Workplaces, Workspaces

Increasingly all such places look like a laptop – in aluminium or plastic, but it contains the brushes, easels, film cutting tables, phones, whole libraries of folders of accounts, typewriters, plans, schedules, control panels and machines creating objects – all in a tiny room turned inside out, accessible not through a door but window with a screen, to which commands are given through a keyboard and a mouse. We have adapted our bodies to the demands of compact workplaces, often with pain and reservation towards the changes brought by new requirements that UX designers bring on us.

Little divides our worktime from our play. Both happen under the constant blue glow of a screen. We do accounting, planning, meeting, writing there but our streams, games, friends and conversations, orders of food and tables, chairs, forks, plates, books – our content is all there, at the tip of a finger on the touchscreen.

Not long ago a lifestyle of withdrawal from physical presence in conversations, of reliance on digital services outsourcing and suggesting to us all our needs was in the realm of marginal existence. Hikikomori is a term coined in 1998 by a Japanese psychologist Saitō Tamaki to denote a severe form of social withdrawal in a society where economic performance is social participation. Observed from 1970s onward and seen as a culturally specific psychological disorder that sees young men – not in education, not in employment, not in training lead their lives in one room, often dependent on their families. Seen as a marginal social class embodying the macho nihilism in USA, an incel follows the same path but politically radicalized in a self-escalating whirlpool of ironic detachment that a cis white male can afford again because of dependency on existing privilege. Their workplace, station of their thought is somewhere in between a basement in the parents’ house and message boards on-line, arguably an extension of “man cave” – a husband’s garage or a cabinet where thinking is unbridled by familial duties and nerdy hobbies are pursued. Such privacy has a long and gendered history, one that has defined and sadly continues to determine who has and hasn’t an opportunity for unbound thought.

The tech became significantly cheaper, its luxuries of never-ending content stream not anymore restricted to an upper class. A workplace, or at least all leisure can fit into a pocket and flicked through on a smartphone touchscreen. The social spaces are now open for participation and anyone can partake in a race to produce content. Various state and non-state actors can employ the same tools, whether to employ information as a weapon or to broadcast atrocities as propaganda – or as entertainment. The line between the two is blurred. Although what is said on-line is now likely to be noted, this does not stop the flood of political and corporate performances within a virtual space. A professional account – managed by a social media agent, does not need positive attention only, while scandals travel further and with quicker pace. Attention can also be converted, mined, sold as data. But all the same, this logic of micro-celebrity potential is something anyone can now aspire to spurned along by emotional feedback of satisfaction or isolation on which social media feeds. In fact, if you do not aspire to popularity, however local or niche, what then are you doing on the social network at all?

A job implies a workplace which defines the operations workers undertake. The workplace is not merely a desk, not only a desktop or a conveyor belt, a driver’s seat, a mine, a station, a piece of software, a cashier’s chair. Workplace is a physical, digital, and social receptacle for a workspace. The latter is defined tasks and tools, by rules for what can and cannot be done, for interactions that are possible and limitations that discipline, direct the labor. In other words, a workspace is the manifold of dimensions of possible actions one can take within it. It is both the energy expended and its result in transferable form that is labor. Workspace defines freedom, but this freedom is corralled from the workers. Their efforts or results make the cogs within organizations turn; their energy is what powers the whole mechanism. The labor, its abstractions, content on-line are both produced, taken, consumed and power whole institutions. What freedoms then, are left to us?

There is a freedom to decorate our tools, to have a fetish for the stationary, for interfaces of our software, for quiet poetry of our dress, or to define our living spaces – within the limits afforded by our budgets of course, and these within the limits of what we can imagine. Often, these budgets can afford only the minimum means to continue the provision of labor in exchange for said means. Our workplaces can be tweaked, relationships within them carefully redefined along the lines of hierarchy and interpersonal office politics. We can sidestep to a different job, position, to start anew but still a largely predefined program. In fact, what is a profession if not a lifelong program for behavior in a workspace? The skills acquired may not be trivial to learn, in fact could take a whole life to perfect, but each one can still be defined as an algorithm however complex and branching. And learning a profession or landing into one is a matter of accepting that program – to accept that you perform it for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and will do your best to improve it, to add to it. In fact, for those who find a way to slack off on a job, the way to hold on is to perform the bare minimum within that program, while not straying too far outside the boundaries described by the rules of workspace and certainly without leaving the workplace. And so, surrounded by the facts we acquiesce that this is simply naturally how things work.
The program can be complex. Often requiring division of mental labor, sometimes to use other people as part of computation – secretaries, supervisors, like computers dealing with one particular set of tasks becoming a function within a larger program. Other times it means merging with the workplace by becoming part of its machinery: from learning simple mechanical operations on a conveyor belt assembly line to rehearsing an almost automatic level of performance of complex patterns of tasks with a particular tool, perhaps even a few operations at a time like a fighter pilot would. But even a fighter pilot is a part of some larger plan, an institution within which she performs a role and certainly don’t make the rules within her workspace. That freedom not to think the way your job structures you is rare.

The secret place then, the island to which artists go to work, a place of freedom where they choose what they can do is more than a mere luxury of a cabinet. Room of one’s own is much more than a secretary desk under the lock and key or a large studio space rented solo. It is a time and place afforded both in social and financial terms to do the job by choice and more importantly to define the choice. An artist – is a person who can define their workspace, its rules – the boundaries, dimensions, and vectors of their freedom to act, to make, to produce, to think. But not all rules, at least within the technological paradigm of today. Even more importantly than laws of physics, some circumstances – financial, social, and conceptual dimensions of freedom – rules limiting what kind of art and practice can be achieved, but also narrowing down the abstract freedom to do anything at all to a more particular, more concrete set of choices. The choices are not open ended either if after all an artist cares to make any work at all. In fact, the concept of what makes an artwork and what is disqualified as none is most important, for work can also be found without producing it. It is that concept in correlation to which the choice and judgment are made what directs the plan according to which the whole practice is made, the rules by which a workspace of a studio runs and plans by which the tools are put to use. It can be also ready-made.

An atelier, a studio is far more than a physical space with well-oiled tools in drawers sliding smoothly into a shelf. It’s more than a set of mirrors with a rail. It’s even more than a technology which allows us to carry a whole office in a pocket. And certainly, it is more than a narrow wiggle room afforded by adopting the workspace rules of already existing platforms, jobs, roles, no matter their promise of social ascent and success inherent in following the given normative tropes. The personal workspace is a construction that may take decades to build and is expensive enough to maintain that it elides the compromise of being a hobby, because it takes a lot of mental space. A room of one’s own is a whole life changed bit by bit like Theseus’ ship in a workshop of one’s mind, until parts fit. And true freedom is to decide which ones do.