(Draft #2) Is there no alternative?

My 1L year has made evident the many ways in which we police ourselves and feed into the bureaucracy of late capitalism. Though we have witnessed many attempts at structural change, both within our school and in the world at large, our attempts at challenging the prevailing order have been narrow-minded and compatible with the existing system. We have allowed the Lacanian notion of the ‘big Other’ to guide our decision making; we feel that we are subordinate to an invisible force and act according to our idea of its demands, even if this is not rooted in anything material.

In 2008, Finnish performance artist Pilvi Takala went undercover and performed “The Trainee” at the international accounting firm Deloitte. Over the course of a month, Takala acted as an eccentric trainee who took long breaks throughout the day to do nothing-- whether aimlessly riding the elevator or sitting by herself in the cafeteria looking out the window. When questioned about her activities, Takala told the other employees that doing nothing helped her come up with creative ideas and that her strange breaks were in fact part of her process. Before long, Takalas co-workers started talking behind her back and sending alarmed emails to each other about the peculiarity of her behavior. Takala notes that aimlessly scrolling through the internet or social media elicited no such reaction; this was an unquestioned “norm.” Takala’s work highlights both the absurdity of our commitment to what is expected of us and the power of refusing to participate in this system. In her own words: “It is non-doing that lacks a place in the general order of things, and thus it is a threat to order.”

In many respects, the pandemic has allowed us to turn inward and participate in some forms of the ‘non-doing’ that Takala refers to. Yet this period can also be summed up by Adrian Tomine’s popular New Yorker cover art, “Love Life.” This illustration shows a woman on a Zoom date, elegantly dressed from the waist up with a martini glass in hand. Outside of her camera’s view, however, is total pandemonium. Garbage is strewn throughout her room, dishes pile up in the sink, Amazon boxes and pill bottles lay about, and the woman holds a smartphone under the desk, presumably dividing her attention between texting and her date. While this cover art was likely meant to be amusing and relatable, I found it highly depressing. Our culture seemingly values justice, equity, inclusion, positivity, and honesty. Yet in the midst of a pandemic, many of us have put all of our (very diminished) energy into broadcasting a certain image to the world or doing what we think we should be doing. There were many times throughout this year when I joined a wretched Zoom call or “virtual happy hour” rather than take care of my personal needs, just to feel that I am somehow involved in something.

Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? further sheds light onto this issue. Fisher notes that capitalism has bred an obsession with PR; “mission statements,” “aims and objectives,” and “targets” have become ends within themselves (Fisher 44). Traditional top-down bureaucracy has morphed into more widespread, surveillance oriented systems of administration that rely on self-reporting. We can see this shift very clearly in schools, where teachers are told to perform frequent self-evaluations and report back on their students. In discussing the new forms of “rigidity,” Fisher points to Kafka’s distinction between ostensible acquittal and indefinite postponement: with indefinite postponement, one is seemingly free but ridden with anxiety that their case will never close (Fisher 51). While we were all technically free to ignore the Zoom evites and spend the year in a thoughtful state of observation, most of us (myself included) were too busy upholding our personal brand out of fear of what would happen if we let it all go.

We cannot expect to enact meaningful change when we have so deeply internalized the big Other and continue to operate in a state of anxiety. Though there is no one solution to this issue, it seems that stepping back to move forward is a good place to start. ‘Non-doing’ can make clear the absurdity of what we call the norm, and bring attention to the things that we truly need to change.