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What’s up guys, Jared here to talk about pop culture’s greatest call-to-arms for
slackers, Office Space.
The beloved 1999 film about hating your job, your boss and your early morning commute has
inspired and comforted the souls of many a bored administrative assistant.
At first glance, Office Space seems to be a hilarious ode to white collar laziness and
Michael Bolton.
"Micheal...Bolton?"
"That's me" "Wow, is that your real name?"
"Yeah"
But we think there’s something else going on that may explain why the film has remained
relevant for over 20 years.
It’s because Office Space embodies what some believe to be the most radical form of
revolution-and we don’t mean arson.
Let’s find out what all of this has to do with a Dan Harmon lookalike in this week’s
Wisecrack Edition on The Philosophy of Office Space.
And Spoilers ahead for Office Space and a 19th-century short story by Herman Melville.
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And now, back to the show.
Alright guys, let’s go in to a little recap.
Peter Gibbons is a dissatisfied programmer at an oppressively generic tech firm, where
he spends his days getting nagged by his boss.
At his girlfriend’s request, he agrees to see an “occupational hypnotherapist” who
puts Peter in a trance and then promptly dies of a heart attack.
Peter’s left in a state of blissful non-give-a-fuckery, which he then pairs with flip-flops and heads
into the office.
When the firm’s new consultants meet a suddenly-chillaxed Peter, they’re so impressed by his boss-like
attitude that they literally make him one.
"So you're gonna fire Micheal and Samir and you're gonna give me more money?"
"Wow"
Once Peter’s promoted, he and his buddies plot to rob their company and things go a
little nuts.
Now, for the purposes of this video we’re not going to be talking much about the scam
that fuels the second half of the film.
Rather, we’re focusing on the film’s legacy as a cultural artifact that speaks to employee
disaffection and general workplace ambivalence.
People don’t proudly display an Office Space poster to express their desire to steal millions
from their corporate overlords- well maybe that-but mostly to encapsulate their fantasy
of showing their boss how little they care.
To understand why Office Space is so intoxicating, we need to take a super-brief look at the
history of the office as a social construct.
But not the physical office, but say, “The Office of the Mayor.”
As philosopher Giorgio Agamben recounts in his book Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty,
the idea of the office really began with the institutionalization of the Catholic church.
If a priest tells you to do 100 Hail Marys, well that could be just some rando arbitrarily
making up a number.
But coming from a guy holding an official office with ties to the official church, it
gives his order more legitimacy.
Which is all well and good, but this construct of the office has had rippling effects.
Scholar Benjamin Lewis Robinson builds off Agamben by suggesting that, from the beginning,
this imbued the culture of work with a spiritual and transcendent element.
By early modern history, Robinson writes, “the notion of the efficacy of the office
was generalized into a moral concept that defined the very agency of human beings.”
Doing your work wasn’t just about a paycheck, it was about duty and purpose.
In other words, your very “you-ness” is defined by what you do for work, and how effectively
you do it.
Now, This may seem like a given, but that just shows how thoroughly our society buys
into the idea.
In this way, our very conception of ourselves is defined by our obligations as employees,
which sucks.
The phenomenon of a person’s work subsuming their identity is pretty clearly illustrated
in Office Space when Peter is casually asked by his boss to work not just one, but both
days of the weekend.
"I'm gonna need you to go ahead and come in tomorrow, so if you could be here around 9
that would be great, m'kay?
Oh-oh and I almost forgot ah- I'm also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday
too, kay?"
Because why would he have a life outside of his job?
Similarly, for his soon-to-be-boo Joanna, every part of her identity is regulated by
her waitressing job.
Her “flair,” or assortment of buttons and patches might seem to be showcasing her
personality.
But, we soon learn that such displays of individuality are actually mandated by her boss.
"We need to talk about your flair" "Really?
I have 15 pieces on" "Well 15 is the minuimum, okay?"
Here, her very performance of selfhood is tightly controlled by her job.
So we have this monolithic definition of the office as a place where we not only accomplish
our life’s work, but our lives as such.
Is it any wonder we might come to resent the very institution?
Indeed, the slacker lifestyle didn’t begin with your cool incense-burning aunt.
In fact, we see a distinctly-Office-Spacian-brand of slacktivism fermenting in author Herman
Melville’s iconic 1848 short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,”
which we have opted to illustrate vis-a-vis a delightfully corny 1969 short film adaptation
because, those eyebrows…
Melville’s story chronicles, through the eyes of a bewildered lawyer, the exploits
of his newest employee, a scribe named Bartleby, who, after working industriously for several
weeks copying lengthy law documents, suddenly decides that he doesn’t feel like it anymore.
His vernacular choice has become immortalized in literature and pop culture.
When asked to do anything he doesn’t want to do, Bartleby simply says “I'd prefer
not to.”
This starts with not wanting to proofread his copy, then escalates to refusing to copy
at all, and eventually culminates in him refusing to leave the law office, where he just plain
prefers to hang out all night while quietly staring out the window.
The similarities between Bartleby and Peter’s initial narratives are not insignificant.
Both are low-level employees working for passive-aggressive bosses.
Both labor in claustrophobic solitude doing work they don’t care about.
Both appear to have a distaste for bureaucracy And both will eventually seek solace in the
great outdoors, to varying degrees of happiness, but we’ll get to that later.
Most importantly, both turn their offices upside down when they decide to stop working.
But let’s start by looking at their defining characteristic: The choice not to work.
According to Robinson, Bartleby’s refusal to act is not a “mere inaction.”
Rather, by “preferring” not to act, Bartleby ventures from sheer passivity into what he
calls a “second-order passivity” which is “performed in its ineffectiveness.”
He, and Peter as well, choose to be useless, in the very place where effectiveness is the
highest calling.
So inexplicable is Peter’s behavior, and his apparent unwillingness to do his damn
job, that the uncomprehending, chummy consultants decide it must be evidence of superiority:
He is, indeed, too good for his work, and thus should be promoted.
Peter’s inaction becomes even more radical when considered with the culture of office
politics.
As Robinson puts it, “The modern office is the space that ensures that it is easy
to do one’s duty” free from the burden of your conscience or the consequences of
your actions.
When your work is inherently disengaging, he adds, “petty conflicts and trivial confrontations
seem to take on epic proportions.”
This, he notes would eventually manifest delightfully as “office politics,” or the cultural
science of why the HELL Cassidy chews her Greek salad so damn loud.
Office politics are on full display in Office Space, whether in the form of Peter’s boss
claiming the best parking spot, or poor Milton being separated from his beloved stapler and
relegated to increasingly worse desk assignments.
By refusing to engage in or even recognize office politics - as when Peter steals his
boss’s precious parking spot, stops dressing up, and comes in when he feels like it - a
newly-zen Peter acts like an anarchist agitating against the very institution of the office.
Bartleby and Peter bring something else profound to the office, as identified in the famous
last line of Melville’s story.
After Bartleby inevitably starves to death in prison after preferring not to eat, his
former boss exclaims: “Ah Bartleby.
Ah humanity.”
Robinson argues that this line can be read as a recognition of the fact that Bartleby,
in all his perverse peculiarity, is “what humanity would look like in an office, were
it ever to make such an appearance.”
In other words, for an office to function, it must strip us of said humanity.
In Bartleby’s refusal to do boring grunt work, his desire to do nothing and his complete
rejection of the mundanities of office life, he displays an unwillingness to suppress his
human desires for the sake of official duties.
Similarly, tranced-out Peter seems to embody the selfish, pleasure-seeking impulses that
unite us in humanity - he acts on base human desires in a world where everyone else simply
ignores or represses them beneath a veneer of earnest good will and productivity.
A human version of Peter looks like a guy who actually dates someone he likes, a guy
who watches kung fu movies, a guy who smashes a faulty printer just for the heck of it.
It’s worth noting that these two slackers are backed by one influential philosopher
- Slavoj Zizek.
Zizek is a major proponent of Bartleby’s style of Political Action, and is one of modernity’s
biggest advocates for saying “I would prefer not to” to… well, everything.
Indeed, inaction, he argues, can be incredibly active.
Zizek wrote in his book Violence that, “Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to
do.”
If this sounds ridiculous, you’ve clearly never been ghosted.
But why is Zizek wearing the jersey of literature’s greatest slacker?
To understand that, we first need to contextualize Zizek’s perspective on contemporary society.
His argument goes like this: We live in a world of economic and political deadlock where
multinational corporations have all the power and change feels low key impossible.
This is the net result of the 20th century, which was a time of intense action - various
countries experimented with socialism, facism, communism, hippie-ism, bad-hair-ism [80s],
every ism they could think of.
It brought change, much of it not great, and resulted in our present day world.
In Zizek’s mind, all that action may have been misguided, or as he puts it “maybe
we tried to change the world too quickly.”
And so we’re stuck with status quo capitalism, rampant inequality, the Amazon on fire, and
Cassidy not shutting up about essential oils.
Along those lines, Zizek tends to think that, despite capitalism’s numerous flaws, we
don’t yet have an alternative worth actualizing.
As a result, any activity that we do take is not only doomed to fail, but actually risks
aiding the powers that be.
Zizek warns against engaging in “localised acts whose ultimate function is to make the
system run more smoothly.”
He cautions that, rather than fearing passivity, we should strenuously work to avoid “pseudo-activity”
that is “the urge to ‘be active’ to “participate,” simply as a way “to mask”
the pointlessness of your actions.”
That right there describes the office work both Bartleby and Peter rail against.
In refusing to copy legal documents or print out cover letters for boring reports, they
are boldly asserting a truth that only doing nothing can communicate: that the office work
which once dominated their lives is actually totally meaningless.
While it may be tempting to tell your boss off, that may only lead to new new HR rules,
you may complain of overwork, but they’ll just add a pool table and call themselves
heros, or you may want to burn the place down, but that will only put a fat insurance check
in your boss’s pocket.
All these things only make the system stronger.
The most radical form of rebellion may be to do nothing.
Lastly, it’s important to look at the ending of both Office Space and Bartleby.
What is the net result of each main character’s defiance?
In Office Space, the office is burnt down and Peter takes a job cleaning up the refuge
with his next door neighbor.
“This isn’t so bad, huh?
Making bucks, getting exercise, working outside."
In retreating from office life entirely, he’s sought a return to blue collar labor, getting
as close to a pastoral paradise of sweat, calluses, hard work, and tangible results
as modern city life might allow.
For Bartleby, his refusal to leave the office eventually lands him in prison, where he spends
all his time hanging out in the courtyard.
Fittingly enough, he too has escaped the grind and fled to the outdoors.
Sure, he starves himself to death, but at least he didn’t die at his desk, right?
So, what do you guys think?
Does your effectiveness at work or school define you, and how do you feel about that?
Do you fantasize about doing nothing like Zizek, Peter and Bartleby, or is preferring
not to just a cop out?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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Go ahead and hit that “Subscribe” button, and as always, thanks for watching guys.
Peace!