strenuously work to avoid “pseudo-activity”
that is “the urge to ‘be active’ to
“participate,” simply as a way “to mask”
the pointlessness of your actions.”
That right there describes the office work
both Bartleby and Peter rail against.
In refusing to copy legal documents or print
out cover letters for boring reports, they
are boldly asserting a truth that only doing
nothing can communicate: that the office work
which once dominated their lives is actually
totally meaningless.
While it may be tempting to tell your boss
off, that may only lead to new new HR rules,
you may complain of overwork, but they’ll
just add a pool table and call themselves
heros, or you may want to burn the place down,
but that will only put a fat insurance check
in your boss’s pocket.
All these things only make the system stronger.
The most radical form of rebellion may be
to do nothing.
Lastly, it’s important to look at the ending
of both Office Space and Bartleby.
What is the net result of each main character’s
defiance?
In Office Space, the office is burnt down
and Peter takes a job cleaning up the refuge
with his next door neighbor.
“This isn’t so bad, huh?
Making bucks, getting exercise, working outside."
In retreating from office life entirely, he’s
sought a return to blue collar labor, getting
as close to a pastoral paradise of sweat,
calluses, hard work, and tangible results
as modern city life might allow.
For Bartleby, his refusal to leave the office
eventually lands him in prison, where he spends
all his time hanging out in the courtyard.
Fittingly enough, he too has escaped the grind
and fled to the outdoors.
Sure, he starves himself to death, but at
least he didn’t die at his desk, right?
So, what do you guys think?
Does your effectiveness at work or school
define you, and how do you feel about that?
Do you fantasize about doing nothing like
Zizek, Peter and Bartleby, or is preferring
not to just a cop out?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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and as always, thanks for watching guys.
Peace!
