Few comedies depict the banal, Kafkaesque day-to-day of working life in addition to Mike Choose’s 1999 movie Workplace Area. When educating Marx on the idea of alienation, both in a political philosophy or ethics course, Workplace Area’s bureaucratic and boring depiction of superior capitalist working life is a superb compendium for classroom dialogue.
Having learn for sophistication choices from Marx’s Financial and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, I start by asking college students to debate, in small teams, concerning the worst job that they’ve had: What had been the hours? What made it dangerous? How lengthy did you’re employed on the job? What was your relationship together with your boss?
If college students haven’t had a nasty job (and these college students are often uncommon), I ask them to reply the identical questions, however with respect to the perfect job that they’ve had.
If college students have by no means labored, I ask them to explain their dream job and the situations of such a job, after which describe what sorts of situations must come up to make them stop their dream job. In doing so, this supplies college students an opportunity to contextualize their background experiences, perceive the lives of their fellow college students, and study the number of working experiences and environments that college students have been uncovered to.
After a report again to the category about their group findings, I’ve college students return to their teams to look at and critically analyze two brief sections from “Estranged Labor” from Marx’s Financial and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, whereby he describes 4 dimensions of alienation among the many working class: alienation from (1) the product of 1’s labor, (2) the labor course of, (3) one’s species-being, and (4) different people.
After speaking about Marx’s dimensions of alienation their teams and the category as an entire, we then flip to a sequence of brief clips from Workplace Area.
On this clip, the protagonist of the movie, Peter Gibbons, a programmer at a agency referred to as Initech, is approached by one in all his many bosses, Invoice Lumbergh. Peter is informed that he has did not put a brand new cowl sheet on the latest spherical of TPS experiences (take a look at process specification). After a trite and irritating “dialog” together with his boss, Peter then turns to his fellow co-worker, Milton, whose music is stopping him from getting work completed. After some push again, Peter units again to work when he’s approached by one other one in all his bosses who asks if he has acquired the memo about placing new cowl sheets on the TPS experiences.
The irritating triviality of his bosses request highlights Peter’s alienation at work – he lacks significant management over his personal working atmosphere, the place he’s chastised for inconsequential errors.
College students are then proven a second clip the place Peter, having deserted any pretense of take care of his job, attends a gathering with two males who’re tasked with downsizing the corporate.
On this scene, Peter brazenly describes his dissatisfaction together with his work, his lack of take care of the work he does, and his full alienation from his working life. He additionally involves a key Marxian perception, that if he works tougher to provide extra financial worth for Initech, he doesn’t see any of that financial worth for himself.
After watching every of the clips, college students are requested to clarify, apply, and unpack every of Marx’s 4 dimensions of alienation in relation to the scenes from Workplace Area.
They attempt to discover examples of every of the 4 dimensions of alienation current within the above clips.
On this dialogue, it’s useful for college students to contemplate each the psychological and structural points of Peter’s alienation. What do the day after day situations of working life imply for the way these characters perceive themselves and their objective? What are among the structural causes as to why these characters would possibly really feel this fashion? What alternate options do they realistically have? What could possibly be completed to ameliorate their sense of alienation?
Lastly, I finish this dialogue with a broader dialogue of the distinction between work and play (or leisure). Teams of scholars are tasked with arising with a professionals and cons lists of each work and play. Out of this, college students are then requested to explain a “excellent” work-life stability for themselves, adopted by evaluating their solutions to their fellow group mates. I then have teams work collectively to create a listing of situations that may be wanted at work to break down the excellence between work and play, i.e., what would work have to appear to be for it to really feel like play? These conversations are helpful for quite a lot of pedagogical causes associated to the course content material, however they’re equally as vital for serving to college students contemplate their profession personal paths. Scholar are capable of conceptualize a working life that’s inherently helpful fairly than one that’s rife with alienation as in Workplace Area.
And at last, we talk about as a category whether or not or not work should really feel like play, if the excellence could be collapsed in any respect, or, even when we might collapse the excellence, whether it is higher for us to maintain these two worlds separate – work as work, and play as play.
These clips may be utilized in quite a lot of different contexts, together with as an addition to Camus’ The Fantasy of Fantasy of Sisyphus and his exploration of the absurd:
It occurs that the stage units collapse. Rising, street-car, 4 hours within the workplace or the manufacturing facility, meal, street-car, 4 hours of labor, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday in line with the identical rhythm—this path is definitely adopted more often than not. However in the future the “why” arises and the whole lot begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. “Begins”—that is vital. Weariness comes on the finish of the acts of a mechanical life, however on the similar time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it’s the definitive awakening (2018 [1942], 12).
Camus’ notion of the absurd as feeling the “stage units collapse” is just like the conclusion that Peter has within the clip the place he meets the downsizers. One’s working life turns into acutely absurd as soon as one begins to take care of questions of that means, objective, and demise. Work from Camus or Kafka can be a welcome complement to a course, and even class intervals, on work, alienation, that means, and the nice life.
The Teaching and Learning Video Series is designed to share pedagogical approaches to utilizing humorous video clips for educating philosophy. Humor, when used appropriately, has empirically been proven to correlate with larger retention charges. In case you are excited about contributing to this sequence, please electronic mail the Sequence Editor, William A. B. Parkhurst, at parkhurw@gvsu.edu
Alec Stubbs
Alec Stubbs is a postdoctoral fellow within the Division of Philosophy on the College of Massachusetts Boston & The Institute for Ethics and Rising Applied sciences (IEET). His work focuses on financial democracy, post-capitalist alternate options, rising applied sciences, in addition to prefigurative social change and its relation to that means, pleasure, hope, and absurdity.
