mills

Bathroom Politics: War and Defeat

Robot-Heart posed a hypothetical bathroom question, which reminded me of the intricate and fraught politics of sharing such spaces. I suppose it’s normal enough to feel at least ambivalent about communal zones where we use partially sexual and partially unhygienic personal equipment to eliminate wastes from our otherwise angelic bodies. Such small rooms are fast filled with some of our deepest concerns: reminders of death, filth, sex, privacy, vulnerability, social order.

They are therefore rather hilarious.

I happen to be quite comfortable with biology and thus totally unafraid of using bathrooms: public, private, clean, dirty. I tend to think of myself actually as rather heroic, as a guerilla bathroom soldier. Where others will hold it in, I can sit down and read. Where others are distracted by noise and crowds, I can take care of business. I have used bar bathrooms where you would be afraid to stand at the threshold. Bathrooms are one of the only spheres of human experience in which I feel tough: not neurotic, not weak.

Pee-Shy (“paruresis,” if it makes you feel better)

But all things are relative. To take an example, for years I have felt something almost all men know: the personal pride of standing at a urinal next to someone who is pee-shy. If you’ve ever been pee-shy, you know that other, freely-urinating men in the bathroom are judging you in all sorts of ways (that’s part of the problem); there are complicated implications to pee-shyness, most of which have to do with the pee-shy person worrying that others think they’re weird or scared or perhaps sexually distracted.

If you are not pee-shy, you perhaps enjoy some small measure of satisfaction while peripherally aware that, next to you, someone is anxiously struggling with a mounting series of urinary concerns as they worry about what you think. Being in a bathroom makes one a bit like a primate, and I’ve often been content with my status in the order.

Battle and Defeat

Some years ago, however, at our corporate HQ, I experienced a terrific reversal. After a long meeting in which I consumed too much coffee in the hopes of remaining sharp enough to impress an executive, I raced to the men’s room only to find said executive in it already, washing his hands. He and I had butted heads in the past and I was afraid of him, hostile to him, and eager to win him over nevertheless (corporate life!).

Since he was washing his hands, I went to a urinal rather than a stall (choosing a stall to urinate is a sign of weakness, I gather, although I think that’s ridiculous). But he was just washing his hands first, as though his member was too sacred to handle without preparation. Making his way to the urinal next to me, he smilingly initiated conversation: where did I go to college, what was my major, etc.

Within seconds, I knew it was happening: the damned flow seized up, despite my nearly-burst bladder. And worse: I knew that he knew, and he was loving it, almost as revenge: it was in his smile and tone. He prolonged the conversation long after he’d stopped going, and thus I was stranded: he knew I hadn’t peed, knew I must have had to (why else was I there?), knew I wasn’t, and knew I’d eventually have to quit the field.

Which I did, in humiliation. But I’ve never since lorded my bathroom bravery over others, as I know their anguish now. He’s long since left the company, but, to quote Kafka, it is “as though the shame of it must outlive him.”

How Corporate Culture Creates Political Apathy (Or: There Is No Truth)

[Apologies for the long political post, the last on this subject].

One of the defining aspects of youth is political indignation and perplexed incomprehension: how is that no one else sees the lies, sees the injustice, sees the opportunity to fix the world and wants to seize it? In America, this is an especially common lament: why are citizens so radically disengaged, so indifferent to demonstrable political crime? Why don’t people care that Bush is an incompetent liar, for example?

I have felt for some time that the West learns its capacity for self-deception, for cultivated apathy, from corporate life. As I discussed here and here, corporate culture has a far greater effect than political activists understand. Not part of the machinery that dominates the laboring lives of most Americans, activists -who are mostly the youth, academics, and cultural creatives- don’t realize how totally corporate life drills a few key cognitive habits into workers:

• Self-interest is all that matters, and is in fact -in a roundabout way- the best mechanism for incentivizing good behavior; if everyone acts with self-interest, the structures of power and politics in the office will assure that everything is equitable.
• All statements of values and ethics are lies. Corporations have decimated the language of ethics: posters of company “values” undermine the plausibility of any meaningful manifesto.
• Doublethink is normative. Statements of “values,” appeals to corporate “mission statements” that all employees know are at odds with the corporation’s mission and which serve only to mask the self-interested careerism of managers, must be “taken seriously.” You only roll your eyes privately; in meetings, you parrot the manifestly false “values” your company “cherishes.”
• Love and affection are inappropriate in the realm of the “serious” and the “real.”
• Data can be endlessly reworked, represented, underreported, masked, decontextualized. There is no reality: what matters isn’t whether an idea is good or fair, but whether it pleases those above you and can be fed to those below.
• Managers come and managers go; regimes rise and fall; “values statements” are printed and disseminated and torn down when the CEO is forced out by defrauded shareholders; nothing is permanent but self-interest.
• The shareholders are an irritating body from whom you try to get as much money as you can while concealing as much as possible.

In sum, if you live in a corporation for most of your day, week, month, year, you grow accustomed to the ideas that truth doesn’t meaningfully exist, reality is something to be distorted in presentations, the people to whom you report are to be appeased (and the shareholding public lied to), and any ethical or moral claims made are in fact self-serving distortions.

Particularly damaging is the inculcation of doublethink: hear lies and believe them, speak lies and support them, inspire lies and benefit from them. How is it that so many Americans live indifferent to or in denial of plain truth? It’s simple: that’s what is demanded of them daily in one fatuous, insipid, phony meeting after another.

Corporate life is not about change, or helping others, or any other damn thing but this: keeping your head down, pretending to respect what you don’t, going with the flow, doing the minimum amount of work, and getting as much money as possible. Almost everyone behaves this way.

Humans learn mimetically and our minds are permeable; if this is your primary interaction with reality beyond the family, what will politics be to you? Who is Obama to you, but a slick climber? Who is McCain to you, but an old executive? Who are “the poor” to you but an abstraction? Who is “Africa” to you but a competitor?

(Even if you rise above these sentiments, doublethink preserves your apathy: you can know our consumption habits are problematic and put it out of mind easily, for example).

And what value system competes with the corporate order, where you see wealth and privilege and power and happiness, however false, daily? Religion is debased, civic culture is merely media culture, and art is obscure and self-referential.

You may laugh at the corporate man, but for millions and millions, he is the sole moral figure in the modern world, the paragon to emulate. The rewards of the corporation are all that exist; truth is an irritant in your eye; don’t waste everyone’s time prattling on about it at the next meeting: just get through the day.

Management and the Soul (Or: Corporate Life, With or Without Mills)

(See also my extension of this line of inquiry into the problem of American political apathy, which was far more well-received).

WTM loaned me an extraordinary text, Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past. Of particular note was the aforementioned essay by Eugene McCarraher, “Me, Myself, and Inc.” The book as a whole is a socio-historical or anthropological examination of how the corporation has dictated the evolution of modern selfhood.

This essay in particular explores the quasi-religious quality of “management theory” as developed and practiced, in all seriousness, by men like Stephen Covey, and it asserts that this framework of values and ideas has an implicitly religious quality: it defines the moral self for the modern American (excluding countercultural groups), and as such should be studied if we are to understand what selfhood means in the consumer capitalist world of the present, when it very obviously doesn’t mean what it once did.

I’ll probably post more from the essay, but this reference to Simone Weil was notable immediately, both for its serious description of what labor means for transcendence (Weil worked in a Renault factory) and because I want to get it emblazoned on a sign at my office, along with two other quotes:

• “Lasciate ogni esperanza voi ch’entrate.”
• “Arbeit Macht Frei.”

[Simone] Weil saw the opportunity for management to conscript the disembodied soul through the mystification of managerial expertise. Because modern science and technical education had become “a corpus of knowledge closed to the working masses,” they comprised an “outstanding mystery” analogous to theology or the occult. The mystification of managerial expertise facilitated the entrusting of management…to “a curious machine, whose parts are men, whose gears consist of regulations, reports and statistics,” and which tried to “imitate the effort of thought to life.” In its fracturing of the laboring self and its construction of a spurious social selfhood, Fordist capitalism constituted a massive desecration of sacramental labor, because of only in the unity of thought and action could work afford “a certain contact with the reality, the truth, and the beauty of the universe and with the eternal wisdom which is the order in it.” This is why Weil could warn that “it is sacrilege to degrade labor in exactly the same sense that it is sacrilege to trample upon the Eucharist.”

Honestly, the first bolded phrase (and the emphases are mine) sums up my life in middle management fairly well, and inclines me to feel a rather pronounced sense of guilt. McCarraher is right, too: anyone who is compelled to read such works as The Servant Leader can attest to the corporate humanism which attempts to replace the desecrated values of the pre-corporate era with a new morality and ethics, regrettably being articulated mostly by imbeciles in hotel conference rooms and seminars.

Update: see this fantastic essay by Stuart Willis (blimpsarecool). It offers (1) a concise explanation of the historical development of the corporation and the management class, (2) why the latter functions without meaningful regard for the success or failure of a corporation, and (3) a discussion of how the phenomenon of emergence relates to the problems of corporatism and contemporary society. Totally awesome.