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Originally Posted by porkmarras
However, this resistance has a horizon inasmuch as the employees cannot – however much they may subconsciously or secretly want to – destroy the space that occupies them. This horizon is the horizon of powerlessness and entrapment. They need their jobs and salaries. There are therefore two primary responses to this powerlessness, and to the amalgamation of public humiliation and private degradation that it eventually breeds. There is either an inner assimilation of the corporate aesthetic as a feeling of estrangement, detachment and emotional automation, or there is – in effect – rebellion, albeit of necessity a cautious and covert rebellion, in which company resources and materials are appropriated and subverted to the unrecognised and unserved needs of the worker. Autonomy asserts itself against automation.
There is an irony in the fact that those who facilitate the movement and selling of consumer goods are themselves being utterly consumed. Consumers regularly complain about the robotic, faceless, unassailable power of bureaucrats and ‘people at the other end of the phone’ of large companies. Yet this voice of power on the behalf of power is voiced by the one of the most demoralised and powerless of worker-types. The psychological ramifications of automated, cell-like, endlessly repetitive working days are less commonly discussed than the technological advancements that ‘increase profits’, and with this in mind I want to examine how people communicate with or subvert each other via the things around them by appropriating, adapting, and narratizing the objects, materials, and appliances that threaten to subjugate them. By monitoring the mass-manufactured office objects of cold functionality in the idiosyncratic context of possible intimate, human meanings projected! onto them, the project will illustrate the states of emotional truancy we are susceptible to in the office environment and how our interaction with the objects of daily life can affect our ability to work or even communicate effectively.
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This is good, but I have major reservations: First of all, the notion of the 'individual resistance' is always consumed within the larger narrative (cf Hegelian master/slave dialectic). The worker may, of course, at any point,take small succur within the notion of perversion - for instance, the re-arrangement of 'company property' so as to reflect not a personal identity but a general, nameless anarchistic gesture. The problem is that these gestures are always consumed within the larger dialogue of the so-called 'faceless master' of the corporation or capitalism in general. There are misceginations, or better, incommensurable dialogues - each side claims their petty victories. These petty victories are only seen as such by the (so-called) opressed workers, the larger, abstract and therefore faceless 'masters' are mechanistic and autonomous precisely because they are abstract - not abstract in the sense of being intangible (anyone who has ever had any interest in politics will emphasise this), but abstract insofar as they are the (distinctly Deleuzian) mileu, made up of several hundred unconscious 'desires'. A desire, as any good Freudian will tell you, is never within the ken of the immediate-conscious, and rarely within the fief of the conscious>subconscious. This, in turn, relates to Lyotard's notion of the Marxist worker being a masochist at heart, claiming small victories in a language unspoken by the master, shitting on their heads. In essence, there is no language spoken by the master, he (for the abstract 'master' is inextricably linked to an abstract patriachal system (cf Lacan), regardless of the ontological gender of those involved.
I could go on, but I suspect the forum of a rock band is not really the place to continue. In essence, I support your friend's attempt to isolate the territories of self within the office (the Deleuzian part of the proposal), but I fear he will fall foul of the great demon Hegel. PM if you want a further exegesis.