Mike Judge’s unjustly undercelebrated film Office Space (1999) is as acute an account of the 90s/00s workplace as Schrader’s Blue Collar (1978) was of 70s labor relations. Instead of the confrontation between trade union officials and management in a factory, Judge’s film shows a corporation sclerotized by admin- istrative ‘anti-production’: workers receive multiple memos from different managers saying the exact same thing. Naturally, the memo concerns a bureaucratic practice: it aims to induce compliance with a new procedure of putting ‘cover sheets’ on reports. In keeping with the ‘being smart’ ethos, the management style in Office Space is a mixture of shirtsleeves-informality and quiet authoritarianism. Judge shows this same managerialism presides in the corporate coffee chains where the office workers go to relax. Here, staff are required to decorate their uniforms with ‘seven pieces of flair’, (i.e. badges or other personal tokens) to express their ‘individuality and creativity’: a handy illustration of the way in which ‘creativity’ and ‘self-expression’ have become intrinsic to labor in Control societies; which, as Paolo Virno, Yann Moulier Boutang and others have pointed out, now makes affective, as well as productive demands, on workers. Furthermore, the attempt to crudely quantify these affective contributions also tells us a great deal about the new arrangements. The flair example also points to another phenomenon: hidden expectations behind official standards. Joanna, a waitress at the coffee chain, wears exactly seven pieces of flair, but it is made clear to her that, even though seven is officially enough, it is actually inadequate – the manager asks if she wants to look the sort of person ‘who only does the bare minimum.’
‘You know what, Stan, if you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair,’ Joanna complains, ‘why don’t you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flair?’
‘Well,’ the manager replies, ‘I thought I remembered you saying that you wanted to express yourself.’ Enough is no longer enough. This syndrome will be familiar to many workers who may find that a ‘satisfactory’ grading in a performance evaluation is no longer satisfactory. In many educational institutions, for instance, if after a classroom observation a teacher is graded as ‘satisfactory’, they will be required to undertake training prior to a reassessment.
Initially, it might appear to be a mystery that bureaucratic measures should have intensified under neoliberal governments that have presented themselves as anti-bureaucratic and anti- Stalinist. Yet new kinds of bureaucracy – ‘aims and objectives’, ‘outcomes’, ‘mission statements’ – have proliferated, even as neoliberal rhetoric about the end of top-down, centralized control has gained pre-eminence. It might seem that bureaucracy is a kind of return of the repressed, ironically re-emerging at the heart of a system which has professed to destroy it. But the resurgence of bureaucracy in neoliberalism is more than an atavism or an anomaly.
As I have already indicated, there is no contradiction between ‘being smart’ and the increase of administration and regulation: they are two sides of labor in Control societies. Richard Sennett has argued that the flattening of pyramidal hierarchies has actually led to more surveillance of workers. ‘One of the claims made for the new organization of work is that it decentralizes power, that is, gives people in the lower ranks of organization more control over their own activities’, Sennett writes. ‘Certainly this claim is false in terms of the techniques employed for taking apart the old bureaucratic behemoths. The new information systems provide a comprehensive picture of the organization to top managers in ways which give individuals anywhere in the network little room to hide’. But it isn’t only that information technology has granted managers more access to data; it is that the data itself has proliferated. Much of this ‘information’ is provided by workers themselves. Massimo De Angelis and David Harvie describe some of the bureaucratic measures with which a lecturer must comply when putting together a module for an undergraduate degree in British universities. ‘For each module’, De Angelis and Harvie write,
the ‘module leader’ (ML, i.e., lecturer) must complete various paperwork, in particular a ‘module specification’ (at the module’s start) which lists the module’s ‘aims and objectives’, ILOs, ‘modes and methods of assessment’, amongst other information; and a ‘module review’ document (at the end of the module), in which the ML reports their own assessment of the module’s strengths and weaknesses and their suggested changes for the following year; a summary of student feedback; and average marks and their dispersion.
This is only the beginning, however. For the degree program as a whole, academics must prepare a ‘program specification’, as well as producing ‘annual program reports’, which record student performance according to ‘progression rates’, ‘withdrawal rates’, location and spread of marks. All students’ marks have to be graded against a ‘matrix’. This auto-surveil- lance is complemented by assessments carried out by external authorities. The marking of student assignments is monitored by ‘external examiners’ who are supposed to maintain consis- tency of standards across the university sector. Lecturers have to be observed by their peers, while departments are subject to periodic three or four day inspections by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). If they are ‘research active’, lecturers must submit their ‘best four publications’ every four or five years to be graded by panel as part of the Research Assessment Exercise (replaced in 2008 by the equally contro- versial Research Excellence Framework). De Angelis and Harvie are clear that these are only very sketchy accounts of only some of the bureaucratic tasks that academics have to perform, all of which have funding implications for institutions. This battery of bureaucratic procedures is by no means confined to universities, nor to education: other public services, such as the National Health Service and the police force, find themselves enmeshed in similar bureaucratic metastases.
This is in part a consequence of the inherent resistance of certain processes and services to marketization. (The supposed marketization of education, for instance, rests on a confused and underdeveloped analogy: are students the consumers of the service or its product?) The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for inter- vention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureau- cracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short- circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the gener- ation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be charac- terized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. As Marshall Berman explained, describing Stalin’s White Sea Canal project of 1931-33:
Stalin seems to have been so intent on creating a highly visible symbol of development that he pushed and squeezed the project in ways that only retarded the development of the project. Thus the workers and the engineers were never allowed the time, money or equipment necessary to build a canal that would be deep enough and safe enough to carry twentieth-century cargoes; consequently, the canal has never played any significant role in Soviet commerce or
industry. All the canal could support, apparently, were tourist steamers, which in the 1930s were abundantly stocked with Soviet and foreign writers who obligingly proclaimed the glories of the work. The canal was a triumph of publicity; but if half the care that went into the public relations campaign had been devoted to the work itself, there would have been far fewer victims and far more real developments – and the project would have been a genuine tragedy, rather than a brutal farce in which real people were killed by pseudo- events.
In a strange compulsion to repeat, the ostensibly anti-Stalinist neoliberal New Labour government has shown the same tendency to implement initiatives in which real world effects matter only insofar as they register at the level of (PR) appearance. The notorious ‘targets’ which the New Labour government was so enthusiastic in imposing are a case in point. In a process that repeats itself with iron predictability everywhere that they are installed, targets quickly cease to be a way of measuring performance and become ends in themselves. Anxiety about falling standards in school examinations is now a regular feature of the summertime in Britain. Yet if students are less skilled and knowledgeable than their predecessors, this is due not to a decline in the quality of examinations per se, but to the fact that all of the teaching is geared towards passing the exams. Narrowly focused ‘exam drill’ replaces a wider engagement with subjects. Similarly, hospitals perform many routine procedures instead of a few serious, urgent operations, because this allows them to hit the targets they are assessed on (operating rates, success rates and reduction in waiting time) more effectively.
It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.
Here, Žižek’s elaboration of Lacan’s concept of the ‘big Other’ is crucial. The big Other is the collective fiction, the symbolic structure, presupposed by any social field. The big Other can never be encountered in itself; instead, we only ever confront its stand-ins. These representatives are by no means always leaders. In the example of the White Sea Canal above, for instance, it wasn’t Stalin himself who was the representative of the big Other so much as the Soviet and foreign writers who had to be persuaded of the glories of the project. One important dimension of the big Other is that it does not know everything. It is this constitutive ignorance of the big Other that allows public relations to function. Indeed, the big Other could be defined as the consumer of PR and propaganda, the virtual figure which is required to believe even when no individual can. To use one of Žižek’s examples: who was it, for instance, who didn’t know that Really Existing Socialism (RES) was shabby and corrupt? Not any of the people, who were all too aware of its shortcomings; nor any of the government administrators, who couldn’t but know. No, it was the big Other who was the one deemed not to know – who wasn’t allowed to know – the quotidian reality of RES. Yet the distinction between what the big Other knows, i.e. what is officially accepted, and what is widely known and experienced by actual individuals, is very far from being ‘merely’ emptily formal; it is the discrepancy between the two that allows ‘ordinary’ social reality to function. When the illusion that the big Other did not know can no longer be maintained, the incorporeal fabric holding the social system together disinte- grates. This is why Khrushchev’s speech in 1965, in which he ‘admitted’ the failings of the Soviet state, was so momentous. It is not as if anyone in the party was unaware of the atrocities and corruption carried out in its name, but Khrushchev’s announcement made it impossible to believe any more that the big Other was ignorant of them.
So much for Really Existing Socialism – but what of Really
Existing Capitalism? One way to understand the ‘realism’ of
capitalist realism is in terms of the claim to have given up belief
in the big Other. Postmodernism can be construed as the name
for the complex of crises that the decline in the belief in the big
Other has triggered, as Lyotard’s famous formulation of the
postmodern condition – ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ –
suggests. Jameson, of course, would argue that the ‘incredulity
towards metanarratives’ is one expression of the ‘cultural logic of
late capitalism’, a consequence of the switch into the post-Fordist
mode of capital accumulation. Nick Land gives one of the most
euphoric accounts of the ‘postmodern meltdown of culture into
the economy’. In Land’s work, a cybernetically upgraded
invisible hand is progressively eliminating centralized state
power. Land’s 90s texts synthesized cybernetics, complexity
theory, cyberpunk fiction and neoliberalism to construct a vision
of capital planetary artificial intelligence: a vast, supple,
endlessly fissile system which renders human will obsolete. In
his manifesto for nonlinear, decentered Capital, ‘Meltdown’,
Land invokes a ‘massively distributed matrix-networked
tendency oriented to disabling ROM command-control programs
sustaining all macro- and micro-governmental entities, globally
concentrating themselves as the Human Security System’. This is
capitalism as a shattering Real, in which (viral, digital) signals
circulate on self-sustaining networks which bypass the Symbolic,
and therefore do not require the big Other as guarantor. It is
Deleuze and Guattari’s Capital as ‘Unnamable Thing’, but
without the forces of reterritorialization and anti-production
which they argued were constitutive of capitalism. One of the
problems of Land’s position is also what is most interesting about
it: precisely that it posits a ‘pure’ capitalism, a capitalism which
is only inhibited and blocked by extrinsic, rather than internal,
elements (according to Land’s logic, these elements are atavisms
that will eventually be consumed and metabolized by Capital).
Yet capitalism cannot be ‘purified’ in this way; strip away the
forces of anti-production and capitalism disappears with them.
Similarly, there is no progressive tendency towards an
‘unsheathing’ of capitalism, no gradual unmasking of Capital as
it ‘really’ is: rapacious, indifferent, inhuman. On the contrary, the
essential role of the ‘incorporeal transformations’ effectuated by
PR, branding and advertising in capitalism suggests that, in
order to operate effectively, capitalism’s rapacity depends upon
various forms of sheathing. Really Existing Capitalism is marked
by the same division which characterized Really Existing
Socialism, between, on the one hand, an official culture in which
capitalist enterprises are presented as socially responsible and
caring, and, on the other, a widespread awareness that companies
are actually corrupt, ruthless, etc. In other words, capitalist
postmodernity is not quite as incredulous as it would appear to
be, as the jeweler Gerald Ratner famously found to his
cost.
Ratner precisely tried to circumvent the Symbolic and ‘tell it how it is’, describing the inexpensive jewelry his shops sold as ‘crap’ in an after-dinner speech. But the consequence of Ratner making this judgment official were immediate, and serious - £500m was wiped off the value of the company and he lost his job. Customers might previously have known that the jewelry Ratners sold was poor quality, but the big Other didn’t know; as soon as it did, Ratners collapsed.
Vernacular postmodernism has dealt with the ‘crisis of symbolic efficiency’ in a far less intense way than Nick Land, through metafictional anxieties about the function of the author, and in television programs or films which expose the mecha- nisms of their own productions and reflexively incorporate discussions of their own status as commodities. But postmod- ernism’s supposed gestures of demystification do not evince sophistication so much as a certain naivety, a conviction that there were others, in the past, who really believed in the Symbolic. In fact, of course, ‘symbolic efficiency’ was achieved precisely by maintaining a clear distinction between a material- empirical causality, and another, incorporeal causality proper to the Symbolic. Žižek gives the example of a judge: ‘I know very well that things are the way I see them, that this person is a corrupted weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him’. However, postmodernism’s
cynical reduction to reality ... falls short: when a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of the Institution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of judge if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. Lacan aims at this paradox with his ‘les non-dupes errent’: those who do not allow themselves to be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction, who continue to believe their eyes, are the ones who err most. A cynic who ‘believes only his eyes’ misses the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, and how it structures our experience of reality.
Much of Baudrillard’s work was a commentary on this same effect: the way in which the abolition of the Symbolic led not to a direct encounter with the Real, but to a kind of hemorrhaging of the Real. For Baudrillard, phenomena such as fly on the wall documentaries and political opinion polls – both of which claimed to present reality in an unmediated way – would always pose an insoluble dilemma. Did the presence of the cameras affect the behavior of those being filmed? Would the publication of poll results affect the future behavior of voters? Such questions were undecidable, and therefore ‘reality’ would always be elusive: at the very moment when it seemed that it was being grasped in the raw, reality transformed into what Baudrillard, in a much misunderstood neologism, called ‘hyperreality’. Uncannily echoing Baudrillard’s fixations, the most successful reality television programs ended up fusing fly on the wall documentary elements with interactive polling. In effect, there are two levels of ‘reality’ in these shows: the unscripted behavior of the ‘real life’ participants onscreen, and the unpredictable responses of the audience at home, which in turn affect the behavior of the onscreen participants. Yet reality TV is contin- ually haunted by questions about fiction and illusion: are the participants acting, suppressing certain aspects of their person- ality in order to appear more appealing to us, the audience? And have the audience’s votes been accurately registered, or is there some kind of a fix? The slogan that the Big Brother TV show uses – ‘You decide’ – captures perfectly the mode of control by feedback that, according to Baudrillard, has replaced old centralized forms of power. We ourselves occupy the empty seat of power, phoning and clicking in our responses. TV’s Big Brother had superseded Orwell’s Big Brother. We the audience are not subjected to a power that comes from outside; rather, we are integrated into a control circuit that has our desires and prefer- ences as its only mandate – but those desires and preferences are returned to us, no longer as ours, but as the desires of the big Other. Clearly, these circuits are not confined to television: cyber- netic feedback systems (focus groups, demographic surveys) are now integral to the delivery of all ‘services’, including education and government.
This returns us to the issue of post-Fordist bureaucracy. There is of course a close relationship between bureaucracy – the discourse of officialdom – and the big Other. Witness two of Žižek’s own examples of the big Other at work: a low-level official who, having not been informed of a promotion, says ‘Sorry, I have not yet been properly informed about this new measure, so I can’t help you...’; a woman who believed that she was suffering bad luck because of the number of her house, who could not be satisfied by simply repainting a different number herself , because ‘it has to be done properly, by the responsible state institution...’ We are all familiar with bureaucratic libido, with the enjoyment that certain officials derive from this position of disavowed responsibility (‘it’s not me, I’m afraid, it’s the regulations’). The frustration of dealing with bureaucrats often arises because they themselves can make no decisions; rather, they are permitted only to refer to decisions that have always- already been made (by the big Other). Kafka was the greatest writer on bureaucracy because he saw that this structure of disavowal was inherent to bureaucracy. The quest to reach the ultimate authority who will finally resolve K’s official status can never end, because the big Other cannot be encountered in itself: there are only officials, more or less hostile, engaged in acts of interpretation about what the big Other’s intentions. And these acts of interpretation, these deferrals of responsibility, are all that the big Other is.
If Kafka is valuable as a commentator on totalitarianism, it is by revealing that there was a dimension of totalitarianism which cannot be understood on the model of despotic command. Kafka’s purgatorial vision of a bureaucratic labyrinth without end chimes with Žižek’s claim that the Soviet system was an ‘empire of signs’, in which even the Nomenklatura themselves – including Stalin and Molotov – were engaged in interpreting a complex series of social semiotic signals. No-one knew what was required; instead, individuals could only guess what particular gestures or directives meant. What happens in late capitalism, when there is no possibility of appealing, even in principle, to a final authority which can offer the definitive official version, is a massive intensification of that ambiguity. As an example of this syndrome, let us turn once more to Further Education. At a meeting between Trade Union officials, college Principals and Members of Parliament, the Learning and Skills Council (LSC), the quango at the heart of the FE funding labyrinth, came in for particular attack. Neither the teachers, nor the Principals, nor the MPs could determine how particular directives had generated themselves, since they are not there in government policy itself. The answer was that the LSC ‘interpreted’ the instructions issued by the Department for Education and Skills. These interpreta- tions then achieve the strange autonomy peculiar to bureaucracy. On the one hand, bureaucratic procedures float freely, independent of any external authority; but that very autonomy means that they assume a heavy implacability, a resistance to any amendment or questioning.
The proliferation of auditing culture in post Fordism indicates that the demise of the big Other has been exaggerated. Auditing can perhaps best be conceived of as fusion of PR and bureaucracy, because the bureaucratic data is usually intended to fulfill a promotional role: in the case of education, for example, exam results or research ratings augment (or diminish) the prestige of particular institutions. The frustration for the teacher is that it seems as if their work is increasingly aimed at impressing the big Other which is collating and consuming this ‘data’. ‘Data’ has been put in inverted commas here, because much of the so-called information has little meaning or application outside the parameters of the audit: as Eeva Berglund puts it, ‘the infor- mation that audit creates does have consequences even though it is so shorn of local detail, so abstract, as to be misleading or meaningless – except, that is, by the aesthetic criteria of audit itself’.
New bureaucracy takes the form not of a specific, delimited function performed by particular workers but invades all areas of work, with the result that – as Kafka prophesied – workers become their own auditors, forced to assess their own perfor- mance. Take, for example, the ‘new system’ that OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) uses to inspect Further Education colleges. Under the old system, a college would have a ‘heavy’ inspection once every four years or so, i.e. one involving many lesson observations and a large number of inspectors present in the college. Under the new, ‘improved’ system, if a college can demonstrate that its internal assessment systems are effective, it will only have to undergo a ‘light’ inspection. But the downside of this ‘light’ inspection is obvious – surveillance and monitoring are outsourced from OFSTED to the college and ultimately to lecturers themselves, and become a permanent feature of the college structure (and of the psychology of individual lecturers). The difference between the old/heavy and new/light inspection system corresponds precisely to Kafka’s distinction between ostensible acquittal and indefinite postponement, outlined above. With ostensible acquittal, you petition the lower court judges until they grant you a non-binding reprieve. You are then free from the court, until the time when your case is re-opened. Indefinite postponement, meanwhile, keeps your case at the lowest level of the court, but at the cost of an anxiety that has never ends. (The changes in OFSTED inspections are mirrored by in the change from the Research Assessment Exercise to the Research Excellence Framework in higher education: periodic assessment will be superseded by a permanent and ubiquitous measurement which cannot help but generate the same perpetual anxiety.)
In any case, it is not as if the ‘light’ inspection is in any sense preferable for staff than the heavy one. The inspectors are in the college for the same amount of time as they were under the old system. The fact that there are fewer of them does nothing to alleviate the stress of the inspection, which has far more to do with the extra bureaucratic window-dressing one has to do in anticipation of a possible observation than it has to do with any actual observation itself. The inspection, that is to say, corre- sponds precisely to Foucault’s account of the virtual nature of surveillance in Discipline And Punish. Foucault famously observes there that there is no need for the place of surveillance to actually be occupied. The effect of not knowing whether you will be observed or not produces an introjection of the surveillance apparatus. You constantly act as if you are always about to be observed. Yet, in the case of school and university inspections, what you will be graded on is not primarily your abilities as a teacher so much as your diligence as a bureaucrat. There are other bizarre effects. Since OFSTED is now observing the college’s self-assessment systems, there is an implicit incentive for the college to grade itself and its teaching lower than it actually deserves. The result is a kind of postmodern capitalist version of Maoist confessionalism, in which workers are required to engage in constant symbolic self-denigration. At one point, when our line manager was extolling the virtues of the new, light inspection system, he told us that the problem with our depart- mental log-books was that they were not sufficiently self-critical. But don’t worry, he urged, any self-criticisms we make are purely symbolic, and will never be acted upon; as if performing self- flagellation as part of a purely formal exercise in cynical bureau- cratic compliance were any less demoralizing.
In the post-Fordist classroom, the reflexive impotence of the students is mirrored by reflexive impotence of the teachers. De Angelis and Harvie report that
practices and requirements of standardisation and surveil- lance obviously impose a huge burden of work on academics and few are happy about it. There have been a number of responses. Managers have frequently suggested there is no alternative (TINA) and have perhaps suggested that what we need to do is ‘work smarter, not harder’. This seductive slogan, introduced to dampen staff resistance to further change which in their (our) experience has a devastating effects on working conditions, attempts to couple the need for ‘change’ (restructuring and innovation) in order to meet the budget pressure and increase ‘competitiveness’, with staff’s resistance not only to worsening of their condition of work, but also to the educational and academic ‘meaninglessness’ of the ‘changes’.
The invocation of the idea that ‘there is no alternative’, and the recommendation to ‘work smarter, not harder’, shows how capitalist realism sets the tone for labor disputes in post- Fordism. Ending the inspection regime, one lecturer sardonically remarked, seems more impossible than ending slavery was. Such fatalism can only be challenged if a new (collective) political subject emerges.