Everything is traversal in the Thames Valley. Our contracts are getting shorter, our assignments more rarified. Who actually has a permanent contract? Who has a six month contract? A three month one? Never mind, there’s work to be done and the infinite labour of adapting oneself to this or that workplace. Yes, adaptation, for that’s what happening. By the tenth company, the twenty-fifth, the fiftieth, it takes you no more than an hour to adjust yourself to the system.
The law streams through you; you can hear its streaming. Listen. It makes no sense – empty orders, detached subroutines. Listen more closely – there is nothing there. The law has no substance, but is only the dissolution of substance. Listen and you hear only that great senseless roaring that fills the empty places between the stars.
How is it then that the law is able to assume the human face of your boss, the executive, the company director? How is it that it is hypostatised into the particular bodies of those who pass through the Thames Valley? (Ah, those marvellous bodies, pared down and sleek: bodies which will not offend clients or vendors, bodies anonymously sleek like the great cars which pass along the roads: how I admire them! How I would like to tone and trim my own body! To shape and streamline it like the sleekest car!)
The network is connecting us. The network dreams for us. The network speaks through each of us, I can hear it, even as I know behind these orders there is only empty noise. The network! Now I am a networker; my friends those with whom I network and who network with me. I close my eyes and I see sleek bodies climbing up and down a great ladder. Up and down they go, their shining bodies becoming indistinguishable. Until: a vision: the up and the down are the same and each body is the same. The temp worker and the boss are the same and we are each substitutable for one another.
The truth was mine: each worker was substitutable, perfectly substitutable. Our skills were equivalent and interchangable. Our bodies were sleek. There were others, it is true – bad machines: disabled workers, obese workers, mad workers, those who could work no longer and fell from the loving arms of Capital. And those who would never get connected, whom the network would not reach. We pitied them, all of them, but we had to keep our eyes on the job.
Lars Iyer's Blog 