Course Post 2: Accelerationism in the Work Place
Milton Waddams in a comedic scene of Office Space
In 1999, 20th Century Fox released the film Office Space as a parody to the soul-sucking jobs of corporate America that have caused wide rates of burnouts among cubicle-trapped subjects. The plot features Peter Gibbons is a jaded computer-programmer and his two colleagues Samir Nagheenanajar and Milton Waddams. The three are constantly micro-managed and under the hands of the company, Initech’s, loathsome Bill Lumbergh, a representation of the labor power relations that have turned the three employees into what Michel Foucault calls “docile bodies” and what Martin Heidegger coined as “available equipment.” When two corporate consultants are invited to begin the downsizing of Initech, they actually are impressed by Peter’s intellectual insights and promote him, despite Lumbergh’s vocal resistance. However, Samir and Milton are fired. Angered by the “master’s tools” to dispose of bodies as they please, Peter, Michael, and Samir are fueled by revenge and hack Initech's accounting infrastructure with a computer virus that converts fractions of pennies into a bank account. This virus rapidly begins to coalesce into a substantially large sum of money of which the three disenfranchised employees are basically stealing from Initech.
Office Space is a cogent example of Steven Shaviro’s concept of Accelerationism, which states that “in political, aesthetical and philosophical ters . . .the only way out of capitalism is to the way through” (2). Shaviro believes that “[i]n order to overcome globalized neoliberal capitalism, we need to drain it to the dregs, push it to its most extreme point, follow it into its furthest and strangest consequences” (emphasis mine, 2). Therefore, “[t]he hope driving accelerationism is that . . . we will be able to exhaust it and thereby open access to something beyond it” (emphasis mine, 3). This something is much like the proletariat revolution Marx had always hoped for, where the poor are taking back from the rich. In Office Space these three docile bodies are accelerationists. Borrowing Audre Lorde’s famous phrase, they have actually used the master’s tools to tear down the master’s house, quite literally as we see at the end of the film when Milton burns down Initech’s offices in order to destroy evidence of Peter’s money-stealing virus. In fact, we can consider these three men as Creative Destructionist Marxist that Lee Konstantinou speaks of in his Pop Apocalypse, a radical group of Marxist-Leninist thought that believes “there’s money to be made off the destruction of the world” (1). In Hegel’s words, capitalism negates the being of workers by expropriating their labor, but “ironically creates the very conditions for, an even necessitates, its own supersession” (5). As Shaviro states, “[w]e cannot wait for capitalism to transform on its own” and Peter, Samir and Milton display this thought throughout the entire film by revolting against Initech, perfectly captured when the three men steal a dysfunctional printer out to a field and beat it to pieces with brute anger. Although this is one minor instance of going beyond capitalism, it does show some type of agency a la Fight Club.
Docile bodies standing up against the real conditions of their existence
In short, lets stick it to the Man!
