Invaders
You knew who they were because they had a funny mark on their neck, a hump under their shirt between their shoulder blades, or a twisted pinky. They always had glazed expressions and weren’t interested in sex or ice cream cones. Sometimes they were puppets of the ‘real’ masters from another planet, sometimes they were the invaders themselves, taking crypto-human form. Control was their principal objective, occasionally dinner, and reproduction a distant third.
Our invaders are more subtle now, and they’re not from Mars. They’re from the boardrooms and the men’s rooms of corporatedom. They take over our time, energy, dreams. They create unpaid labor, what Illich calls ‘shadow work’ – that which must exist in order to justify the perpetuation or expansion of other non-subsistence paid work, but for which there is no compensation or recognition: housework, student work, the work of getting to and from a job, shopping …
The job of a college teacher now encompasses outreach and recruitment, fund-raising, enrollment, counseling, registration, program development, monitoring and evaluation, investigation or adjudication of such matters as sexual harassment, training, and many other functions of administration – shadow work for which we are not paid. Meanwhile, the numbers and ranks of paid administrators supposedly qualified to carry out these functions grow apace. We note that when an activity such as “development” is professionalized, a high-paid position for it created and filled, the shadow work generated by it also increases. We are told that this unpaid additional labor meted out to us is our share in the participatory democracy we have demanded: you want to participate, here’s how.
The management ethos invades everywhere and everything. The leisure time (or professional) reading we used to do has been commandeered by “Re-Engineering the Corporation” and other such tomes. This genre of seemingly sincere, self-effacing critique of the business sector by ostensibly neutral/expert (rich, successful) managers of it or professional sociological, psychological or other researchers (flacks) for it has proliferated since the publication of The Peter Principle in the early ‘70s, as I recall, and MegaTrends ten years later. The differences between these books are interesting, particularly in view of what happened in the country during the intervening period. “Peter” was searing and revealing. “Mega” was self-congratulatory and folksy. All of the management self-help books that have come out since “Mega” appear to fall either into the latter category or into a new one that has fallen through the looking glass, where technocratic approaches cut off all our heads.
Such books seem to serve two main functions: (a) by talking about how American corporations are decentralizing and democratizing, they deflect people’s attention from the lay-offs, moves of corporate headquarters and facilities out of cities or out of the country, upscaling of upper echelon managers, downscaling of mid- and lower-level managers and workers, lousiness or deadliness of their products, sleaziness of their advertising, their lobby’s ownership of American government and media, interpenetration with other people’s governments and institutions, oppressive and unhealthful working conditions for employees, alienation from community life, polluting practices, contribution of their business to global warming, etc., and (b) by inundating us with this obfuscating literature, they persuade us of a central powerful image: that all activity is essentially managerial in nature, and that there are no other realities.
The shadow management we are all now doing demands of us that we develop skills in addition to those we normally pursue in our pedagogy and professional fields: statistical analysis and other quantitative methods, report writing, organizational approaches such as TQM, the use of management communications technology, MBO techniques, the language of corporatese itself. The lexicon of educational administration is drawn from the latter, so to function in an educational environment today means to understand and use it or be left behind. For some of us in the sciences, social sciences, and technical areas, the acquisition of these skills may be directly or peripherally useful. To learn new things is usually beneficial in and of itself. This is not especially invasive. However, to learn image and technique without substance is insidious. Others of us may find these skills irrelevant to their professional activities or in conflict with the kind of preparation they received in their disciplines. Some of us may be temperamentally, philosophically, or intellectually unable to acquire management skills like statistics or small-group training praxis, and may find themselves disadvantaged in their careers as a result. For all of us, this additional assignment constitutes an invasion of our time and a usurpation of our creativity and liberty.
This is a special invasion, too, because no one notices it. Like the shadow work that is its vehicle, it has cloaked itself in the rhetoric of sanity. Who could question the necessity of doing good business? Who can take seriously the complaints of someone who has gotten what they wanted: the management of the university? This work of management is the form of the power you wanted, so if you don’t want to do it, you must be insane, stupid, lazy, or otherwise undeserving of it. And while you’re doing it, don’t look too closely at the emperor.
….
“Look! Over there! Someone who doesn’t look like you is trying to get an uneven break!”
While you’re looking, they take your purse.
Would you know if you’d been replaced by a pod? ‘You’ wake up one morning. The alarm has the same tympanum-shattering grate it’s always had, but ‘you’re’ not irritated. Would ‘you’ notice? The husk of your old consciousness has been swept away in the night because you fell asleep. The physical self seems the same, maybe better, without the awareness of the annoyances of age or fat or imperfections, but ‘you’ wouldn’t know even that. Does the android really bemoan its inhumanity? Would you miss dreaming if you didn’t know you’d ever had the experience?
The invaders keep the humans busy, so busy they’re tired all the time and too frustrated to think. Instead of doing, they plan. Instead of being there, they have to get there. Instead of using, they buy. They’re in constant motion. They only have enough spare time to complain about their sense of being cheated, which causes them to become tiresome and repellent to one another. Who enjoys the sound of whining? They don’t have enough spare time to get to know the others, to explore deeply that sense of presence they all share, let alone find out what they’re being cheated of and how. Work in the ancient way of knowledge – travail, devotion, significant effort, devolves to the sham of scheduling a hundred conflicting demands. The humans are too tired to know what is happening to them.
And they have come to think it is normal to live that way. They never wonder why they are writing more reports, going to more meetings, traveling more, reducing more matters to numbers, talking more, spending more, filling more positions, spending more time with non-human technology, organizing more committees, making more appointments, planning, scheduling, managing more. Robots never question. They may notice that they teach less, learn less, listen less. They may have an indistinct sense of having accomplished nothing, built nothing, participated in nothing greater than themselves. But they don’t notice that bureaucratic imperatives have replaced pedagogical ones, compulsory consumption has taken the thrill away from making or chasing down our livelihood. We think this is normal. So we don’t worry about what we’ve lost. We are prosthetic humans. We function in human-like ways. We don’t realize that our life has lost its meaningfulness and that we are no longer organic parts of an integrated whole.
Or we may be convinced we are happy, if we chance to look up from our commuting and consumption and meetings to remember the horrors of hunger and war and disease elsewhere. We thank god we are merely busy to death.
The invaders need no invitation. Our permission for the invasion to take place was not solicited. As the case of the grenouille so clearly illustrates, whatever puny discomfort we may feel along the way to the dinner plate is more easily attributed to the kicks and croaks of the other frogs in the pot than to any mysterious agent turning up the heat underneath it. People accept the unacceptable all the time without realizing it. Their mystified acceptance may indeed be mistaken for approval or merely stupidity by the administrators of the unacceptable. Are they still to blame for their misery? Did they ask for the heat to be turned up?
It is not always easy to know when to rebel. Accounts of the Holocaust are full of appalling agreements. Alright, I will tell you where they are hiding. Yes, I will leave my apartment. Okay, I will sew this symbol on my children’s garments. Yes, I will enter this railroad car … I agree to insanity. At every step, it seems as if the alternative – certain death – cannot be preferable to going on with the outrage. If the voices of the objectors are quickly drowned out by their own final cries, silence seems sane. But the stillness of the living matches that of the dead, and it doesn’t guarantee their survival.
“’Twas ever thus.” My mother said this to me in riposte to a complaint I made that the Abramoff scandal reporters were covering the wrong story. The press was interested in the influence-peddling angle, the corruption of politicians and their families. I thought Abramoff’s behavior merely typical of how business is done among the wealthy class … they protect one another’s interests, money and position in ways unavailable to the rest of us who don’t own things or manipulate electronic capital for a job. I thought that was the story: that the reprehensible and illegal backscratching habits of the rich are never sanctioned and rarely noticed until one of them becomes a politician and gets ‘caught’ with another rich man’s lice in his mouth. The vast majority of us simply cannot do wrong in these ways. Our ways of doing wrong – less glamorous, perhaps, savages that we are – send us straight or gaily to the slammer. Our little money and less power give us no protection. Our fleas stick to us. My mother thinks this is normal.
It can be heard on the ‘news’ that “some conflict is inevitable in society,” and “there will always be a certain percentage of poor,” and other such nostrums. If something is inevitable, then it must be accepted. If something has always been with us, then it must be okay, possibly even good. To suggest that society need be neither stratified nor violent is to be instantly labeled a fool. The Lugbara are suspicious of competitiveness and luxury. A man who gets ahead of his neighbors is liable to be accused of witchcraft. The Lugbara avoid conspicuous prosperity. Whenever I remark that I think it would be nice if we all had the same decent standard of living, I get stared at or called names. Here, I am the witch to have such thoughts.
We embrace all sorts of savagery. The story of one day is centered on which source of carnage is in the lead – guns, autos, cancer, AIDS, spousal abuse, past wars … The next day’s pits oppressed groups against each other, as if there were a measure for oppression … this is enough, this is not enough, this is really too much … measuring each to an American dream that makes a Procrustean fit for everyone it finally accommodates, including the oppressors, a dream of the loneliness of greed, the heartlessness of success, the emptiness of the conquest of nature by cement. Inundated by brutal messages, we are brutalized and we brutalize each other and we may never know it.
College teachers are often comfortable with absurdity. Their sense of the absurd enables them to contemplate the timeless loveliness of an aria while drinking radioactive water. They can participate in a system they know to be vicious without believing themselves to be instruments of its ferocity. I used to think it astonishing and risible in the extreme that the neo-conservative intelligentsia, the D’Souzas and Horowitzes, were afraid of a flock (or is it a gaggle?) of English professors. Not only Harvard but Dallas Baptist is on Richard Bernstein’s list of enemies, not only the NEA but the National Council of Churches. It is not surprising that the legislatures and citizenry have taken up their attack, though in different terms. Their concern is not deconstruction or multi-culturalism, but how we spend our time, or, rather, their money.
They’re right. We are threatening. College teachers are culturally defiant. They do something hard for almost nothing. Other members of their social class, people in general who have wits, education, privilege, are all trying to get ahead by owning things or entering into what Lewis Lapham calls “the miracle of finance capitalism”. Even if they’re doing something inane or incomprehensible like the stock market, something patently dangerous like the firearms industry, something repellent like defending giant corporations when their products injure or kill consumers, or something useless and exploitive like cosmetic surgery, regular people can accept them because they’re doing it for money. Other occupational categories do not receive the same kind of scrutiny college teaching does. Has anyone checked to see how much time their pediatric orthodontist devotes to his practice lately? He (more rarely she) makes ten times what your anthropology professor makes, but no one finds it odd or objectionable to see him on the links at ten a.m. every Friday.
No wonder distance learning is invading everywhere. It maintains the ritual, the routine of education. This we must now acknowledge to be the only real thing, so far as the invaders are concerned, education does: screen persons and erect barriers; it preserves and expands stratification, which we have learned to love because it is impossible not to have it. So what if the dynamic interplay of a classroom of people is lost? So what if the feeling of being co-present at the creation of an idea or a relationship gives way to the familiar numbness of watching TV? So what if individuals of different backgrounds and characteristics don’t have to find ways to get along? These things are awarded no value in our culture. Who cares if the teachers and students are removed from each other and hence can develop no inter-personal connection? No one. As long as we focus on the technological means of communication and the administration of management activities, that is to say the form and the structure, we need not be concerned with either the content of the communication or the relationships of the communicators. We may even forget these exist, once our courses are in a can and we are managers of information technology occupying our proper places in the hierarchy.
Why don’t they like sex and ice cream? Eating ice cream, whether you are alone or with someone else, is the ultimate self-indulgence. You and your senses, blissful gluttony. You are fully alive in the moment. You are meditative. You are a child, a creature. There is no mold to worry about fitting. Time being is time wasting for the invaders, and time is money.
Ice cream isn’t interesting unless you happen to sell it. Then you can take the fat out or the sugar out or put chemicals in or plastic on to see if you can sell more of it. But it is hard to market the spirit of being in the present, so they don’t want to encourage it. Further, if you are fully aware of your living self full of feeling, you may notice that you have been deluded for most of your life. They don’t want that to happen.
Sex they must control at all costs. Sexual attraction brings people together across all boundaries – race, age, religion, those that separate men from men and women from women, class, caste, condition – and obliterates their isolation for a time of being a not-individual. Undivided consciousness threatens to undo the structure of division. And there’s no profit in it, apart from that ribbed, glow-in-the-dark, extra-large, purple Elmer Fudd condom you just bought.
A vast sameness yawns before us. Everything sold and bought, everything managed. Two kinds of people: the owners and the rest. No more different coinage; the Yap stone wheels, a currency too heavy to carry so it never changes hands, finally deserted for a handful of dollars. Only one pleasure, of having, buying, owning. The form and structure of modern civilization flattens culture everywhere, a steamroller disguised as a hamburger. The trade in souls remains brisk. We who thought of teaching as a relationship, as a being-in-the-moment of wonderment at words or tunes or events, have exchanged ours for strategic planning. The invaders have no souls to lose, and they don’t live – they manage by objective. The moot, the palaver, the rite, the dance, the love poem, the Tiv brass rods, all the meanings and connections now have come down to the bargaining table. We may yet have something to bargain for. Do we have anything to bargain with?
Dorothy Davis Wills