Cage, Machine, and Whip: Alienation in Performance Society

Abstract

The chapter revisits discussions of alienation to make sense of experiences of suffering at work. Drawing on recent debates in critical theory, I argue that the concept of alienation is important as it allows us to approach these experiences as structural and systemic problems engendered by the capitalist social formation. The concept of alienation helps to politicize suffering by translating it from a private trouble into a public issue (Mills, 2000). It also illuminates the psychic life of capitalism, or how capitalism plays out and comes to be lived “on the skin.” The chapter shows that while the post-Fordist work ethic interpellates workers to understand work as a source of identity, self-realization, pleasure, and creativity, these very meanings are repeatedly denied or instrumentally hijacked for the purpose of increasing productivity and efficiency in the everyday realities of work. This generates deeply embodied, and affective modalities of alienation, manifested in exhaustion, frustration, burnout, and depression. The chapter traces these modalities of alienation, and how they are lived out, contested, and made sense of in therapeutic engagements. It shows that therapeutic discourses and practices not only serve to harness subjectivity more thoroughly for the production of value, but also provide tools to critique and disengage from the post-Fordist work ethic. The chapter concludes by suggesting that therapeutic engagements open up space to envisage and enact forms of life and subjectivities not entirely subsumed by the capitalist logic.