A Reasonable Proposal

When the man in the cubicle next to me talks on the phone to some muttonheaded superintendent to confirm the exact number of wire spools on an order form, and he says the other man’s name repeatedly, okay Andrew, okay Bill, alright Mark, the obsequiousness of it, combined with the piddling yet essential nature of the call, the indispensable work of verifying lengths of panels or numbers of outlets and the ingratiating but still palpably anxious, unnatural deployment of personal relations principles, the application of conversational Crisco to chafed exchanges between a field grizzled and sunpunched electrician with the skin of chewed beef jerky and a paedomorphic desk amphibian with a degree in construction management or accounting, sparks in me a bilious revulsion and an urge to incinerate the entire office, the whole industrial park, the city of Indianapolis and Washington DC.

This man, when not pretending to laugh on the phone or sighing and muttering admissions of despair or cracking his knuckles, walks to the printer seven hundred times a day back and forth behind my desk. I hear the swish of slim fit nylon chinos stretched to the brink by inexplicably expanding and concaved glutes, as the latest fashion wave of ultra baggy denim and t shirts hasn’t reached the mainstream millennial lumpen bureaucrat class yet. The toxic, testicle clamping and vital fluid compressing deformal clothing continues a spiritual legacy of self-mortification in ostensibly rationalized, disenchanted settings. God may be dead but hatred of the body and the natural world is alive and well. Why don’t they wear togas or kimonos or robes, or natural fiber billowy pimp suits with hats and jewelry and scarves. Why this stuffed functionary weasel wear.

The office could feature an abundance of plants and flowers and small trees, vines and ivy, squirrel sanctuaries, bird baths, cat scratching posts, chicken coops and ant farms and beehives and vegetable gardens. We could do without desks altogether and either stand or sit on the floor like properly civilized people with excellent mobility into old age. There could be nearby hiking trails, porches and decks for catching sunrises, streams and lily ponds, fire pits, charcoal grills, skewers and spice racks. Multiple private bathrooms, toilets outfitted with bidets, floral scented hand towels. Basketball and tennis courts, football fields, gymnastic equipment, a theater. We could play music, keep a closet of instruments and art supplies, take watercolor painting breaks. Curate a portrait and landscape gallery, maintain a library with classic literature and cinema.

Instead, the administrative environment punishes the body and soul of the worker, appeases a dark and vengeful and jealous god who lustfully groans for refinements in suffering and submission. Spared from the ravages of factory labor, fruit picking, mining operations and heavy construction and the dangers of policing and fishing and logging and trucking and soldiering, the seemingly pampered office employee weathers a climate controlled storm of abusive conditions and disorienting surroundings and degrading procedures, dulling his mind with tasks so narrow and tedious even a robot would rebel against them and destroying his body by eating the feculent meat of industrially tortured and slaughtered animals while stuck in festering postures that look like they’re being bullied by gravity. The degradation of Congolese children scraping tunnels for cobalt is visited upon but by no means adequately recompensed by the professional and recreational users of lithium-ion battery powered electronic devices through an imposed lifestyle of whittled down competence in a mechanical insect role and a stupefied spectator alienation from athletic, artistic and domestic practices and a deafness to religious and communal and ecological tenors of existence. Really, I deserve to be flogged for my obscene indifference to the direct link between worldwide exploitation, slavery, mass extinction and my pinched, fake way of life and its picayune concerns, but I’m still paying for it, though not nearly enough.

The very word cubicle upsets me, sounding like a small fleshy or warty growth in damp skin folds or a processed meat dish on a spaceship. Not even Jeremy Bentham in a pique of paranoid hallucination dreamt up such an ingenious piece of control technology. The cubicle acts as a whole-body horse blinder for a stalled man, putting him into unnerving proximity with others while pulling his spiritual pants down with carceral isolation. Far from improving focus or a sense of security, the tight quarters and visual impairment increase the feeling of vulnerability, of being trapped and awaiting an uncertainly timed beating, while an overcompensatingly acute ear picks up every aural distraction.

Attempts to improve or humanize the modern office largely derive from the ethics of tech industry mutants and other body snatcher style consultants, designers and an assortment of auxiliary administrative personnel bred in stimulation pods and electronic factory farms, leading to tired variations on stock branded experimental and playful workspaces offering goofball jackoff diversions and adolescent aesthetics and grating cohesion exercises that mask the spurious and/or predatory character of the enterprise, while the conventional midsection of the clerical sector stays committed to county morgue interior arrangements enlivened by steady supplies of donuts and bagels and the strategic placement of candy drawers.

Rationality, reason, efficiency, optimization, as well as democracy, technology, progress, the nebulous and almost never critically studied Enlightenment, have all become near synonyms of contemporary degradations, facilely analyzed as the primary conceptual causes of a wide range of complaints, thus fueling a far too easy-going admiration for regressive, authoritarian political orders and belief systems and kitsch economic modes and social forms. By insisting on a crude, direct and inexorable lineage between emancipatory, universalist thinking and repressive, elitist impositions of parodic techno rationality, critical independent reasoning is neutered, imagination is hampered and resistance is herded into remystifying ideological movements and amorphous subcultural identifications that provide some cover or justification for mounting outrages.

There is no problem with efficiency as such, only with those who speak for it and their interest in doing so, and the same goes for reason, rationality, and the like. These terms are all contestable, useful and necessary, not solely the instruments of anti-human and anti-life criminal powermongers, for which the only alternative is tacked on pasteboard tradition. (Tradition is also not inherently malign or oppressive, and broadly speaking it is also necessary to some degree, but there is a very real danger in fatuously invoking it as a defense of what are preventable or correctible problems.)

When I speak of efficiency, I might mean that I want to figure out how to work only 20 hours a week and make a decent living. When a corporate elite speaks of efficiency, he might mean cutting regulations or drafting policies that deprive people of services, roles and comfortable environments. His reason is not mine, but I shouldn’t renounce my own ability to think independently because critical notions currently serve a destructive, insectoid agenda.