Kafka is a soothing reference these days

Today I’m going to the office where I used to work, in a manner of speaking, to hand in my company laptop as large as a pontoon boat and a mouse still encased in impenetrable plastic. I think I have to do this although no one has told me to do anything; I sent an email last week saying I couldn’t work there anymore and it took days to schedule a meeting with the vice president for what I guess we could call an exit interview or a transition of sorts, using the elderly alien trying to fit in on earth language they like in corporate offices. I could probably not show up and never hear from them again and if they sent an email or two I could ignore them and it wouldn’t matter all that much. My career in a corporate office could be described as Kafkaesque if Kafka hadn’t become a stabilizing reference, the hoary norm by now, emptied of strangeness or imbued with a soothing respectability (the man who doesn’t wake up as a hideous insect is the grotesque outsider now, revolting to his family); these men are well-adjusted to their absurd conventions, their tournament brackets and home repairs and barbecues; they just want to build peptide labs for pharmaceutical companies and buy trucks with tires big enough to house whole families of Mexican day laborers.

Picture it with the tint of an early German expressionist film, or a downbeat slapstick, a lone stooge mood piece; I was hired to document company processes; senior leadership had hired a consultant who analyzed the company and reported confusion, lack of clarity, undefined opportunities for growth, something about pathways and so on, and my role was to provide much needed structure and organization and documentation. Every other job in the company is based on specific construction projects rigorously determined by strict production schedules, so every other person was spreadsheeting and talking about wire spools and numbered forms all day, corresponding with the field, responding to safety issues, Manuel or Dustin impaling themselves on rebar, Chuck ordering the wrong wattage bulbs; each of them was mired in excruciating detail, stressed and bleary eyed but at the same time jovial about weekends and baseball games and home smokers; none of them needed me for any specific tasks, nor did they seem especially inclined to describe what they did; when I interviewed them I got a mix of general statements and concrete wall incomprehension; I don’t know what you’re asking, I would sometimes hear. Neither do I, I wanted to say.

Though I was a salaried employee with a regular 40 hour schedule, I had no deadlines or direct superiors, no managers officially tasked with overseeing my work; there were no consequences to anything I did or didn’t do, and within a couple of weeks, if I didn’t walk up to someone in their cubicle or office and hit them over the head with my cinderblock of a laptop, no one spoke to me, not even a greeting. People whom I’d sat in front of and talked to for an hour or more, asking them questions about their jobs and what they needed, lowered their eyes when passing in the hall. By habit I’m not the most boisterous backslapping cutup or an airhorn honking clown, so if I detect a whiff of reluctance or uninterest from others then I pretty much give up; and that might be a defect on my part; as economic and social success depend to some extent on what some call putting yourself out there and others like me refer to as bothering people and acting like a shameless jackass.

For weeks I went into the office, sat in my cell, wrote questions into AI and then grew so bored with its dweeby obsequiousness I genuinely desired human contact again. I did type up a roles and responsibilities document for every job in the company but after that I mostly read articles on arts and letters daily and fiddled with org charts and tried to read up on Institutional Organizational psychology, which reminded again of how much specious and extraneous work somehow passes as legitimate and earns stamps and certificates.

Psychology has always been rife with perverts, predators, charlatans, control freaks, hippie dippee pyramid schemers, smoky manipulators, totalitarian tools, big business magicians, unsolvable head cases; IO psychology pools and rewards the secular pontificating of overproduced professional managerial clerics. IO psychology is mass society corporate scholasticism, a dusty monk discourse that excuses certain businesses practices and executive strategies and justifies continued funding to academic departments and corporate roles. Like the dancing angel invisible hair-splitting theology of the high Middle Ages, contemporary psychology, especially its institutional wing, occupies minds and consumes whole lives in developing system-refining theories, specifically in the present by fortifying the intertwinement of the human psyche and mass scale organizations. The aim of control is always rationalized in psychology and psychiatry as therapeutic adjustment, reconciliation, tinkering with man, machine and structure to make each one more like the others.

If, in the Middle Ages, ruling ideology took the form of theology, and then with the enlightenment mutated into natural philosophy and science, since Nietzsche psychology issues the commands through three channels, the objective operational, institutional or organizational thinking that programs systems and souls for administrative cooperation, the subjective economic and therapeutic, the sophisticated manipulation of emotions and social instincts for political influence and economic capitalization, and the chemical/pharmacological, with direct intervention into brain states, material recalibration of mood, personality and behavior. Big business and government funding and drawing on research into unconscious mechanisms to lock populations into patterns of production, consumption and intra categorical conflict (inflaming the war of all against all in the mode of political progress and economic prosperity).

Not that economic class interests would cohere in the absence of commercialized and technopolitical psychological interference; people diverge and clash and exclude and categorize organically, all on their own, inspired by home-grown perversity, the irrepressible perception of differences, the influence of charismatic sociopaths, and most importantly, massive increases in population size, density and social complexity. Maybe hunter gatherers can maintain egalitarian social bonds in small groups; if there were 50,000 people on the planet we’d all be singing John Lennon and playing naked twister; larger population tend to hierarchize, divide, specialize and foment more intense status and resource competitions. Psychological science is the control interface of mass man conceived as an automated ape.

The psychological man of the 20^th and 21^st century is an organizationally adapted individualist, a therapeutic and pragmatic subject who expresses himself through adaptation to large scale commercial systems and rationalizes individual and collective behavior on the basis on psychoeconomic principles. At the same time, organizations adapt to psychologizing and individualistic tendencies and carry out atomistic economic warfare while simultaneously developing therapeutic and integrative internal policies.

Mass scale technopsychological harmonization of humanity and automated systems leaves open the spiritual dimension as a site of additional therapeutic management. Contemporary religious revivals employ sociological, aesthetic and nationalistic arguments; casting a return to religious practice as necessary for individual and collective health, artistic flourishing and national strength, opposing themselves to a purportedly secular liberalism and for the most part ignoring sectarian disputes, heresies and schisms. The truth of a religion is secondary to its practical value, especially where social cohesion, well-being and fertility are concerned. Even a crisis of meaning is primarily addressed not through the frame of truth or reason, but in a therapeutic, sociological and scientific engineering mode, with religion as a possible treatment or operating system. Religious reaction disguisedly continues the project of secular modernity under the heading of enlightened social and economic programming, attempting a rationalized re-enchantment of an over administered world on the edge of collapse.

(The old critical commonplace about the unselfconscious religious fanaticism of secular activism should be updated with the poorly concealed enlightenment descended social engineering of apparently spiritualish reactionaries.)

(It might be thought that the 20^th century and 21st century have been dominated by economics, but economics follows psychology, in that all apparently objective market formulas or laws presuppose a psychological profile of the human being, a definition of his nature and tendencies; economic activity as we now understand it in developed societies is determined by mood, motive, underlying insecurities, anxieties, competitions, ie driven by instrumentally manipulated psychology.)

If I say academic psychology resembles medieval scholasticism (as an institutional discursive formation that reinforces a foundational belief system) while pop therapeutic psychology works as a lullaby or nursery rhyme for adult psyches neotenized and consternated by bureaucratic environments, and the pharmaceutical industry manufactures mass scale chemical lobotomies and sterilizations, I don’t thereby want to argue for replacing one set of managerial elites with another; money saved by eliminating civil servant and academic salaries under one ideological constellation flows into equally if not more questionable enterprises, departments, networks, coalitions, movements, with the specter of “useless jobs” as a pretext for further concentration of wealth and power and the repurposing of resources from, say, one area of domestic control technology and social pacification to expanded overseas military operations or the greater enrichment of neofeudal corporate elites working with specially selected government officials in corrupt regulatory agencies.

I don’t know what to do about administrative and political strife among rival factions of managers and office workers, or how to efficiently allocate resources or instill prosocial and materially constructive behavior in large scale populations at the current stage of technological cuckoldry. I went back to work in a cafe, where at least I move more than my fingers for a living. My ass needed a break.