Hello, from the American Midwest.
Ok. Here is the deal. I’ve got a massive amount of stuff to do, and I’m ridiculously short on time to get it all accomplished in. One of the things I need to do is finish something for publication (getting published is something I need to do to keep my job as a professor, so this is somewhat important). The writing I’m working on has been moving along slowly but surely, and now it needs to move along a lot faster and surly [EN1].
One of the things that makes this difficult is that I’ve got a lot of writing that is coming in from students, and I need to give that a lot of my time and energy. Along with seeing to all this writing, I’ve got several podcasts I’d like to get edited and released sometime soonish, and I’ve got a few events I plan to attend.
The point: Writing CP takes time, and right now, I need more time than I have. Be that as it may, I enjoy the weekly discipline of writing something and sharing it every week. So, rather than take a break, I've decided that the next several weeks, the format is going to be rougher than it has been over the past several editions.
(Who knows, maybe this rough format will end up being more liked than my typically longer-form writing you usually see here.)
Having said all of that:
Complex Praxis is an email newsletter I write on a (mostly) weekly basis. A version of CP does live on the web in a blogish sort of format, but the best way to consume it is to get it sent to your inbox every week. You can use the button below to get CP in its (proper?) email format.
The “Plan” for this edition of CP:
One of the things I’ve been doing is participating in an informal reading and discussion group. This month we read (or in my case re-read) the Mark Fisher book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative. As I was re-reading, I was taking notes of things I wanted to bring up when the group meets to discuss the text.
This edition of CP is me taking some of my notes and sharing them with you all.
These notes are… well… notes. They are raw. They lack refinement.
Ready? Cool.
ON BUREAUCRACY:
Neoliberal late capitalism says it wants to do away with the inefficient bureaucracy of government programs/agencies.
Neoliberalism did indeed demolish many (most?) government programs /agencies. However, crippling or getting rid of these government programs did not do away with the bureaucracy!
What it did do was replace government bureaucracy with corporate bureaucracy.
Case in point: Is talking to Comcast any more difficult than talking to the DMV? I’d say no. Here is an example of someone trying to cancel their Comcast service in 2015, which is a (cherry-picked) example of the Comcast version of corporate bureaucracy.
Important: This is not to say that government bureaucracy did not or does not exist; it most certainly does. The point I want to make is that large corporations also have infuriating administrative-bureaucracies.
ON CALL CENTERS:
Fisher comments on the work that call center works have to do, which is being tasked with “solving” problems people call in with even though they usually don’t have the power to do anything.
Example: A person sees a charge on a hospital bill, and they think it should not be there. The person calls the 1-800 number and explains what’s going on. The agent says they see what’s, but they can’t fix it. Maybe they transfer you to a different department, but that ends up being the wrong department, and you get transferred back to the first agent, who transfers you to a different agent, but then the call drops. The person with the bill calls again. More run around. Perhaps eventually someone says they will take care of it, but then a month later the bill shows up with the same charge again.
In these instances, it is not that the agent does not want to help. They probably do want to help, but they lack the power to change the bill. The only power they have is to transfer the caller to another person who also lacks the capability. So on and so forth.
Fisher says:
The call center experience distills the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since - as is very quickly clear to the caller -there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could.
To my way of thinking, this is very similar to what mental health workers who work big institutions (hospitals, state agencies, etc.) experience. Both the call center worker and mental health workers are working within the logic of neoliberal capitalism; both have the same sort of impotence when it comes to being able to do anything that might be helpful to the people who come to them seeking help.
I also know of lots of people who go into a big institution, and therefore the institution's structural bureaucracy, with the intention of improving it, with the idea of making this insane place into a sane one. But contained within the structural/material conditions of the neoliberal "call centerish" structure make us impotent. We enter the structure with youthful vitality and desire to change it. Still, very quickly, the madness of the structure embeds itself in our subjective experience; it reminds us that we have no authority, that we lack any sufficient power to effect change. After being exposed to this structure for long enough (which is not long at all), we become an extension/agent of the structure. On some level, we know this is happening, and that (unconscious?) knowledge makes us sick, anxious, depressed...
There is a demand: Hold yourself accountable!
The question is to what?
There is a demand: Hold the corporate institutions responsible!
The question is, how?
Wrap:
Ok, that’s all I have time for today.
So. What did you think of this one? Let me know.
Now, I return to work. See you next week.
Endnotes:
EN1 — The editor of the book I’m writing a chapter for subscribes to this newsletter, at least I think she does. If you’re reading this editor, please know my word count is increasing by the day. I still plan to have something for you by 12/1, but I may need a little more time to get you what I believe is a 100% finished draft.