Hazy Localities: Corporate Structures of Sentiment (Version 1)

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

-Langston Hughes, A Dream Deferred[1]

The “haze” returns to the 32^nd floor of the World Financial Center near the frothy waters of the Hudson. Outside, seen through the double-paned, tinted windows lining the walls thirty feet away, it seems frigid, maybe warm, fairly sunny but maybe not. It doesn’t matter and the feeling is back, the ebbing pressure of, “Why am I here?”, “What am I doing with my life?”, “What is this all about?” The curled fibers of the tightly-wound carpet with carefully-planned color tiles specifically laid out to denote direction and lead people to the nearest emergency exits feels hard under his wingtip shoes. My cubicle walls rise 5’5” above, cutting me off from any of my fellow co-workers and the only occasional interaction I have is with my nearest neighbor across the hallway, a Puerto Rican woman named Elisa, mother of two happily married and the proud owner of a home in Astoria, Queens. This is all that is shared here. I stand up to stretch my legs, only see the tips of individual’s heads, see someone from my “team” (a co-worker under jurisdiction of the same boss) walking down the hall and the “haze” is in his eyes, within his slow-moving gait and delayed bodily movements. He says, “Hello,” continues on his way. This is the extent of one of five interactions I will have today with physical human beings. I sit back down, hear the rumble of the sanitized air vents overhead, their quiet presence and white noise unnerves me. The clock strikes 9:00 a.m., the day has just begun, and the “haze” has settled in to stay.

The “haze” is the sneaking sadness of stifled desires, deferred dreams. It is the act of mentally checking out of a situation deemed abominable just to get through the day. People wear it in firmly-pressed creases of their baby blue shirts, their tightly-woven hair, downward sloping mouths. It leaks through the air vents in syncopated motions, nestles itself into the gray cubicle walls and the glaring florescent lighting overhead. The deadness can be felt walking down the quiet hallways three hundred feet above the people on the sidewalks below, and the lack of noise, jovial conversation, of any conversation echoes in glass-shattering screams. It drips from the mahogany walls of the meeting rooms, shoots spears of precisioned countenance from newly-bought projectors onto bone-white screens. The “haze” is that feeling of sadness that presses down on your neck, climbs up to your skull and starts pounding, makes you question your sanity, wonder what Is wrong with everyone else. The, “Why are they all zombies?”, or “Humans aren’t meant to spend eight hours a day like this” kind of questions. And once these questions-internalized go unanswered, the sadness turns inwards and implodes into anger and frustration, that feeling that things should change. But they don’t and the anger steps to the background. The “haze” sneaks in and I have resigned myself to its presence.

This paper is about tracing this sadness, anger and resignation through a specific location and time. The institution in which I worked, Three World Financial Center in the financial district of New York City, bespeaks of heavily managed and maintained physical and sentimental structures, constantly in negotiation between the physical spaces of the office building and the workers within, as well as between the individuals themselves. My approach will be to trace these emotions from the point of sadness to the point of resignation, event though I acknowledge that in the beginning of my job there were a mix of sentiments (excitement, financial relief, and wonder) and after quitting (relief, excitement, fear of what was to come). I also acknowledge that the presence of sadness was not instantaneous, on a specific date or time or always felt in the same way, but instead was a gradual development that nestled itself into my daily working life and those of others to whom I spoke. For some, twenty years had passed, admittedly the majority of it enmeshed within the “haze” and on more than one occasion, they expressed a deep sense of regret for not making a change in their lives. I wondered then, as I wonder now, what kept them from making a change, if in a way them telling me this was a performance of sorts that would allow them to get through yet another day by making the change seem beyond their reach? Was this, as Hochschild states, a moment of, “’deep acting,’ in which individuals convince not only others, but also themselves, that they feel some named emotion mandated by cultural ‘feeling rules’ that tell people which emotions are proper in which situations and what to expect in the course and consequences of glossed emotions”?[2] Using this personal experience and the conversations I had with co-workers, as well as primarily the works of Janis Jenkins, L.A. Rebhun, and Catherine Lutz, this paper will trace the emotions of sadness, anger and resignation (collectively referred to as the “haze”) through three specific locations on the 32^nd floor of Three World Financial Center: the cubicle, the conference room, and the bathroom. Collectively, these three locations entail a number of complexities including, but not limited to, the affect of physical space tightly managed, the negotiated emotional responses between co-workers, the self-management of what to say, how, when and whom one should express particular emotions to (especially if one is interested in “climbing the corporate ladder”) and the pervasive locations of silence which were at times sought after, at others painfully endured, and yet at others, internalized and incorporated into the ebb and flow of the sentiment-laden “haze”.

Cubicle: Object

The calculated temperance of my cubicle was standard for my rank and position of executive administrative assistant.[3] Twenty square feet of space, ten of which was covered by a desk, ten of which opened to a neatly-woven Berber carpet, gray in color. Two foot long cabinets adorn one side of the cube, each one foot wide and one foot deep. A standard, well-used, black ergonomically-correct chair and one black garbage can. The cube was a standardized prison, far from the windows, well cordoned off from other individuals to increase productivity and decrease talking, and placed strategically in front of my boss’ office, the panopticon, the baron’s lounge. Directly above the cube, an air vent fervently regulated the temperature, in the hall one of the many white noise machines droned on. The hallways between cubes had widths particular to the floor’s duties, finance floor’s hallways smaller (so that more people could be fit in) than those of the graphic designers. The colors on the floor in identical squares were representative of which corner of the building one was in (a post 9-11 development to aid in evacuations). Those that were  lower in rank such as myself were placed in the middle of the floor, far away from the windows. The harder one worked, the more dedication one showed to the company, the more one navigated the managed channels of speech and sentiment, the closer one got to the windows. In essence, one could not imagine a more controlled setting, save some of the trading floors a few blocks away on Wall Street. What does this do to an individual working within it? What sentiments do such surroundings elicit and disparage? What role does the regulated airflow and calculated proportions of the cube in which 40-50 hours of one’s life are spent play in producing a deep sense of sadness?

Against the ethnopsychological view of emotions that Lutz outlines, in which, “the essence of both emotion and thought are to be found within the boundaries of the person,” the physical regulated space of the cubicle engendered sadness through the physical limitations on movement, harsh florescent lighting overhead, and impersonal schemas of a mechanical nature.[4] In her discussions of the mind-body dichotomy that, “pervades Western thought, emotion is identified with physical feeling,” later identifying the physical images which are so often accompanied by discussions of emotions in the West: “his stomach knotted up, she was fuming, his eyes popped out of his head.”[5] What is perhaps lost in these discussions is the interplay between the physically and mentally felt emotion and the physical space itself. After years of working in the same regulated space, what work do the fibers of the carpet do to a person? Where do the drab walls and countenanced measurements permeate? Does the sadness begin as a recognition of one’s physical limitations, of the color and lighting’s affects on one’s moods, as a recognition of existing within a physical uniformity reserved for a particular rank? Or does it creep in slowly in a drag show of normalcy?

Particularly in the beginning of my tenure at the corporation, there were many days I would ponder whether or not I should decorate my cubicle walls, give it more a sense of home or personality. These thoughts found their way into conversations with co-workers and it was often the case that I would receive replies akin to, “I want as little of myself in this place as possible,” “I don’t see the point,” or, “Forget it. They don’t pay me enough to care.” People wore these thoughts daily within their balding heads, their well-polished shoes, in well-trimmed beards and calculated fashion. So many had become their cubicles, become that which was regulated and managed, cordoned off the personal from work and embraced the corporate impersonal. The sadness resounded in complicated and sedimented layers of emotional work, on forming the appropriate responses to those of a higher rank, of making every effort to successfully manage oneself into the uniformity of the physical and expressed emotional space of the office. Some co-workers that I spoke to were quite happy doing whatever they could to climb the corporate ladder while others of varying ranks would often express thanks to the company but soon after, speak of regrets, things they wished they would have done, chances they might have taken. A sense of resignation could be heard from co-workers as young as 29, ostensibly with much more life to live. In a dramatic episode one day, a male co-worker of about 30 years, came over to my cubicle to speak. After exchanging the normal pleasantries, he looked at my cubicle wall where I had pinned up a small world map and placed little dots of where I had traveled and where I longed to go. He said something very near to the following: “You’ve gone all those places? Oh, that’s great. I wish I would do something like that. I feel like I haven’t gone anywhere. Man, I feel like killing myself in this place.” He quickly moved on to another subject but what he had said and the fact that he had said it with a strained smile stuck in my mind for the rest of the day. What place is he really talking about? Does he actually feel like killing himself, is this just a saying and if so, what does saying such a thing do in the context of a casual conversation with a co-worker? Why do I sense that I know what he is talking about and what is that commonality? What happens to dreams deferred, desires stifled? Where do they go, how do they come out, how do individuals wear them within their bodies, upon their faces? The “haze” is undoubtedly felt by some but not all and invariably experienced in different ways while perhaps retaining a traceable commonality. The cubicle and its location of sadness and later, anger and resignation, is, to say the least, complicated and as Rebhun states: “Emotions have interacting cultural, psychological, and biological aspects, and are experiential, interpretive, and interpersonal.”[6]

Conference Room: Sentiment

The central hallway led in a pre-meditated fashion, into the main mahogany conference room which seated twelve. At the head of the long, polished teak table would sit my boss, on her right and left her closest confidants, her directors, and her managers would fill in the seats afterwards. I was strategically placed in the middle of the table as it was the location closest to the outlets. As people would shuffle in, it would be my duty to be on the floor plugging things in, unwinding cords and making sure the projector was properly set up. Very seldom would anyone offer to help. Said always with a very wide smile and a cheerful thank you, my boss was teacher, I and others were students, and she had just begun the school of managed sentiment.

Often as the boring presentations proceeded, I would look not only at the physical space of the room (those sharp, clean architectural lines, dust-free tables thanks to the night staff, the adjustable halogen lights above) but also at the physical posturing of my co-workers in relation to our boss and paid particular attention to not only my boss’ physicalities but also her cadenced release and control of verbal and non-verbal expressed emotions. One of my boss’ directors would throw her back into an over-exaggerated posture of attention, her hands always folded neatly on the desk in front of her, her gaze attentive on my boss’ presentation and her head tilted up ever so slightly as if to elevate herself above the rest of us at the table. Like clockwork, one of the managers would laugh at everything the boss said. The pitch and tone identical, the manager waited, intensely poised for the precise moment in which to let loose her calculated laughter and this became her meeting-occupation. Others would hold themselves tightly-wound, listening intently to our boss’ words, legs sometimes crossed but always in a  mechanical, broken manner. The control expressed within the cubicles and the hallways became exaggerated to a laughable degree in the conference room were it not how things operated within the office. The insane had become sane and this entailed a lot of work.

My boss was a woman in her late 50’s, having doubtlessly climbed the phallic corporate ladder through a number of blockades and hurtles, limitations and derisions. She was, by my tenure, a well-seasoned corporate professional and demanded much from her “team”. She spoke with perfect cadence, measured tones, smiled at the appropriate times, always stayed “positive” or knew exactly when to keep quiet or change the subject. If one stepped out of the acceptable boundaries of sentimental allowances, she would quickly inform you of the infraction. Having met my first emotional limit to the “hazy” corporate days, I informed her at one of our weekly one-on-one meetings of my frustrations in a straightforward manner. Her look of repulsion was immediate and in five seconds, she had realized her facial expression, reeled it in, and changed it completely to one of controlled attention. It was this controlled expression she so often exhibited at her meetings and it was endemic to many of the individuals I interacted with at her rank. As Rebhun states, “Emotion is more a negotiation than an event; it constitutes a vocabulary that is manipulated, misunderstood, reconstrued, and played with as social actors attempt to understand and control both themselves and others.”[7] Constantly being an outsider to this performative display of negotiated emotional controls and releases due to my lowly rank and overall disinterest in climbing the ladder of the corporation, I and others like me were given the opportunity to observe the syncopated motions of individuals more often than not doing whatever they could to meet the right people, say the right things, work on the best projects. This was achieved by internalizing not only the managed physical space of the office but the constantly negotiated sentimental allowances carved out by those of a higher rank. To ignore these negotiated rules was to forsake promotion and for many that I spoke to, it was either the case that they didn’t have the stomach to do what it took to rise or they unconsciously missed the mark when it came to saying the right things, wearing the right clothes, smiling at the correct moments and were now silently ostracized from the “in-crowd”. As Elias states, “This whole reorganization of human relationships went hand in hand with corresponding changes in men’s manners, in their personality structure, the provisional result of which is our form of ‘civilized’ conduct and sentiment.”[8] Within the conference room of the 32^nd floor, men and women’s sentiments were honed and refined in manners decided upon by the upper echelons of management who then organized trainings for middle management. This “trickle down” effect of sentimental negotiation and management was only effective when people were interested in promotion or were fearful of losing their jobs. For individuals such as myself, toleration was practiced as long as too many questions were not asked, as long as I remained within one of the lowest possible positions in the company hierarchy, and importantly, as long as I did not display the emotions of anger that would surface after experiencing bouts of prolonged sadness or resignation. Jenkins writes of the cross-cultural reviews of ethnotheories which culturally configure anger as problematic.[9] Rebhun notes the Brazilian folk metaphors which describe anger as a, “dangerous force that can accumulate inside the body or even leap out through the eyes.”[10] Lutz aptly states the following: “Those individuals [expressing emotion over thought] can be expected, as a result, to stumble crazily through social life, potentially harming the delicate and proper social coordination that has been achieved by the application of reasoned thought.”[11] In all of these ways, the expressed sentiment of anger is seen to, “push against the restraints of the socialized, cognitive self.”[12] The constant negotiation to keep emotions such as anger out of the office was aided by well-paid, high-ranking corporate employees, the internalized self-monitoring of emotion well learned by those interested in promotion, as well as the monitored physical spaces of cubicle, hallway, and conference room. As Foucault speaks of in great length, the body has exercised, “upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself—movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity…”, the economy and, “its efficiency of movements, their internal organization…”[13] Escape from such coercion and management was found only in the most sacred of places: the bathroom.

Bathroom: Release

The bathrooms were located, as they often are, furthest from human work areas, neatly tucked away behind a corporate-insignia covered wall and out of sight of the corporation’s ceiling cameras located throughout the floor. I quickly realized, as others had before me, that the bathroom offered a legitimate excuse to not be at my desk and offered itself as a site of respite from the “haze” of the workday. Whether or not I had to use it, it became a place visited 4-5 times a day, often to read or write poems on that particular flavor of the “corporate cloud of gloom” on any given day. It was common practice by many to change their habits of consumption to legitimize their bathroom trips, drinking prodigious amounts of water. This at the time seemed absolutely necessary but now seems at once troubling and comedic. The bathroom itself was a well-oiled machine, its sinks with automatic faucets, its walls lined with laser-sensored towel dispensers. Even the soap dispensers sensed the presence of a human in need of cleansing. Two separate stalls and an over-sized handicapped stall offered ample room to camp out and once the stall door had been closed, the “haze” was temporarily assuaged. A sense of dignity was regained from locking myself in a three foot by three foot box and this was both a widely-practiced habit of many and a well-known part of people’s workplace schedules (well known particularly by those of higher rank). What then, made this escape acceptable? What about this space was imbued with an impenetrable force field? Was it merely impossible to monitor because of privacy laws or was there something else? This widely-practiced action bespoke of a sense of resistance and thinking of it this way caused reverberations in my mind to the bathroom-centered resistances of childhood: the tantrums over diapers, the conscious and deliberate defecation and urination in “unacceptable” places, the sense of pride a child has after defecating in the toilet for the first time and the sorrow of having it all flushed away. What state had things gotten to if the bathroom was our last site of sentimental respite from the tightly-managed corporate structure?

Through the closing of the bathroom stall doors, co-workers and myself were cordoning off physical space to feel what and when we wanted to feel, think what we wanted to think, make whatever strange and twisted physical gestures we felt we needed to make. It was safe space; safe from the constant management of bosses, safe from the over-zealous, internalized self-management enacted particularly by those looking to be promoted, safe from the harsh world of financial acting, the Goffman presentation of the self, which sees society as a great stage on which actors work to direct others’ impressions of them, concealing some aspects of behavior in a “backstage” while presenting others for public scrutiny.[14] But what were we all really staying “safe” from? Feelings, as M. Rosaldo states, “are not substances to be discovered in our blood but social practices organized by stories that we both enact and tell. They are structured by our own forms of understanding.”[15] Perhaps, then, we were seeking respite from these stories, from the hearing of them, the re-telling many felt compelled to enact, the formation of new stories within this corporate structure. Perhaps the “safety” came with not wanting to understand for a few moments, to escape the harsh realities of a cut-throat, competitive world.

Importantly, it must be acknowledged that his story of the “haze” is not universal in how people understand it or respond to it, nor are the ways in which individuals practice agency and creative manners of resistance homogeneous or lost altogether. Admittedly, there are complexities here glossed over, perhaps topics for a longer piece to come. What can be offered are subjective expositions by myself and those I spoke to on commonalities of sentimental experiences in the workplace of a highly organized, hierarchical, managed and controlled atmosphere of the corporation. As invariably the bathroom was a site of respite for many, so too would other places (both external and internal) offer the same in particular settings of our increasingly busy lives where occasionally, we just need to “get away”. But the interest of this paper has been to ask where the feelings of sadness, anger and later resignation come from, where they reside and how they are managed?

The end of the day approaches. The shuffling of papers, zipping up of bags, closing of computers, locking of filing cabinets all sound from the seemingly people-free recesses of the floor’s cubicles. Those currently resigned to proving nothing towards receiving a promotion ready themselves for a five o’clock departure. Those looking to move up the corporate ladder buckle down to see who can last the longest. The vents above quiet the silent spewing of mediated air flow, the white noise machines continue unabated. There is a sense of resignation that I have, a sense that even though it is the last thing I want to do, I will be back tomorrow. The cubicle will not have changed but the trash will have been emptied. The hallways and meeting rooms will have been dusted. The weekend becomes the goal of a Monday morning. Pervasive is a sense of nostalgia for how things could be, but aren’t. The, “curious phenomenon of people’s longing for what they themselves have destroyed,” is perhaps a pernicious take on the complicity of those of us who at once denounce the measured corporate structure but subscribe to it nonetheless, receiving monthly paychecks.[16] Within the physically and mentally layered structures of sentimental management and negotiation and the agency and resistance of corporate actors working in tightly managed private enterprises built to maximize profit, however, complexities beyond the scope of this paper remain to be explored.

Note:

There are an abundance of questions that I would love to explore in a longer piece: what agency do individual’s working in such environments have? Are there forms of resistance to the hierarchical and heavily managed control of this corporate space? How are these sentiments managed or negotiated amongst employees and what specifically occurs in the interactions of people of a higher rank and lower rank, two people of the same rank and what, when the people are of the same rank, occurs in those interactions when one or both of the individuals are looking to be promoted as quickly as possible? Are there connections between the use of sites of defecation and urination as a site of respite in corporations and the use of such sites in other areas of oppressive management and regulation (i.e. plantations, highly-regulated factories, abusive households, small homes with large numbers of people)? What is the entity of the corporation, where has it come from and what are the many connections between the structure of the corporation and Norbert Elias’ work on the civilizing process? Where are the places people go when they need to get away but can’t use places such as the bathroom to do so? What are the connections between pharmaceuticals, sentiments and the structures of the corporation?

[1] Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage, 1995.

[2] Hochschild, Arlie R. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press, 1983.

[3] It is standard to issue a numerical rank to all employees ranging from 25 to 70. This directly corresponds to the existing hierarchy within the corporate structure.

[4] Lutz, Catherine. “Emotion, Thought, and Estrangement: Emotion as Cultural Category”. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1986): 289.

[5] Ibid., 294.

[6] Rebhun, L.A. “Nerves and Emotional Play in Northeast Brazil”. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1993): 146.

[7] Ibid., 132.

[8] Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000, 231.

[9] Jenkins, Janis Hunter. “Anthropology, Expressed Emotion, and Schizophrenia. Ethos, Vol. 19, No. 4 (1991): 395.

[10] Rebhun, 139.

[11] Lutz, 293.

[12] Lutz, 293.

[13] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

[14] Goffman, Erving. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959, 34.

[15] Rosaldo, Michelle Z. “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling” in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion by Scweder, Richard and Robert A. Levine (eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 143.

[16] Resaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.