Abstract
Juxtaposing two books under review can produce mixed results. Sometimes it can highlight strengths and deficiencies of each or generate unexpected cross-fertilization of ideas and insights. Alternatively, it may lapse into an arid formula of spotting differences and similarities or lavishing excessive praise on one by setting the other as a straw man.
These two books that reached me almost simultaneously, however, offer great opportunities for discussing some social developments in late modernity that dramatically alter the nature of relations, identities and experiences in our times. There are considerable differences of style, tone and theorizing, but they both address the changing nature of capitalism, the commodification of ever wider swathes of social, personal and intimate life, and, maybe above all, the frenetic qualities of contemporary workplaces and the toll they exact on all of us.
Hochschild, described on the back cover as America’s ‘leading sociologist of daily life’, has written a probing and generous book, whose many chapters explore a single theme – the idea that, as a result of the demands of the workplace and the increasing participation of women in it, many aspects of contemporary private or family life are outsourced to strangers in market transactions. Activities and experiences that in the past were handled by an individual, his/her family and his/her close community are now marketized and commodified. Hochschild skilfully weaves into the chapters of her book the narrative of her elderly and much-loved aunt, an independent-minded and resourceful woman who suddenly finds herself in need of urgent care with no close-by relatives to provide it. The drama of Aunt Elizabeth pursues the author and her readers through the chapters of this book and finds a satisfactory conclusion at the end.
The main theme of the book, the idea that outsourcing is not a practice exclusively undertaken by multi-national corporations and governments but equally by families and individuals, is one that has been explored by numerous authors, including contributors to the excellent collection by Korczynski and Macdonald (2009). What, however, Hochschild does very effectively is to illustrate the argument with a wide range of very sharp and carefully-researched vignettes which demonstrate the pervasiveness and invasiveness of the outsourcing logic. Couples meet each other on the internet, often conducting conversations by proxy, with Cyrano-like alter-egos feeding them lines. They subcontract the incubation of their babies to ‘rented wombs’ in India and name their babies on the advice of specialist name-coaches. They offshore the raising of their children (attending their soccer games by proxy-‘parents’) and the running of their households (if they are rich enough) to a variety of domestic carers, while elderly parents are placed in the care of paid strangers or languish in ‘homes’. Every kind of emotional state, fantasy (sexual or otherwise) and experience can be found through some market transaction or other.
Hochschild’s vignettes are delivered mostly with compassion, even-handedness and insight. Where two parties are involved, she frequently presents the views of both sides, subcontractor and subcontracted, off-shoring and off-shored, carer and cared for. Some of them are quite entertaining, as when an imaginative dad decides to organize his 5-year-old daughter’s birthday party only to discover that his attempts to be funny and entertaining are ridiculed by the 5-year-olds, who demand a professional party-organizer to take command of the proceedings. Others are poignant, especially those addressing the sacrifices, physical and emotional, made by those under-rewarded groups in the US and abroad to whom many of the services are outsourced.
The tone of Hochschild’s book veers from compassionate to elegiac, occasionally drifting towards nostalgia for a time when people relied on themselves, their families and their neighbours to meet the demands and challenges of life. Today, she observes that there are armies of therapists, coaches, carers, household and love consultants to whom Americans turn to get support and sustenance. Nor should it be thought that Americans reluctantly adopt this outsourcing mindset. Many of them do so enthusiastically, like ‘April’, who outsources everything except her ‘core competences’ as a tax consultant: I apply to myself the same logic my company applies to itself. … What am I good at? I ask myself. Tax strategy. So I want to outsource everything except what I am best at. I’m always asking myself: What can I outsource? Hopefully not me! (p. 106)
The language of such aggressive outsourcing marks a more general adoption of a business vocabulary in personal and family life. Thus April had produced a 15-page PowerPoint entitled ‘Family Mission Statement’, whose first page was a list of four ‘Family Goals’. In this way, individuals are cast as the CEOs of their personal life, buying whatever resources are required to meet their goals and needs.
Such individuals, of course, come from a relatively narrow range of Americans, quite affluent, middle-class and middle-aged. There is another type of person who populates Hochschild’s book, the carers. These come mostly from racialized, underprivileged, often immigrant and often undocumented, frequently exploited and under-appreciated groups. Hochschild offers several touching portraits of carers, some of which border on the saintly: Barbara [an exceptionally sensitive and skilful carer] offered care to people at moments of great vulnerability, it occurred to me, in a society that separates young from old, beams commercial headlights to fourteen-year-olds, casting the old in shadows, and requires money most don’t have to afford the extra services of Barbara. The need is great and Barbara’s gift is rare. (p. 210)
This passage demonstrates Hochschild’s wonderful writing style, her observational qualities and the gentle critical agenda that she pursues. While clear that ‘the unforgiving demands of the American workplace impose penalties that reach far beyond the American home’, Hochschild is not prepared to chastise or rebuke. This is maybe the price that Hochschild’s book pays in trying not to frighten or antagonize the ‘non-academic’ reader. Hers is the book of a public intellectual reaching out to the masses in what looks very close to high quality journalism, of the sort offered by Barbara Ehrenreich (2005), Louis Uchitelle (2006) or Madeleine Bunting (2004), whose sharp critical qualities, however, this book lacks. Hochschild holds a mirror to America (mostly blue eyed, of which an uncanny number populate her book) which may not flatter it, but it certainly offers no deeper insights into its malaise, suffering and despair.
For a sociologist who made a ground-breaking contribution to the study of emotion, her book is curiously shallow in its discussion of emotional dynamics, most especially in engaging with the overpowering emotions unleashed by relations between carer and cared for (Gabriel, 2010). It is curious that for an author who has always chosen very catchy and appropriate titles for her books the current volume says rather little about ‘intimate life’ (the book’s subtitle) or what has become of it. Perhaps my biggest disappointment with this book concerns Hochschild’s reluctance to ask the question ‘Why?’ Why do people require a consultant to help them choose their child’s name? Why do 5-year-olds require a professional party organizer in order to have fun? Why do people so crave children that they go to enormous trouble and expense to get fertility treatments, only to abandon their offspring into the hands of strangers? Why do people in ‘high power jobs’ drive themselves remorselessly to the point where their work exacts huge emotional costs, maybe even, as the authors of the next book under consideration would argue, killing them?
Dead Man Working is an angry and polemical book which not only seeks to shake its readers but positively to scare them. Cederström and Fleming are in no doubt: contemporary capitalism is not merely dehumanizing or even alienating us – it is literally killing us. Where Hochschild observes loss or even tragedy, Cederström and Fleming observe exploitation, oppression and, above all, their internalization by individuals who turn into willing slaves (Bunting’s most appropriate expression) or, to adopt the book’s label, working dead.
While a much shorter book than Hochschild’s, Dead Man Working punches well above its size. Its core argument is that today’s work regimes are far more pervasive and invasive than those critiqued by authors from Marx to Marcuse. Today’s workers are generally workaholic zombies who have thoroughly internalized the ‘boss function’ and need no Foucauldian Panopticon to keep them disciplined. The authors’ guiding image supplied by Italian autonomist Marxist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi is that we are currently living in that indeterminate period before the tsunami strikes. Paralysed by the imminent catastrophe which we are unable to avert, we immerse ourselves ever more deeply into work, as if this can save us, when in fact it turns us into ‘living dead’.
There are many overlapping themes with Hochschild’s observations, but we encounter them here in far darker and more depressing hues. Aware that work is killing us, we subcontract many of the activities that would return us to life to others in order to dedicate more of ourselves to our work master.
What others have called 24 hours capitalism not only means that at any moment of the day (and night) someone, somewhere is working, but also that at any moment of the day everyone is always working. (p. 7)
All divisions between private and public life, work and non-work melt away as we increasingly breathe and sleep our work, even taking it to the shopping mall, the bedroom and, reluctantly, on vacation. Far from each one becoming a CEO of his or her own life, we all bring the factory home, or indeed we turn our home into a factory. We have thus become a new ‘bio-political proletariat’. Although the concept of bio-power had been explored in depth by Marcuse in his critical re-reading of Freud (long before Foucault and Žižek), Cederström and Fleming emphasize the total grip of work in a way that goes some way beyond the performance principle; it is the defining quality of corporate totalitarianism. In this way, Cederström and Fleming offer a powerful answer to the ‘why’ questions that Hochschild fails to ask. In the view of these authors, workaholism is driven by a volcanic death anxiety – the minute we stop working we are dead, forgotten and finished; we are only as good as our last output, our last market transaction, our last publication. Through work we strive to remind ourselves that we are still alive, even as it is killing us. We now live in a “‘worker society” … a hermeneutically [sic] sealed totality in which we are always at work’ (p. 17). The corporation is now everywhere, or in the words of Deleuze (1992) ‘the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas’ that permeates everything. The market logic now suffuses every aspect of life: everything becomes work, everything can be outsourced.
A particularly interesting feature of this book concerns its treatment of authenticity, an idea which along with many others like criticism, freedom and rebellion has been appropriated by the market. In what the authors refer to as the ‘industrialization of bohemia’, the market has commandeered many of the values of the rebellious ’60s, turning them into core features of a new managerial regime that celebrates authenticity as total immersion in work. Having fun, criticizing, parodying, self-expression, self-actualization and irony have all, as per Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), been reintroduced into work routines that infantilize employees and turn them into willing accomplices of management. In this way, Cederström and Fleming seem to counter Hochschild’s contention of the outsourcing of intimate life by proposing that, in these disenchanted and reactionary times in the West, ‘intimacy’ has been colonized by management.
Some of the characters that populate Cederström and Fleming’s book are very similar to those who feature in Hochschild’s. However, what Cederström and Fleming constantly emphasize is the death drive that lies behind ceaseless workaholism, outsourcing and marketization. This drive, Thanatos, first proposed by Freud (1920) and subsequently elaborated by Marcuse (1955), has now been commandeered by the corporation to propel people to seek a kind of ‘inorganic inertia’ in meaningless, compulsive repetition, in working like automata (Gabriel, 1983). But where Freud and Marcuse counterposed the majestic power of Eros as moderating the destructive and self-destructive force of Thanatos, Cederström and Fleming see no such struggle. In the struggle between capital and life, life has already been suffocated. We truly live under the hegemony of necrocapitalism (Banerjee, 2008; Mbembe, 2003).
Unlike Hochschild, who meets her characters and talks to them, Cederström and Fleming tend to encounter their protagonists in movies, documentaries or second-hand in research published by others. They are particularly interested in actual suicides of bankers and other professionals, but also of Chinese workers and managers of France Telecom, though they are somewhat undecided as to whether these suicides represent acts of boredom (as among 18th-century aristocracy) or acts of escape. ‘We have become our job, and therefore an obvious way to end the tyranny of work might be to end ourselves’ (p. 61).
The book’s unremitting gloom evokes the one-dimensional qualities of Marcuse’s (1964) One-Dimensional Man. But where Marcuse saw Eros as the great adversary of death-driven performance, the force that lights up creative tensions, passions and unions, Cederström and Fleming see love itself as commercialized, trivialized and turned into a principle of sexual domination and humiliation. Theirs is a sunless world, populated by people without love, spirit or hope and strangely without politics or any awareness of the great mass of their brethren living at less than $2 a day in not so distant parts of the planet.
The book’s last chapter ends in a suitably bleak but poetic way, like some apocalyptic film, when the tsunami finally arrives.
Night has fallen for the last time. You lie awake and listen to the dead silence surrounding you. That’s when you hear it. It is still far away, but you are not mistaken. You have waited long enough now. It is dark. You cannot even see your own body. It draws closer. Finally. No more early morning meetings. No more emails. The wave is here. It wipes you away. (p. 67)
But this is not the end of the book. In a curiously titled ‘Postscript: What does a little girl want?’, Cederström and Fleming seek to imagine a way out of the asphyxiating bunker that they have constructed. They are inspired by two acts of defiance in Hollywood films, The Shining and Fire Starter, both undertaken by single children, a little boy and a little girl, against the ‘logic of the market and the corporation’. While the little boy fights ‘by assimilating the power of the code’, the little girl does not welcome the enemy into ‘her own world’ but ‘withdraws from power’. How? By setting on fire anyone who ‘messes’ with her. I must confess that I was not at all convinced by this attempt to reinvent the eternal feminine as a Deleuzian resistance. But in seeking an alternative exit to death through outrageous imagination, the book’s conclusion may shake many readers out of complacency and raise very uncomfortable questions. Is much academic work in the social sciences nothing but light-hearted fiddling while the tsunami approaches?