The Mythology of Work

Planet of Work

Welcome to the planet of work. When a 21-year-old banking intern, Moritz Erhardt, died in his London apartment in 2013, it attracted worldwide attention. What was so troubling about his death was that it followed 72 straight hours of stressful work. Subsequent reports pointed to an industry mentality that gleefully celebrated such arduous displays of commitment. Working incredibly long hours is a badge of honour, something to be proud of and rewarded by the company. Erhardt’s parents stated that they had become increasingly worried about their son’s lifestyle, noting how his emails were sent at very unusual times, indicating that he was working too much.

In January 2014, Li Junjie, a 33-year-old investment banker for a large US firm, jumped to his death from its high-rise tower in Hong Kong. Some commentators suggested that he had a rather stressful job, but it was news of an impending financial crash that had prompted this awful act. The wave of banker suicides in 2014 has been shocking, with some large firms even banning its employees from using email after hours so they have time to unwind. But the fact remains, why would someone take their job so seriously that they choose to end their life when something goes wrong at the office? How does such a lack of perspective come about?

In 2013, News China magazine reported on the strange death of Li Zheng, a 24-year-old employed by a global PR firm. He died from a cardiac arrest on the first day back from a stress-induced holiday. Li Zheng’s death was totally unexpected given his chance to recuperate and relax. But all was not well, as this report emphasizes: ‘It was obvious from the 24-year-old’s public microblog posts that he was regularly to be found burning the midnight oil. In the personal description on Li’s Weibo [China’s Twitter equivalent], he called himself ‘an over-worker in overworking season’, and an earlier post revealed that the young man did not leave the office until 11PM on the day of his death’ (News China, 2013).

In February 2014, 56-year old Richard Tally, a senior executive at American Tiles Services was pronounced dead at his Colorado home. His company was being investigated by the Colorado Division of Insurance. Not unexpectedly, the media concentrated on the particularly gruesome nature of his death. Evidence suggests he walked into his suburban garage, picked up a nail gun and shot himself seven or eight times in the head and chest. It is unclear exactly what the investigation involved that apparently motivated the suicide. But it is safe to categorize this as a job-related suicide, a phrase that increasingly appears in the daily news.

These four sad deaths tell us much about the world of work today – not in quantitative terms (for the numbers are few) but in the way they tragically reveal the ‘ideal type’ of worker that we are all increasingly measured against. Most reports about work-related death after the 2008 economic crisis cite lack of work as the chief driver. For example, the BBC recently highlighted a study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry suggesting that 10,000 additional suicides in Europe and North America (above and beyond the typical rate) have been recorded since the global recession began. Much of this has been put down to the stress and humiliation of unemployment: ‘losing a job, having a home repossessed and being in debt were the main risk factors.’ (BBC, 2014a). However, less emphasized here is the death-drive connected to the overactive ‘I, Job’ function. That is to say, what connects these cases of deaths is the particular relationship that the victims had developed with their jobs – not a lack of work, but lives oversaturated with the stuff so that no alternative could be envisaged, least of all quitting. There was no reasonable way out.

It is this perception of endlessness that I think is so important for understanding the cultural meaning of capitalist work relations today. The ‘all or nothing’ attitude exemplified in these four unhappy deaths now runs deep in our social imagination. However, our driving concern here should not simply be about grasping this facet of neoliberal reason and its ability to universalize a rather isolated and partial part of modernity (i.e. working); no, what is really at stake is figuring out how we might practically transcend this universalization, a question that resounds in much critical theory, from Adorno’s negative dialectics to the notion of exodus in Italian autonomist thought. That is to say, it is all very well to map the totality of real subsumption, especially today when it now invades our dreams, sexuality and most private moments of rest; but we must now focus on the problem of ‘escape’. When the biopolitical articulation of power creates a self-sealed world that only reflects more of the same, what type of cognitive map might help us break free from the acephalous society of work?

There Is No Outside

There is much to be disconsolate about when we read yet another report of someone dying because their job was unbearably close to them. However, I suggest that the four deaths mentioned above do actually tell us much about how a growing number of people approach their jobs in the post-industrial workforce. Whereas our grandparents could ‘switch off’ after leaving the office, positioning it as something they did among others things, what we might call the bio-proletariat view their jobs as something they ‘are’. While suicide and death-by-overwork are extreme cases, they are indicative of an idealization of employment that affects many people, encouraging them to perceive their jobs as everything. Work has become a generalizable social insistence, an inclusive reference point that relates to everything else we do. These deadly trends say something more generally about the intentional conflation of work and life in late-capitalist societies.

Standing on the outside looking in, the idea of killing yourself over a trivial thing like work is unfathomable. Over a lost lover? Yes. Ennui? Perhaps. But a stupid little office job, or even worse, a bank’s bullying letters about the mortgage? Never. Just quit. Walk away. Sadly, however, just as a troubled sleeper at 3.23 a.m. cannot help worrying about a problem at the office, the suicidal clerk too resists perspective. This might be described as a kind of capitalist resistance. The ‘I, job’ function poisons everything and rebels against what we know is actually the case. And only then does a violent end seem like the only reasonable way out. Life and labour are perfectly blended. And is this not neoliberal capitalism’s highest ideal? Those who work themselves to death or sacrifice their lives at the altar of work represent the highest embodiment of the neoclassical model of human capital. Hence the title of this chapter. A planet of work is not only a physical globe overtaken by manufactured necessity, a reality principle that has infiltrated the collective imaginary of large parts of society; it also points to an assiduous socio-political circularity that always brings us back to the beginning again, ensuring that we are never done or finished with anything.

The Antinomies of Escape

This is where many cinematic visions of the present juncture in late-capitalist societies fail when endeavouring to portray the universalization of labour today. They always posit a visible outside. In Stephen King’s Under the Dome, the entrapped citizens of a small US town are tormented not only by their inability to escape the giant dome, but also by its transparency – they can literally see the world outside, its trees and inhabitants, the rescuers in florescent yellow slowly getting bored with their impossible task – an exterior that is discernible and nefariously taunting. But the inside–outside dichotomy, as with any oversimplified dialectics, is far too clear-cut for our purposes. Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 film The Cube comes closer. A group of strangers mysteriously awake imprisoned in a giant machine consisting of shifting cubical rooms. No one knows how they ended up there. They suspect that it might be a governmental experiment or some corporate ‘hunger games’ entertainment for the elite. But they don’t know for sure. They immediately search for an exit. Each compartment has a trapdoor that allows them to move between the cubes. But escape will not be easy since the rooms periodically rotate, shifting their respective positions, as if dictated by some strange and indecipherable algorithm. Making matters worse is that some of the rooms harbour clandestine booby-traps that kill off the characters in increasingly disturbing ways (incinerated by a blowtorch, literally cubed by a matrix of blades that appear from nowhere, etc.). Those who remain slowly descend into madness. The film’s genius is in the way it almost perfectly captures the neoliberal nightmare of permanent redeployment – the inscrutably changing nature of the game’s rules with deadly effect, and a division of labour that foments interminable interpersonal conflict. But the film fails when it attempts to visualize how we might escape this machine. There is a clear external domain, a decodable path to the outside, which understandably motivates the captives’ activity. We witness the exit’s brilliant glare towards the end of the film, a magical square of light, as the last survivor (a mute man inflicted with chronic Asperger’s) finally disappears into freedom.

But the neoliberal universalization of work is not a prison with a clear perimeter wall. Infinity is an endlessly repeated loop. This is why the time and space of working today has managed to reduce all of our efforts to its own myopic register. And this is perhaps too difficult to depict in cinema. The ideological curvature that points only to its own vectors of accession is not immediately representable in visual terms. Not even Rodrigo Cortés’s otherwise brilliant 2010 anti-capitalist film Buried can analogize neoliberal interment. Paul Conroy is a truck driver based in US-occupied Iraq. One day he is ambushed by terrorists and buried alive in a coffin with a bottle of water, some glow sticks, a pen and a BlackBerry mobile phone. His abductors have asked for a ransom. The US government won’t pay but will try to rescue him. Conroy calls his employers and is summarily fired. His captors then request he record himself cutting off his finger on his phone and he dutifully complies. Finally, Conroy hears digging and then beautiful sunshine surges into the coffin. He is about to be liberated. The lid opens. He is free. But it was only a hallucination as he awakes in the coffin. As Conroy’s makeshift lighting begins to fail the film ends in blackness.

The claustrophobic impossibility of a world overcome by work is brilliantly captured in this film. All of the items Conroy is buried with are fixtures of the postmodern office cubicle – the pen, the artificial florescent lights, the mobile phone, etc. Indeed, not only is the BlackBerry a lifeline to the outside world, but it is also an instrument of psychic torture, a self-harming weapon that Conroy clings to nevertheless since he would be completely alone without it. The paradox, of course, is that like the millions of overworked employees around the world, he is in fact already alone and cruelly abandoned. While his job has killed him, Conroy is alive to observe this reality with increasing desperation. Not even self-harm can save him. But Buried is still marred by the motif of imprisonment. A clear exteriority is naively suggested. This is the film’s basic error. We cannot ‘dig’ ourselves out of late capitalism. Power is not a seven-foot stratum of sand and dirt above us that might be tunnelled through to freedom if only we had a good trowel. While it sometimes feels as if we have been buried alive, that sense of existential collapse is absolutely fundamental to the economy of justification that makes manufactured inequality seem bearable. Our intuition is correct. We are being suffocated. But the air we seek merely signals more of the same, an oxygen mask at the bottom of a grave.

The hypostatic pressure to produce incited by neoliberal employment policy, to make one’s life into an indefinitely poised factor of production, does not operate through the logic of old-fashioned incarceration. As I argue in a later chapter, the late-capitalist concern with confinement – what Foucault (1977) called disciplinary power – no longer bothers with imprisonment as its guiding metaphor. Containment might have been useful under the Fordist regime of accumulation; but today it would seriously hamper the flows of power that seek to enlist the agential freedoms of ‘life itself’. Corporate domination now depends upon a dynamic social indexation and suspiciously multiple passages between institutional domains. This kind of freedom is designed to inspire anxiety. And this tactically constructed anxiety inspires a certain type of unfreedom that restrains political involvement. Capitalism evidently understands the dialectic very well.

Let’s return to the problem at hand; the indexation process allows a primary power to create indirect sympathies with other social logics that are sometimes far removed from the capitalist interface itself. It acts as a social conductor that we must resist at all costs. This is how work becomes the ultimate measure of all things even when not directly present in our lives. And only then can the negative costs of production be externalized so that workers carry them – for we know that prisons are notoriously expensive to maintain. Thus the nasty reality of so-called flexible labour. If anything, what Deleuze calls ‘societies of control’ is a regime of power more aligned with the ‘open prison’ that tags the permanently accused, with debt, mobile technology, a family that will be with you forever, and a CV that is always on your mind. As I maintain later, this tagging process accomplishes an important function. It gives us the impression that the era of coercive power is over. But that is part of the deception. Old-fashioned managerialism continues, but with the added benefits (from the capitalist perspective at least) of having us eternally on call. Perhaps even in the grave, as Ross (2013) illustrates in relation to the way some workers can only obtain a loan by enrolling a guarantor to take on the repayment obligation if the signee dies.

This never-ending structure of feeling that neoliberal ideology has been particularly successful in perfecting requires us to find new ways of conceptualizing emancipation. The old leftist slogans are problematic here. More work is certainly not the answer. Nor are better wages that deepen our normative indebtedness to the tenets of production. In order to refuse capitalist regulation in an era defined by ‘societies of control’ we must break the spell of permanency that confers a sense of interminableness to our economic subordination. Perhaps this is why the 1993 comedy film Groundhog Day is a more faithful cinematic illustration of our present situation than those we have examined so far. Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a grumpy TV weather reporter who finds himself trapped in a small town called Punxsutawney on 2 February. He hates the town. When his job is done and he is about to leave, Punxsutawney is besieged by a snowstorm that makes departure impossible. Awaking in his rustic hotel room the next morning he finds himself reliving 2 February. Everything is exactly the same – the people, the conversations, the events. All of Phil’s attempts to break the time-loop merely result in his awakening once again in his room on 2 February to begin the day as he did before. Nothing stops the repetition. Becoming desperate, he even commits suicide (throws himself in front of a truck, jumps off a building, electrocutes himself). Still 2 February begins again. Phil complains to his friend Ralph: ‘What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?’ Ralph replies, ‘Well that about sums it up for me.’

Finally, Phil starts to use the special insights gleaned from constantly reliving 2 February for other purposes – to save those who were destined to die, to undermine local power authorities, to enhance the civic well-being of Punxsutawney’s citizens and workers. And thus the loop is broken. Phil Connor’s new-found communist ethic of social love, learning and laughing is our only hope too for breaking the life sentence of late-capitalist employment relations. Fundamentally, it consists of a critique of everyday life through radical remembrance. Phil knew exactly what was coming. However, is it really possible to break the spell of capitalist realism with some sort of inspired social love?

Learning From the Falling Banker

Let us delve a little further into this strange Groundhog-Day-like impasse that has lured so many into the closed universe of work today. As is often the case, we can learn some axiomatic principles about the late capitalist mindset by examining its fullest embodiment. For this, we must return to work-related suicide. The financial crisis has seen a spate of job-inspired suicides in the banking sector. It is far too simple to cite ‘underlying personal problems’ as the sole causal factor when endeavouring to explain these extreme acts. Indeed, this trend has a strong social backdrop that is very important to this book’s argument: namely, all-encompassing work environments and the inescapable pressures they have created. And now, with a huge amount of governmental and public scrutiny directed towards the banking sector, this already stressful occupation has become a ‘hyper-stressful’ vocation that ought to carry a severe health warning.

As I mentioned above, the real question is this: why would someone end their life over something as relatively minor as their job? I believe this has to do with the ‘suicidal work ethic’ that these institutions tend to foster, which is also an important element of how we are all encouraged to approach our jobs today as neoliberalism flounders in irredeemable crisis. Like other institutional believers in endless work, banks have encouraged a reckless ethos in which nothing matters except what happens in the office. Excruciatingly long hours are a sign that one has submitted to their work and worthy of the position, the bonuses, etc. Under these conditions, and especially with the help of mobile technology, the distinction between work and non-work dissolves. You are your job – 24/7.

This has always been the wet dream of neoliberal capitalism. Classic proclamations concerning ‘human capital’ are salient in this regard. What better way to secure capital’s future than transforming labour into its primary vehicle of dissemination, making it intangible (knowledge, competencies and sociability) and portable (self-reliant, fluid, dynamic and transmittable through social interconnections)? Perhaps this is the key ideological role of human-capital theory. When we relate to ourselves as capital, mobile and always potentially valorizable, we begin to do the dirty work for a beleaguered economic system that is so ossified and decrepit that it requires the self-styled virtuosity of living labour to carry out its class mission. Moreover, we must acknowledge the other side of the coin, which is perhaps more important than the ‘positive’ exploitable qualities of human capital. Its true value to capitalism lies in its inherent disposability. When capital is personified in this manner, its individualization makes ‘letting go’ (aka firing) a more feasible option than defining the worker as a member of a collective coalition. It is easier for a firm to justify an employee’s abandonment if it is able to emphasize reasons that are related to individual personalities. The talk is no longer of structural decline and systemic unemployment, but of wrong people.

Personalizing the negative returns on capital is a central feature of human capital theory. And this has profound consequences for those who must bear the weight of work, especially when things go wrong, as they often do. What characterizes the suicides that have blighted the finance sector around the world is the human enrolment that binds the fortunes of the market to the individual’s body. As a result, these people lose perspective, since work has no outside. A small problem in the office is blown out of proportion, making it feel like a life-threatening issue. From the outside (wherever this may be, since it does not exist in a formal sense), it seems like no big deal; but when you are inside the ‘I, Job’ function, there appears to be no way out, because work is mercurially inscribed as a worldwide horizon. Making this situation more complex is the masochistic pleasure derived from such self-sacrifice. This is why typical ideology critique does not work here. Human capital is impervious to being shown the truth because it lives its own negativity as a realistic and pragmatic response to external stimuli, even though these stimuli systematically distort the truth. Self-sacrifice cannot be deemed a lie, especially when a modicum of freedom is derived from a slow (or, in the case of suicide, sudden) demise.

In this sense, the concatenation of human capital can be deadly to your health and well-being. It is indicative of a changing relationship with how work is conducted and the deeply deleterious consequences that can follow. This recent and morbid development in capitalist philosophy did not come about by accident. Human capital represents a new configuration of power that glorifies work as the ultimate ‘advantage’, whilst heartlessly denying it to millions whenever it can. This denial is not only numerical, however, but also qualitative since it infects the already-working as well. You may be ‘let go’ with little notice. But here’s the rub: if we actually had pure neoliberalism in the office – say, complete individualism, no state regulation, profligate competition, no mutualism or open co-operation – absolutely nothing would get done. Neoliberal ideals are completely unworkable when actually applied to most employment settings. As we see in the next chapter, the irony is that managers know this fact very well. As a result, corporate capitalism requires us to be fully present, socially resourceful networkers who can pick up the slack. Organized employment inherently requires worker discretion and autonomy, something that managerialism resents as it increasingly comes to rely upon social qualities that lie beyond its formal powers. Regardless of this enmity, we feel compelled to employ our whole personas to deal with the unbearable disorder around us. As a result of this closeness with work, many of us misdiagnose the failings of neoliberal capitalism as our own.

We can see this playing out in the finance sector and other industries today. For example, the pressure of living up to the ‘successful banker’ schematization (which usually has strong masculine connotations) is increasingly difficult to do when the finance sector is in such dire straits. Couple this with a work ethic that indexes everything to the job, and stress morphs into depression and a dangerously diminished sense of self-preservation – risk becomes addictive and nihilistic. Moreover, in this culture of anxiety and financial atrophy, combined with extremely negative comments from the media, it is inevitable that some will begin to hate themselves and try to resist what they have become. Freud argued that suicide can be defined as killing the hated ‘other’ inside us – those characteristics that we have assimilated from our environment over time and now perceive as an awful stranger inside us. When we mistake this unwanted guest as ourselves (rather than the ugly cardboard cut-out that neoclassical economists widely laud as ‘human capital’) we risk making a grave miscalculation.

All of this sounds bleak, and it is. But the main focus of this book is how we might push back and break the capitalist gridlock that has us hanging between an unliveable life and a future of more of the same. Given the above trends that have generalized some horrible principles in the form of human and social capital, this is more easily said than done. For how might we oppose the ‘I, Job’ function when it is now somehow tied up with our very sense of identity and personal worth? And what would a world without work actually look like? I argue that a new resistance movement is emerging in post-industrial societies and beyond that seeks to put work in its place. Unlike traditional conceptions of employee resistance (such as the strike or sabotage) which often functioned as a platform to demand more, better or fairer work, this novel form of opposition seeks to escape the paradigm of work altogether. It does not view our over-attachment to a job as an inevitable consequence of survival, but as a hypnotic political absurdity that we have come to live as if it has always been so. But before we look at how neoliberal strategies of ‘tagging’ might be successfully evaded, we need to further explore the planet of work and especially its demented sense of time.

What Happens to Time on the Frozen Planet of Work?

In The Seeds of Time (1996), Fredric Jameson contends that late-capitalist society has mangled time in a strange manner. Unlike other political systems that warp history to counterbalance existential and concrete individual grievances – for example, by erasing certain stories from the historical past – capitalism in its latest phase simply does away with time, creating a permanent present: ‘for us time consists in an eternal present and, much, further away, an inevitable catastrophe, these two moments showing up distinctly on the registering apparatus without overlapping or transitional states’ (Jameson, 1996: 72). Here, Jameson is identifying a double totality that has long been part of the capitalist imaginary, given the man-made alienation that it conspires to render immutable. On the one hand, the individual is detached from his or her own collective history through the exchange process, becoming an abstraction that is bought and sold in the marketplace like any other commodity whose history is ultra-condensed into an infinitesimal moment by the transaction process. On the other hand, history coagulated in the state form and the collective institutional apparatuses of the capitalist mode of production are reified into a spectacle. We witness the class offensive as something like a bad movie that we are unable to walk away from. Late-capitalist democracy amounts to being strapped in a chair and forced to watch another Adam Sandler offering.

However, working-class politics has always evinced its own totality, a sub-genus of history that is minor, peasant-like (i.e. a nameless universality), and incommensurate with official narratives that attempt to obliterate any reasonable sense of time. Walter Benjamin was particularly proficient at detecting this history, his textual colligations or collages consisting of elements drawn from seemingly disparate sources. This allowed his essays to speak as if they were voicing the nameless who haunt us because the crimes that befell them continue to befall us. The fetish of individualism can only be undermined by this minor knowledge. If the totality of work today forms a suspended temporality that only folds back on itself, a loop of infinite regress like the one that the hapless Phil Connor found himself trapped in, two important experiential elements also become apparent. Firstly, no totality can be without a putative outside, as Adorno taught us well. The infinite is impossible. The fabricated totality of late-capitalist reason always insinuates its own impossibility. This falsity often becomes conspicuous via the limits of the body – its capitulation to illness, burnout and injurious revolt. It is in the organic impossibility of the present that the materials of minor knowledge conspire, oozing from the fissures of the untrue whole. Secondly, the calculus of exploitative rationality is not only experienced like a bad film on constant repeat, but also as a real world detached from an observer who nevertheless remains an integral participant. Work too is lived in this way, a spectacle without a history – or as Jameson might put it, an eternal present. But there is also a minor history here that can be recovered and deployed as a route out.

When it comes to late capitalism’s ability to eternalize the present, Deleuze (1992) understood a great deal. His conception of ‘societies of control’ is important for discerning the crisis of disciplinary regulation. (It might also be argued that Foucault understood this too, for are not his genealogies of particular knowledge regimes always written at the time of their demise? – ‘I do not say the things I say because they are what I think, I say them as a way to make sure they are no longer what I think.’) Deleuze’s brilliant essay identifies the tactics of endlessness that the neoliberal corporation and state apparatus pursue. Central to maintaining the false whole is the corporeal incitement guided by an unpayable debt, or what Deleuze and Guattari (1983) earlier called infinite debt. But the abiding and contractual weight of this unpayable sum is not enough in this respect. For its religious connotations of life without atonement is too closely allied with a moral universe resistant to the cold cash nexus of everyday capitalism. The debt has to be social in order to serve a class function properly, whereby bios itself is deferred in a continuous state of exception.

For this reason, to truly grasp the significance of our society of control we ought to analyse it through the concept of overcoding rather than as some sort of vital debt. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), overcoding is a dangerous instrument of social logics that are folded upon themselves so there is no longer any perceptible beginning or end. Life becomes an endless series of soon-to-be postponed fixtures that can never be realized or completed. For example, the state overcodes the employment situation through a multiplication of legal supplements and reclarifications, each of which rewrites the law of an earlier period and simultaneously expiates that period’s history until the original impetus no longer matters. As a result, there is no longer any ‘ground zero’ or absolute baseline to which we are able to anchor our experience of the present. Overcoding is also isomorphic. The repetition of emetic axioms and their rewritings of the social body are the chief reasons Deleuze constantly approached biopower under neoliberal conditions as something akin to a virus. The virus cannot be isolated in any part of the cellular totality, but is somehow virtually constitutive of each part within the systemic whole. From this point onwards, we must therefore refrain from conceptualizing the apparent totality of the neoliberal impasse as an inside–outside system. Instead we ought to speak of tactical lines that build upon the non-voiced minor histories of class autonomy and a future that gives licence to extending those lines. I suggest that several aspects of neoliberal employment practices conspire to present an otherwise finite experience (i.e. work) as infinite, endless, and so forth. Let’s explore them in detail before we turn to some detotalizing interventions that might finally hasten an emancipatory transformation of the world of work.

Deformalization

In 2014, a Long Island customer service firm, United Health Programs of America, was sued by the US Equal Employment Opportunities Commission for forcing employees to say ‘I love you’ to each other. The company’s Human Resource Management (HRM) office clearly believed strongly that spirituality in the workplace would increase motivation and sales. Spearheading this management approach was a program called ‘Onionhead’. Employees were required to express deep feelings of emotional attachment to their colleagues and bosses (including love) and pray at the office each morning. A number of workers complained about this intrusion into their personal lives. One individual was subsequently fired by the company for not participating in the Onionhead ritual of love, prayer and gestures of peace. A report about the incident explains: ‘A month after she complained, the employee was removed from her office and relocated to an open customer service area, while a large statue of a Buddha was placed in her former office. She protested to the owner that the move amounted to a demotion and was fired, the complaint said’ (Reuters, 2014).

It has been widely noted that one way in which the production mentality is generalized throughout society is to blur the boundary between work and non-work. Many features of corporate life today – including parties, emotional bonding exercises, spirituality and overt sexuality – would have looked peculiar and completely out of place in the classic offices of Fordism. When work is personalized in this manner, it is not as easy to walk away from because power is drawing on vested social qualities. As Deleuze argued in his ‘societies of control’ essay, such deformalization ought to be viewed as a very worrying trend: ‘We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world’ (Deleuze, 1992: 6). Why is this a terrifying prospect? If we cherish the opportunity to experience love, then why not welcome it into the workplace, a zone that has been bereft of meaningful emotion for so long? There are a number of reasons to be horrified. The informalization of work in this manner is not simply driven by an attempt to build stronger, warmer and more spiritually fulfilling ties between employees and management (a reading we criticized in the last chapter). A more important driver is social disposability, which dovetails neatly with the contractualization of everyday life under late-capitalist conditions. With the advent of ultra-formalization exemplified by the technical bureaucracies of the Fordist period, a platform was inadvertently created for certain social-justice claims. Edwards (1979) notes that this was an unintended consequence of modern industrialism. From the capitalist perspective, the immediate gains of rationalization under bureaucratic structures were clear, and it provided an efficient instrument of class domination. However, by developing nominally impartial systems of employment, impersonal occupational grades and career paths, corporations unwittingly civilized workplace power relations. Managers had to partially forego the freedom to sadistically toy with the worker, often on a whim, that they had enjoyed under patrimonial employment relations such as the early factory system.

This is why the attempt to retract the rituals of formalization ought to be seen with a very pessimistic eye. It has very little to do with forging lasting bonds of reciprocity, trust and commitment. Critical theory often misses this point when it laments the advent of the corporate clone, in love with their firm and the firm with them. All of the talk about ‘high commitment’ cultures elides the real nature of the discourse. These changes actually signify the return of the emotionally unpredictable and capricious boss, who one day treats you as his favourite pet and the next day scorns you like a jilted lover. Moreover, when work relations are personalized in this manner, it is much easier to justify an employee’s ejection from the workplace. The rationale for doing so can be framed in the same terms as those that apply to a lover breaking up with their partner. Our bosses are now able to say, ‘This is not a forced relationship, but a matter of choice and compatibility. Please leave now, this isn’t working out. And by the way, I have found someone new.’

This is why the attempt to model workplaces along the lines of a ‘family’ is fundamentally disturbing from the worker’s point of view. Marxian critiques of this capitalist manoeuvre are correct to point out its ideological function, manufacturing the pliant and loyal worker at the expense of their true class interests. But matters are more serious than that. As any psychoanalyst will remind us, the modern nuclear family turned out to be a rather brutal invention, a social structure that often caused years of torment, even long after the victim had escaped. Replicating in the office the psychological hang-ups, backbiting, mind games and spirit-crushing guilt at the heart of the modern family is rightfully considered by most workers to be a vicious development.

Additionally, the deformalization of work seeks to nullify long-standing transgressive spaces typical of working-class resistance. The evocation of various tropes associated with rebellion, even if only as a flimsy and substanceless caricature, is a cause for worry from a critical point of view. For example, a new trend in office management in London was recently reported in an article entitled ‘Drinking on the Job’ (Williams-Grut, 2014). At first glance, the headline might lead us to expect a scandalous account of the secret pastimes of disgruntled employees, functional alcoholics who would surely be fired if their lavatory whisky-sipping activities were discovered by the boss. But a very different story is told:

London’s white-collar brigade is taking up a new habit that blurs the boundaries between work and play so much they’ve nearly been rubbed out completely. Everybody is drinking in the office. Booze trolleys, beer fridges, drinks cabinets, office cocktails and even in-work bars mean it’s no longer taboo to drink at your desk. Hundreds of Londoner’s are clinking bottles before they’ve even clocked off – with the boss footing the bill. Dress rental service Girl Meets Dress is typical, with the 12-strong team gathering for drinks in their office every Friday afternoon … Tom Morris of Fishburn thinks the in-house social not only boosts morale but also helps foster new ideas. (Williams-Grut, 2014: 35)

Of course, for any dedicated drinker, this trend is extremely depressing. Capitalism has always maintained an extremely antagonistic relationship with respect to alcohol consumption in the workplace. E.P. Thompson (1967) noted how the legendary ‘Saint Monday’ binges became the enemy for early industrialists and government officials. The customary practice consisted of workers dropping their tools, vacating the factory and getting extremely inebriated on Monday mornings just as the workday was formally beginning. A raft of disciplinary measures was hurled at the working class to stamp out this reverential tribute to Saint Monday. The anti-work connotations of boozing on the job continued through the Fordist period under Western capitalism. For employees, drinking was not only a moment of escape, but also a sign of triumphant insubordination in the face of sobering discipline, as epitomized by Hamper (1992) in his tale about working on the line at General Motors. The relationship between alcohol and authority takes on an important political dimension in societies governed by prison-like regimentation and disciplinary power. We see this in so many of Charles Bukowski’s stories and poems. Once we stand back and contemplate the ritual of paid employment from an objective distance, its so-called normalcy disappears and we see it for what it really is: a type of mindless psychosis. A drunk can never be a perfect worker. That is why she is beautiful. Alcohol not only alters our perception of time in a favourable manner, but gathers connections with our peasant past and frequently obliterates the non-time of capitalism’s eternal present.

Consequently we should contest the corporate enclosure of this component of working-class praxis for a number of reasons. It hijacks a decisively incongruent modulation of temporal experience and seeks to smooth it out, rendering it felicitous with the self-same present of neoliberal rationality. Alcohol’s minor modulation traces a line back to the rebellions against the factory, Saint Monday (and sometimes Saint Tuesday) and a constellation of non-capitalist images that are muted when they enter into the parlance of corporate socializing. In addition, sanctioned drinking on the job becomes a code of capitalist obstinacy regarding our attempts to reclaim the non-numerical time that alcohol otherwise signifies. One can only imagine the pressure not to drink an employee must experience when forced to ‘enjoy’ a glass of wine with a watchful boss. The oppressive restraint kills the historical knowledge delivered in a bottle of wine. Alone with trusted friends we get shit-faced. With the boss, we sadly stare at our half-empty glass and pray the occasion ends quickly. The blurring of work into play and non-work heralds yet another attempt to universalize the logic of work so that even getting drunk is not immune to its reach. Once again, work infiltrates everything, and social time collapses in upon itself like some lapidary bad dream.

The Labour Marathon and Modafinil

For the above reasons, this is why I think Pollack’s 1969 film They Shoot Horses Don’t They? truly goes to heart of the terror that social deformalization can instil among the bio-proletariat today. Set in the 1930s US depression, Robert Syverton (played by Michael Sarrazin) finds himself in Los Angeles, where he discovers an infamous competition called the Dance Marathon. He wants to try his luck. With the help of an organizer, he is paired with the mentally unsound Gloria (played by Jane Fonda). The competition is simple. Couples must dance continuously for as long as they can. The final couple standing receive a large cash prize. The marathon is both physically and emotionally gruelling. And it is this that precisely draws such large audiences. Over the hours, a range of feelings are expressed between the couples. Joy and frivolity at the beginning is slowly replaced by feelings of hate, jealously, resentment and irrational bickering played out over many hours, days and weeks. Robert and Gloria begin to experience their relationship as a life sentence, a never-ending bond of revulsion neither can walk away from – even though the exit door is in sight. After weeks have past, some participants attempt to carry their fatigued partners, angrily demanding that they do not fall asleep since that would result in disqualification. When Robert and Gloria are told by the organizer that expenses will be deducted from the prize, reducing it to a negligible sum, they give up and bow out. Both have been duped and economically exploited, all in the name of a competition that seeks to test the ‘staying power’ of couples in love. Do you really love me? In the final scene of the film, Gloria asks Robert to help her commit suicide. He obliges and finally fulfils the role of the loyal husband. Of course, now it is too late.

It is obvious that this excessively bleak film is an indictment of the way many unloving marriages needlessly continue, for whatever reason. However, is this not also a vivid depiction of what happens to us in the highly deformalized workplaces emerging in the post-industrial West? The terrible and exhausting eternity that these couples endure together is similar to the inability to fathom an outside by many employees today. As we observed above, even drinking is not safe.

There are three elements of the film that are important for the purposes of this discussion. First, Robert and Gloria were complete strangers before the marathon organizer paired them together. Unlike the other couples who genuinely loved each other (and interestingly were often the first to exit the competition), Robert and Gloria were forced together by economic reason. This allowed the supposed romantic dynamic to withstand almost inhuman levels of fatigue, exhaustion and humiliation. We should read the ‘I love you’ command by the United Health Programs of America Corporation discussed above in the same way. There is no authentic love involved, since it is a simulation designed to extract arduous hours of work from employees. One might suspect that the worker fired by the firm actually did love her job, but as soon as it became a mandatory requirement of her employment contract she recoiled and departed the scene.

Secondly, the informal stereotype of partners in love becomes a mechanism for extending the endurance of the working pair. After a week of dancing, the time of labour (which is so overladen and ultimately camouflaged by so-called personal bonds) becomes universal. Robert and Gloria can no longer remember how the marathon started or even that they once were complete strangers. They obediently submit to the regime of generalized labour and the easily noticeable ‘exit’ sign on the door becomes a nauseating emblem of their own predicament. Departure is impossible when beginnings and ends are rubbed out. As Deleuze argues, this kind of time is without the clear sectors, domains and borders of distinction that would help differentiate life from labour. Now is only a time of postponements against a steady screen.

And thirdly, Robert and Gloria can only exit this infinite social space once their exploitation is revealed and visibly enjoyed by the tyrannical organizer, who displays a subtle and excruciating schadenfreude as they painfully limp off the dance floor. Even afterwards, when Gloria is finally free from the ghastly competition, she can no longer decipher what her life might actual be. Only death can provide her with the terminus she longs for. The time of work has instilled a self-entrapping circularity that not even departing the stage of exploitation can disrupt. As Robert assists her suicide, we might remember the bankers falling from the high towers in the city centres of London and Hong Kong or the interns who simply cannot stop until their bodies rise up and utter a definitive and irreversible no.

If Gloria and Robert had had access to Modafinil and Ritalin I suspect they would have wolfed them down in order to win the Dance Marathon. Indeed, many employees in the post-industrial West are using ‘smart drugs’ to get through their own personal work marathons. The proliferation of mobile technology, shift work and the 24-hour synchronization of international markets have all been important for giving birth to the Modafinil-addled employee. The drug enables a self-imposed lengthening of the workday by individuals struggling to keep up in the factory that never sleeps. In her autobiographical article, Stylist writer Lizzie Pook experiments with these ‘work-enabling’ pills whose consumption has apparently reached epidemic proportions in the United Kingdom and the United States. Do they really make you a better worker? She mentions a career-driven individual called Sam, who seems to think so:

‘I first took Modafinil when I had an important presentation to prepare and I’d been working until 2am the night before,’ says Sam, 29, a marketing executive from Balham. ‘I was given a few pills by a friend who had taken it while studying and thought I’d give it a shot. I work hours of overtime, so I didn’t feel guilty about taking something that would level the playing field with my colleagues. The results were quite comical. I found myself drawing up huge Excel spreadsheets and becoming really focused on boring admin tasks.’ (Pook, 2014)

On the first day of Pook’s experiment she is working faster and (in her mind) smarter than ever. On the second day, she is still typing at a breakneck pace, but feeling a little nauseous. On day three, paranoia sets in and she terminates the experiment. As we noted in the last chapter, there is enough paranoia in the office already without the assistance of drugs. The escalation of smart-drug usage in the workplace is significant for our argument in a number of ways. Given their effects, these chemicals were initially popular among workers who had little choice but to toil for long hours: army personnel, night-shift workers, long-haul truck drivers, etc. But now these once isolated conditions of employment conditions have become the norm for the mainstream workforce. And the other type of worker that regularly used these stimulants was, of course, the artist, who has become the ideal model of the contemporary employee: fast, flexible, never absent-minded and always ready to produce (see Cederström and Fleming, 2012).

But we would be wrong to think of Modafinil use at work simply in quantitative terms (more hours on the job). No, it is not only the proximate lengthening of the working day that is important here. Modafinil also provides for a more existential presence, a qualitative shift in exactly how our work time is lived regardless of quantity. We might call this ‘presence stamina’, an attribute also demonstrated in the intense and verbose dialogue between Robert and Gloria in the Dance Marathon. This is what makes Modafinil such a special drug, differentiating the overworking bio-proletariat from other eras of labour obsession. In the city offices of the 1980s, I might have put in a 12-hour day at my desk; but much of this would have been time spent looking into space, tired and dazed. Today, however, I also need to be ‘switched on’, present, alert, creative and enthused with my task, even when I am actually doing nothing. Only after I get home and the paranoia sets in can I relax with a glass of bourbon. If, that is, my boss has not made that method of escape into a mandatory team building exercise too.

Totality Refusal

Now we must turn to the question of how we might escape the totality of neoliberal capitalist time by adopting tactics to thwart and turn our back on it. Unfortunately, walking away from the marathon of work is no easy feat when you are caught up in its momentum. Deleuze argues that the first task we need to undertake here is to avoid fearing ‘societies of control’ since fear is an integral part of their operational systems. Attention instead ought to be directed towards inventing useful weapons for crashing those systems. I would like to build on this thought, since every weapon requires a concept. Theory is fundamental in this regard. Ideas of successful struggle (by which I mean a form of contestation that envisages its own demise once its objectives are achieved) must be rigorously considered in order to withstand the tidal wave of regulation that seeks to draw us back into the language of capitalist productivism. Weapons of revolt surround us, however. We only need to see them: being on the ‘outlook’ is the first step to understanding the indeterminate versatility of an otherwise hostile environment. And for this reason alone, designs and realizable memes are now more important than ever.

Dialectics, Maps and Lines

Dialectical inquiry has, of course, dominated critical thinking in this regard. Future spaces and times are specified via the contradictory pull between what the present is and what might be so given the technological and social possibilities systematically denied under class conditions. We see zones of otherness in the socialized forces generated by private ownership and waged employment. For Lukács (1971), our complex totality is a precatory combination lock that can only be cracked from the proletarian standpoint. While workers do not constitute the totality, their position echoes the whole because they collectively stand inside the house of exploitation and live the impossibility of complete inclusion. Only the bourgeoisie, according to Lukács, is fully enveloped by the blinding processes of reification. I think this is a very convincing argument. But its applicability to the neoliberal totality is thwarted because every effective capitalist has (indirectly of course) now learnt important lessons from Lukács’s challenge. Under the auspices of globalization and free trade, the parasitical 1 per cent has concertedly endeavoured to transform this totality into something that is virtual and viral rather than only structural. Space is no longer of any consequence. This lack of co-ordinates makes it particularly difficult to escape through dialectical reason, since labour and capital blend into each other in such unpredictable and complex ways.

If we are to assign a date to the death of dialectical praxis then it is probably 1966, the year Adorno published his attempt to rescue dialectics in the face of a new form of power and inadvertently imploded its internal clockwork. Negative Dialectics (1966/1973) distils the totality into an unvariegated singularity that must suck in another world in order to reconcile its positivity. But that other world is not immediately detectable. It has to be inferred through the negation of the negation. However much Adorno aggressively escalated the capitalist contradictions to visualize this emancipatory other, it grew evermore distant, like a black hole that exponentially recedes as we approach its event horizon. Every gesture is extirpated and fed back into the never-ending circle of control. The universal subsumes the particular and devours it. The concept and category collapse into a holistic hell without respite. Adorno presents his findings after having pressed dialectical thinking to its breaking point:

Whoever pleads for the maintenance of this radically culpable and shabby culture becomes its accomplice, while the man who says no to culture is directly furthering the barbarism which our culture showed itself to be. Not even silence gets us out of the circle. In silence we simply use the state of objective truth to rationalize our subjective incapacity, once more degrading truth into a lie. (Adorno, 1966/1973: 367)

The problem with this type of totality-escape attempt lies in the way it is swiftly hamstrung by the notion of its supposed outside, which is but an incomplete projection of the false whole’s essential failures. We can also note this in Bloch’s lament concerning utopian thought, when he despairs, ‘We hear only ourselves. For we are gradually becoming blind to the outside’ (Bloch, 1964/2000: 34). What outside? Who have you been talking to? The perfunctory supposition of an outside implies a conceit that is far too biblical for my tastes. The method undermines fruitful methods of refusal by misconstruing what the totality actually is, since its so-called ‘outside’ is but an antimonial reflection of its own impossibility. In other words, the totality is not a ‘prison’ that can be escaped. Plotting a breakout is definitely counterproductive to cultivating a socio-biotic resistance to the virus of work. Purity will never be yours, and that precept must be put to democratic uses. For how can we contemplate the emancipatory potential of being a ‘fugitive’ (Lordon, 2014) when we are defined as such by capitalist class relations from the outset? – even before we are born, and regardless of whether we are born or not.

Michel de Certeau (1984) comes closer to solving the problematic we are dealing with here. He argues that tactics operate by opening new spatial fissures, disrupting the time sequence of the strategies that code and overcode us within the circle of power. For him, what one uses (rather than how one uses it) within the permanently backdated ideological matrix of domination is what really matters. He asks the question: How can one exit the realm of power without going anywhere? Tactics exploit with guile and cunning the very topographical textures of control, turning power back on itself and thus yielding potential fractures of freedom. Certeau posits a kind of map (e.g. the abstraction of New York City when viewed from the top of a skyscraper) whose margins are everywhere within the system. Similarly, the universe of work too might be traversed by cracks and half-finished rudiments that can be deregistered for other purposes.

The tactical undermining of the strategic totality of work can take a number of forms – most of which, in my opinion, are fairly mundane and tame. For example, the technocratic measurement of time in most workplaces – you are contractually obliged to log your holidays – can be manipulated to forge more time away from the office by a workforce that seldom relaxes. This was why Richard Branson’s recent ‘as much holidays as you want’ policy for his personal staff was criticized. Inspired by a similar policy at Netflix, Branson said in his blog that ‘it is left to the employee alone to decide if and when he or she feels like taking a few hours, a day, a week or a month off’. Of course, there is a catch. Only when employees feel that they have met their responsibilities fully (finished a project, etc.) are they able to enjoy this benevolent approach to holidays. The problem is that this ostensible gesture of freedom would most likely result in staff working forever and never taking holidays. Commenting on Branson’s policy, Kellaway (2014: 16) correctly observes that ‘the trouble with modern work is that it is endless. You are never through with it, which means that judging when to take a break is very difficult indeed. A fixed holiday entitlement tells us it is OK to take a break – even though our work is far from done.’ So, what was intended to be a disciplinary mechanism to track work time (i.e. formal holiday requests, etc.) can actually be turned back on the company to stave off some of the more insidious features of the ‘I, Job’ function.

But Certeau’s conception of the totality as a map with a multitude of constitutive blind spots and opportunities to hack power misses the impossibility at the heart of the neoliberal whole. The tactics and practices of everyday life recorded by Certeau still implicitly hold onto the rather liberal assumption that a life is indeed possible within the universe of capitalism. For him, we can make do and get by, despite the monstrous strategic codifications of the neoliberal city, family and work arrangements that claustrophobically close in on us from every angle.

This is where Deleuze’s suggestions about how we might elude the transmutable virus of work in the societies of control is perhaps bleaker but more realistic. Rather than viewing control as a prison (with an identifiable outside), or an all-encompassing antithesis of a hoped-for future (as in dialectical thinking), or an official map (with its unofficial underworld of crevices in which we can make do), power for Deleuze is more like a perpetually failing diagram. As he argues, a diagram maintains a ‘function that must be detached from any specific use, as from any specified substance’ (Deleuze, 2006: 61). The virus of work is virtual in so far that its concrete expression moves between the peopled components of neoliberal society. But these components are always failing. Disappointment and botched attempts to control us actually energize rather than weaken the totality of late-capitalist relations. Perfect control is always something to come, always nearing perfection, always in a future which never arrives. In other words, the generalization of capitalist time in societies of control is held together by an acute impossibility: our attempts to live, that futile optimism that fools even the most enslaved, is stymied at every turn by an existential darkness that denies complete synthesis. Our embodied and inexorable modi operandi are defined by a breathless and depressing, ‘It cannot go on like this’, things must change. But they never do change, and somehow we continue as before.

Deleuze is important for understanding not only how this false totality remains consistent with itself, but also the pulse of impossibility that echoes the true nature of its form. This seam of darkness is the nightlife of neoliberalism, both the painful moment of immoderation and the social source of a new world announced when its impossible figure finally steps out of the shadows. It is for this reason that the most politically abject and ignored in our society must be considered foremost if the totality is to be understood. The absolute ‘worst off’, that part of the whole we like to consign to the status of an exception or aberration, is really what gives the totalized system its false positivity. Its part is the part of everything. That is why society despises the untouchables so much, because in them we see the untruthful structure that bears witness to society’s own mendacity. Society’s debt is to those who are born owing more than what they are. In other words, we must always approach the neoliberal whole from the standpoint of the impossible. Was not the working-class credit-card disease, for example, invented to postpone this impossibility? This impossibility is characterized not only by the Saint Genets haunting the cut-throat nightlife of the neoliberal order. We are not referring to a distinctive class or social category, although the destitute prefigures its form. For the impossibility lodged in every centre of this wrong whole is viral too. Its inflections are to be seen in the homeless, in the tearful bankers falling to earth from their high-rise prisons, in academics sacrificing themselves to the ‘bad deal’ they call a mortgage, in the call-centre employees who cannot go on, etc. The official silence concerning these unmanageable moments constantly throbs everywhere in the large cities of the capitalist order, a low and compulsive hum that troubles those who have learnt to listen to its message.

A Negative Optics of Revolt

After Deleuze, the planet of work is no figurative prison or straitjacket, but a set of impossible geometric lines that we must render obsolete so that their perpetual postponements and qualifications can be halted for good. These qualifications can never be perfected, and this is where a minor knowledge of deviant ‘lines of flight’ becomes useful to the majority who seek to escape the ‘I, Job’ function. Such peasant knowledge, based on sedimentary memories that can never be deleted in societies of control, consists of lines rather than spatio-temporal locations. The era of locations is finished and should not inform the work-refusal movement any longer. Locations are today but interdictions that point to other locations, which in turn point to yet others without end. Neither does time pertain to the lines of revolt we are considering here. The social frequency of so-called ‘non-work’ time, for example, is now too sympathetic to the never-ending cycle of capitalist power relations. Dreams of a future time freed from capitalism are simply one dimension of our current mode of domination, which incidentially has built a booming ‘escape industry’ as iniquitous as the post-industrial office cubicle.

What I call peasant lines of flight simply embolden what they already are – not in the chancy ‘accelerationist’ sense or even as a dialectical manoeuvre to heighten the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production through genuine protest. The generalized skyline of economic reason can only be broken if we have the courage to face the reality of abandonment that is the real message to us from the neoliberal ruling class. Abandoned times and spaces can be transformed into abandoned lines rather than vague outlines perpetually postponed by an infinite panoply of excuses and qualifications (‘the reason the free-market system is not working is because we do not have true free markets, we need more deregulation’). Strangely, it is these vague lines that are the most visible and ensnare us more thoroughly, given their indeterminate trajectories of surveillance, judgement and subjectification. This is where Certeau misses an important aspect of power that emerged following the biopolitical shift in exploitation. The outline, with all of its potent pre-significations, is what makes the artillery of late capitalism so powerful.

By identifying these ultimately impossible lines, we follow a theory not of spatial or temporal totality, but one that is basically optical. The ideology of work today can be compared to the same rules that organize fibre optics – work acts like silica undulations or waveguides, collecting all that is not work within its pulse. Vision is the currency of power today, but not in the manner of the panopticon gaze of the prison. The ‘open prison’ of neoliberal society requires numerous blind alleys and unrealizable times to function – how could it otherwise commandeer the self-control and self-reliance that has made the closed prison of Fordism obsolete as a method of exploitation? The vision of the unmanaged is as much a function of biopower as that of the managed. Optics empties the subject of history. Of course, we learnt this long ago in Lefebvre’s (1947/1991) critique of everyday life. The new visual apparatus that purifies the capitalist present for everybody (i.e. the totality) is actually about diminishing the faculty particular to our proletarian memory. The hurt, vilification and dispossession that define a collective past evaporate when capitalist culture goes hyper-optical. Never has so much been seen and so little truly viewed.

Refusal can be effective if it practises a negative or reverse optics. The impossible lines house the exploited 99-percenters and are concealed in plain view. Like a distorted photographic negative, the visible is only possible from power’s perspective when it is held in abeyance. A line of flight implodes its own impossibility by erasing the vague outlines and thus departing the postponements of optical subjugation tying us to the universal ‘I, Job’ operating system. A minoritarian line of revolt has nothing to do with numbers in this respect. Perhaps this is where Certeau (1984: xvii) is correct when he states that ‘marginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive … marginality is becoming universal’. A wayward or departing optical line of negation makes the impossible circuits of power visible so that the erasure process has a qualitative effect as it remembers – memory not as quanta of data but as a connection to the minoritarian world that excoriates the totality, those who came before us. It is only ‘in their place’ that we are able to act presently with any authenticity. These are the nameless lives that run ahead of us to issue warnings about our fate. This type of remembrance views us as ghosts haunting their world. It is not the dead but the impossible permanence of an irreconcilable present (i.e. ‘us’) that we seek to exorcize. And if there is a canticle for the worker today, lost and abandoned by the very enemy that demands that we stay, then it entails a closure of the false vision that has obliterated our past. Only then can night and day begin once again.

The eye begins to see once more through memory – not of a crippling debt-laden promise to be fulfilled in the future, as Nietzsche argued in his genealogy of morals. This type of memory isn’t about conscience and guilt burnt into the individual like a brand. Indeed, present-day debt can only be transformed into guilt by erasing a particular version of history. Here, personal liability is not about the past, but is always co-present with a timeless ‘now’. Neoliberal debt in particular relies upon the freedom of the subject who knows no past and is thus entirely responsible. This is why a worker’s historical imagination is the enemy of the capitalist project; ‘to forget suffering is to forgive the forces that caused it – without defeating these forces’ (Marcuse, 1955: 163). This is the only way to appreciate the totality of neoliberal temporality if we are systematically to leave it behind. As capitalism becomes a Marathon Dance that eternally repeats itself, it uses the forces of insinuation or ‘indirect discourse’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 77) to bolster the misconception that departure is out of the question. Insinuation removes any obvious exit, even as it taunts us with its visible proximity. The overcoded can only be decoded by a minoritarian peasant knowledge (i.e. tribal, as we all belong to a tribe). I see my practice remembering its own presence as a ghost haunting those who came before me; that presence recalls how, why and roughly when the dance of exploitation was transformed into a marathon without end: ‘Substitute forgetting for anamnesis’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 151).

But such remembrance also acknowledges that our life sentence is underscored by abandonment or more precisely an ‘ideology of abandonment’, as I call it in the next chapter. We now need to give our abandonment depth so it corrupts the smooth plane of one-dimensional rationality that makes the curve of capitalist reality seem unending. This is the ‘lost dimension’ of industrialized modernity (Virilio, 2012). So in summary, the pertinent ethical question for those who seek to refuse the ridiculous verities of the ‘I, Job’ function today is simply this: Are you worthy of your abandonment? If not, then keep working for a master who doesn’t even see you on his radar (but would nevertheless like you to think he is watching you all of the time). If you are worthy of your own abandonment, then what are you going to do with the absolute impossibility that is now the defining quality of the late-capitalist worker? Where will you go, what will you say and who will you take with you?