|
||
The spectacle is a museum of images, a showroom of stick figures. It counts on us to identify with our wax-museum likenesses, cast behind the glass of the commodity fetish. The refusal of inauthenticity triggers explosions of popular anger from the conductors of the spectacle of alienation
We are as old as what we buy. We are weak, we must grow old, we must die. Our attachment to objects, things, is the surest road to reified existence and the kind of death which comes before the end of life
Science provides a rationale for the police. It teaches how much someone can be tortured without dying, and above all to what degree someone may be turned into a dutiful self-torturer
The carrot of happier tommorrows is at the root of the principle of productivity. The dictator of productive work weakened, castrated, and stupified everyone collectively, making them receptive to the most feeble, senile ideologies in the history of falsehood, then returned to his office to play consecutive games of computer solitare
The actor supposed to play a condemned man in a realist play is at perfect liberty to remain himself. The role of the waiter is played by John Heck, whose performance relies upon the paradox of fine acting
He would work in a perpetual state of alarm with a furrowed brow for the entirety of the day gasping for breath in a smoke-filled room of restaurant hell to fall into bed at night like a man with an arrow in his back, asleep before he hit the pillow
Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival: from now on we want to live, not just to survive
The harder we try to find salvation in appearances, the more vigorously it is borne in upon us by the ephemeral and inconsistent nature of the spectacle that we live like dogs and die like bundles of hay
|
|
IMAGINE A SMALL CAFE in a French provincial town. The large doors onto the street open wide in the summer evenings . . . old wooden blackboards from concentration camps with the menus written in chalk . . . the waiters, humiliated in black vests with white aprons, carrying plates of food, are wax figures behind the glass of commodity fetish . . . smoke, noise, music and people coming and going . . . restaurant reviewers with sharp pencils, writing in first-person . . . the patron looking unshaven and occasionally helping to clear an ashtray . . . imagine all these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but its final saturation with absence: this is what lends a dangerous charm to dreams of apocalypses, kitchen fires, gigantic destructions, gun-play in dining rooms, complete annihilations, cruel, clean and total deaths. Imagine a Ukrainian woman working in the kitchen non-stop 15 hours daily for a dollar an hour to send to her family in Kiev where unemployment is out of control. Imagine that one of the managers would tell her he doesn't want to see her drinking coffee because it's too expensive. Rather, to save on food costs, that she should prepare meat from the trash bin for staff meals. The manager, who moved to Prague from Paris one year before without previous restaurant experience asked: “Anya, why has this meat been thrown away? It looks okay to me. Wash it off and use it for the staff meals.” Imagine that. In Sergei eisenstein's film, Battleship Potemkin, the sailors' revolt started with a refusal to be fed maggot-infested meat. At Chez Marcel, the knowledge of the hygienic indiscretion was passed with a quiet outrage to be added to the inventory of restaurant hell. Imagine the hands of Anya, the slaving woman, a captive by economic conditions. Imagine how the wages of the entire staff could equal 40% of the wage of a manager who sleeps late and enjoys the diversion of games on the office computer. Chez Marcel has all this and more. overworkedredblisteredfingerswetfromalldaysoaking cleaningdishesfloorstoiletswindowssaladmaking potatopeelingpommefritesfryingsmilingallthewhile
AS JOHN HECK, waiter, says, the kitchen help is crushed under 50-kilo sacks of potatoes. Without lifting the sacks it is impossible to deliver them from their endless and unbearable suffering. It is terrible that even one person should be crushed under such weight: to want to breathe, and not be able to. The potatoes rest on everybody and everyone tries to lift them up, though not with the same conviction. An odd, groaning staff. The customers ask themselves: “What? People under potatoes? However did they get there?” All the same they are there, and the hungry people come for lunch or dinner to prove in the name of objectivity that the burden can never be removed, thus adding to the weight of the potatoes. On occasion Christian Spirit visits with his good dog Suffermore to show everyone his snapshots of crushed but smiling people. “The rationality of the potato sacks is always the best,” proclaim the tourist guidebooks and restaurant reviews. Many of the people who want to breathe say: “We will breathe later.” There is a special guillotine for chopping baguettes. The atmosphere may be French but it is definitely turn-of-the-century Museum of Human Labor as well. First and foremost is the simple arrangement of the act of consumption; tables and chairs organized into uniform rows ensure increased proficiency, thereby increasing the chance that the desired level of pleasure for the patron may be targeted. For amusement there is the dissenting voice of the worker. Though constrained by social and economic conditions, it is startlingly authentic as it reaches our ears. It is a sustained and well-defined tone of sacrificial pain that has survived centuries of suffering, while aquiring only a slight patina. The controlled bleeding of the worker, administered with the help of the latest scientific techniques, produces a voice modulated by alternating currents of submission and refusal — a constrained realist performance which often provides the negation of the activities of the patron, giving additional flavor to a conversation over a pair of cafes creme and, occasionally, an entire evening's entertainment or dinner conversation. Of course it is all in French, but the waiters are willing to explain everything. Detournement, role-refusal, stories from real-life. “For this occasion,” explains Nicolas Flipo, waiter, to Julian Rimmer, restaurant reviewer, during this particularly busy lunch-hour, “your voice will be reduced to a passive third-person; receiving, rather than 'reading' the action of a restaurant.” The reviewer looks impassively at the menu while Nicolas describes several possibilities, a grand injustice, and the barren vegetable garden at Anya's summer house, 60 km from Chernobyl. The main courses on the menu seem attractive to Mr. Rimmer, but his heart goes out to the Czech worker in the bicycle factory who couldn't buy even one of the bicycles he built with his own hands. every last one had been exported to the Soviet Union so at Christmas he could buy for his child only a clumsy, poorly crafted Russian import. After being the producer and the raw material, (his labor like a natural resource to be siphoned from his body), the worker could not even buy back the product of his own labor. The situation might not be measurably different for him today under the Czech Republic's economy of capital. As workers, we are depended upon to consume our own output, the commodification of our lives. We are the raw material, producer, and consumer. At the same time, the more that we are what we have, the more we become alienated, dead. The spectacle of alienation is the glass museum case around the life of each worker. The spectacle teaches us how to treat life as if it were an object — not to live life, because it is now external, but to think about it, gaze at it, merely possess it.
IN AN INDUSTRIAL society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. What spark of humanity, of a possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of weekends, where the crowd communes in a brutish weariness? From adolescence to retirement each twenty-four hour cycle repeats the same shattering bombardment, like bullets breaking a window: mechanical repetition, time-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion. John Heck, waiter, is a dutiful self-torturer. His father taught him how to work and now he sees himself through the eyes of his own forced labor. He learned to serve to survive and came to love his trade with the vitality of an already smothered creativity which helps him bear 10 to 15 hours daily. The continuance of the server's skill conception in the workplace has allowed him to contrive a precarious comfort in the hell of the restaurant. But after endless and repeated butchering of his youthful energy he learned that the refusal of the call to productivity could deal the death-blow to a mentality which had been carefully fostered by archaic capitalism. It is useless to expect even a caricature of creativity from the conveyor belt. Nowadays ambition and the love of a job well done are the indelible mark of defeat and of the most mindless submission. Still, the dictatorship of productive work holds the carrot in front of his face expecting him not to see through its attempts to weaken, castrate, and stupefy those under its control, and so try to make everyone receptive to the feeblest, least virile, most senile ideologies in the entire history of falsehood. He won't do it. Too many workers of our day are paralyzed by the possibility of being recuperated by the spectacle. No new job has proved sufficient to avoid being taken back in, reowned, and dispossesed by the apparently ubiquitous image of our own life that hovers before us daily, reminding us that we produce our lives for some mysterious “other.” No economic theory has proved sufficient to account for this “other,” whether it is socialism or capitalism. At best they draw a dim outline of a phantom, and demand we shed our distant, unrealized lives to take aim against some immediate and imaginative foe, that, for the low price of our participation, we will keep our freedoms safe, we will satisfy our desires. The “other” will always evade us, and the spectacle shall forever recuperate our working lives. For all we know, this is how it has always been, and shall always be.
THE TIME HAS COME to recuperate the spectacle itself. The image preserves its recuperative powers by theories of ownership. It sucks in what the human imagination might produce, leaving a barren soul begging for sustenance from the very system which has desiccated its life. Wage is one of the constructs of such an economic black hole. No “other” will be found beyond the feeding itself. There is no Spectacle, no Capitalist, no Marxist, to lay blame on, only the feeding. As such it is time to reject these constructs, and reclaim our life that perhaps once fed us. Communication must no longer consist of the one-way dictates of a detached dictator, rather, it must be returned to the realm of community. As workers, some of us “look forward” to a time when we can be our creative selves without having to look over our shoulders for the dictator of productive work. This is wrong. If we want a world where workers are treated as nobody's property, then we only have to make it. This is where the Cataclysm comes in. Nothing is quite as radical as reality itself. The buttresses will show their age. Tearing down and building are the same thing; it is only a matter of perspective that makes them seem so different.
THE MEAL ARRIVED astonishingly quickly. It seemed as though he ordered his food, whereupon a man burst out of the kitchen, rang a small bell commandingly, and one of Pavlov's waiters delivered the plate all at once. This is wonderful, he thought — Prague has been missing a place like this. even the way the meal had the appearence of french-cafe: A large, fast-fried steak spread over his plate covered by a mound of french fries. The steak was his choice mainly because he believes it can give you an idea about how the restaurant cares about people, the quality of ingredients, the well-being of the staff, tea in China, as well as its ability and desire to prepare them for people like Julian Rimmer, restaurant reviewer, as he demands. On closer inspection of the steak he realized that no one really cared about him. He felt betrayed by the bell-ringing man wielding the tenderizing hammer. He had ordered the steak rare, expected the steak to be rare, but in the end it wasn't to his liking. He felt sadness and a sense of loss. He wasn't going to leave, though. He had a review to write. He was going to have a salad and then order dessert and write about it. Later, after his disillusionment with the salad he enjoyed creme brûlee and complained about there not being enough carmelized sugar on top. It is a little bit sad, but there may be hope. After the revolution and actualization of the four-day work week, a commencement of adequate health-care, and more realistic compensation for persons who are daily exposed to an inequitable economy of labor, there perhaps will be pleasure in service for those who wish to achieve their desired level of pleasure by the hands of others. Until the weight is balanced we can only gaze through the museum glass of the spectacle and sigh: “Someday.” FINIS.
|
|
This episode of the Expatriot is taken from Psrf no. 48, which is another publication also associated with this site.
John Heck, waiter, is a founding member of THE TAPE-BEATLES and a current collaborator with PUBLIC WORKS. He lives in Prague where, after having worked for several years in various cafes and restaurants there, has recently taken a job in a video rental store. READ ALSO: ( “Great Escape: Food Worker Tunnels to Freedom” ).
THE EXPATRIOT was, during 1994-1995, the editor's self-published travel journal, chronicling both the physical and emotional landscape of living as a foreigner. In its current incarnation, it is written by various authors and will appear as a column in PSRF. Good writers who are living abroad are encouraged to submit.
|
||
