Category: Office Life

There’s nothing natural, I said to H., there never was. Not for you or I or for anyone, I said. Ideology is what passes itself off as what is natural and eternal, I said. So it is that Winnersh Triangle has always existed and was always meant to exist, I said. At the very beginning of life on earth, I said, in the first amoebas, Winnersh Triangle was already latent I said. All of nature was awaiting the appearance of the clever corporate type, I said, the one who justifies corporatism to himself according to the laws of nature. This is pure ideology, I said, don’t doubt it. But here and now, today, what is natural and eternal and the end to which all life struggled is Winnersh Triangle.

She is an eagle, I said to H., of the corporate type who reverses her car out of his driveway in the morning. She works in finance. She speculates for others on currencies and bonds. Hers is a world of balance-sheets and budgets. She is not like you or I, H. saddled by a strategic plans, audits and appraisals, I said. She’s beyond that. She flows with Capital, speculating on Capital. The eagle looks far into the future. She is staring the future down, I said. Because she knows the future is hers, I said. All of power is concentrated in her sinews. The whole of evolution presses forward in her synapses. She can see very far into the future, I said. Soon there will be only eagles, I said, and sons and daughters of eagles. The takeover is nearly complete, I said.

They’re magnificent, I said, turning in the air above us, I said. Riding the financial currents. Riding the thermals, effortlessly. Of course what they ride is information, I said. They are information-riders. Information streams around them, I said. It does so, they tell themselves, because they are fitted to ride information. She and her husband leave in the morning like eagles soaring from their nest, and both come back tired after a day of eagle’s battles. When they sleep, I said, it is the sleep of the just, I said. They are innocent as an eagle is innocent. And this is so because they are on good terms with the future. It is because in their eyes there open the eyes of an eagle which have seen the future, I said, and they know what will happen.

But I know their weakness, I said. Their afraid for their daughter, I said, who is driven to a pre-school club in a 4 X 4 every morning. They know they’ll have to prepare her for the world, I said. She’ll have to study the right subjects at university and to cultivate the right kind of connections. True, they almost always do well, these sons and daughters of eagles, I said. They’ll go the right school and the right activities. They’ll study the humanities to broaden themselves a little, I said. Then they’ll do a postgrad in something vocational. And then job market will spread itself before them, I said. It will open itself to them because their mothers and fathers were far sighted, I said. They knew what was coming and they knew the law of its coming. The future presses up against them, and they know Capital is liable to sudden swerves and transformations, I said. How will their sons and daughters ride the waves of Capital? A good job and a good marriage, that’s what is important, they say. But above all, good connections. Connections which must be cultivated from the first, I said.

They’re not like us, I said to H. The eagles are far beyond us. They have their eyes on the future. Our eyes rest on the present and the past, I said. Our eyes rest on the pages of our favourite books, I said. Meanwhile, the last drunks are being picked up and driven away. The last heroin users are being rounded up and shipped off. The criminals are all tagged and under house arrest. When the financial collapse happens in 2014, the eagles will be ready, I said. They’ll be ready for new looters and new criminals. They’ll be ready with guns and with their sharp eyes. But it is their children they worry for, I said. You can never be sure with their children, I said. A wrong turn might be taken. The child might go wrong somehow. They might be one of the weak and not one the strong. Lambs and not eagles.

Hence the new cult of the child, I said to H. The new cult of the child and the cult of youth. In reality, I said, it is the capture of childhood and the capture of youth. There is to be no childhood and no youth, I said, but only training. Nothing can be left to chance. Above all, there must be no free time for the eagle’s child. All time must be accounted for. The child’s life is a life in training. The world is venal and the child must be trained. There must be no slackness, no time in which the child wanders across the face of the world. The world is not a place in which to wander. There are drunks and addicts in the world. The outside is fearful and so the child must see the outside only through the tinted windows of a 4 X 4.

I’ll bet there were patches of uncultivated land when you were younger, I said to H. I’ll bet there were expanses that were not yet gold courses and housing estates, I said. There was still unused space, I said, still space left unruly and overgrown, I said. Today, parents are as suspicious of empty space as they are suspicious of empty time. Wild space, for them, is where the paedophiles lurk, I said. It’s where discarded needles prod up from the bare earth, I said. It’s where alcoholics gather to sprawl in the sun, I said. The child of eagles must not wander the face of the earth, I said, just as she must not know deep time, I said. Soon, they’ll increase the number of school terms, I said, just as they are increasing school opening hours. Holidays will last no more than a fortnight, I said. And there will be no deep time, I said, and no face of the earth over which the child can wander.

What about us, I said to H. What of our future? These eagles are indifferent to us, I said. We teach them and they are indifferent. They can see through the pages of Marx and Foucault to the future, I said. The years of study are holiday years, I said, because they know what’s ahead of them. They’re ready for the years of work. They’re ready to pair off, I said, according to the rules of Victorian fiction (it’s all about money, prettiness and breeding), and move to the home counties to start all over again. That is what the home counties are for, I said. They’re a stud farm, an experiment in breeding and rapacity.

As for us, I said to H., we are a colony. The whole of the north is a leisure park for the south. We get new galleries and new music venues and the southerners buy flats for their children, I said. Its a spectacle for southerners, I said, with the same poverty beneath. The wealth that arrives here is eagle’s wealth, I said. It comes from eagle and it departs with eagles. The whole of the north, I said, is an item on an eagle’s balance sheet. The university is no more than a finishing school, I said. A humanities degree is a way for the eagles to spread their wings a little, to absorb a little culture, before real life begins. Science degrees are no longer vocational; slowly, one by one, pure maths, physics and chemistry are disappearing.

The future is opening in the home counties like a long, tree-lined avenue. The eagles cruise into the future as we head into perdition. When the disaster comes, we will disappear into slack time and wild space, I said. But they do not have to fear the corrosive force of the everyday, I said. They need fear nothing of the sky above the head of the unemployed, I said. They’ll carry the future with them, I said. They’ll live at the brink of the future, I said. A thousand tiny gestures tell them we are not of their kind, I said. They are more rarified than us, I said, more subtle. With eagles’ eyes they read the signs, I said. Theirs is the keen edge of the future, I said. And they know the future will pass us by.

In the hi-tech industrial estate where I first went to work there were still wide patches of grass between the plots on which companies had constructed call centres and warehouses. The rain was allowed to lie in long puddles in the grass and mud. Every so often the grass was mowed, but for the most part it was left unused. Once, gypsies came and spread their caravans on the grass. We heard about it on the tannoy. They were evicted and the council brought in diggers to cut channels along the fields so no caravan could be towed there. A channel four foot deep and then a wall of earth four feet high marked the perimeter of each lot. But the grass had been torn up and now there were great tracts of mud. When it rained, I thought to myself: these lakes are like great wounds and what they wound is time. The gypsies have left great scars of tme in the muddy fields.

May 2nd. My boss allows me, after a hard day of work, to take an hour off for my birthday. I change from my toetectors and take off my hardhat and walk past the empty plots of land to the station. Ahead of me, the slim, boyish figure of a woman I would see every morning waiting for the train. I had seen her before, coming down the bridge towards me on the platform. I remembered how the sun flashed across the lenses of her glasses and seeing what I imagined was a look of pain and hatred on her face.

As I walked behind her, I remembered the lines from the gospels which spoke of the face we would have to wear to meet God and thought: that pained and hating look will be mine on the day of my judgement. It will be the face everyone will wear in the Thames Valley.

I had turned nineteen on that day. Nineteen and I knew great parentheses had been placed around me. I was an exception only in a banal sense – a bad machine, one who had been hollowed out too deeply, who did more than carry out orders and give his body to the company. I would come to know others like me. Others with that morbid excessiveness, that mutation of interiority which made them dissatisfied with their job. Often they’d become vicious. I remember X. (I’ve forgotten his name), the long-eyelashed reader of Sartre who like to insult me. I bore his insults happily. I felt elected, privileged. He noticed me and insulted me. One day he told me I should leave the company for my own good. I saw a copy of what I now know must have been a Methuen copy of Existentialism and Humanism by his computer terminal.

And I remember M. who had a copy of Genet’s The Thief’s Journal on the back seat of his vast company car. He would drive me to London and we’d eat on his expense account. He’d been kidnapped as a child, he told me, and held in a caravan. The police came to free him, but days had already passed. ‘What happened?’ I asked him. Nothing, he told me. It was his mother’s third husband who’d kidnapped him. He was mad, but no paedophile. He’d lost his job and then his wife and now he’d lost his life. He’d wanted to hurt the boy’s mother, that was all. ‘What happened to him?’ He went to prison said M., as we drove back up the motorway. The world of books had opened to M. in the caravan, he told me. ‘Up until then I’d never read a book …’

Parentheses. We did little for the most part in the warehouse where we were supposed to work. This was boom time in the Thames Valley; there weren’t enough workers, and if you were sacked at one end of the warehouse, you would reappear at another, being employed by a different temping agency. We, the warehouse workers, didn’t like the office workers. Their world was bright and clean, ours dusty and half-lit. Sometimes we would pass resentfully through their open plan offices. When they came to visit us, they had to be careful. Rows would break out and a lad of the warehouse would stand nose to nose with an office worker, bellowing. It was marvellous. Later, apologies, still more wonderful. It had all been a misunderstanding. ‘I thought you meant that …’ – ‘I thought he had said …’ The warehouse manager calmed us down. He was on our side, we knew it. He understood us. Now and again he’d call us over to ask for a progress report. Then he would say ‘good, good’ and we were allowed to go. He was watching us, we knew it, but he was like an indulgent father and once he had worked as we worked, on the warehouse floor.

That was the late 1980s. Three years later, when I returned to the same companies, the ethos had changed. The reign of efficiency had intensified; no longer was there the chance to snatch an hours sleep in the long afternoon. No longer was overtime a chance to read the paper on Saturday morning. I’ve heard the ethos has changed again and the offices are deserted, everyone working at home or offsite. The same workers I knew in the warehouse had become anxious office employees. A world disappeared and now the empty lots which I always imagined lay open and dreaming in our place are occupied by new office buildings.

What sense of ‘we’ there was, of ‘them and us’ has dispersed. The warehouses are gone and the offices empty. Companies are now marvellously fine network spun across the world. Now the word ‘we’ refers to the small team with whom you stay in contact by e-mail – and to your family, your husband or your wife, in the room next to you as you work. You don’t need to go out to office; you don’t have to. You write reports in the morning and take conference calls every evening. The office comes to your living room.

The world has been fitted around you like an exoskeleton. From your home office you perform the great, subtle movements that alter the course of the world. Your boss is the archangel who looks out for you. She allows you to wheel higher and higher in the sky until you imagine you are close to the throne of God. And what is marvellous, still more marvellous, is that you are also the young woman I might meet on the street, an angel and a human being, with wings that spread across the sky and hands that could reach out to take mine.

Meanwhile, the wounds of time are closing, leaving no trace. Worktime and hometime are completely enmeshed in the Thames Valley. The new solitaries, wired to the others but not living alongside them seek what they call spiritual solutions. There are painting classes and lessons in the history of art. Everything is at your disposal; you meditate and buy mail order healing crystals. There are only new skills to acquire and old skills to improve, only quality time and time to be invested in relationships, only jogging time and time to follow leisure trails through the woods.

Visiting the Thames Valley, I notice that space, too, is annulled. Every corner of the land is accounted for. Even the gypsies, feared by everyone, have been settled. Tracks have been lain in the woods. Cycle paths thread the countryside. Nothing moves. The takeover is complete. All time is worktime and nothing besides.

But I know that M. is still driving his great car up and down the motorway. His heart is full of rage and loathing. I imagine his car tearing a hole in time and space. He is like the anti-Messiah, I think to myself, a living wound. He hates enough for all of us. One day the poison will flow from him into our veins and the Furies will rise with hatred in their faces to battle the angelic order.

My oldest friend P. visited me in our Manchester house and I took him along the great circuit of the streets I walked on a daily basis. ‘Do you see what it’s like?’ I asked him. He knew what I meant. There was something obscure and retarded about this life, as though I had prematurely retired from it, throwing in the towel before I had begun. He had visited me in my parent’s house in the south too, having already left me behind for a job in the world. Already I had retired, losing the job I’d found for some foolish venture which took me to Greece and brought me back again within a week. Job lost, and the agency through which I’d found it disgusted with me and Hewlett-Packard, that great organisation, turned  from me now and forever. Why would they employ me again, when I left my job for foreign adventure?

Only the adventure was not so; in the too-bright beaches of Greece I thought: this is not life either and resolved to return almost straightaway. I had only brought one book, you see, with the aim of this being the last I would read, abandoning reading for a new, book free life in the tropics. I found myself back in the scruffy train station of my hometown. It was raining, but I had been relieved to see the green fields and woods of the country I had resolved to leave only a few days before.

Jobless and unemployable, I was visited by P. who shook his head at the obscurity of my life. He had a job, a flat and money, living in the far South. I applied for training schemes of various kinds; I failed to get on the training course to be a teacher, I liked to write but the chance of writing had been battered to death by the obscurity of the everyday. What chance was there? This was a time when recession had hit the south, even our mini Silicon valley …

I would often see the twin buildings of Hewlett Packard from the train. Yes, there they were, vast grey boxes alongside a vast car park. I remembered the pond of koi fish and the suite of meeting rooms named after philosophers. I remembered the leather armchairs by the machines which served the best instant coffee where I would read every lunchtime. And I remembered the bosses whom I assisted so readily, being close, always close to the chance of a longer temporary contract. Alas, in the long hours when they could find nothing for me to do, I read and my despised temp boss, wandering from office space to space to check on her minions was unhappy to see me reading. ‘Can’t you ask them to find you something to do?’ – ‘I asked, and there was nothing to do’.

Nothing to do, and so the life of a little department would be closed to me. I would sit on its edges, listening to old jokes and office banter, laughing with others. But when they turned to me it was to say with great seriousness, ‘I’m afraid that’s all the work we have for you’. I always found it wonderful how a boss would switch from joking to seriousness in this way. How poised and elegant they were! How used to every circumstance! One minute laughing and the next terminating my contract! With a flick of their great wings they changed course in an instant, now wheeling, now diving, now climbing back to the heights which we theirs. I could not blame the company for paying them such large sums, they were marvellous minor deities whose body was joined to the great body of the company.

A graduate trainee advised me to make use of the training suite in my lunchbreak. ‘Work on yourself’, he told me. He was working on himself. Already in his mid 30s, he’d done a degree to improve his skills portfolio, he told me. It wasn’t broad enough, he said. I could see his great wings spreading to cover the sky: here was a trainee manager who would soar. I thought: I am not like him, but went, nevertheless, to the training suite. It was closed to temps, alas and so I fell outside the chance of benediction. What happened to that trainee manager? I picture him beside Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard, a picture of whom graced the wall behind me. There they were, two older men smiling and shaking hands. How happy they looked! How happy I was to see them! I would like to have knelt and have them bless me.

Did I ever come close to finding more than a temporary job in the great buildings of Hewlett Packard? I was not a diligent worker, it was true. I liked to take long walks from one building to another and back again. Here I was, I thought to myself, at the heart of a great corporation, but I was still an alien body. How could I translate mine into the sleek body of a worker?

Sometimes I would see my an old schoolmate in the corridors between office suites. He had made the transformation, working in sales. I was always in awe of the sales group and hardly dared approach them. Men and women whose camaradarie was forged in the tough work which kept the golorious company on the move. A marvellous bond existed between them – I envied it! How I would have liked to join their team as one among others! Gender and ethnic origin were no boundaries – what, then, was it that kept me from their world? I thought: they can see I am not one them. I am marked in some way. They are the ones Plato would called the men and women of gold and I am a man of dross. They wheeled in great circles above my head and I returned, after passing, apparently invisible, between them, to the desk where I entered data into relevant boxes.

P. understood this. He had a life, a fiancee, a job and a flat. In between jobs, I’d listen to motivational tapes from business gurus. I had to get all my ducks in a row, apparently. My ducks were in disarray, most of them loss, bobbing far from where they should be. They needed to be all in a row. Tom Peters advised me on one such tape to find a small company in which to work. Small companies were more adept at recognising excellence, apparently. Was I excellent? I was in search of excellence, it was true and I knew excellence to day was not the arete of the Greeks. There was a new set of values to inculcate.

I listened to Tom Peters and played the first version of Wolfenstein. I applied for jobs. I visited the dole office. But the corporate world was closed to me, before and after my disastrous trip to Greece. Week after week fell into obscurity. A year passed, and I wondered how this passage of time would look if pressed into hardness, as a diamond is born from compressed carbon. I thought: it would be perfectly clear. You would hardly know you were holding anything. But there it would be in your closed palm: time, all this time, pressed into perfect translucency. I wondered what I would see ifI looked back along the long corridor of weeks and months which opened behind me and before me. Was it a kind of labyrinth into which I had disappeared? If so, where was the Minotaur and where the thread that would lead me from it?

I have written before, I think, of the university library which opened to admit me and the shelves on which, I am told, my bad first book can be discovered next to the books which opened another world to me. I remember them still, books which came to me from a space I did not know existed: Nick Land’s Thirst for Annihilation, Cixous’s Readings, Shaviro’s Passion and Excess and finally, Josipovici’s edition of Blanchot’s writings. What led me to them? How did I find them? It must have been their titles. Titles I knew that formed a kind of thread I would follow out from the Thames Valley where a minotaur was following me with a razor in his hand.

I told P. I was leaving for the North, for Manchester. He was unsurprised. Disasters of various kinds followed. I lived for a while in a house with a woman similar to the witch expelled on Big Brother 6. Then there was a time of violence, burglary and paranoia. Finally, poor, nerves shredded, I found myself in another labyrinth in which I would wander my 20s away.

The question you ask yourself one morning as you are driven to Slough to work as a telemarketer: Am I dead or am I alive? Or is that everyone is alive and I am dead? Masochism: your disappearance will allow the world to complete itself, for history to end. So long as you are alive these are the Last Days.

And when you disappear? History will complete itself, the horizon will fall away and this civilisation will spread across the earth and across the skies. You are a point of absolute negativity. Everyone else is present to themselves and the day, replete. They admit light into their deepest recesses, they have no secret from the day. And each of them, the telemarketers, maintains an impressive balance of the inner and outer, like those peculiar creatures that live in the sea’s depths: they appear delicate, but their strength is such that they do not collapse under the immense pressure of miles of water.

And you? You have collapsed as a star collapses upon itself. Now you are the dark point which will draw everything into itself. The singularity across whose event horizon the world must crawl. Or is this delusion itself – some compensating ideology, some imaginary revenge on a world which has turned its face from you?

God, said Simone Weil, following Isaac Luria, has departed. As he left, the universe opened in his wake. We were born because of his absence and our lives are evidence of our abandonment. You are being driven through Slough. This is the anti-town, the seventh circle of Hell (Bracknell is the eighth circle). You ask yourself: is it that death is everywhere and only I am alive? But then you know that you are hardly alive and this is not life. You know you are the exception: it was your curse to have lifted yourself from this great living. Somehow you broke from it. Somehow it abandoned itself in you.

You are like the living wound across the everyday. Your immense boredom, your death-in-life is the wound wherein the everyday comes to know and despise itself. Now the everyday will seek revenge because it did not want to be known and to know itself. Your disappearance will allow the world to complete itself, for history to end. But you are Gracchus, the one who cannot die which means so long as you exist the world cannot bring itself to an end.

The Last Days: today, tomorrow, and all the days to come. You are Sisyphus, grinding everything into meaninglessness. It is easy to make unmeaning of meaning, says the phenomenologist, but the task is to make meaning of meaning. Yes, but your presence in the world turns everything into unmeaning, which is why the everyday will not tolerate your presence. Now it must set out to crush you and to crush itself in you. But how can it crush the one which allowed it to become self-aware?

You ask yourself: am I dead or am I alive? The answer comes: you are the wound which prevents dying from finding death. You are Parisfal’s wound. Today, like tomorrow and every day to come, you are telemarketing. ‘Hello, I’m calling on behalf of Hewlett Packard …’

I have borrowed an edition of Kafka’s Wedding Preparations in the Country which includes other posthumous prose writings including the Octavo notebooks which I remember once photocopying one lunch hour when I used to work for Hewlett-Packard. Sad memory: the hopelessness of my position at that time: young but also futureless, reading and dreaming but also bound by a series of trivial jobs. I remember them still: covering for a man who had had a stroke, being there to help him, all the while reading Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility for the second time. Then a period in administration when there was little to do. I read Hollier’s Against Architecture in that period. Then there was a time on the assembly line when nothing was being sent down the line to us. I read plays instead: Strindberg, Tennesee Williams….

It was hard to make one’s way in those days just as my friends who work in such places tell me it is today. You can expect, they tell me, upon getting your job, seven years of difficulty, of idiot co-workers and tyannical bosses, seven years of pettiness and short-term contracts, until you find a decent position. Meanwhile, for me, then, there was reading which existed at a strange angle to my present. How was it possible that Mishima’s tetralogy and Hewlett-Packard could co-exist? In a corner of the office, there was even a picture of Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard, shaking hands. And elsewhere, in the coffee rooms, there were motivational posters. Read Runaway Horses in such an office and of what else could you dream of the great conflagration which would destroy everything? Read the Octavo notebooks and dream of the rebellion of office equipment and temporary workers – the faculty photocopier, the glitched computer, the crashed network (I would like one day to write of the strange allies I made in the office, those who belonged to the Outside even as they were inside, strange beings who were stronger than the office and yet consented to remain inside it) …

What purpose do these reflections serve? I am alone in the office, R.M. having become Dr. R.M. and returned to the South (she does not like to be written about and I will say nothing here, not even to offer my congratulations (ah R.M. with the roses on your hairclip and your new jeans!)). In the space where she was, silence, emptiness, and it is as though nothing begins in my lonely office. As though the world were unspinning itself, fraying, coming apart, and I were stretched across those same unpleasant afternoons when, as a temp worker, I would watch the clock and wait for five-thirty.

Am I capitalist who dreams? Or is it capital that dreams in me?

I thought I saw you working in the Sales Team. It looked like you – looked like the one I remembered from school, the one who was obsessed with sex, who spoke of nothing else, but who also spoke of the Bible (you brought it on that fieldtrip and read it at night). It looked like you, but was it you in a suit and braces? Speaking with a salesman’s voice? Was it you?

I think it was you. Between the one I knew and the one I no longer knew I saw the difference on which identity always depends. I saw that difference, that virtuality which gave itself in you to be seized by the movement of capital.

Capitalism captures difference. How then to recapture it – or at least to draw anew on that difference, that virtuality, in order to stop capitalism from dreaming us?

The area around the foyer on the ground floor of the company is open; you can sit wherever you like. This is not a space for work, but for meetings (names of the meeting rooms: Locke, Spinoza, Hegel …). You come here to read. You sit on the leather couches near the receptionist and say to yourself: I look like a client. You pour yourself the coffee which is intended for waiting clients. You read the business pages in the Financial Times and then read Management Today. It’s delightful.

Then you go to the training suite and borrow self-motivating tapes. Who produces these tapes? They coalesce out of the air. They are born in the middle of the air. No one makes them, the motivational speakers do not exist. They arise, these tapes, in the same way as the ancients thought insects arose: from dirt and mud. Only the tapes arise from the pristine air-conditioned corridors of the company. From the dead space of the company foyer.

Who is the one who works beside me? I am watching you, management trainee. Watching you who work beside me, you for whom I am nothing. But I am barely anything for myself, I can assure you. Soon I will disappear, but you will still be there.

You have entered the Castle, management trainee; you are a functionary. Others want your place, but it is your place. Looking at the new graduate trainees you think to yourself: they have a lot to learn. You’ve already forgotten you were one of them. One of them: how could it be? You fear them, you turn your gaze towards the boardroom. Yes, that is the source of your essence, what you are. You exist insofar as you aspire. Only you will not struggle openly to find a place in the upper echelons. You know a great training is required.

You know that your boss is like Plato’s Sun who radiates through everything in the company. That those close to him glow with a light that burns through him. But you also know that this Sun is your boss’s only because he has passed through a great movement of training. You can learn from him, you say to yourself. He is not a god. He is like me, and one day, I will be like him. Because you know that once upon a time he too was a management trainee like you. And just as you cannot bear to look at the new graduate trainees, because you fear to confront your own dissolution (the fact that you did not always occupy the lofty place that is yours’) he cannot bear to look at you. Only sometimes may he allow himself to think: this management trainee is like the young man I once was. A lion cub, but a lion nonetheless …

Meanwhile, work on yourself. Develop your skills. Develop your portfolio of skills, management trainee. Perhaps you will have to move from this company to another one. Perhaps you will have to insist on a pay rise. Perhaps you will have to move into another team. Work on yourself. Only the work has already begun. Before you knew it. Before you took yourself to the training suite. You are a part of the great machinery, and it works through you. At the level of the habits and rituals of the company life: breakfast (a sausage in a roll) in the canteen, the cigarette break, the trip up to Birmingham, the night out in Reading at Mulligans on whose barfront is written: drinking, dancing, cavorting …

I am watching you, management trainee. I am watching you and wondering what it might be to be a management trainee. I watch and I think to myself: I would like to see him malfunction, this company robot. Would that he drank like Jed the robot on Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump. Would that one day he laughed so hard at his own imposture he is that he fell into his laughing mouth and disappeared.

You are thinking again of the M.D. Of his softness. The great apparatus around him – the suite of rooms, personal assistants – and then: his softness. Rather like that of the Martians in The War of the Worlds who are soft inside the metal carapaces in which they stalk the Earth. Only the M.D.’s softness is benign; in place of the mask, there is only a kind of feebleness (the soft face of the creature from the Predator; the puffy Darth Vader beneath his mask). You say to yourself: but he is just like me. Only he is not like you. And as he looks at you does he think, too: he is just like me. Or: he is just like my son. Or: we are all like one another.

I am reading Gramsci in my lunch hour. And I note to myself the miraculous smoothness. World that functions without the strictures of external authority. The great functioning of the industrial estate, of the interactions of this or that company, and then the relationships which spread over out brave new world, in which company trainees come to us from Delhi or from Prague. In which a foreign name arouses no curiosity. In which everyone speaks perfect English.

Smoothness: it moves of itself; its mechanisms do not simply traverse us, we are those mechanisms – its robot arms, its mechanical pseudopodia. But what happens when we are denied a firm place in the industrial estate? When you only have the position of a temp? Your light step: you are barely there. Only you are there – you are not yet a proper worker – but you are hardly there. You have always usurped someone else’s place – replacing a worker on maternity leave, for example, or providing phone cover when staff are on holiday. You role is to disappear into the role of others. To do so with a minimum of fuss and training. To be unobtrusive.

‘Is Helen there?’ – ‘She’s away on maternity leave.’ – ‘Can I speak to Mark instead?’ – ‘He’s on a company trip to Blackpool. Can I help you at all?’ – ‘Who are you?’ – ‘I’m temping here. Can I pass on a message?’ – ‘No, it’s okay.’

You are an usurper. But what you are is also usurped; your existence is borrowed; you are a temporary fix, an item from a repair kit. You are not to obtrude; you are there but you are not there, a ghost. But this is what reveals itself in the temporary worker: identity itself is phantasmic; the working of the great benign system depends upon an identification of worker and role. This is how hegemony works: you become your job; you pass through a training scheme, and there you are. You say to yourself: I am a management trainee. And you say: this is just what I deserve. The world has opened to you and let you in.

Capitalism is dreaming in me. But of what does it dream?

You’ve found yourself in a warehouse job. They gave you free ‘toetectors’, there they are on your feet: black trainers with a hard tip. Sometimes at the weekend you come in for order picker training. You are learning to drive a forklift. Before the practical, the theory. A man pulls over the sheet of his flip chart. He’s done this before, trained countless employees. The forklift, it says, with a diagram of the forklift truck. Your best friend – picture of a forklift truck unloading pallets – or your worst enemy – picture of a man beneath the forklift. You laugh, but you shouldn’t laugh. Everyone is looking serious. You stop laughing.

I was young then and introduced as ‘the lad’. I was an assistant to an older man, who liked to take things easy. I am replacing another ‘lad’ who has graduated from the warehouse to the office. I’ve inherited his workstation, his cartoons sellotaped to the cubicle wall. I think to myself: I’ll never live up to the example of my predecessor. I’m supposed to find packages lost in the warehouse: unable-to-locates, they’re called. UTLS. I get a list of them every morning, and off I go. Only I go nowhere; it is easier not to look. I wander from coffee machine to coffee machine. I take breaks sitting on the stairwell which goes up to the roof, where I can read in peace. What I am reading? Something trashy. Really, it’s a waste of time.

Meanwhile, there are forms to fill in. Time to wander through the warehouse again. Today it’s my birthday, my boss lets me off early. When he is away, I go up to the offices and sit in his cubicle. He has books about management and getting on with your employees. Every month we have a team meeting. There’s three in my team: a guy who dresses like a cowboy we call Cowboy Pete, some other guy, very skinny, and me. Then my boss, who likes The Stranglers. This is what we talk about, if we have nothing pressing on our minds: The Stranglers. My boss deigns to talk to me about Hugh Cornwell, Rattus Norvegicus etc.

It’s high farce. We’re playing at team meetings. Nothing depends on us; nothing we do matters. We search for UTLs and fill out forms saying we can’t find them. And when we do find them, we bury them more deeply. It’s not worth the bother of finding things. So we say: we can’t find them. And my boss arranges for a report to be sent out to customers and an insurance claim to be made. Job done.

Today, though, it’s my birthday, so I’m let out an hour early. I go towards the train station past the fields where new buildings will be constructed. I think to myself: how is that you haven’t dissolved into the air? By what force are you held together – what counter-force binds you to yourself in the midst of this absurdity? Is it possible to die of absurdity? Or would you simply evaporate into the air? Or is it possible that this is already the afterlife, that the disaster has happened and this is a form of punishment? You are a banal Prometheus having his insides pecked out every day. And this industrial estate (but where is the industry? It’s all multinational computer firms …) is a benign hell. But it is also a dream.

Capitalism turns in its sleep. When it wakes up, the whole world will vanish.

One lunchtime you see the Managing Director, who jogs every lunchtime. He had a heart attack and has become a jogger. Round the building he goes. I think to myself: he is more real than any of us. He may be a slim, small man, but he is also a planet and we all revolve around him. If we lose our jobs we will be spun off into the outer darkness and torn apart. He’s the one who keeps us safely in our orbits. The M.D.: a small man, but he has a whole suite of rooms with a special entrance of his own from the main foyer. He has a toilet in there. Once I was able to use it, I can’t remember why. But I thought: well, this is it, here I am in the M.D.’s suite, the engine room. It all happens here.

The M.D. is the minor deity who holds our world together. We should be grateful to him. We owe our existences to him. He is like Descartes’s God who sustains each of us in our existence. He is a benign father and we should break off our work now and again to sing his praises. In the end, none of us exist, we are finite substances and he alone is infinite: infinite substance. He alone is real and here you are in his personal toilet.

Then there are the senior managers who surround him. Important women, sleek and well-groomed. Important men, less sleek, less well-groomed. Reasonable people. You can call them by their first name. You can aspire to be like them: they are models, exemplars. The thirty something graduate trainee in my department says: I went to university to make something of myself. He is in his sandwich year. He recommends I take myself to the training facilities. Work on yourself, he says. And he is right, I’m not real enough, none of us are, there’s a great deal of work to be done.

We know we’re not real enough; there’s a long way to go. Our desire to identify ourselves is phantasmic. We want reality, identity, want to hold on to something so the everyday won’t blow us away. Because there is a recession on and there are never enough jobs. But who are they, the deities? If I went to the boardroom in his private suite of rooms, spoke to him, he would be calm, reasonable. He might have a son my age and recognize in me a version of his son. And what would I see? If I expected to see a god in shining armour, I would be disappointed and confused like K. in The Castle when he discovers Klamm is a banal man, that there was nothing to him. A fat man behind a desk. But what about the M.D.? A man who is just like me?

The fact he is just like me allows you to measure yourself according to the measure which accords great status. He is an ordinary man, it is true, but he is also a minor deity. He is quietly spoken, pleasant, and you can call him by his first name. He has an open door policy. You have a problem? Then go and see him. He is benign, mild; there he is, he’ll talk to you. He is just like me, born from the streaming body of Capital, coalesced from the everyday by working on himself (by allowing Capital to work on him …) Beyond him, there is Capital. Capital is The Castle. But as K. discovers, it is also a motley collection of huts. Just as this industrial estate is a collection of prefabricated buildings …

Escape from unemployment, from the corrosive force of the everyday. You are brought into the office, a temp among other temps; there’s work to be done, no one is quite sure what – sit there, await instructions. You wait, minutes pass, then an hour, two hours. You take out your book; you read – but this is objectionable. Soon the woman from the temping agency, doing the rounds, comes to tell you off: think what an impression this makes, she says. You say: but there’s nothing to do. She says: they wouldn’t employ you if there was nothing to do.

So you play on the computer instead – there’s Solitaire, but this was before the Internet, before the World Wide Web, so in the end the screen is without depth. You change the background to Windows. You reset the defaults. You can offer to collect tea and coffee for everyone, that’s easy enough, off you go carrying the little plastic cup holder and returning with six cups. Or you can listen to conversations. Hot air, business talk. ‘Touching base’; ‘blue sky thinking’; ‘x [name of a customer] is screaming for y [name of a product or service]’. It is easy to make nonsense of sense, but how do you make sense of sense?, asks a phenomenologist. But the office is the place where sense frays, where it is undone and torn apart.

Gradually, you discover there are other temps; over the next few days, you find out they are unemployed actors, who occasionally have bit parts on The Bill. Sometimes you’ll work alongside them, it’s a laugh, work becomes a great parody. How does anything get done here?, you ask yourself, but you know you are in a backwater, you are working in admin and the sales team are downstairs.

Sales: that’s where it’s happening. Go downstairs, wonder down, drink coffee at their machine, use their kitchen. Yes, it’s happening, there’s excitement in the air. They seem more virile than the rest of us. More self-assured. For myself, as I get to know my job, I feel apologetic. It involves badgering engineers to fill out this form or that, to observe procedure. It is an interruption of work, not work. You take their time, get in the way. You’re apologetic, they’re polite, but you’re the obstacle.

Outside the office there is a little garden in the concrete. A fishpond. There are fields where buildings for hire have not yet been constructed; it’s peaceful. Then there’s the great carpark, car after car. You can’t drive. Driving is impossible. These vast company cars remain mysterious. Above all this, the sky, serene, indifferent. You are irrelevant here, there’s no reason why you should be here rather than anywhere else. In the end, they let you go because you aren’t filling in enough of the spreadsheets.

Next week, where will you be? The same company? Another one? This is Bracknell, there are infinite number of companies, all interchangeable. You are perfectly interchangeable. There are always more of you, a great army of temporary workers. And really, you have little to offer. You wander through the corridors, from coffee machine to coffee machine. The absurdity of non-work. For what do you hope? To be noticed as a non-worker among the workers? To be told off? Sacked?

They will let you go, it’s clear enough. Today or tomorrow, or next week or the week after that. Meanwhile, office time, the great expanse of minutes and office life – you receive phonecalls all day asking for ‘Sinjun’. He’s not here, you say. There’s no one of that name here. You are sitting next to St. John, but you didn’t know how his name was pronounced.

Then, for dinner, you seek to let yourself out into the air. You think to yourself: I’d like some air. You push the doors and – alarms – the whole canteen turns to look. No matter. You are invisible, interchangeable. No one says a word. To be told off would mean you would be thought worthy of developing, educating. But you are not quite in their world, any of them. There are lots of you, like ghosts. You drift around the building and sometimes come into contact.

But you are less real than the real workers. Descartes was right: there are degrees of reality, and you, as a temp, are less real than the rest. Listen to them talk, the real workers; plans for the weekend, for Friday and Saturday nights. All of them, around you, are planning a trip out. They go off to the pub on the Friday, leaving you there to man the phones. Then the big boss comes across to address the workers, announcing the rise and fall in the share-price. It comes over the intercom: a rise. Everyone around you is happy. They’ve made a little more money. A rise …

I like it when the lads from the warehouse come up to complain about something or other. They are dressed in denim, they’re out of place. They’re more real than the office workers, and they know it. They get angry – they’re not being given enough time, they say. You have to treat them with respect; the office workers are worried. Great dramas ensue. Quarrels. Then they all calm down. Quarrel over.

One day you are promised money for some piecework and go unpaid. You tell the other temps. This is social activism. They don’t like the sound of it. You tell them your wage, they tell you theirs. They’re being paid less than you. So you stage a sit in. You are not going to leave, you and a co-worker, until you’ve been paid. The middle manager talks to us in his office. We threaten to take him to court. No dice. He’s stubborn, we’re up against it, we haven’t got a chance. We give up the sit in, leave the building. A warm afternoon … you find yourself back in the everyday, it’s over, back to the dole …

I am a bad machine, I say to myself. Whom have I failed? My temp controller, my coworkers at the companies at which I temp and above all, myself. Yes, I’ve failed myself. Conversation with temp controller: ‘I know I was wrong, I know I did badly’ – ‘What you did was extremely immature’. As I speak, I feel deep shame. My soul is ashamed and wants to extinguish itself. She’ll not use me again. I am at fault, I’m infinitely guilty.

I will be cast into the outer darkness, into the ring of broken temps who float, occasionally colliding with one another, like the asteroid belt. Now I will have to win her confidence again, my temp controller, I say to myself. I’ll have to begin with the most mundane jobs and work my way back up. One day in the warehouse in Farnborough? No problem. A half day in Basingstoke? Yes, of course. Anything, everything, for I’ve been a bad machine and deserve punishment.

Cycling into town (I do not drive; I have never driven even now, more than ten years later) it comes to be it is because I want to punish myself first of all. What is the reason for my little fit of madness? Why that small insanity of sending a soup stained spoon instead of a leaflet to the company client, and changing the name on the envelope from a he (Steven X) to a she (Stephanie X)? The answer comes to me: I did it because I want to be punished. I did it because my soul is too large and too hollow. I did it to expurgate my interiority, to destroy that echoing place inside me in which laughs (but it is not my laughter) at the madness of my job, all jobs and at the madness of capital.

I want to be punished. But the punishment will not be complete until interiority is turned inside out. Until what is hidden inside me emerges into the day and shrivels up in the sun. The Samurai take the sword and open their innards to the sun. Thus is shame extinguished. I imagine my temp controller reaching a hand into my chest and drawing my innards outside. My secret exposed, the even light of the day pouring through my insides, I know I will be fit for employment again.

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.