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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?
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.
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...
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where no other claim is indicated.