6

Critique of Dialogical Reason

In a recent BBC interview with the controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq, we observe the painful impossibly of truly talking about ourselves, especially within the confessional format so cherished by neoliberal society. The television presenter prefaces the interview by warning vulnerable viewers about the infamous challenges faced by anyone brave enough to talk with the elusive author: ‘Michel Houellebecq has an interesting reputation amongst interviewers. In the past he has been known to fall asleep, get incapably drunk, make a pass at the interviewer and sometimes simply not turn up.’ No wonder the conversation is stiff and awkward from the outset. ‘Michel Houellebecq, welcome to Edinburgh.’ Silence. More silence. And then another ten seconds of agonizing muteness. The flustered interviewer then makes a big mistake. It takes the form of a rather trite truth statement followed by a question: ‘One of the things in your novels that I think fascinates the public, for good or for ill, is the relationship between Michel Houellebecq and the various narrators … I mean, how much of you is in the narrators?’

Of course, by now our suspicions are correct. All speech in this medium of exchange is somehow forced and inherently risky. The interviewer is probing for something that does not sit well with those who write in order to disappear. He is demanding the subject in all its impossible and fake positivity. The degree to which such an appearance remains impossible is only matched by its traitorous susceptibility to surveillance, a gaze that manufactures what it pretends to publicly present; namely, you. Houellebecq puffs on his cigarette, mutters to himself incomprehensibly, stares at the interviewer as if the question is too unreal. Following a very long minute or so it looks as if the conversation is already over. Only then does the author reply:

Perhaps the mistake is to think of me in actual fact [very long pause]. I mean by that, I have never been able to talk about my life actually. As soon as I talk about my life I start lying straight away. To begin with, I lie consciously and then very quickly I forget that I am lying.

The deceptive fallaciousness of speech when one is called upon to respond personally, to describe who one is and how one feels, what one stands for and the specificity of one’s history, is an important political characteristic of the late-capitalist social system. One is forced to talk and represent in almost every situation, especially in the workplace where the ‘truth of self’ (warts and all) is painfully sought by human resource managers and other authority figures. Abandonment requires a present subject in order to function as an effective ideology. But as Houellebecq notes, an important conceit and dangerous discursive logic operates at the heart of autobiographical truth telling. We cannot but lie. When we open our mouths to utter descriptions about ourselves to the boss, a co-worker or government official dealing with an unemployment claim, someone else, an alien and foreign semiotic force, begins to speak in our place. An invasion occurs. We become bystanders to our own semantic exertions and efforts. We have all experienced this in job interviews; it is perhaps a post-industrial office version of invasion of the body snatchers. In a study by Weiss and Feldman (2006), it was discovered that 81 per cent of job candidates lie about themselves to their prospective employers. To be precise, candidates told an average of 2.19 lies every 15 minutes during the interview.

It might be tempting to explain this lying as merely the desire to impress, to tell those who have something we want (a job) what they want to hear: ‘Oh yes, we are very committed, enthusiastic and honest …’ However, I suspect the compulsion to misrepresent is deeper than that. It may occur even when unnecessary. There is something about the unusual attention given to the supposed subject who speaks that activates another form of influence beyond our control. Who are these alien ‘others’ that abduct our internal lexicographies, taking over our bodies so that we become passive and tardy observers of our own discourses? I do not think it is indicative only of the existential void that forever displaces the aleatory subject, as a Lacanian reading of the utterance might suggest. Above and beyond this universal constitutive lack, something very historical is occurring here, specific to the particular time and space of neoliberal capitalism. Indeed, this type of power enlists the language faculties of what we have called the ‘I, Job’ function, transforming people into speaking machines of a certain sort; this is an integral facet of how post-industrial employment systems control us. All the talk that we are induced to perform in the overdetermined context of our jobs never really amounts to anything other than the reinforcement of sign itself, a subjugation to the impossible ideal of the ‘I, Job’ function. Deleuze and Guattari put it in no unclear terms:

The elementary unit of language – the statement – is the order-word … language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience. Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits. Every order-word, even a father’s to his son, carries a little death sentence – a Judgment, as Kafka put it. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 76)

Even writing these very words causes a small death, of course, which brings to the surface the insurmountable impasse in Deleuze’s thought. He attempts to short-circuit the sign’s antinomy through style, but never quite succeeds.

But let’s move on. Historically, the evolution of language has always been heavily influenced by record keeping or accounting: What do you owe us? This Sumerian inflection poisons our spoken word to this day, especially manifest when a moral deficit is implied: What are you lacking? It is thus only natural that we make things up and fake it when interrogated by the modern technocrat. Diversion becomes a weapon of the weak and slowly consumes us as a political force. Now we can see what really makes Houellebecq nervous about self-talk. For one is not speaking at all in any determinant sense. Instead we are being subjected to the speaking machine that imposes standards and criteria ultimately against the life we want. There is no subject of the statement. Its arrangement creates a fauxinteriority that only seeks to drape these command words in the garb of free speech. A sort of broken and self-referential performativity is crucial for this purpose. These enunciating freedoms transform us into neoliberal ciphers via the act of dialogue as much as the content. It is the template that governs and its specific contents provide an alibi post festum. And this forced self-talk in our current era of anti-democracy and the all-pervasive ‘I, Job’ function has important ideological implications.

This confusion between form and content is crucial for valorizing the fascist inside us, maintaining the facade of participation (i.e. input and consultation) amidst an institutional setting that has long forgotten who we are. Indeed, the half-baked encouragement to represent and engage in dialogue, however critical that speech may be towards your captors, is part of the open madness that is capitalism today. Unlike other political systems in which heartfelt opinions are prohibited on pain of symbolic (or actual) death, neoliberal capitalism thrives on the word and a social garbage analogy: empty out your content and leave the container as a reminder of your tagged status. A closer inspection reveals, however, that there is still a dim message underlying this practical impotence. Speaking = nothing. Actually, more than nothing because proletarianized talk somehow gives power a weird excuse for its own embarrassing existence. What we are theorizing here has little to do with personal surveillance and the panopticon-like structures of confessional interrogation (although that is still a substantial part of the institutional landscape). We know from Foucault that technologies of the self screw us by getting to know us, endeavouring to elucidate who we really are whilst actually politically profiling us for purposes that are contrary to our interests. But this attention should not inspire any misguided narcissistic pretences – that we are questioned because there is something special about us and our voices are important. The type of regulation we face today has little genuine interest in us. Biopower has given up on us in this respect; this makes it much more dangerous.

But there’s another catch. And this one will hurt. The enforcement of universal exchange value – your ‘soul’ and capitalist profit combined to form a backstabbing social monster that is the ‘other’ inside us – requires a modicum of linguistic presence to persist, for reasons that are both ideological (‘You are free to speak your mind’) and pragmatic (‘Public opinion is in favour of the next iWhatever … thankyou for your feedback’). This is why speaking to power has become so problematic today. A symbolic human-trap has emerged in this anti-person environment in which our speech is never to power (which implies an external vantage point), but always already with it. The sender1–recipient1–sender2 cycle with its gaps and interpretative spaces has irrevocably closed now, so we are no longer ever at home as we speak to the force that simply desires our recognition. This is also why many of us feel that we have become uninvited guests in our own personhood homes. The feeling of being out of place and lost behind enemy lines is usually the first response we have when solicited by a manager to present our authentic views.

When expression becomes an undue influence that has no outside and can’t even be bothered entertaining the idea that the world might be otherwise, the putative ‘free-speaking’ citizen starts to serve a certain function. This function is to clearly signal to a captured social audience that capitalism and life are now one. There is no going back. This is the world. A precociously false ontology is introduced. Our ability to speechify in an openly acknowledged oppressive context somehow substantiates the notion that social life would be impossible without the order words that bully us. Questioning the presence of authority is like questioning the existence of the weather. This is why so many of us suspect that our talk is strangely useful to the neoliberal gaze, even as we are denouncing it and endeavouring to hold it to account. All is public yet nothing is admissible. And nothing is admissible because all is compulsively dialogical. Radical philosophical praxis has typically deployed two tactics in the realm of dialogical reason to dethrone power, both of which have struggled to remain relevant today when everything is permissible yet inadmissible: dialectical critique on the one hand and irony on the other. Let’s examine dialectical reason first. It seeks to discern a space of synthetic excess born of the contradictions between the capitalist accumulation process – its forces of production (e.g. the social intellect, knowledge sharing, freeware, and so forth) and the relations of production (e.g. private property, patent laws, copyright, the HRM office, the neoliberal state, etc.). The overflowing social surplus that results is divined by way of analytically extending those contradictions towards capitalism’s own structural inabilities. That is to say, those irreconcilable qualities that cannot be subsumed within the universal process and thus explode into a clearing in order to exist for their own sake. A distant and emancipatory ‘other’ emerges from capitalism’s own contradictory dynamics; we might call this democratic communism.

However, there are some problems with this mode of radical praxis today. As we noted in Chapter 5 concerning false truth telling, self-criticism and open contradiction have recently become visible broadcast points in pro-corporate ideology. While mendaciously claiming to be open, the effect is to widen the distance between power and its dialectical ‘other’ (i.e. freedom) that we seek to render into a positive force. Societies of control engage in rituals of contrition in order to reinforce a permanent yet reiterative postponement of progressive political recompense, partially short-circuiting dialectical reason in the process. For example, a scandal concerning executive bonuses does little to rectify this patent affront to the ordinary working citizen who is struggling on the minimum wage. In fact, the revelations are vital for the continuation of the status quo since they lead us to believe that somewhere someone must be doing something about it. But they seldom are. UK readers might also think of the widespread furore caused by the Conservative government when it negligently undervalued the publicly owned Royal Mail before placing it in private hands; or the infamous ‘horse meat’ scandal, which led to nothing. It seemed that the immense verbal outrage functioned as a license to preclude criminal culpability. This warping of dialectical reason also connects with the speaking machine in increasingly strange and counterintuitive ways.

For example, a senior manager in the financial industry told me about the exercises he organizes with employees of a large bank that has been embroiled in scandal. For obvious reasons, one would expect the bank’s internal culture to favour ignorance, silence and distortion over critical truth telling. Instead, the bank decided to embrace the unsympathetic and dark truth about itself. In the exercise, ten of the bank’s employees are led into an ‘immersion room’, which is freezing, pitch-black and far too small. Following a few minutes of disorientation, six video screens start to play hard-core ‘anti-advertisements’ that completely destroy the bank’s credibility, highlighting its connections with organized crime, tyrannical governments and endemic corruption. No holds are barred. Afterwards, the employees are asked to answer a simple question: Why did we show you that? Two dimensions of entrapping bio-talk are thus unleashed. Firstly, criticality itself becomes part of the backdrop of capitalist power relations, internalizing a potential moment of dialectical excess for its own regressive needs. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, in the process of coercive enunciation the speaking machine actually intends to appropriate and snuff out the existential impact of the awful truth. Of course, employees will invariably fumble over their own lies when answering this already answered question, still recoiling from the shocking confession made by their own employer (and perhaps an element of capitalist perversity is involved here too). Once again critical admission mutates into a pro-capitalist stance and begins to serve an ‘I, Job’ function that is experienced as more inescapable than before. By facing the appalling truth these individuals paradoxically become more astute and willing investment bankers.

Again we witness a rather schizophrenic and demented feature of capitalist realism today. Because its revelatory contradictions are no longer hidden but expressed, the grit that dialectical analysis relies upon to force the synthesis is circumvented or even dissolved. This post-dialectical expression of power immunizes both patent falsehoods and plain-speaking corporate truthfulness from true radical criticism. Contrasting both types of deceptive speech with the ‘facts’, as dialectical criticism recommends, always risks feeding the very machine one seeks to subvert. These rituals of truth and reconciliation don’t diminish the power that false statements currently hold over our realities. Indeed, domination occurs precisely through the statement format (the empty performative that only communicates its own subordination) rather than by appealing to some counter-argument or excuse, thus scrambling the co-ordinates of traditional critical reason, for obvious reasons. What is being hidden is actually in plain view, as Deleuze and Guattari point out:

We see this in police or government announcements which often have little plausibility or truthfulness, but say very clearly what should be observed and retained. The indifference to any kind of credibility exhibited by these announcements often verges on provocation. This is proof that the issue lies elsewhere. Let people say … this is all that language demands. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 76)

We can observe this disempowering visibility all around us. The depravities of neoliberal society are constantly being paraded before us (by itself as much as by its critics), and we are relentlessly encouraged to respond. Whether we do or not, nothing ever happens. One begins to suspect that nothing ever happens because of the way these truths are used and our placement in relation to them, as we noted in the last chapter. This is evident when the presence of the sign intends to ‘prompt’ a certain speech-perception among the target audience: we know what is objectively going on, but that knowledge automatically renders itself inadmissible and can no longer be an open political concern to discuss meaningfully. This is why a hesitant resignation pervades political language today. The very invitation to engage verbally with power separates us from the organs of direct influence, turning the political event into a distant spectacle whose truths can be observed but never pragmatically questioned:

Just look at what they call scandals today: the newspapers talk about them incessantly, everyone pretends either to defend themselves or go on the attack; but the search for anything illegal comes up empty-handed, given the nature of the regime of capital. Everything is legal … they keep on talking about ‘ideology’. Ideology has no importance here. What matters is the organization of power. (Deleuze, 2004: 263)

But we have already proved that this is actually a purely ideological process. Potentially damaging insights into the mechanics of power are now an important aspect of the ‘slide show’ that it presents to an otherwise disempowered audience, who paradoxically feel even more controlled by actually knowing these truths and being asked to reply within a setting that inexorably supplies its own affirmative answer, no matter what one says. A mannerist gesture that results in a cardboard cut-out version of ‘critique’ is now a basic aspect of corporate self-representation. It operates as an inoculation against more serious and systematic interventions that would otherwise undermine financial tyranny. For example, mining firms now honestly speak about some of the more controversial implications of their business activities. If they did not, then they would be open to a more ferocious attack, given the hypocrisy that accompanies their proclamations about environmental and social sustainability. But a small dose of radical truth – a prearranged opening for limited dialogue – provides a platform for feigned remorse and that most important instrument of neoliberal reproduction: remedial postponement. A large gold-mining company implicated in gross human rights violations in Papua New Guinea and Tanzania is thus able to state on its website:

Businesses that strive to act responsibly can create and contribute to negative human rights impacts, and we are not immune from that regrettable reality. To mitigate this risk, we will continue to roll-out and implement our global human rights policy and human rights compliance program.

A space of dialogue between capital and its ‘stakeholders’, which ostensibly appears to be a progressive move, is actually the opposite. Consideration of how criticism can be appropriated by the institutional constellation under critique is not new, of course. And this is what troubled Adorno (2005: 66) as he pushed dialectical thought to its limits and unwittingly discovered pure, unadulterated power: ‘The last grandly-conceived theorem of bourgeois self-criticism has become a means of making bourgeois self-alienation, in its final phase, absolute, and of rendering ineffectual the lingering awareness of the ancient wound, in which lies hope of a better future.’ For Adorno, the antithesis of dialectical reason rendered speaking to power almost impossible from an emancipatory perspective. In his search for resolution, or at least a space of alterity to capitalist influence, he found only more domination, reverberating infinitely in all directions. Hence his pessimistic advice: ‘For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity. All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation, merely masks the tacit acceptance of inhumanity’ (Adorno, 2005: 26).

Let us now turn to irony. This method of engagement has held some promise for debunking domination in the late-capitalist social order. Indeed, it has long been recognized that power does not do irony very well. It demands that its edicts be taken seriously, on the formal level at least, even if it knows that no one ever does so, including those who wield the most power. If the capitalist totality is experienced as omnipresent, then revealing its double structure of ‘fake faking’ through ironic distancing may allow some respite, providing a place of escape which yet lies within the zone of subjugation. In Miller’s beautiful investigation of how to ‘fake it’, he describes the critical freedom that irony affords:

Those who adopt it seem to feel that irony gives them control over feeling foolish about playing the various roles that they are self-conscious about playing. It is a style of making one’s less than full immersion in various roles the substance, as well as the style, of one’s character. (Miller, 2003: 115)

If we push this reasoning further in a socio-political context, we might suggest that ironic language – including satire and exaggeration – aims to disrupt the seriousness with which power takes itself and which it demands from it audience. However, has not the neoliberal enterprise too discovered irony and put it to work? Many studies of corporate culture, for example, reveal that an ironic disposition and the pseudo-subjective distance it provides is part and parcel of the domination process. Do not take your subordination too seriously – we don’t – but act as if you do and the ‘joke’ is on all of us!

I discovered the ironic corporation late one Friday night in my East London neighbourhood. After getting horribly drunk with some Swedish friends and wandering around aimlessly in the crowded streets, we were invited by a young man and woman to ‘join the party and free drinks’. We went along to the party and were given a bottle of beer and ushered to a table with paints and placards. ‘There is a protest tomorrow, help us tell them what we think of the government.’ Other inebriated guests were painting peace signs and other slogans. I then asked who was sponsoring the party. ‘Our firm is!’ It turned out this was a marketing exercise for a large mobile phone company and our hosts were its employees. So, feeling devilish, I prepared a placard that read ‘MOBILE PHONES KILL’. ‘Wonderful!’ said our host, ‘the boss will absolutely adore that, we will use it tomorrow!’ So much for the transformative potential of irony. I left the contrived festivity in a rather sober mood.

Rethinking Dialogical Politics at Work

What makes the contemporary politics of the ‘ironic corporation’ so fascinating is power’s ability to absorb and pre-emptively utilize multiple points of reference in a non-dialectical manner, including speech acts that appear to be against capitalism itself. Its centre is centre-less and expansive, functioning through a network of oblique vectors, even though we now know that this sense of universality is actually an ideological distortion designed to make collective departure seem impossible. Regardless of this, the distortion is real. A society of control yields to an isotopic space, one that ‘is constituted not by the abolition of circular segmentarity by a concentricity of distinct circles, or the organization of a resonance among centres’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 211). Discerning an optical blind spot is not enough. Its supplementary character must also be occupied and subverted. Outlining the limits of our relentless co-optation (or a threshold that corporate ideology cannot easily integrate into its own parlance without making its own existence untenable) is therefore central for the anti-work project today. Of course, when domination channels refusal through its own prism, it too changes to a certain degree, something we have learnt from studying colonialism. The key difference between this and cynical neoliberal truth telling, however, is that the latter’s apparent totality is only propagated rather than modified as a consequence. While, for example, ‘corporate social responsibility’ programs may imbue the firm with a facet of humanity, they add only a shallow genuflection to an otherwise unaltered universality that catapults us deeper into capitalist realism. How might we speak in power’s presence without simply withdrawing, as Adorno sadly recommends, and without supplying it with the attentional energies that it so craves from us?

I Want This Too Much!

Managerialism in the contemporary neoliberal enterprise necessitates clamorous public speech with denied or barred admission. Our participation in the discourse of power makes us not only spectators in a theatre of domination but also audiences to ourselves. This is the paralysing abrogation that the speaking machine institutes. The travesty of power is now part of the corporate public script, cloaking the bases of regulation in ever more inscrutable ways. This is why some suggest that the traditional approach to opposition typically championed by the workers’ movement – speaking the truth to power – is less effective today, especially as it pertains to traditional ideology critique: ‘This is not how things really are.’ The critical interlocutor submits that all is not what it seems, and furthermore, this ‘what it seems’ is a generative distortion aiming to obfuscate the outlandish truth. However, drawing attention to contradiction and falsehood – ‘You say we are free at work, but look here, this is patently untrue’ – is increasingly rendered ineffective in our neoliberal milieu. Why is this? Because, as Latour (2004) notes, hegemony has extensively appropriated the critique of meta-narratives so that now there is no longer one truth, only ‘points of view’ and opinion. This provides space for false truth telling to emerge. Ideology critique must therefore ‘compete’ in the capitalist marketplace of ideas along with the most ridiculous ones. This might look like pluralism, but it is the exact opposite. It conveys a pre-emptory structuring of the background master index so that the ideas of the ruling classes are the only ones that really win in the end.

By way of example one might think of the self-referential reasoning of former US president George W. Bush when he strangely confessed he felt very proud about the millions of street protesters opposing his policies. Why? Because he too stood for free speech and those were the very values he was defending when invading foreign countries!

What makes neoliberal pluralism (including ‘communitarianism’) so hazardous to progressive thought is that it implicitly relies upon its opposite: it symbolically twists emancipation into a mannerist byword for a society already lost to power. Its key word is ‘yes’ with an array of unremitting false guarantees. Yes, we are permitted to speak the truth, but only in a meta-context where our reflections do not matter or will be immediately deemed inadmissible through the sheer weight of the context. Power knows that we understand this logic very well, which is why it can nevertheless wryly recommend: ‘But, nevertheless, still speak, speak as much as you like!’ Making things doubly problematic is the way in which the very opportunity to speak is automatically deemed proof that speakers are free, by token of their own utterances. This is why the widespread celebration of ‘tempered radicals’ in US corporations ought to be viewed with scepticism. According to Meyerson (2001), the tempered radical quietly calls into question the inequalities that result from ‘being different’ and empowers the silent majority who are slowly changing their workplaces from within. In actual fact, they assist in reinforcing a fallacious and horrific dream of ‘friendly capitalism’ that embraces all standpoints. Žižek sheds light on what is happening here when he observes:

We act as if we are free to choose, while silently not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction (inscribed in our very commitment to ‘free speech’) tells us what to do and what to think. As Marx noted long ago, the secret is in the form itself. (Žižek, 2009: 134)

This is a nice point. The utterance of words designed to oppose arbitrary subjugation often takes place on an unquestioned stage of power – a capitalist supra-reality – that actively thrives on such words and gestures. Recalling the ‘immersion room’ exercise above, perhaps the same thing transpires in the postmodern ‘organization’ that demands we speak and display our true thoughts, be they happy or disgruntled ones. For instance, we might earnestly denounce a particularly nasty wave of organizational restructuring at the office. But this is treated as even more evidence of the wonderfully enlightened nature of the modern firm as the restructuring continues apace. The same goes for the ghastly ‘consultation meetings’ that follow an announcement of layoffs. Consultation merely means that a decision has been made regarding your fate and the firm can tick the right ethical and legal boxes claiming that you had your say before being fired.

Even Starbucks is now willing to listen to those who resist, declaring that open dialogue with dissenters (both in and outside the firm) is a key operative principle in their corporate culture. In his rather repulsive business book, The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary, Michelli notes that Principle 4 of Starbucks’ success is ‘Embrace Resistance’. He quotes one executive as saying: ‘This council brings in dissenting voices among our senior leadership and helps us look to areas of our business that may expect complex future challenges’ (Michelli, 2007: 127). Open consultation can be politically invidious since even fearless speech may aid the endless deference of the real target, which remains irrefragable and patently uncontested.

Emancipatory dialogue within the neoliberal setting must be recalibrated to avoid the recuperative traps we have noted above. If one must speak with power at all, then caution, care and circumspection are required. The first recalibration might be labelled ‘over-identification’; this has been explored a little in the post-work literature (see Fleming and Spicer, 2010). The idea here is relatively straightforward. Because much of the ideology in the biopolitical enterprise (e.g. self-managing teams, democracy, freedom, open speech, etc.) is not meant to be taken literally, it must invariably rely upon a subtextual negation that must not be fully articulated. The cynical enterprise must configure an inbuilt mental distance in this dialogical structure. For example, in the ‘immersion room’ exercise described above, employees are asked why they think the bank has shown them such devastating truths. Everybody clearly knows the serious answer: the boss is an idiot and finance capitalism is inherently corrupt and unsalvageable. But with the help of the abstract speaking machine, workers can distance themselves from this obvious truth and utter some moronic words like, ‘Well, you have shown us these shocking things about the organization because we need to be honest about what has happened. Only then can we learn from our mistakes and serve society as an agent of good.’ But what if the message being burnt into these employees was taken too seriously? Something like: ‘After seeing these truths I can no longer have anything to do with the enterprise.’

The strategy of over-identification undermines this cynical distance and takes corporate claims at face value to reveal and subvert the negation that it hopes will automatically transpire (‘These employees won’t really tell us managers what they think’). Indeed, one of the wonderful weaknesses of what is called in the United States ‘liberation management’ (with its celebration of flat hierarchies, free speech, self-organization, etc.) is that if it was practised to the letter and fully realised it would result in a fundamental shift in the logic of capitalism: economic organizing would resemble an anarchistic collective serving wider needs rather than a capitalist excuse for humiliating work and manufactured scarcity. Moreover, this recalibrated type of speech act is often infused with an element of humour. Corporate managerialism cannot belabour itself and punish those who follow its proclamations without undermining its own axiomatic authority.

Dissenting Consent and its Incorrigible Mirth

If we must accept the order to speak to power, a second dialogical recalibration may be useful. I term it ‘dissenting consent’. Again, like over-identification, it does not launch its criticism from any imagined dialectical vanishing point, but aims to use the partially reconfigured qualities of domination against itself, an immanent engagement with the capitalist overcoding process. Our forced visibility within the confines of the non-admissible can be used to fulminate against the supplementary impossibility that totalization draws upon to sustain its internal integrity. The peasant knowledge we mentioned in Chapter 2 allows us to remember the present and see the unseen extremism of our domination. But how does such ‘dissenting consent’ work in the context of dialogical exchange? The paradoxical ‘visible intrigue’ of cold war politics presents a myriad of examples of this cat and mouse game. The famous ‘Kitchen Debate’ might serve as a useful illustration. When, during the early 1960s, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was shown around a model American kitchen at a trade exhibition in Moscow by US vice-president Richard Nixon, an unexpected debate ensued before the world’s media. Nixon knew full well that the press in the Soviet Union was highly censored. The debate was thus an opportunity to demonstrate the moral superiority of the United States over the demonic communist bloc. Khrushchev mocked Nixon, joking that when the Soviet Union overtook the USA in economic, political, military and social richness, all the Soviets would do is collectively smile and wave, ‘Bye, bye … bye, bye’. An embarrassed Nixon, furtively turning to the giggling media, asked Khrushchev whether he intended to permit the Soviet people to see this excellent kitchen and their leader’s rather rude treatment of his host. Khrushchev insouciantly replied, ‘Of course’. Nixon could now sense victory. With a wry smile, he quipped, ‘and the US shall also hear your words’. Khrushchev’s mood grew hesitant: ‘Oh … erm … do you mean translated into English?’ he nervously queried, clearly worried about the prospect of having his intemperate views broadcast around the world in English. ‘Yes,’ answered Nixon with a confident and resounding smile. Suddenly, Khrushchev beamed with glee, ‘Wonderful! The US people will finally hear the truth!’

Of course, Nixon had been completely outmanoeuvred – not by Khrushchev, but by himself. This engagement with power is interesting because it second-guesses what the seemingly more powerful party feels to be the weaknesses of the subordinate party. And then it leverages these false strengths of the superordinate position (that the Soviets will censor and the United States will not). The ideological coordinates of regulatory speech are then imperceptibly reordered, presenting a reference point (a debate about the free media, in this case) that might potentially serve the stronger actor. And then comes the death blow. The semantic structure unwittingly supplied by the dominant party is swiftly reversed with devastating impact. Only with free speech will the American public learn about the superior greatness of the Soviet people. In effect, the powerful party has pulled the rug from under its own feet.

Now let us return to the equally open intrigue of the neoliberal enterprise and the societies of control. How might this ideological technique be deployed in a corporate setting? A good illustration pertains to the way communication guerrilla groups challenged a number of European airlines involved in deporting ‘illegal immigrants’. Autonome a.f.r.i.k.a. gruppe (2002) report on the symbolic sabotage of Lufthansa by the German anti-racist collective Kein Mensch ist illegal. They understood that a radical critique would need to bypass the cynical neoliberal distancing norms discussed above. Kein Mensch ist illegal therefore prepared overly positive leaflets using the company’s easily recognizable brand. The leaflets explained to customers that the company was very concerned about customer comfort and safety, but simply could not restrain its prisoners with handcuffs and gags to protect its loyal frequent flyers. The leaflets were in fact a glowing humanitarian portrayal of the company, but framed in a manner that immediately revealed the truthful underside about the company’s complicity with a racist state. Importantly, the message of refusal consents to the company’s own caring image and thus has more critical impact than simple chastisement: ‘The company found itself in a bind: it couldn’t deny that it was carrying out the deportations, and that this inconvenienced customers, but it was offering them no compensation’ (autonome a.f.r.k.a groupe, 2002: 167–168). The airline could not disagree with the leaflet unless it disagreed with itself. Paradoxically, it had to buy into the criticism (and undermine itself) in order to uphold a favourable presentation of itself.

The much publicized antics of the Yes Men employ a similar strategy of dissidence. Their strategy is clear: infiltrate a disliked institutional form, impersonate its blithe stereotypical verbiage, and then push that corporate-speak to its logical extreme. This openly reveals the nefarious reality underlying the glossy-brochure-like depictions of the neoliberal business enterprise. Investment bankers, right-wing politicians and management consultants have all been on the receiving end of this kind of sabotage. What makes such ‘culture jamming’ effective is the way it uncovers the rotten core of, say, an arms-trading firm, but in a manner that makes it difficult for those arms traders to dispel. This is because the manoeuvre occupies the firm’s own declarations about itself. This in turn incites a potentially uncontainable and irremediable self-criticism, which is far more difficult to dismiss than external criticism. The latter can simply be ignored or explained away with phoney figures whereas the former gets far too close for that to happen.

As with over-identification, a crucial aspect of this kind of dialogue with power involves humour and mirth. While there isn’t scope to deal with humour in an extensive manner here, suffice it to say that we must be cautious about the significance we give it in relation to refusing neoliberal regulation. Some see in humour the ultimate weapon of defiance, deeming it a crucial weapon for the oppressed. Laughing somehow rescues us from the cold unfeeling technocrat within and can even upset the foundations of oppressive political regimes. I remain ambivalent on this count. In the end, there is nothing remotely funny about the open prison of work today and the recriminating social memes proliferated by an extreme version of neoliberal capitalism. Perhaps Adorno (2005) issues the most pertinent reservation on this topic. For him, any kind of comedy in the context of a horrific totality only serves as a moment of wilful blindness, or worse, a symbolic resonance with the present. Jokingly debunking power nevertheless evokes a secret economy of equivalence, a mutual understanding shared with power. According to Adorno, this mutualism must be rejected by the critic. If there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, then there certainly cannot be laughter. Its countenance of lightheartedness inadvertently hardens the iron in our souls. Even innocent laughing in the street, as Brecht avers, commits a grievous miscalculation since it implies silence about so many travesties. No doubt Adorno had Brecht’s haunting 1939 poem ‘To Those Who Come after Us’ in mind when sketching his reflections on a damaged life:

Truly I live in dark times!
The guileless word is folly. A smooth forehead
Suggests sensitivity. The man who laughs
Has simply not yet had
The terrible news. (Brecht, 2007: 70)

While this austere stance is valuable for checking careless laughter, it does come across as slightly puritanical. For this reason I think we can reconstruct a worker’s diction of humour that could politicize the present and avoid the potential pitfalls outlined by Adorno. Here it is useful to note the Communards of the Paris Commune, the events of ’68, and present-day political satire that truly tests the norms of capitalist acceptability (especially street-sign sabotage). Two modes of laugher can be considered in this regard. The first might be termed having fun while contesting power, in which a carnivalesque attitude serves to motivate the otherwise serious business of political praxis. Here we might do well to reread Ross’s (1989) excellent essay on the Paris Commune and its vertiginous decodification in the drunken poetry of Rimbaud. She explores the lexiconic sympathies between the Communards’ reinvention of everyday life and the poet’s literary derangement of the senses. Indeed, is it possible that he was fighting on the barricades? What a wonderful thought! As the child-poet announces to his de-worked comrades in ‘Blankets of Blood’: ‘It’s our turn! Romantic friends: our fun begins./O waves of fire, we’ll never work again!’ The deactivation of bourgeois seriousness and its tyranny of surplus scarcity was a mostly playful event. But not because it was cruel (Rimbaud did have a reputation after all, as Verlaine learnt well enough) but because it released workers from their subjective straitjackets, from the imprisoning idiom of the métier. And in a society overcome by a negative ideology of work, the métier includes everyone. Rimbaud understood what a false totality could imply, as his lyrical scorn attests (‘Bosses and workers, all of them peasants, and common’). Ross (1989) suggests that the Paris Commune pursued an anti-work modulation via humorous pleasure; one that was wilfully oblivious to the work ethic as defined by fathers, teachers, priests – and today, perhaps the Gates Corporation. But this does not mean that things didn’t get done or children went hungry, as if the Communards were blissfully high on some cult-like utopian dream. Participative mutual aid, co-operation and democratic multitasking abound. For it was only after a long propaganda campaign that this type of sociality came to be termed ‘idleness’. The Commune turned the tables by revealing the truth. Rationalized exploitation was closer to useless idleness than to collective self-management. Indeed, ‘by a striking paradox, laziness remained outside the work order, but moved fast, too fast’ (Ross, 1989: 53).

Antonio Negri (2009) introduces a second way of approaching laugher in the notes he penned in an Italian jail cell. His words are extraordinary, given that political prisoners are not known for their promotion of frivolity. However, he does not go quite that far. In the context of totalized pain, Negri suggests, we might turn inward to affirm a joyous ethic, constituting a form of life that exudes the uncontainable expansiveness of living labour. This is a communist ethic. Laughter might provide a code that takes the subordinated life beyond itself, for it cannot be entirely reduced to a calculus of economic obedience. I believe this kind of humour is very amenable to the anti-work movement. Nevertheless, it is still always susceptible to co-optation, repackaging, and so forth. It must therefore be enunciated with circumspection and pointed calculation. Negri writes:

[I]n a world that no longer knows anything of measure but only of the immense [smisurati], the principal of criticism consists in ‘laughter’. ‘Laughter’, ‘irony’ and ‘sarcasm’ have, in this world of immense contrasts, the same function that doubt had in the limited world … It is a picaresque laughter that accompanies paradox or constructs it and intersperses the discussion with its critical effects. The demolition of the function of retribution in the relationship of morality and theology is carried out in the name of sarcasm. (Negri, 2009: 60)

In principal, therefore, we certainly ought to view humour as politically suspect, especially the humiliating laughter of the powerful. But sarcasm can conjugate the internal failure that is definitive of all forms of domination and wrest from it points of departure that avoids the restitution of an already bad position. The impossible subject (i.e. the imprisoned) that we have become is no longer an open secret, the elephant in the room that we must ignore. This is why our sarcastic remark reveals a secret public stepping forth to partially resolve its own impossibility. Power cannot accept the forthrightness that this remark signifies, for it is also a path to redemption and power’s absence within that symbolic structure. So if one is to laugh at power, it must be done tactically. Was not Khrushchev’s barbed sarcasm in the context of Nixon’s economy of retribution the most pure expression of such humour? Truth’s unpredictable force is turned inside out – not by earnestly revealing power’s straightforward hypocrisy, but by sarcastically amplifying the double duplicity within its own semantic alliances.

This is why Adorno is wrong when he asserts that the proletariat have no language of their own. Uncompromising humour is the intelligence of the oppressed because it reveals an alternative set of historical lines that are in no way dependent on capitalism for their self-articulation. Unfortunately, Adorno’s understanding of this ostensibly immured stance misses the point when he argues, ‘the language of the subjected … domination alone has stamped, so robbing them further of the justice promised by the unmutilated, autonomous word to all those free enough to pronounce it without rancour. Proletarian language is dictated by hunger’ (Adorno, 2005: 102). This is where dialectics gets into trouble or, more accurately, gets Adorno into trouble, something he later rectified. If we view capitalism as a parasitical structure unable to author its own preconditions, then we must also impute an ontic positivity at the heart of that incapacity. This positivity is not a dialectical contradiction but a diffuse and universal negative opiticalization that draws upon our peasant knowledge to remember the present. Herein lie the remnants of a proletariat discourse, a mute excessive autonomy. Its syntax is precisely silent and withdrawn when perceived from the viewpoint of capital, since it cannot express neoliberalism’s founding impossibility by using the language of that impossibility: capitalist reason itself.

Post-Dialogical Politics at Work

If biopolitical societies of control put ‘life itself’ to work through the ‘I, Job’ function, then how can we trust ourselves, our anxieties, words and gestures? More importantly, if the CEO now criticizes the ethical standing of his or her firm more stridently than employees (albeit in a mannerist form), then how is it possible to discern the boundaries that distinguish a genuine anti-capitalist activation of politics? How do we sidestep those intimate zones of sympathy that capital constantly establishes in order to reterritorialize dissent, draw it back into the logic of accumulation and turn it into an instrument of exploitation? As the ‘immersion room’ example discussed earlier demonstrates, we can now see all sorts of attempts to make resistance speak in order to make it congruous with the ideology of work. Advertising in London currently seeks to cash in on underground chic and revolutionary cool – ‘Be your own revolution!’ cries one advert for new computer software. Right-wing management consultants tell their readers that much can be learnt from the creative upheaval of 1960s counter-culture: promote an organization that resembles the attributes of a topsy-turvy world of anarchy and hire employees that hate capitalism.

But let’s look more closely at what we really mean by co-optation and recuperation. Indeed, the question of appropriation is somewhat analogous to those old (and yet still very relevant) debates about commodification. This may prove instructive for us too. As many pessimistic commentators have noted, there does not appear to be any limit to the commodification process. All forms of dissent are potential grist for the commercial mill, as millions of Che Guevara T-Shirts around the world attest. So what exactly are the limits of commodification and what forms of radicalism are impervious to being transformed into yet another marketing message for Google or Levi’s? To find the answer, we need to revisit our basic critique of dialogical reason in the neoliberal age. The ideology of work and its capitalist correlates operates through an implicitly empty performativity. Thus we need to think in terms of form rather than content. Once the commodity form has attained regulative dominance (i.e. real subsumption), everything and anything can be inserted as content, from radical chic obscenities to revolutionary pornography, to the most poignant critique of capitalism posted on the Google Lecture Series. Content is transposed through an indomitable formalization in which it becomes yet another empty gesture, marketing gimmick or simulated lifestyle with no real connection to social release other than that of the senses. It is in this way that the commodification process arrests the shared sympathies between content and form. However, there is one thing that cannot be commoditized: the commodity’s absence from its own generative form. That particular lack is beyond the commodity’s conditions of possibility. It is unable to recover any exchange value from that gaping non-presence. Here we arrive at the intractable limit of the commodity form.

We can apply the same rationale to approaching the restorative limits of neoliberal co-optation, especially pertaining to criticism and the universal injunction to work. What kind of refusal can remain resistant to becoming the content-grist for the speaking machine as it seeks to reduce life to a tradable piece of human and social capital? For as we know, late capitalism can reintegrate all sorts of non-economic and wacky recalcitrant activities, drawing upon them as useful ‘contents’ to deepen real subsumption. But, as with the commodity form, the neoliberal project cannot incorporate its own formal absence, just as the capitalist paradigm cannot incorporate its non-existence into its ideological rhetoric (although it often does so with respect to content). To push the argument one step further, we must also consider the victims of neoliberal integration. While the artificial intelligence wired into the ‘I, Job’ function means that even the most rebellious views (even in a purely inverted form as with moral deviance or criminality) can safely be processed within its system, it cannot incorporate its own formalized non-presence. The machine reveals its own internal limit and begins to malfunction and emit smoke. However, if this negative field cannot be achieved through dialogue (given that resistant speech always risks being hijacked by the incorporative flows of the generalizable exchange form) then absence ought to be instantiated through silence. By this, I do not mean a mute presence, but a collective and pro-democratic exchange that the pundits of corporatism view as silence only after we have literally departed the scene altogether. This is the non-identical reversal of the ideology of abandonment which otherwise so forcefully holds us in its crushing gaze.

Why Does Capitalism Fear Our Desertion So Much?

This reasoning might explain the rise of a post-dialogical approach to refusing the ideology of work. This method of resistance decides that dialogue with power is simply too perilous. It prefers silence, an ethic of inscrutability and, if possible, of communal departure. The agents of struggle understand that one of the most insidious features of neoliberal capitalism is its ability to neutralize a speech act before that utterance gains power. For all our pleas to power to halt its invasive degradation of living labour, its various modulations continue unabated, often making good use of those pleas. This is indicative of the type of domination we are facing today. So here is the central aporia. The clear demands of the bio-proletariat’s refusal movement are rendered inaudible (indeed, they are smothered) precisely by having employees speak – or, more accurately, by having them sacrifice themselves to the whims of a pugnacious speaking machine. Rather than allowing workers too few opportunities to speak and invite recognition, the modern corporation is a veritable recognition machine, inducing endless waffle about ourselves, our worlds, our identities, likes and dislikes. And in a rather schizophrenic manner, this recognition is closely connected to the inadmissible, peddled by the postponed promise of abandonment.

The ideology of abandonment representative of neoliberal employment policies complicates post-dialogical refusal. It enrols workers in the power matrix not by welcoming us into its domain, but by threating permanent exile. Of course, this false promise of abandonment operates as a Trojan Horse for a painful form of subjectification. In this respect, the ideological policeman interpellates us not with a ‘Hey you!’ but with a ‘Go away!’ This is why I distrust the term ‘exit’ for explaining progressive post-dialogical politics. It has become part of the fear apparatus that binds us to work. The rhetoric of abandonment carries a potent conditioning reference: ‘You are nothing more than a debt, why have you done this to us and yourself? What is the matter with you?’ The capitalist employment relationship begins to resemble a weird version of battered-wife syndrome: the more we are beaten and emotionally taunted by rejection, the more we desire to stay. Adorno makes a striking observation about this intersection between the discourse of social exclusion and the magnetic attraction to stay put: ‘Sociability itself connives at injustice by pretending that in this chill world we can still talk to each other’ (Adorno, 2005: 26). From now on the mouth becomes an indigent chronicler of its own unworthiness, an open fetishization that is systematically collated by the coordinates of power. Dialogue can only verbalize its mute consent. The sensible objective of departure is hamstrung by the interpellative command: ‘Go away!’ In this respect, post-dialogical politics involves a withdrawal from both the syntax of power and its ensnaring discourse of dismissal.

The generalized speaking machine currently breathing down our necks is cunning. It uses the arithmetic of abandonment to hold us in place and undermine our intuitive reflex to simply walk away. Regardless of this, the preliminary frontrunner of post-dialogical politics is a buoyant suspicion concerning the benefits of ‘participation’ and ‘consultation’ within a broader capitalist horizon that ends up being reinforced by our involvement. At the present moment, the collective trajectory of our class struggle is simply about being left alone. Of course, any parasitical social system like extreme neoliberal capitalism cannot abide by this under any circumstances. Hence the bizarre ‘no-escape’ culture that we find ourselves perpetually entrapped in. Escape? That we don’t even know what might lie beyond the outer perimeter is a sure indication of how bad things have become. But in this dire predicament there is a pinprick of optimism to be found. That capitalism has entered into a profoundly parasitical mode at least indicates a founding weakness in the system, its internal impossibility. What is the nature of this weakness? In the past, anti-capitalist analysis frequently made the mistake of seeing living labour as the by-product of capitalist control. The institutional brawn of private ownership was assumed to be a first mover, a leader, given the havoc it has caused. This line of analysis misses the infinite and overflowing social wealth that capitalism can’t do without but has little reciprocity with. Because of its ultimate class structure, capitalism is unable to summons what it truly needs – living labour – but cannot acknowledge that systemic impotence. This line of thinking, I suggest, clears the ground for post-dialogical political struggle, because living labour cannot be truly abandoned by a system that is unable to exist without it. The ideological spell is broken. Now it is us who wield the threat of desertion, which is simply an articulation of our peasant knowledge in practical form. Post-dialogical praxis confounds power’s self-assured assumption about the way employees comprehend their oppression. Slowly the semantic hold begins to fail. The space for any old content now drastically shrinks. Finally, the totality dissolves when we nullify the grammatical attention it absolutely requires from us. Just as the pervert cannot stand being ignored or passed over, the mute mouth of our militant non-observance reduces the social factory to something of a little policeman with nothing to say. Now we are free.

Absentification

Given this theoretical backdrop, we can now delineate two practical types of post-dialogical struggle that may help us withdraw from the stage of late-capitalist regulation: namely political and ethical methods of absence. Let’s discuss the political dimension first. Radical absenteeism in this respect includes those concrete initiatives that self-valorize the non-coincidental, unassignable or unrecognizable exterior points within the capitalist exchange circuit. This kind of critical praxis seeks to build autonomous filaments that collectively repossess social time. Indeed, if the hyper-accelerated time codes of capitalism require an impossible level of presence, cognitive attention and visibility, then some typography of structural anonymity can secure a common time when we are left alone. But this invisibility can also be transformed into a weapon if utilized correctly.

As the Invisible Committee’s manifesto The Coming Insurrection suggests, ‘Turn anonymity into a defensive position’ (Invisible Committee, 2009: 112–113). This is very different to the anonymous ‘sabotage’ that has long been a feature of industrial life. For example, the ‘Anonymous’ radical group does actually have a face (a Guy Fawkes mask), an icon (a headless suited man) and a set of protocols (on the Internet if you search closely). However, this is a paradoxical ‘identity-less’ identity guiding its anti-corporate interventions, because a real and identifiable human face is the medium in which power functions most effectively today. In short, avoid the face.

Anne Elizabeth Moore (2007) nicely explores this post-dialogical politics in the music industry, which is notorious for capturing and exploiting the living labour of artists. In the 1990s a thriving network of autonomous culture producers had developed a unique sub-economy of music in a number of US cities. These communities often celebrated anti-capitalist independence and a DYI ethic that dispensed with the need for large commercial labels. At the same time, however, large music multinationals were making ever deeper forays into this subculture. While engagement with powerful corporations through various forms of ironic and cynical analysis was still the common currency (à la Nirvana or Radio Head), this frequently resulted in artistic ‘sell-out’. In this context, Bikini Kill (which had considerable underground success with the song ‘Suck My Left One’) and other ‘riot grrrl’ bands (anti-consumerist, feminist DYI groups) sought to resist this aspect of commodification. They rendered the unmarketable marketable. So these bands practised a politics of imperceptibility: ‘Riot grrrl participants developed a sophisticated response: a media blackout … for the most part the mainstream media were forced to describe what they could comprehend of the burgeoning scene from the outer edge of a sweaty mosh pit’ (Moore, 2007: 9).

Under a regime of power whereby the corporeal and social ‘I’ is the key locus of regulative compliance and the ‘I, Job’ function is almost indistinguishable from what we are, an additional form of refusal has to be undertaken to support our political absence. This moves us into the ethical domain. Recalibrating struggle through modes of imperceptibility can also become a way of life, in which ethical subjects (re)relate to their pre-constitutive socialities by turning their backs on power through subjective desertion. If ‘life itself’ is now a central concern of the sadistic neoliberal corporation, then what better substance to graft itself onto than ‘the subject’, with all its idiosyncratic fears and desires? We are fairly pathetic in this respect. But let’s work through the process. We know that subjectification requires a number of technologies in order to become operative – language and representation being some of the more pivotal ones (and this might also explain why Foucault became increasingly interested in aphasia in the context of the liberal injunction to speak). US-style human resource management did, of course, perfect this form of regulation in the 1990s. And contemporary managerialism has continued the trend in an inverted form by deploying abandonment as an indubitable instrument of enrolment.

Perhaps this is where Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) Thousand Plateaus comes into its own as a consummate guide for de-subjectification and resisting the ‘I, Job’ function in the neoliberal era. The authors argue that the so-called ‘subject’ of capitalism is radically distinct from the rich existential being we experience as individuals. It is possible to differentiate the individual from the doleful identikit imposed upon us by neoliberal conditions. Joyful individuality connotes social living proper, an unstated testimony to the open speeds and movements that cross the body beneath the radar of static (i.e. asocial) perceptibility. Societies of control (or molar superstructures) govern by harnessing the ‘I’ to the speaking machine, thus blocking the vectors of silent movement that are always at our disposal; namely, by becoming imperceptible. But how do we expunge this fascist imposter, this alien ‘other’ that speaks in our place, lies in our name and commands us to become our work, even as it slowly kills us? Self-flagellation only makes matters worse. And therapy is more than pointless. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari encourage a movement towards becoming the non-subjects we already are within an impossible totality, which allows us to pass like water through a metal sieve and elude the systems of recognition that drive this sadistic variant of capitalism. This is not merely a novel form of humanism, but a tactical anti-humanism taken to its furthermost limits.

De-subjectification can never be achieved just for the sake of it. Only in response to a horrible manifestation of power can it gather momentum. Many artists, addicts and romantics have paid a dear price for believing otherwise, approaching it as a stylistic project. It for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari approach the topic of de-subjectification by demonstrating its importance in relation to the everyday fascism we all now confront, such as the ideology of managerialism we discussed earlier. They isolate three forms of micro-fascism that define the late-capitalist world: the organized body (i.e. the organism), the interpreted desire (i.e. representation) and the subjectified soul (i.e. the subject). To become imperceptible is to cast off this organism–representation–subject combo from our collective existences. This negative optical line of flight seeks not self-destruction but a shedding. Perhaps this is why an acceleration of the ‘I, job’ complex (escaping into work) and the recent wave of work-related suicides we discussed in Chapter 1 all represent failed attempts at becoming imperceptible. Death makes you visible … far too visible. Especially to yourself when you fantasize about it. De-subjectification has nothing to do with self-harm.

In analysing this problem more closely, Deleuze and Guattari raise a perplexing yet critical question: ‘What is the relation between the (anorganic) imperceptible, the (asignifying) indiscernible, and the (asubjective) impersonal?’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 279). Their answer is especially relevant when the generalized employment form appears inescapable, as it does today. For the neoliberal enterprise can only enforce its ideology of abandonment through the internal lie of the other who speaks on our behalf. In doing so it identifies the ‘us’ in the mirror of power as you. Thus, ‘a first response would be to be like everybody else … to go unnoticed is by no means easy. To be a stranger, even to one’s doorman or neighbours. If it is so difficult to be like everybody else, it is because it is an affair of becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 279). In a symbolic environment where the injunction to speak is merely an excuse to transform us into a distant audience to ourselves, absence takes on the obligation of solidarity. To become an embodied negation of the seer/seen couplet: in short, to disappear. How does one do this? Three steps are offered by Deleuze and Guattari (1987). First, eliminate everything that is too identifiable, that roots us to ourselves and makes us easily reflected in the screen of neoliberal abandonment. Second is saturation, to become universal – not just act like everybody else but actually be everybody else. Here we are using a reverse calculus in toto, forming a kind of totality that rubs out the postponed and vague lines of control we discussed in Chapter 2. This is not a bourgeois withdrawal into solitude but more a cancellation of the individualizing capitalist flows that have made us into somebody else. We must cancel that debt that is the fearful human monad and instead gift ourselves to everybody, a very social disappearance. To disappear in the neoliberal world of mute and precluded visibility requires much help and support. We move, then, from the ethical back into the political domain. This ethical version of political imperceptibility is indebted to a sort of Brownian movement. If dead labour is but the congealed reification of lost time and unstated co-operation, then its opposite, living labour, consists more of a ‘pageantry of movement’ to put it in Baudelairian terms. And returning to the central theme of this book, that movement courts the impossible.

The Mute Grammar of Subversion

The syntax of late-capitalist regulation conspires to discourage any movement into the invisible social. After all, the rent has to be paid. And this brings us to an important problematic concerning post-dialogical reason. If the politics of imperceptibility discovers another continent elsewhere, then there are undoubtedly going to be moments when, by accident or design, we will come face to face with power and have to speak. An overly comprehensive social imperceptibility might run the risk of being unable to talk ourselves out of a bad situation if the ‘I, job’ function’ catches up with us. As Seth Price points out in his How to Disappear in America (2008), one must always have a story. But our story also needs to be resistant to storyfication. Indeed, even Deleuze and Guattari suggest that a capacity for speaking to power in the social factory ought to be retained for crucial moments, occasions of both defence and attack. Otherwise our very inability to speak is used against us, as a rationale for why our imprisonment is deserved:

You have to keep enough of your organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 160)

How is this unstorifiable story to be forged successfully? Entrance into the perceptible obviously requires an imperceptible grammar – the common excess of sociality that is ‘everybody’ – in order to function. We cannot speak from ‘nowhere’ but only from ‘everywhere’. This is what is sometimes missing in Foucault’s (2001) analysis of fearless speech in his interesting investigation of the cynics and stoics. While he notes that parrhhesia relied upon a social arrangement in order to be performative (the Athenian democratic polity), the inscrutable and preconditional formatting that makes such speech possible is understated. Ultimately, the power conferred upon the fearless speaker is contingent not only on the more powerful party (from whom the truth-teller takes his or her cues) but also on the vested abilities of the reasoning individual himself or herself. In Foucault’s reading of parrhhesia, it appears that the courageous talker is divorced from the social antecedents that compelled him or her forward in the first place. Here we must remind ourselves that Diogenes was not the paragon of lone individualism that he is often made out to be, but the epitome of communist praxis! His visibility (in the agora for example) was only a minor element of the levelling invisibility fundamental to his project: ‘If I masturbate and piss in the marketplace, it is to remind you that I am just like you, and you are the same as everybody else!’ He practised elimination to the nth degree. And his conspicuousness was merely an accentuated dimension of his complete fullness, the imperceptibility of his unrelenting sociality.

But how can one speak to power and still retain anonymity? How can an imperceptible politics still semantically influence the architecture of domination without being seen and marked by the gaze of the boss? An initial way to think about the valence between engagement and post-engagement politics would be to conceptualize them as diachronically interconnected, following a sequential pattern as refusal evolves. Remain imperceptible until a John Ball-like ‘The time is now’ arrives when we can speak with convincing force, rather than with irony or marauding impotence. As some have recently argued,

Visibility must be avoided. But a force that gathers in the shadows can’t avoid it forever. Our appearance as a force must be pushed back until the opportune moment. The longer we avoid visibility, the stronger we will be when it finally catches up with us. (Invisible Committee, 2009: 114)

The arrival of this opportune moment might also be called an ‘event’, which duly collapses the distinction between visible and invisible politics. The nature of this event and its precipitation has long been debated, from the spontaneous strike of early twentieth-century socialism to the mystical messianic collapse of the distinction between present and past we find in Benjamin’s kiaros. Such an event concerns a transitional rupture whereby all cards are put on the table and history closes in on itself and opens a new vista. The lesson is that we must appear before the enemy at the right time and location armed with the right things to say. And this timing is often unpredictable, almost coming out of nowhere.

But is this sequential argument too simplistic? Can we not decipher a workable juxtaposition in which an exchange between engagement and post-engagement politics takes place simultaneously? To help us theorize this invisibility–visibility co-presence in the workplace we might turn to the wonderful image of Svejk from Hasek’s classic novel The Good Soldier Svejk (1973). Svejk practised a quintessential form of imperceptible politics, summoning the rich sociality of his fellow foot soldiers to exploit weak points in an otherwise formidable institution (the Austro-Hungarian Army). As is well known, Svejk was the master of calculated guile, flummox and foot-dragging, patiently building a common ground among his comrades via a very tentative yet sophisticated engagement with power.

Most relevant for us, Svejk knew how to innocently manipulate the in situ contextuality of his formal disempowerment by becoming a kind of wallpaper figure during his communicative interventions with the authorities. In other words, his bosses recognized and engaged with Svejk on a daily basis, but in a manner whereby he was quickly forgotten or considered as just another piece of cannon fodder on the way to the front line: of course, before they realized it, it was they who landed in jail rather the merry Svejk. In this paradoxical zone of perceptible imperceptibility, he was able to turn the tables, dismantle immediate long-standing hierarchies and still pass ‘under the radar’ of the dominant executive authority.

In this sense, Svejk’s visibility operates paradoxically to hide his invisibility. Hasek was very clear on this point. Svejk should be understood as the product of a perspicuous social logic rather than as an eccentric or heroic individual. The man and the social universe are combined in a way that bourgeois ideology finds challenging to comprehend. Svejk secures his subversive unrecognizability precisely by engaging with power directly, but in a manner that grants licence to blend in with his comrades and exact chaos. This involves active disengagement: camouflage (telling the boss what he wants to hear, but doing exactly the opposite), sarcastic role baiting (turning the tables on power whenever possible), and often proudly flaunting his mental or physical absence. It is through this kind of practised astuteness that he manages not only to stay alive but also to be left alone to have fun with his comrades. Visibility becomes a cloaking device for Svejk’s resistant behaviour. The ‘we’ operates as a form of stealth, even when exposed by some cankered senior officer. And Svejk does this not simply for his own amusement (although there is much of that), since a palpable sense of social justice animates all of his acts of social sabotage.

A contemporary version of Svejk-like behaviour in the workplace is provided by Carmen Segarra, the US Federal Reserve Bank of New York regulator who secretly taped 48 hours of conversation that revealed the intimate relationship between regulators and Goldman Sachs. The degree of implicit cooperation between the Fed watchdog and Goldman Sachs was so close that she decided to gain evidence in case she could no longer participate and was fired (which she eventually was). Goldman Sachs is a very powerful, very aggressive and very male institution. Following the financial crisis, Rolling Stone Magazine colourfully described the company as ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’. Insulting to squid some might say. Anyway, Segarra recalls her reaction when the boss announced her next assignment:

He said, do you know where you’re going? And I said, no. And he said, you’re going to Goldman. And my thought was, uh oh … The look on his face was like he was very much looking for my reaction. And when I … I think after so many years of practicing law, when you see someone that is just looking to see what your reaction is going to be, my first instinct is let me make sure that I don’t give a reaction. (This American Life, 2014)

Instead of letting her anxiety show and risk being inserted into the speaking machine, she remained blank and bought a voice recorder. She subsequently observed some incredible lapses in judgement from the Fed. Any normal person would have raised serious objections about the level of collusion. But an institutional climate of fear was deeply ingrained, and large investment banks could count on the regulators turning a blind eye when required. As she recorded, Segarra was mostly invisible, a wallpaper character that looked like everybody else. She finally spoke out when a superior asked her to change her report about Goldman Sachs so that it omitted a damaging fact. Her defiance was no doubt licensed by the clandestine voice recorder, which was a stroke of genius. Coming out of the woodwork at the crucial time, and knowing full well that it would certainly mean ‘moving on’, is a definitive Svejkian trait. As Segarra refuses to change the damaging report, her boss Jonathan Kim suddenly concentrates on her, amplifying the ‘I, Job’ function. Segarra has been outed. Her interrogator, however, is too late; this modern-day Svejk is much more skilled than he is in post-dialogical politics. This malfunctioning speaking machine now steps forth from the darker edges of corporate life and wreaks havoc:

Jonathan Kim: I’m never questioning about the knowledge base, or the assessments, or those things, right? It’s really about how you are perceived. And so if there’s a more of a general sort of feedback that says, OK, it’s not only one person, it’s not only two persons, but it’s many more people who are perceiving that you have more sharper elbows or that you’re sort of breaking eggs. And obviously, I don’t know what the right word is … I think the message has come back to me saying that you really need to make these changes quickly in order for you to be …

Carmen Segarra: Not fired?

Jonathan Kim: … successful as part of the team.

Carmen Segarra: Not fired, basically.

Jonathan Kim: Well, I don’t even want to get there, because … and here’s why.

Carmen Segarra: Well, I think that it would be unfair to fire me when I am, at the end of the day, doing a good job.

Jonathan Kim: Well, there’s … look. I’m here to change sort of the definition of what a good job is, right? Couple of things that could …

Carmen Segarra: I can see it a mile away.

Jonathan Kim: OK. Couple of things that I would suggest … have a sense of humility, because a lot of the things that you say … and this is the way you’re coming across, right? I think I know you well enough that that’s not what you’re saying, but if I were to be a new person, I would say, Carmen, you’re very arrogant. (This American Life, 2014)

Segarra’s boss clearly seeks to reactivate the ‘I, Job’ function in its more disciplinary and paranoid mode in order to visibilize her. A formerly anonymous and inconspicuous bearer of technical skill (or ‘knowledge base’) is now targeted as a problematic subject of recognition (or ‘how you are perceived’). As noted throughout the book, this aspect of neoliberal personality policing is an ongoing facet of the biopolitical employment system. However, when employees like Segarra become a liability (in this case, by failing to rubber-stamp a dodgy business deal), it can take on a particularly nasty format. More specifically, the speaking machine is used to destabilize Segarra, not only to normalize her but to lead her into statements that will irrecoverably destroy her legitimacy. The boss might have expected her to forlornly admit, for example, that she is unsuitable for the role given common perceptions in the office. In this respect, it must be recalled that the ‘I, Job’ function seeks not only arduous feats of overwork but also expedient means for abandoning labour power once the time arrives. The unspoken correlate of the employability discourse is its opposite.

However, with the help of her clandestine recorder, Segarra pulls off some classic Svejkian manoeuvres of refusal, utilizing her long-standing status as a nameless office drone to undermine the obvious trajectory of domination in this space. First, she uses the speaking machine against itself by redirecting its insinuations back at the boss. Now he is talking too much and discovering an alien presence within his own overly divulging dialogue (‘if I were to be a new person’). Secondly, Segarra uses the general drift of the conversation to let Kim vaguely admit to things that he could not openly state without contradicting the watchdog role of the Fed. All of a sudden, it is he who is on the back foot. And thirdly, knowing full well that she is going to be fired, Segarra makes sure she has a record of the real reason. Some very shaky performance criteria are cunningly teased out of Kim. It was not lack of skill that landed her in trouble but more nebulous subjective factors (‘I’m here to change sort of the definition of what a good job is’). After the scandal broke this made the Fed’s defence difficult to accept: ‘Personnel decisions … are based exclusively on individual job performance and are subject to thorough review. We categorically reject any suggestions to the contrary’ (The Independent, 2014).

By simply releasing these recordings online Segarra has won. They are remarkable. She is also seeking a settlement for unfair dismissal. Moreover, one can only guess what the climate must currently be like in the Fed (and the large investment banks). And is this not the lasting efficacy of Svejkian resistance and post-dialogical politics more generally? Fear and trepidation are inspired among the technocracy since they don’t exactly know how many other Segarra-like imposters are in their midst. This paranoia among the powerful involves an interesting dynamic because it is agent-led. It can thus result in behaviour more characteristic of the disempowered. Put differently, just as managerial oppression frequently does not incite office rebellion, the converse can also be the case: the suspicion that one, two or maybe ten employees may be surreptitious saboteurs can result in the corporation acting somewhat meekly and confusedly rather than tightening the screw of repressive surveillance. The perverse non-dialectical techniques that define biopower (i.e. egregious acts of injustice that do not automatically provoke the rational response of open rebellion) can therefore be used against power too. The feeling that one has been occupied by a false language, as Houellebecq expresses in the interview quoted above, is put to work against neoliberal capitalism. This is precisely why non-speech and anonymity are apt weapons of refusal in the era of the ‘I, Job’ function – not because they allow us to hide, but because of the emotional economy they instil among those who believe they govern. Here we are simply restating a classic observation in Stoic philosophy. The unprecedented proliferation of surveillance cameras and undercover police spies under neoliberal capitalism is symptomatic of its profound integral weakness. The point is to understand how to use that weakness to our advantage and implode the ideology of work using capital’s own claims of strength and ineluctability.