18 April 2010: "I want to be self-employed and work in a conceptual work space / modern cubicle."

This post is about post-Fordism. Many have theorised the epistemic shift from a Fordist set of relations of production, based on a rigorous and hierarchical division of labor, the institution of Taylorist time-and-motion-saving procedures, and the rigorous appropriation of the knowledge of work processes by a technocratic management class along with a concordant deskilling of the rank-and-file labour force to a post-Fordist modality, involving the dissolution of the semi-artificial work-leisure divide, the harvesting of the productivity of everyday life, greater pseudo autonomy for the worker, and the evolution of consumption into a form of cognitive and symbolic production. Carles seizes upon these developments and broadens the import of their emplacement in the contemporary problematic. "One day, I will break free from my job in corporate America," he writes, in the persona of a current-day knowledge worker, anticipating impending structural unemployment and the need to prostitute oneself for a series of cognitive odd jobs without the safety net of the paternalistic corporation.

Carles links the ambivalent comforts of corporate expropriation as opposed to self-employment to the architectural spaces of postindustrial offices, the oft-noted "cubicles" in which knowledge work and data processing is implementated. "Space can really change your workplace / Inspire your employers / Help you to stay connected with the world / in order to make positive changes in our ever-changing societal world." But constrained by legacy conditions of the factory under Fordist relations, the stultifying cubicle spaces curtail not only the worker's practical autonomy in the work process but delimit her subjectivity as well: "H8 being stuck in my cubicle all day. Feel sad that all I can dream of is ‘getting my own office’ one day, but even that is just a bigger cubicle." Imagination itself is stunted by the physical implementation of late-stage corporatism. "Is life just a series of cubicles?" Carles asks rhetorically. Is every work space circumscribed by the "square" forces of the status quo and the established powers that be? Can labor be deterritorialized to the extent that the space of work becomes the time of identity?

This important theorization is explored through the analysis of a composite character of a contemporary cognitive worker: "I work in a generic office building," Carles complains in character, "feeling like a ‘brick in the wall’" and yearning for "Positive community space." Such space is of course the space of post-Fordist labor, the so-called social factory in which workers can "bond, work, thrive, and build peer-2-peer sharing networks of business information and intelligence," as Carles notes. In other words, the space in which affective labor can become productive labor as well.

The transition to a more fundamentally insecure contract between the state, capital and labor is, as Carles points out, being sold ideologically as the new American Dream:

What I really want
is 2 break free
from a company employing me
and to break out of my cubicle

An imaginary escape from the confining space of the cubicle is equated to an escape from the constrictions of consumerist subjectivity into a pure productivity of the self. Self-employment becomes a intersubjective employment of the self as an ontological and productive category in its own right. The evolving work space will be one that is pointedly characterized as private, imbued with the pleasures of domesticity: "I want a window that overlooks my backyard. Watch my children grow. Monitoring the dog, making sure he doesn’t ‘dig up the flowers.’" These processes of the reproduction of the existing socioeconomic conditions preserve their quaint detachment from industrial processes, but only because the character of labor itself has changed, to a self-directed process motivated by anxiety about identity. Hence Carles's litany of para-culture-industry praxis:

Maybe I can start an mp3 music streaming service
a blog website
a music reviews zine
the next facebook
a microblogging community
a meme blog about hipster sea monkeys
The possibilities are endless
as long as I have
the right space to work in

Outside of the industrial office space, one is "free" to work on culturally oriented ideas, but these "endless" possibilities become constrained by their very limitlessness. Space becomes the alibi and the amelioration for a exacerbated scarcity of time. But the dream of autonomy, a freedom from contingency and determination by the wage relation remains just that, a dream. Still the monetary constraint weighs heavy on the possibilities for the self, which can still conceive of no greater aspiration or enplotment of species being than "to make millions of dollars." As Carles is forced to concede, we still must measure our freedom in hard currency.