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It is as if you were doing work - a (mis)reading

 

Mihai Bacaran

 

 

Pippin Barr’s It is as if you were doing work (2017) is a browser-based game that caricaturizes a work environment. After logging in with the "work credentials," (any randomly typed username and password will do) the player is offered a retro-looking virtual desktop — much as those encountered on the office computers of the 90’s — on which tasks, motivational prompts, and distractions pop-up mimicking in a humorous key the experience of an office worker. Sending emails, writing text documents, setting dates in a calendar, responding to multi-choice questions, are among the chores that the player has to complete in order to earn promotions in a meaningless and seemingly endless hierarchy, each successive level meaning solely an increase in the amount of "work" to be done. At the same time, the user is also excluded from the "work" that she/he is performing, since the questions already point to the answers that should be given, and the texts write themselves as long as random keys are pressed. Intellectual labour is stripped of its superfluous intellectual aspect and presented as the absurd, if nonetheless fun, game of feeding electrical impulses into a machine. Where machine stands for the office computer, but also for the larger technological network of which the personal computer is just a small part, and not least for the impersonal social machine that requires the futile labour to be performed and offers credit (including payment, but not only) for it.

 

"Hard work means working hard!"

In the About section, that can be accessed by the player inside the game, Pippin Barr points to the feeling of being useless and ineffective in a world where work is increasingly performed by autonomous machines, and invites the player to "recapture an appearance of usefulness through traditional human-computer interaction" [my italics]. The gameplay makes it quite clear that the usefulness of labour was in the first place nothing more than an appearance, and, in consequence, that work — as represented in the game — is a futile and absurd self-referencing loop with no outer objective that could justify it. But then, of course, there seems to be an important difference between the experience of the spectator of an online art(?)work and that of a "real" worker. There is a chasm between the rules underlying the social reality of labour and those that govern its caricatural representation in a witty online game. Or… Is there?

 

Screen shot of Pippin Barr's It is as if you were doing work
https://pippinbarr.github.io/itisasifyouweredoingwork

 

The line between caricature and "reality" becomes quickly blurred if following Alice O'Connor’s article on It is as if you were doing work we note the resemblance between Pippin Barr’s game and what the title of a 2015 New York Times article refers to as "fake jobs." Leaving aside the tendency towards exaggeration and spectacularity, what the NYT report presents is an insight in the life of unemployed people who, as a way of training for potential future jobs, end up working (sometimes for months) in virtual companies that simulate a real work environment. Their work is as real as it gets, but it has no outside reference, since the products they commercialize do not really exist, and neither does the money they manipulate. A striking similarity with the game we discuss here in as much as in both cases there is an attempt to simulate the experience of an office employee while detaching it from any "real" economic context; at the same time, an intriguing example of simulations and simulacra that render the seemingly clear division between fiction and reality quite hazy. But the stakes are even higher than identifying the "reality" of "fake jobs" as a possible "real world" reference point for a reading of It is as if you were doing work. The problem is rather to what extent work in a "real" environment is as "fake" as the one performed by the gamer and the one of the trainee in virtual companies. Or, reversely, is the work one does as a spectator in It is as if you were doing work, and the one presupposed by the "fake jobs" as "true" and "real" as that of any office worker?

At first sight, the question is rather far-fetched. But let’s note, following Marx in the first chapter of Capital, that the (exchange) value of commodities — the factor that grounds capitalist economy — represents human labour "pure and simple," human labour in general, average labour, in Marx’s words: "labour-power possessed in his bodily organism by every ordinary man [sic], on the average, without being developed in any special way." (1) From this perspective, the three types of work involved in playing a game that simulates work, simulating work in a virtual company and doing "real" work in a "real" office are all susceptible to be reified as exchange value, as long as their products are present on the market as commodities. But, what are these products anyway? What is it that is produced in office work, the simulation of office work and its caricature? And do these products have anything in common?

 

"It’s time for a well-deserved break!
Break time is over when the progress bar is full!"

At the same time, in It is as if you were doing work labour is punctuated by distractions and breaks, to the point that labour and enjoyment — as represented in the game — cannot be told apart any longer; the game is thus operating what might be called a mise-en-abîme by (re)presenting that which itself is, and consequently opening an endless mirroring game. There is an uncanny proximity between playing and working pointed towards by the production of a game that simulates work that simulates games that resemble work... and it serves to further subvert not only the common supposition that there is an inherent usefulness of work but also the idea of a disruptive, liberatory character inherent in enjoyment and fun, that would resist the dull logic of (useless?) labour.

 

Screen shot of Pippin Barr's It is as if you were doing work
https://pippinbarr.github.io/itisasifyouweredoingwork

 

For the moment, I will leave this question open, and observe from a slightly different angle that automated work is increasingly responsible for the production of commodities (and this is true no matter how abstract these commodities are in some sectors of the economic system), and that in consequence the labour performed by human bodies loses contact with what it’s supposed to be its own representation in economy — the exchange value as a property of the commodity. If Marx is right to underline the connection between work time and exchange value, then at the point where work is increasingly detached from the human body, the economy is based on floating signifiers that do not lead back to anything, unless a human body is forced into useless labour in order to provide the illusion of a signified, without which the whole system of signification (including the economic, political and social structure) threatens to collapse. Maybe that would also account in part for the apparent contradiction involved in the much debated condition of the high-speed society initiated by the industrial revolution: the fact that the acceleration of technology instead of offering more leisure time for human bodies, is actually correlated with an acceleration of the pace of life.(2)  We have to produce more and more futile work in order to maintain the fundamental illusion of a linkage between human work time and (exchange) value. And if work is fun, all the better. In this light, the difference between simulating work and "real" work tends to be effaced, since, in an increasingly automated world, human work in general is more and more just a way of feigning usefulness.

In a discussion that looks at gaming and programming (as instances that were supposed to represent fun and enjoyment on the one hand and labour on the other) Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Andrew Lison underline the potentially dangerous aspects of fun, that they understand in relation with exploitation.(3) They observe that fun tends to reinforce, consciously or unconsciously the "right" way of doing things, and, playing with the etymology of the word, note that in a certain sense those who have fun are also being funned,(4) i.e. exploited. The users "in enjoying the object of their use, whether drugs, games, or software development environments," — and we could add here desktop environments for office work (as in It is as if you were doing work) and, arguably, even the plethora of machines of the different stages of the industrial revolution — "are, at the same time, themselves used.(5)

A situation that recalls Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of fun and enjoyment in the culture industry. For Adorno and Horkheimer the culture industry prolongs the logic of capitalist labour in the superstructure of society so that all cultural creation bears the mark of the ideology inherent in the production process. The culture industry is characterized by the constant reproduction of the same thing under the guise of diversity,(6) and in the last instance, what it does is to continually reinforce and reproduce the established social hierarchy. Entertainment and work share the same logic, and thus all aspects of life are subordinated to the same principles.(7)The individual itself becomes just a product of the culture industry, a pseudo-individual tolerated only as long as its identification with the generality is unquestioned.(8) Thus, the culture industry creates a circle of manipulation and retroactive need by shaping the consumer as one of its products. From this perspective, It is as if you were doing work, with its two levels of confounding working and playing that mirror each other — the first being its very existence as a game that simulates work and the second the representation of the common logic of working and playing inside the game — can be read as a literal rendering of the logic behind Adorno and Horkheimer’s position. In other words, forcing a bit the argument, one could say that the game stands as a caricatural portrait not only of the office work, but of the culture industry itself, and consequently of the consumer that internalized its principles. Is it possible that in interacting with It is as if you were doing work the spectator encounters the forces that shape one’s own self as a pseudo-individual caught in the intertwined logic of labour and enjoyment — a logic that works as a tool in the service of an established social system or ideological program?

If this is the case, then, returning to the similitudes between playing It is as if you were doing work, having a "fake job" and working in a "real" office, what is every time at stake is producing oneself, fabricating one’s own body and consciousness in accordance with the rules that govern the ideology of the prevalent politico-economic system. With the possible difference that doing it inside a game that caricaturizes the whole process might create a critical distance, enough to observe it, not enough to break away from it.

 

"Stay true to yourself!"

Work, as It is as if you were doing work suggests (in the reading that I propose here, at least), means feeding impulses into a machine in order to keep it running — in its instances as office computer, technological network, or larger social mechanism. Also, being deeply intertwined with fun and enjoyment, the logic of labour underlies the entirety of the socio-political field, producing the individual social actors in accordance with its rules. Placing oneself at a critical distance from the absurdity of futile labour (while nonetheless being in the midst of performing it), brings into focus the possibility that what is every time (re)produced and reinforced through work/enjoyment is not only the commodity, but the social system itself, and more than that, one’s own body and consciousness, one’s own self as part of that system. The player/worker in executing the work opens up a caesura that runs inside her/his own body, becoming at the same time user and used in rapport with the machine. As the user it is the human individual in control of its world, as the used it is a disposable source of mechanical or electrical impulses. It is this opening in between the two that permits a quick glance at the artificiality of the process that produces the most immediate natural given: one’s own body.

There is an aspect to the body, a certain detachment from its inertial humanist meanings, that both Marx and his later followers and critics tend to miss: the labour (at least since the industrial revolution) was never simply "human" labour. The agency involved in production streams from a complex of assemblages that cannot be neatly reduced to a human body. The interaction with the machine produces a body, is itself a body, that operates within temporal and spatial regimes different from those accessible to a human body. On one hand there is the human-like body/consciousness — stipulated by the ideology inherent in the current social, political and economic systems — that appears somewhere at the periphery of the production process at the level of the interface with the machine as both user and used, and on the other there is the extended body that performs the work, whose agency cannot be theorized in humanist terms. A rapidly extending gap opens between the non-human character of labour (mistakenly considered to be human) and our economic, political and social system built upon human labor (missing its non-human aspect) reified as exchange value. Hence, the stringent necessity for futile work in order to cover and conceal the breach.

From this angle, the user/player/worker is an appendix of the machine, providing the required impulses, in order to receive the frames, the parerga, that contour her/his own individuality: the elements of the meta-narrative that produces a self. It is not that the human body through labour produces commodities, as Marx would have it, rather it is labour that produces human bodies as commodities. Or, in terms closer to Bataille’s, the human body should be understood as an excretion of the labour process.

It would seem that in some sense the condition of the modern human is, after all, that of Sisyphus. The human body/consciousness would be faced with its own dispersion as soon as it would be disconnected from labour, as soon as it would stop working... or playing...

So, maybe it’s a good idea to finish with a link instead of conclusions. Pippin Barr’s Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment.

http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/letsplayancientgreekpunishment/LetsPlayAncientGreekPunishment.html

Select (S)isyphus and roll the boulder up the hill only to watch it roll back down, and then... do it again, and again, and again...

 

 

Screen shot of Pippin Barr's Let's Play Ancient Greek Punishment
http://www.pippinbarr.com/games/letsplayancientgreekpunishment/LetsPlayAncientGreekPunishment.html

 

 

 

 

NOTES

(1) ^  Karl Marx, Capital (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), Volume One, 135.

(2) ^  Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 16.

(3) ^  Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Andrew Lison, "Fun is a Battlefield: Software between Enjoyment and Obsession," in Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Paradox and Pain in Computing, ed. Olga Goriunova (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 176.

(4) ^ Ibid., 175.

(5) ^ Ibid., 187.

(6) ^  Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 106.

(7) ^ Ibid. 100, 104

(8) ^ Ibid. 124-125

 

 

 


 

Mihai Băcăran is a PhD candidate at The University of Melbourne. He holds an MA in Art Theory from Beijing Normal University and a BA in Art History from The University of Bucharest. His research looks at questions of embodiment in relation to spectatorship in net art, asking how the interaction with online works influences what our(?) bodies ‘are,’ ‘do,’ and ‘mean.’

 

 

 

 

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