Hazy Localities: Corporate Structures of Sentiment (Cubicle) (Version 2)

 

**The formatting is slightly off re: pictures and text.

Note: The form that this paper has taken attempts to mirror the structure of the corporate job and cubicle existence while simultaneously leading the reader through a partial exploration of the murky, historical narratives of the sentiments of anger and alienation.

 

Hazy Localities: Corporate Structures of Sentiment

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]

 

I. Cubicle: Introduction to the Haze

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 exit feels hard under my wingtip shoes. My cubicle walls rise 5’ above, cutting me off from any of my fellow co-workers and boss in sight but I can feel their presence, hear their chatter. I stand up to stretch my legs, see only the tips of individual’s heads, see someone from my “team” (a co-worker under the 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. 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 suspicion that one is no longer who one purported oneself to be, the sense of alienation that exists amongst the rubble 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 the firmly-pressed creases of their baby-blue shirts, their tightly-woven hair, downward sloping mouths, and violently-sketched makeup. It leaks through the air vents in syncopated motions, nestles itself into the gray fibers of the cubicle walls and glaring florescent lighting overhead. The numbness can be felt walking down the quiet hallways, along the sterilized countertops near the water cooler, and the lack of noise, jovial conversation, of any conversation, echoes in glass-shattering screams. It drips from the mahogany walls of the conference rooms, shoots spears of poisoned countenance from newly-bought projectors onto bone-white screens. The “haze” is that desperate sadness and longing to escape that presses down on your neck, twists your spine, climbs up to your skull and starts pounding, making you question your sanity, wonder what is wrong with everyone else. The, “Why are we all zombies?” or “Humans aren’t meant to spend eight hours a day like this, are they?” kinds of questions. And once these questions-internalized go unanswered, this sense of alienation turns inwards and implodes into momentary bouts of an anger that is at once diffuse and solid, fragmentary and whole. It ebbs and flows in a waltz with sadness and fear, hope and feelings of despair. It falls in upon itself into a sense of alienation, a creeping feeling of powerlessness and pervasive mistrust. There is a feeling that things should change but they don’t and the anger steps to the background, lodges itself within the deep grooves under one’s eyes, rambles in the back of one’s brain, makes one tired after a full-night’s sleep. The “haze” sneaks in and I have momentarily resigned myself to its presence.

This paper is about tracing the complex sentiments of alienation and anger (as well as their partner emotions) through a specific location and time. This is not a sequential tracing, not intended to imply that one sentiment leads to another. They are such complex sentiments precisely because so often they are experienced simultaneously. The organization in which I worked within the Three World Financial Center in the financial district of New York City from 2007-2009 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 sentiments through the physically and historically-sedimented layers of a cubicle on the 32^nd floor of Three Word Financial Center.

The cubicle entails a number of complexities including, but not limited to, the affect of physical space tightly-managed, the negotiated emotional responses between co-workers, the external and internal control and management of body and emotion (what to say, how, when, and to whom one should express particular emotions and how one should appear to others), 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”.

Within this paper, I will firstly explore the alienation and anger that working in a cubicle engenders, draw comparisons to the anger and alienation of Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes From Underground, the worker in Marx’s Capital, Sartre’s Nausea and Benjamin’s notion of “numbness”. Secondly, I will drudge up the moral history of how the cubicle came to be such a pervasive piece of “systems furniture”. And lastly, I will speak to the external and internal modes of affective control and management that the cubicle breeds and sustains. While there are multiple fruitful spaces which once could use to explore these concepts (i.e. conference room, bathroom, elevator, cafeteria, lobby), for our purposes here and now, none is more suited than the reviled space of the cubicle.

II. Cubicle: Moral Beginnings

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1968 and Max De Pree, then CEO of Herman Miller Inc., and Robert Propst, a successful and young designer at the time, create, market and sell a piece of furniture that would forever change the face of the workplace: the reviled cubicle. Faced with the failed transplants of the open, bullpen style offices of newspapers to other facets of corporate life, Propst created a box he called the “Action Office” whose initial underpinnings were primarily moral in nature[5]. Propst wanted to open up conversation, create a free, egalitarian flow of information and battle the staunch bureaucracies, the immovable hierarchies, the solid walls of offices. The cubicle was his solution: movable walls, no roof to allow for easily passed information, an open-air feeling to increase the well-being of its occupants, the easy-to-use walls where one could pin up any information they were currently working on. All managers and workers would have cubicles and every cubicle had an open door.

The cubicle, as Frantz states, “had its roots in the cybernetic school of thought that arose in the middle of last [20^th] century.”[6] This cybernetic idea of, “seeing the world in terms of information flows grew out of government-sponsored World War II military research and into the information technology industry of Silicon Valley.”[7] In the 1960’s and 1970’s, cybernetic ideas brought, “groups of military-funded computer researchers together with Deadheads, radical environmentalists, and art communards in the San Francisco Bay area” and they began to think of everything from, “bee behavior to dance parties to computer programming as information processes.”[8] In what was seen as a liberation from the grips of the military-industrial complex[9], the images of the computer and information were joined with a new, moral vision of egalitarianism, communal networks and democratic “people power”. [10] In a matter of years, from the architecture textbooks and journals of the 1960’s and 1970’s, cybernetic conceptions of the office began to emerge and cubicle workstations became the new way of thinking about the traditional office.[11]

Intel of Silicon Valley was the first organization to implement widespread changes to their office space, soon acting as the poster-child for the cubicle revolution. Once other corporations started to run the numbers, it was more economical for them to rid of the extra-large offices and cram as many employees into cubes as possible. At first, people really seemed to be sold on the idea of an open office, advertisements and testimonials from workers in the early stages of implementation revealed that people were talking to co-workers more, reaching over to grab paperwork, yelling over rows of cubes to get the next estimate on the cost of Project X. But it didn’t take people long to realize that they missed the privacy of an open office and it was not uncommon for individuals to raid storage closets for pieces of cardboard, plastic, anything that they could either place over the roof of their cube or fill in the gap where a door used to be. People began to hate the cube and it hated them right back, slowly eating away at their sense of self, alienating them from an already alienating job where no one really knew why they were there or how their superiors made fistfuls of money.

The traditional manager that sat in the office at the end of the hall disappeared for many corporations that had adopted the cubicle as their new form of organization but, as Foucault[12] spoke to at great length around the same time as the cubicle revolution, the greatest managerial possibility encased in the cubicle was the creation of a culture in which workers would feel obliged to manage themselves.[13] “Observation, evaluation, encouraging the proper attitude and habits in other employees…these obligations go beyond the management of work to the management of self.”[14] The intended equalizing, moral effects of the transition to cubicles was met with the economic reality of corporate life and cubicle farms began to sprout up all across America. As Julie Schlosser writes, “Reviled by workers, demonized by designers, disowned by its very creator, it [the cubicle] still claims the largest share of office furniture sales–$3 billion or so a year—and has outlived every ‘office of the future’ meant to replace it.”[15]

III. Cubicle: Anger and Alienation (Walls)

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My job is stupid, my day’s a bore,

Inside this office from eight to four,

Nothin’ ever happens, my life is pretty plain,

Pretending that I’m working, pray I don’t get canned.

My cubicle, my cubicle,

It’s one of sixty-two,

It’s my small space in a crowded place,

Just a six-by-six board booth,

And I hate it that’s the truth.

-Vocalist: Jym Britton, My Cubicle[19]

“In the depths of my soul I really didn’t believe I was suffering; there was a stir of mockery, but suffer I did, and in a genuine, normal way at that…I was beside myself with anger…And all as  a result of boredom; I was overcome by inertia.”[20]

“…within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labor are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker…they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine.”[21]

“They have proof, a hundred times a day, that everything happens mechanically, that the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws…They are peaceful, a little morose, they think about Tomorrow, that is to say, simply a new today; cities have only one day at their disposal and every morning it comes back exactly the same.”[22]

“Its [the systems] goal is to numb the organism, to deaden the senses, to repress memory: the cognitive system of synaesthetics has become, rather, one of anesthetics.”[23]

The calculated temperance of my cubicle is standard for my rank and position of executive administrative assistant.[24] 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 is 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 regulates the temperature, in the hall one of the many white noise machines drones on. The hallways between cubes have widths particular to the floor’s duties, finance floor’s hallways smaller (so that more people can be fit in) than those of the graphic designers. The colors on the floor in identical squares are representative of which corner of the building one is in (a post 9-11 development to aid in evacuations). Those that are lower in rank such as myself are 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 navigates the managed channels of speech and sentiment, the closer one gets to the windows. In essence, one can 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 per week are spent, play in producing a deep sense of anger and alienation?

I look up from my keyboard to the walls in front of me. Its gray fibers are numerous and identical, its walls high but not high enough. Everything has been taken off of them, there is no sign of the personal. This is a place of work, a place of death, this is a place of anger and alienation where my sense of the “authentic” self, my identity, is checked at the marble-lined doors, the gold-plated doorways to Three World Financial Center.

“I realize that I am not the person that I have to be at work and I am not enjoying it. I would definitely say that Y-International has separated me from my personality. Maybe not changing it but certainly forcing me to be two people at the expense of my happiness if you like”.[25]

From over my five-foot walls, I hear the white noise machines droning on, the quiet chatter of a manager down the hallway. Slowly, I stand to walk to the tinted windows lining the director’s cubes, look down to the busy streets below. People of all shapes and sizes walk past hurriedly. I wonder where they go, why they are in such a hurry, watch as the Hudson waters lap upon the mossy walls of the harbor. They move to the beats of a well-oiled machine and I am observer, at once separate from them, at once composed of each and every one of them. I return to my cube.

“Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally unquiet, eternally agitated being that—in the space between building fronts—experiences, learns, understands and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls.”[26]

One hour passes since I have arrived but already I feel tired. My computer screen remains static, the florescent lighting above beams down in slicing regularity, nothing moves. I trace the lines of the plastic frames of the cubicle walls, searching for any irregularities and find a black spot where the paint has been chipped off. For the next ten minutes, I will contemplate this anomaly.

“There is a line where you have to realize that there are certain responsibilities in a professional environment and the actual nature of work it is very dry material [sic] and you actually have to approach it in a clinical, professional mindset, you can’t be necessarily creative and artistic and philosophical about it.”[27]

The days at the organization bleed into every aspect of my life, expand beyond the walls of my cubicle into the streets below and my inner domain. My only sanctuary, that of my mind, is assaulted by the dissonance between who I think myself to be and what I am massaged into being within the work setting. The chasms between my “authentic” self and work self becomes a painful reminder of what I am not and anger percolates, the feeling of alienation begins to seep in.

“A critical subset of prescribed emotion involves the socialization of role occupants to mask felt emotions that may disrupt role performance. For example, executives were taught to appear calm and rational by peers who would discourage emotional outbursts by instructing one another to ‘get back to the facts’ or to ‘keep personalities out of this’…”[28]

I begin to distance this sense of “self”, tuck it away safely within the hidden recesses of my mind where it will remain until the day when I can happily reclaim that part of “me” but the realization that I have lost something never goes away, seeps into my facial expressions and I wear it tightly in my workday presentation of self. I begin to wonder: is it not the very organization itself, in its clinical, heavily-managed setting that has caused me to create a more rigid sense of the “authentic” self? Am “I” a creation of the mechanistic organization, a reversal to its planned and orchestrated movements, a reactionary figure?

The anger is complex. It is not simply enough to state, “I am angry”. It ebbs and flows with momentary feelings of calm and temporary bouts of debilitating rage. It is the rapid tapping of the foot, the increased heart rate, the manic rambling through the mental landscape in search of sustenance. It is resistance to the sedated state of the corporate drone. It becomes common to long for more work simply to avoid having the time to think about one’s situation. The feelings of peace and anger, calm and rage, safety and unease, are often simultaneously experienced, leaving one feeling momentarily torn between two or more seemingly opposed sentiments. The very people one can speak to about the shared experience of anger are externally and internally silenced by the historical labor of emotion tightly-managed.

Anger is, as Merriam Webster defines it, a strong feeling of antagonism and displeasure.[29] It is also invoked by perceived misdeeds, “when others fail to confirm their identities or expected meanings in interaction, violate cultural norms, deny them their perceived due status, or treat them unfairly or disrespectfully”.[30] However, anger too is located not only physiologically within parts of the individual’s body (i.e. the wrenching stomach, the increased heart rate, the clenched fists) but is physically embedded in the object of the cubicle as energetic traces and also in the very form of the cube itself, in the very form of the organization in which it sits. The shape of angularity such as the square or rectangular cubicle if often psychologically read as pertaining to order, logic, containment, security, conflict, sharpness, abruptness, and choppiness.[31] The gray color of the drab cubicle walls denote a, “dull, moody environment”, a depressing atmosphere.[32]

The tightly-knit fibers of the cubicle walls, the rigidity of the desk which has been bolted to the floor, the immoveable filing cabinets, the open ceiling, and the harsh florescent lighting pouring in from above. I take my index finger, reach forward and push it into the fabric in the wall in front of me. I trail it along the walls, feel the ribs of the metallic skeleton, the vertebrae of my prison walls, the fortified cage of my work experience.

“We’ve all become so estranged from life, we’ve all become cripples, everyone of us, more or less. We’ve become so estranged that at times we feel some kind of revulsion for genuine ‘real life’, and therefore we can’t bear to be reminded of it. Why, we’ve reached a point where we almost regard ‘real life’ as hard work, a job…”[33]

Mabry and Kiecolt, in their piece on race, alienation and anger, focus on two aspects of alienation that influence anger: sense of control (the opposite of powerlessness) and mistrust of other people.[34] A person’s sense of control directly relates to their belief that they have the means (resources and opportunities) to achieve their aims.

I grab my stapler, move it to the left, place it neatly in its spot. The tape dispenser, the paperclip bowl, the pen holder—all are strategically re-arranged on my desktop. The control within my cube is temporary, lasting only as long as I remain conscious of moving said objects from point A to point B. I think of moving up in the hierarchy, long to be a manager or perhaps a director simply for the change and the pay raise but the path to these positions is murky and it is unclear how such a move is accomplished. I talk to co-workers and through a gossamer of well-countenanced and heavily-sedated semantics, they coach me in the ways in which to present myself and my desires to those in the upper echelons of the organization, state that it will take time, that I must put in my dues. Two days later, they are making a move, climbing the corporate ladder, applying for the very position I expressed an interest in. “Hard work and time,” I say to myself but the days have turned to weeks, the weeks to months, and the leaves on that tree have changed from green to brown. I move the stapler to another spot on the desk. This will have to suffice.

The emotions of anger and alienation as found within the office space are not new by any means. Their sordid histories can be traced through centuries of men and women faced with the seemingly pointless, methodical, repetitive, and nuanced machinations of the transition to industrial society. What of Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes From Underground, a man faced with the banality of the civil service, trolling the depths of misery, anger, alienation, and the nauseous: “On the whole, I was always alone…I still longed to be active; and suddenly I sank into dark, subterranean, loathsome depravity…constant, morbid irritability…there was nothing to respect in my surroundings, nothing to attract me.”[35] The isolating sensations of his surroundings drive him deeper into despair, longing for something, anything really, to interrupt the daily drudgery of his existence: “I believed that some radical change in my life was imminent and was sure to occur that very day…I went off to work as usual…”[36] But no change occurs. “Reality is now looming,” he states but “reality” never comes or when it does, it is viewed from a self-mediated distance of a thousand scarred battlefields-internalized, the hazy separation from reality engendered by day after day of repetitive nonsense, loneliness, anger repressed and the unknown purpose of one’s labor, of an alienation driven-deep. “Why, we don’t even know where this ‘real life’ lives nowadays, what it really is, and what it’s called.”[37] His desire to escape the morbidity of his mindset seems inescapable, he attempts to reach out to others to make friends but the relations are cold and strained. The overwhelming feeling of lacking control over his life, his desired aims, dragging him through fatalism face-first, leads him to attempt exercises of control: “Once I even had a friend of sorts. But I was already a despot at heart; I wanted to exercise unlimited power over his soul; I wanted to instill in him contempt for his surroundings; and I demanded from him a disdainful and definitive break with those surroundings.”[38] The subjugated through complex abatements and swells becomes subjugator.

“For example, it has been suggested that as large corporations encourage forms of social alienation, greed, and class distinctions, they create oppressive cultures that motivate aggressive behaviors driven by economic needs or reactions to alienation and injustice.”[39]

I reach under the desk, feel the grainy texture of the cheap plywood underbelly. It is riddled with pieces of gum large and small, hardened fast, past pieces of chewed resistance. My feet move silently along the aggressively knit, industrial Berber carpet, cold and gray. I raise my eyes slowly. I have received an email, click on it and begin to read. Another meeting to set up and I don’t know why.

“…they [the bourgeoisie] destroy the actual content of his [the worker’s] labor by turning it into a torment,; they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process…they deform the conditions under which he works…they transform his life-time into working-time…”[40]

1859 and Marx writes of the alienating design of the capitalist system. Workers are alienated from the products of their labor, enslaved to the labor process without ever enjoying the fruits of said labor. Workers as well as managers are molded into objects of the capitalist production system whose absolute motive and content of its activity is the creation of surplus-value in pursuit of growth. Before the worker enters the process of capitalist production, “his own labor has been alienated from him, appropriated by the capitalist, and incorporated with capital, it now, in the course of the process, constantly objectifies itself so that it becomes a product alien to him.”[41]

I have scheduled the meeting, look again at my inbox and see that I have received five new messages, all requesting further meetings. My stomach drops, my head pounds, I nostalgically think back to other times in my life when I was not here, in a cubicle, in a corporation, completing menial tasks whose purpose was lost on me. “Perhaps there isn’t a purpose to these tasks,” I think to myself. My only consolation is that one day it will end and the paycheck will arrive at the end of the week.

“Nothing seemed true; I felt surrounded by cardboard scenery which could quickly be removed. The world was waiting, holding its breath, making itself small—it was waiting for its convulsion, its Nausea…”[42]

I am angry at myself, angry for not leaving as soon as these feelings of weighty nausea arose, angry at myself for not having the courage to make a change. “What am I afraid of?” I think to myself and I curl up tighter into the black, pungent fabric of my adjustable office chair.

What is Sartre’s Nausea? Is it the recognition that a change is imminent, that the life one has led will no longer suffice, that the unknown beckons to be explored? Is it the culmination of weeks turned to years of anger-internalized, the blossoming of a sense of alienation now corrupt? As Sartre states, “I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.”[43] The revolution as overthrow of one’s life as it has stood for quite some time induces fear and anxiety in the face of the unknown. When anger and alienation have become commonplace, what lies outside their walls? “I’m afraid of what will be born and take possession of me—and drag me—where?…Shall I awake in a few months, in a few years, broken, deceived, in the midst of new ruins?”[44] [In a longer piece I would love to explore this idea of ruins further in the context of the organization] The fear becomes overwhelming. It is safer to remain enraged and obscure, safer to let the cubicle walls coo me into a fitful sleep.

“The technical apparatus of the camera, incapable of ‘returning our gaze’, catches the deadness of the eyes that confront the machine—eyes that have lost their ability to look.’”[45]

Perception and the body are framed within walls of restrictive limitations. It is the gradual process of a 3’ x 3’ cube internalized. Anesthesia is administered through regulated pulsings of air flow, the managed noise levels through built-in white noise machines lining the ceilings, readily available anti-depressants covered by the organization’s health coverage, the scripted tempo of the days as they all bleed into one: “When you work late every night, so you work, go home, go straight to bed and then you get up and go straight to work, the week merges into one…I feel then when it comes to socializing that I do not have anything interesting to talk about, because I have not done anything other than work for the last weeks.”[46] It is, as Benjamin states, a, “crisis in perception,” a question of restoring “perceptibility”.[47] Does the fury encased in stillness then erupt from a desire to see, a desire to experience, to break through the haze? Is it a reclamation of self that one longs to perform that sends sparks through the synaptic minefield of our minds? Perhaps it is simply the desire to once again feel something other than anger and alienation?

“The factory system, injuring every one of the human senses, paralyzes the imagination of the worker. His or her work is ‘sealed off from experience’: memory is replaced by conditioned response, learning by ‘drill’, skill by repetition: ‘practice counts for nothing.’”[48]

There is a pain in my left leg. I feel as if my body, through inertia, is disintegrating. The pain increases, pulsing through my nerves, down along my shins. It is almost lunch but I must stand at once, my body must move. Like a phoenix I rise off of my molded chair, through the sterile air, swim through the steady currents of dust particles and germs above the cubicle walls. I turn my head to the left where immediately I see my boss’ office, large glass windows and she inside on the phone, looking out. I turn my head to the right, catch a glimpse of a woman in a cubicle three rows down but quickly she ducks. I am alone and yet, I am watched.

“ESTRAGON: (giving up again) Nothing to be done.

VLADIMIR: (advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I’m   beginning to come round to that opinion. All life I’ve tried to put it from me…”[49]

 

 

 

 

III. Cubicle: Control and Management (“Open” Spaces)

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A director of the team emerges from around the corner. We nod and smile at one another and as he walks closer, he asks my how my day is going and my stomach knots up in a bout of dread. The question is as disingenuous as our smiles, I say I am fine and he stops at my cube. Although he is four feet away, I feel anxious, take a step back in my cubicle. “What are you up to?” he asks. His words rise at the ends of his sentences and he peers over my cubicle walls to my desk, scans my computer screen and performs a posture of nonchalance. I am being surveilled.

Our boss’ door opens, he stands straighter and smiles grotesquely as she walks out and towards my cube. “Hi there,” she says in a jovial manner. I look into her eyes, portals to another story of sadness and frustration, anger and alienation that she cannot speak of here and now. I do not feel sorry for her: she makes over $150,000 a year for doing something that no one can quite put a finger on. This is nearly three times what I make as her assistant, as the person she relies upon to know what she is doing, where and with whom every day of her working life is spent. She makes a joke and in the same breath asks me if I wouldn’t mind going downstairs to buy her lunch. I nod my head and I am furious. I smile.

“The change in habitus characteristic of a civilizing process is subject to a quite specific order and direction, although it was not planned by individual people or produced by ‘reasonable’, purposive measures. Civilization is not ‘reasonable’, not ‘rational’, any more than it is irrational. It is set in motion blindly, and kept in motion by the autonomous dynamics of a web of relationships, by specific changes in the way people are bound to live together.”[53]

What is external control? Is it the camera on the street corner, the boss sitting across the hall, the teacher at the head of the class? Is it truly the external body of another individual or a system of surveillance that we know connects to a human being somewhere, somehow, that is watching? While, “organizational structures and management processes can determine what is required of employees,”[54] regimes and forms of socially-structured control range from the, “control of the body such as the display of social interaction,”[55] to the explicit and implicit regulatory regimes of physical and ideational control.”[56] Where and how people work, what emotions they express and how they express them are woven through a wider, complex system of interactions between people and their fellow co-workers as well as between people and inanimate objects such as the cubicle. The objects tell us things, they speak to us through the ruins of our lives and the past labor of those no longer with us. The cubicle is at once moveable, rearrangeable, and open yet simultaneously, is well-known to rarely, if ever, move, change, and often feels more like a cage than an open-air retreat from the traditional closed office. It’s color is drab and dreary, its textures tightly-woven and stony, its furniture pre-arranged and often bolted to the frame of the cube. This is the workspace afforded to the worker, the space which the individuals in the upper echelons of the organization have deemed appropriate for a human being to spend eight hours of their day in. Space becomes synonymous with freedom, lack of space denotes captivity and the only clear way of escaping the stifling space of the cubicle while keeping one’s job is to gain the trust of the organization and climb the corporate ladder to the position of Vice President where finally one can enjoy the luxury of a private office.

“Perhaps even more significant in our time, when millions of American workers spend most of their working day in an office, is the sense that the organizational technologies of office life provide a kind of moral education, that offices shape character, that they create a certain type of person.”[57]

My teeth are clenched as I hand my boss the lunch I have retrieved for her. She smiles and says thank you, I leave and she quickly closes the door behind me. Upon returning to my cubicle, I see I have missed four calls and received ten emails. This will take me at least thirty minutes to clean up and I will not leave my cube again for the rest of the day. While retrieving the voicemails and reading the emails, my feet are tight against the floor, my fingers tap wildly upon the desk—I am anxious that I have missed an important message about my boss’ schedule and angry at myself for caring.

“Supervision is made more efficient: with no walls to hide behind, slackers have to work or at least imitate work in a convincing way.”[58]

While the minimal architecture eliminated the physical walls of the traditional bureaucracy in search of a more egalitarian, free-flow of ideas, it allowed for a, “management by walking around,” an anxiety-inducing form of managerial surveillance where the worker is never quite sure when the boss will appear or a co-worker will pop through the open door of the cubicle. On constant alert, the often prescribed way of battling such anxiety is to either truly work hard or do one’s best at appearing as if that is the case. Anxiety, then, finds its homes within the open spaces of the cubicle originally intended to be sites of egalitarian freedom.

“The totalitarian learning organization exerting complete surveillance over unwitting employees has been labeled as fantasy because there is simply no organization that does not have members smart enough to develop equally subtle forms of resistance as well as claim organizational parts that remain uncontrolled.”[59]

I watch myself become embroiled in bouts of anger. “Why was I here?”, “Why was I so quick to jump when my boss asked me to?”, “Why did I exert so much energy pretending that there was actually enough work to keep me busy?”, “Was I to remain a paper-pushing corporate drone for the rest of my life?” Anger rises up inside of me, presses down right below my sternum until I began to feel nauseous. I snap at a co-worker blathering on in “corporate-speak” about a project he is completing when I have had enough and make it clear that I no longer want to hear what he has to say. He immediately stops speaking and leaves. I take a deep breath, feel overwhelmingly relieved and begin from that day forth to externalize my anger and frustration. I discover a form of resistance to what I had for so long believed to be a totalitarian specter of surveillance.

Anger as an “extreme” emotion, has long been considered a “bad” or “irrational” emotion in need of regulation and control. Ashforth and Humphrey, in their study of emotion in the workplace, outline four means that have evolved for regulating the experience and expression of emotions (particularly “bad” emotions) in work settings: neutralizing, buffering, prescribing, and normalizing.[60] As they state, organizations may invoke and institutionalize norms of rationality to prevent the emergence of emotion (neutralization), use procedures that attempt to compartmentalize emotionality and rationality (buffering), the creation of “feeling rules” or norms that specify the range, intensity, duration, and object of private emotions that should be experienced (prescribing), or diffuse or lessen unacceptable emotions or reframe the meaning of the emotions (normalizing).[61]

Fineman and Sturdy, in their study of industrial operators, found that, “extreme feelings, such as anger, rage, or fear…were deemed deserving of harsh treatment,” while “’good’, productive [, and rational] emotions—such as the smiling ones” were much better received.[62] Such emotional controls are historically, socially, culturally, and economically situated. As Fineman and Sturdy state, “feelings and actions are legally, hierarchically and materially framed…the immediate, localized outcomes of control attempts are part of broader patterns of capitalism and consumerism…explicit in the emotions of ideology, for example, beliefs about keeping industry profitable…”[63]

Norbert Elias, in his lengthy work, The Civilizing Process, details the nuanced ways in which affect expressions slowly gravitated towards a middle line with smaller peaks and abysses and changes less abrupt.[64] “Pacified spaces” are bred, drives and affects are tempered (particularly from a young age), and restraint and foresight are promoted as a means to inhibit affective outbursts.[65]

Weeks pass. My anger and frustration have become public emotions, “openly” shared through calculated expressions: I share only with those of the same band level or those of other teams that I feel will not damage my chances of keeping the job which I despise. To the rest, I let my anger and frustration be known with short, clipped sentences, abrupt interactions, unpleasant facial expressions but never do I say something which could later be used to fire me. My anger has become politicized further than it already was. I am still alienated from my “authentic” self as I have not quit but I am now faced with the challenging situation of being further alienated from my co-workers. My private alienation has now become public as well. I begin to feel that my expression of anger has caused others to deem me dangerous, that for those interested in climbing the corporate ladder, associating with me becomes detrimental to their pursuits. No one says anything directly to me but I see it in people’s eyes, in the shaking of my boss’ head, in the fact that people four cubes down now call me instead of walking over. My anger implodes. I have no one at work to speak to about our shared experience. I do not know what to do.

“Can you imagine? I really felt I could buck this machine. When I began, I was sure I could win. I no longer have that confidence. What’s happening is so extraordinary. It’s so much bigger than I am. I’m just trying to go along for the ride. I have little to do with it.”[66]

 

 

IV. Cubicle: Control and Management (Self)

[67]

[68]

[69]

Expressed anger has a minimal shelf-life before the individual expressing such anger is alienated from the “group”, marked as a person of “negative affectivity”,[70] or simply fired. When it becomes abundantly clear that one has been clearly separated from the group and is in danger of being fired and one is interested in keeping their job, the anger is forcibly returned to the interior. The battlefield, as Elias states, is moved within: “Part of the tensions and passions that were earlier directly released in the struggle of man and man, must now be worked out within the human being…an individualized pattern of near-automatic habits is established and consolidated, a specific ‘super-ego’ which endeavors to control, transform or suppress his of her affects in keeping with the social structure.”[71] Whereas previous in human existence, anger or other “strong” emotions could be more widely voiced or enacted, they now become privy to further, almost paranoid, calculation of expression, maintenance, control and repression: a “social apparatus is established in which the constraints between people are lastingly transformed into self-constraints”.[72]

My head aches. I am frustrated and angry and I have a meeting with my boss in 15 minutes. I feel like punching down the cubicle walls, running a rake over the florescent lighting, leaving this place and never coming back. I want things to change, want to express my feelings to my boss to aid her in enacting change. Do I tell her that I am feeling frustrated or angry? Is she in a good mood today, what meetings has she had, when is the last vacation that she has taken? I decide after much deliberation to tell her that I feel I am not being properly utilized, that the company could better benefit from having me in a position more challenging. While I say it, I know that all I will feel like doing is screaming at the top of my lungs but I tamp those feelings down, coat them over with a glossy smile and “corporate speak”[73], know that the more pleasing and “civil” I can be while trying to get my anger and frustration and anger across, the more likely something good will happen. My foot is pounding against the floor, my fists are clenched. I am ready for the performance to begin.

“In some cases they [affective constraints] lead to perpetual restlessness and dissatisfaction, precisely because the person affected can only gratify a part of his or her inclinations and impulses in modified form, for example in fantasy, in looking-on and overhearing…sometimes the habituation to affect-inhibition goes so far…that the individual is no longer capable of any form of fearless expression of the modified affects, or of direct gratification of the repressed drives.”[74]

Affective control and management, external and internally located (more often than not, simultaneously experienced), is a deeply complex, historical and often site-specific process. To dispense of the exploration of how such control and management (particularly internal control and management) is exercised here and now would be naive and irresponsible of me as a writer. When we begin to really think deeply about what control and management mean, what, in the end, do we surmise they may be? Do we know any more than when we began or do we simply more fully understand that we know very little? The process and enactment is multi-faceted. It is historical. By this, I simply mean that it comes from somewhere, not in a linear, teleological fashion but rather, the dialogue of affective control and management is an ebb and flow, a give and take. It is a constant conversation between present, past, and future, between worker and co-workers, worker and manager, manager and CEO, CEO with shareholders. It is a conversation between students and teachers, the man selling hot dogs on the streets of NYC and his vendors, the interplays between a child and parent, between good friends and strangers. The conversation leaves traces, reformulates our presents, informs our futures. It is at once everywhere and nowhere in particular. The control and management of affect is simultaneously physiologically located and coursing through sentiment-laden objects which animate our thoughts, actions, and importantly, our emotional experiences in this world. Many calls have been made to destroy the cubicle and yet, while perhaps worthy of disdain, perhaps the cubicle is not our source of anger, our well-spring of alienation and unhappiness. Perhaps the organization is stifling in its control and management of the individual but never is the organization totalitarian. There remain veins of possible resistance that run voraciously under the tightly-woven Berber carpets, through the transformative gaps between the cubicle walls, through the ceilings of metal frames and porous fiberboard. Through the assault of the organization, economically-social, the individual faces a challenge of perceiving and, in the end, reclaiming a sense of self. To perceive is to see with ones physical and mental eyes that all is not lost, that the “self” endures in recessed, fragmentary caverns, beneath the rubble of a corporate-speak-imposed, in the many spaces left untouched by the surveillance of many. To perceive is to see that the self as one once thought of as “authentic” was perhaps predicated on the very stifling order and civility that one came to despise so much. Does the common rage that arises from being subjected to the physical cubicle spring from the recognition that so much of our lives have become the cubicle-internalized?

I am still here. One more hour and I will exit this cube. Someone is spraying a can of condensed air into their computers four rows down. I open the drawer to my left, pull out the small, square mirror and hold it up to my face. I see my left eye, dark lines underneath. I have not been sleeping well. I put the mirror back and when I open the drawer again, I see the yellow notepad, It has a smiley face on it in purple ink. When I quit, I will pin it to my bare cubicle wall and walk out. Today is not that day.

 

 

V. Cubicle: Concluding Openings

The haze then, is not congealed nor is it hegemonic. The individual battles with it, at times internally, at others externally. It lies within the confining physical spaces of the cubicle, the imagined spaces of the corporeal organization, the interaction between co-workers. It is amorphous, utterly complex, at once definable and lacking all definition. It is a “crisis in perception”, a writhing sense of anger, an alienation from one’s “authentic” self and the creeping, rage-inducing suspicion that one is becoming the corporate drone so despised. It is sadness and fear, anxiety and hope for a better life, a better job, a sense of worthwhile work. It is the feeling of being thrown under the juggernaut of capitalist production,[75] the longing for forgetting. It is to be oppressed and in so being, longing to oppress. Through a feeling of powerlessness it is the search for the means to gain control and power over one’s environment, other people and one’s own life. Physiologically, it is the erupting stomach, the twisting intestines, the bunched-up neck. It is the foggy eyes, the clenched teeth, the ripped-out hair. It is the pounding head, the scarred face where one has continually picked at small protrusions on the skin. It is the cubicle, the dreaded sameness, the sentiment-laden, well-countenanced physical spaces of the corporate life. It is everything and nothing all at once and deserves a more thorough exploration than was offered here for the experience of the haze may not properly be confined to a few pages while it mangles the bodies of thousands wandering blind.

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

[2] http://www.pureextracts.us/disp_product.php?id=72

[3] http://www.hermanmiller.com/DotCom/jsp/designResources/imgSearchResults.jsp?prodId=222

[4] http://www.innovativelearning.com/educational_psychology/cognitivism/index.htm

[5] Franz, David. “The Moral Life of Cubicles: The Utopian Origins of Dilbert’s Workspace.” The New Atlantis. Winter, 2008, 133.

[6] Ibid., 133.

[7] Ibid., 133.

[8] Ibid., 133-134.

[9] “The Military-Industrial Complex is a phrase used to signify a comfortable relationship between parties that are charged to manage wars (the military, the presidential administration and congress) and companies that produce weapons and equipment for war (industry). To put it simply, the Military-Industrial Complex is described as an all-too friendly relationship that may develop between defense contractors and government forces, where both sides receive what they are perceivably looking for: a successful military engagement for war planners and financial profit for those manning the corporate boardrooms. It can be viewed as a “war for profit” theory.” From “What is the Military-Industrial Complex” http://www.militaryindustrialcomplex.com/what-is-the-military-industrial-complex.asp.

[10] Franz, David, 134.

[11] For an in-depth analysis of some of the major organizational changes taking place in the 1960’s and 1970’s, see: Martin, Reinhold. The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

[12] See: Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995.

[13] Frantz, David, 138.

[14] Ibid., 139.

[15] Schlosser, Julie. “Cubicles: The Great Mistake.” Fortune Magazine. 22 March, 2006 http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/09/magazines/fortune/cubicle_howiwork_fortune/index.htm.

[16] http://www.greenlightcommunity.com/group/cubicledwellers

[17] http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/supernova514/

[18] http://timslogos.wordpress.com/

[19] http://tenacioust.wordpress.com/2006/06/18/my-cubicle/.

[20] Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground. New York: Norton and Company, 1989, 12.

[21] Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. New York: Vintage, 1977, 799.

[22] Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. New York: New Directions, 1964, 158.

[23] Buck-Morss, Susan. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” MIT Press, Vol. 62 (1992): 18.

[24] 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.

[25] Costas, Jana and Peter Fleming. “Beyond Dis-Indentification: A Discursive Approach to Self-Alienation in Contemporary Organizations”. Human Relations, Vol. 62 (2009): 366.

[26] Ibid., 423.

[27] Costas and Fleming, 367.

[28] Ashforth, Blake E. and Ronald H. Humphrey. “Emotion in the Workplace: A Reappraisal”. Human Relations. Vol. 48 (1995): 107.

[29] www.meriam-webster.com/dictionary.com

[30] Kiecolt, Jill K. and Beth J. Mabry. “Anger in Black and White: Race, Alienation and Anger”. Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Vol. 46, No. 1 (2005): 87.

[31] Scmitt, Bernd H. and Alex Simonson. Marketing Aesthetics. New York: Free Press, 2009.

[32] Paterson, Ian. A Dictionary of Color: A Lexicon of the Language of Color. London: Thorogood Publishing Ltd., 2003.

[33] Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground. New York: Norton and Company, 1989, 89.

[34] Kiecolt, Jill K. and Beth J. Mabry. 87.

[35] Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 33.

[36] Ibid., 47.

[37] Ibid., 89.

[38] Ibid., 47.

[39] Silberman, C. Criminal Violence and Criminal Justice. New York: Vintage, 1978.

[40] Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I, 799.

[41] Ibid., 716.

[42] Sartre, Jean-Paul, 77.

[43] Ibid., 5.

[44] Ibid., 6.

[45] Benjamin, Walter. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006, 147-149.

[46] Costas, Jana and Peter Fleming, 366.

[47] Buck-Morss, Susan, 18.

[48] Ibid., 17.

[49] Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press, 1954.

[50] http://stanandergo.wordpress.com/2007/12/

[51] http://jurmo.us/2007/03/04/work-20-the-empty-cubicle/

[52] http://www.marieclaire.com/career-money/advice/tips/work-office-career-quiz

[53] Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000, 367.

[54] Fineman, Stephen and Andrew Sturdy. “The Emotions of Control: A Qualitative Exploration of Environmental Regulation”. Human Relations, Vol. 52 (1999): 633.

[55] Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, 1967, 112.

[56] Fineman and Sturdy, 633.

[57] Frantz, David, 132.

[58] Ibid., 133,

[59] Gabriel, Y. “Beyond Happy Families: A Critical Reevaluation of the control-resistance identity triangle. Human Relations, Vol. 52 (1999): 185.

[60] Ashforth, Blake E. and Ronald H. Humphrey. “Emotion in the Workplace: A Reappraisal”. Human Relations, Vol. 48 (1995): 104.

[61] Ibid., 104-108.

[62] Fineman and Sturdy, 635.

[63] Ibid., 659.

[64] Elias, Norbert, 372.

[65] Ibid., 374.

[66] Terkel, Studs. Working. New York: New York Press, 1972, 339.

[67] http://www.self-esteem-enhances-life.com/self-management.html

[68] http://www.mckpeople.com.au/Content_Common/pg-Outstanding-Sales-People-Skills.seo

[69] http://www.unitten.org/CASEYVILLE/Teacher%20Web%20Pages/Bauer1Page.htm

[70] Aquino, Karl, Steven L. Grover, Murray Bradfield, David G. Allen. “The Effects of Negative Affectivity, Hierarchical Status, and Self-Determination on Workplace Victimization”. The Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 42 (1999): 261-262.

[71] Elias, Norbert, 375.

[72] Ibid., 375.

[73] For a lexicon of such “corporate speak”, see Beckwith, Lois. The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit: An A to Z Lexicon of Empty, Enraging, and Just Plain Stupid Office Talk. New York: Broadway Press, 2006.

[74] Elias, Norbert, 399.

[75] Marx, Karl, 799.