Working Life, Living Work_ Forms of Control in Johannesburg’s New Workplaces.txt

Working Life, Living Work: Forms of Control in Johannesburg’s New Workplaces 

We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under 
which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man 
was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous 
network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports. 

– Gilles Deleuze 
“Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?” asks Erin Griffith for The New York Times, 
pointing to the curious development of American millennials, who, despite their bubbling 
discontent for corporations and flirts with anti-capitalist rhetoric, nevertheless partake in a 
performative workaholism that dresses zeal, overexertion and social competitiveness in the 
appearances of passion, creativity and engagement.1 

The new professional workplace, replete with high-minded messaging and amenities catering to 
every need – nursing, feeding and spiritually guiding their employees – has spread from the tech 
startups of Silicon Valley to contemporary workplaces and individuals globally. With access to 
medical facilities, gyms, laundromats, shops, eateries, bars and supermarkets, with work 
appearing more free and laidback, and with life’s conveniences at one’s fingertips– why would 
you ever leave? 

The new corporate culture mantra is expressed in the slogan of American shared workspace 
company WeWork, who implores its tenants (called ‘members’) to “make a life, not just a 
living.” WeWork landed this year in Johannesburg’s still-growing decentralised CBDs; Sandton 

1 Erin Griffith, "Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?,"The New York Times, January 26, 
2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/business/against-hustle-culture-rise-and-grind-tgim.html. 

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and Rosebank. These two areas continue to witness surges in property development as many 
companies complete their migration from the old Johannesburg into its new financial centres, 

now reinventing themselves in the 4th Industrial Revolution geist as ‘smart cities.’ 

HSBC, one of the world’s largest financial services providers decided this year to lease 1,135 
desks from a WeWork in London. Citigroup and Deutsche Bank also house some of their 
operations in WeWork buildings, and in Johannesburg, Standard Bank and NASPERS are joining 

this cohort of big name tenants. Given the rise of precarious, short-term work, the appeal of 
WeWork to freelancers is obvious – but why are big multinational corporations similarly 

charmed by WeWork, or at the very least to re-style themselves in its fashion? A marketing pitch 
for a Manhattan based WeWork gives a clue: “Your old office might have had a coffee pot,” it 

reads, “but ours has a micro-roasted coffee bar and fresh fruit water.” It’s hard to imagine that 
premium roasted beans revolutionize the work experience. In the new world of work, work 
appears to be about everything but work. 

Although what was the old way of work? In capitalism, the evolution of the workplace is the 

story of the development of its managerial techniques, driven by its most basic feature – the 
exploitation of workers in the pursuit of profit. Richard C. Edwards describes how control is the 
animating principle behind changes to the workplace, where, “The labor process becomes an 

arena of class conflict and the workplace becomes a contested terrain. Faced with chronic 
resistance to their efforts to compel production, employers over the years have attempted to 

resolve the matter by reorganizing, indeed revolutionizing, the labor process itself. Their goal 

remains profits; their strategies aim at establishing structures of control at work.”2 

The early phase of industrial work was monitored by a supervisor or foreman wielding the threat 
of force, a hangover of feudal and colonial relations which Michel Foucault described as 

2Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century 
(New York: Basic Books, 1979), 16. 

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3

“societies of sovereignty,” with powers to harshly punish . For example, South Africa’s early, 
racially fraught mineworker struggles beginning in 1883 Kimberly resisting strip and search 
rules and culminating in the 1922 Rand Rebellion typifies this early period of brutal control, met 
with fierce resistance followed by violent repression – “This kind of working subject has no 
rights, it is exploited like a slave, without (public) protection; the worker completely depends on 
the will of the sovereign that can hire and fire him at any time.”4 In the transition to Fordist 
capitalism this system would eventually collapse, paving the way for ‘softer’ disciplinary 
techniques since, “Bosses were petty tyrants, supervisors prone to arbitrary authoritarianism, and 
the visible presence of line managers made them easy targets for retribution.”5 

Following this, the regime of workplace control was revised to be mechanistic and impersonal, 
organized around the model of the ‘factory’ within industrial production, as well as around the 
‘office’ of public administration.6 With the birth of the modern liberal state, was the shift to, in 
Foucault’s terms, a ‘disciplinary society’ that employed rigid and hierarchical methods of control 
exercised in the enclosed spaces of factory, office, school or prison, and regulated by 
normalization and standardization.7 Control was imposed through an indirect disciplinary 
architecture designed to produce self-disciplining subjects that modelled their behaviour 
according to well-established rules and regulations, yet wielded by an invisible power: “[the 
individual] who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for 
the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in 

3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 

4 Bernadette Loacker and Katharina Chudzikowski, Beyond Bureaucracy, Fordism and 
Entrepreneurialism: On the Mutual Construction of Career Contexts and Professional Self-Identities 

(Lisbon, Portugal: 26th Egos Colloquium, 2010), 4. 

5 Peter Fleming, Resisting Work: The Corporatization of Life and its Discontents. (Philadelphia, PA: 
Temple University Press, 2014), 73. 

6 Bernadette Loacker and Katharina Chudzikowski, Beyond Bureaucracy, 4. 

7 Jannis Kallinikos, “Work, Human Agency and Organizational Forms: An Anatomy of Fragmentation,” 
Organizational Studies 24, no. 4 (2003): 595-618 

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himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle 
of his own subjection.”8 

As an ideology of cool, rational control, Fordist-Bureaucracy employed methods of production 
standardization and surveillance to maximise efficiency and stability. Governed by a strict 
division of labour kind and the specialization of labour roles, workers are required to do 
calculable tasks specific to their competency and place in the workplace hierarchy, wherein, 
“Fixed blueprints and linear time tables produced a stable rhythm of the work process as they 
clearly defined what had to be done, when and by whom.”9 Work was straightforward, albeit 
monotonous– the worker was a passive recipient of formalized tasks and commands, to be 
completed during a routinized timetable where ‘start’ and ‘finish’ are clear, with their 
productivity determined by measurable criteria and enforced by a Panopticon model of 
surveillance.10 In return for their labour, this ‘man of exchange’ was afforded secure employment 
in the firm, and if ambitious, in exchange for their obedience and loyalty, the ‘organizational 
man’ who successfully exhibited their conformity with the firm’s norms and standards was 
promised organizational ascendancy.11 

Weber encapsulates the ethos of Fordist-Bureaucracy thus: “The more bureaucracy is 
dehumanized, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, 
and all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation. This is the 

8 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202-203. 

9 Bernadette Loacker and Katharina Chudzikowski, Beyond Bureaucracy, 5. 

10 The Panopticon is described in Richard Weiskopf and Bernadette Loacker, “ ‘A snake's coils are even 
more intricate than a mole's burrow.’ Individualisation and Subjectification in Post-disciplinary Regimes 
of Work. Management Revue 17, no.4 (2006), 400: “Disciplinary power finds its ultimate realization in 
the Panopticon. Jeremy Bentham’s marvellous architectural invention, which was designed as an 
‘inspection-house’ that is polyvalent in its applications and may be used ‘whenever one is dealing with a 
multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behaviour must be imposed’ includes all 
the strategic elements of disciplinary power.” 

11 Alan McKinlay, “`Dead Selves’: The Birth of the Modern Career,” Organization 9, no.4 (2002): 595– 
614. 

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specific nature of bureaucracy and it is appraised as its special virtue.”12 On the one hand, this 
leads to the worker becoming thoroughly alienated from their work, where as Erich Fromm 
explains, “[The worker] is put in a certain place, has to carry out a certain task, but does not 
participate in the organization or management of the work. He is not interested, nor does he 
know why one produces this, instead of another commodity—what relation it has to the needs of 
society as a whole.”13 On the other hand, the bureaucratic workplace devoid of autonomy expels 
‘life’ and emotion from it such that the physicality of the workplace came to symbolise a space 
for work and work only, with the worker’s life and time being their own once clocked out. It is 
therefore clear where work ends and where life begins and vice versa, itself an important strategy 
of control by immobilizing work to ‘enclosed spheres’ to make surveillance easier.14 The worker, 
objectified by capital and required only for the specific tasks assigned to them as defined by the 
employment contract, adhered to the strict delineation between work and play: “When we are at 
work, we ought to be at work. When we are at play we ought to be at play. There is no use trying 
to mix the two. When the work is done, then the play can come, but not before.”15 

Deriding the stultifying nature of Taylorist scientific-management, a form of disciplinary power 
preceding Fordist-Bureaucracy proper, Antonio Gramsci wrote that, “Not only does the worker 
think, but the fact that he gets no immediate satisfaction from his work and realises that they are 
trying to reduce him to a trained gorilla, can lead him into a train of thought that is far from 
conformist.”16 Indeed, operationalist controls only worsened the anomie of workers.17 Once 

12Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 220. 

13Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart & Company Inc, 1955), 175. 

14Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). 

15 Huw Beynon, Working for Ford. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 40. 

16 Antonio Gramsci, “Taylorism and the Mechanization of the Worker,” in Selections from the Prison 
Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smit (London: Elecbook, 1999), 139. 

17 Michael Masuch, “Vicious circles in organizations.” Administrative Science Quarterly 30, (1985): 
14-33; cited in Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda, “Design and Devotion: Surges of Rational 
and Normative Ideologies of Control in Managerial Discourse,” Administrative Science Quarterly 37 
(1992), 382. 

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more, regime-adjusting class conflict ferments and thus, “in establishing those conditions most 
favorable for bureaucratic control, capitalists inadvertently have also established the conditions 
under which demands for workplace democracy flourish...Rising dissatisfaction and alienation 
among workers, made exigent by their greater job security and expectation of continuing 
employment with one enterprise, create problems for employers, one of which is reduced 
productivity.”18 

Stephen Barley and Gideon Kunda point out that, “Although rationalization may have 
streamlined production, it was criticized for rewarding specialization, parochialism, and 
calculative involvement at the expense of loyalty and commitment.”19 They further maintain that 
shifts in managerial techniques –from rational to normative strategies– can be explained through 
a combination of cultural (or ideological) and material (or economic) analysis: the former to 
explain the changing discourse of managerial strategy, the latter to explain the timing in which it 
occurred. Importantly, this progression did not happen linearly but rather in alternating waves 
that “strongly suggests that American managerial ideology has evolved within the confines of a 
bipolar ideational structure.”20 A normative rhetoric was adopted that saw management not as 
experts, but rather as role models to disseminate workplace values and inspire a workforce. This 
switch from the hard rationalism of Fordist-Bureaucracy which treated the worker as a mere cog, 
however, was not completely replaced but rather coexisted with the normative shifts of a post-
Fordist workplace where notions of communality were gradually instilled. 

The broader macroeconomic shifts of the 1970s involving a series of crises and recession 
(triggered by the energy shocks between 1967 and 1979) provided room for an incipient 
neoliberal political project even though its intellectual development began much earlier with the 

18 Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain,153-154. 
19 Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda, “Design and Devotion,” 82. 
20 Ibid., 385. 

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likes of Hayek, Friedman and the Mont Pelerin society.21Alongside the creeping ‘construction of 
consent’ orienting a focus towards market-fundamentalism and a culture of individualism and 
consumption, the Global North experienced the decline of traditional industries with the rise of 
the services economy where “having matured during the 1960s, many professional workers and 
their blue-collar contemporaries seemed less willing to accept authority or view work as a central 
life interest,” which meant that “loyalty to the firm could no longer be taken for granted, even 
among the professional labor force.”22 

As an art of managerialism, the post-Fordist Bureaucracy emerges as a project of building and 
managing organizational culture through three tenets: first, that turbulent and competitive market 
environments necessitates commitment from employees who make no distinction between their 
own wellbeing and that of the firm; second, that strong corporate cultures can be designed and 
manipulated; and last, that by subsequently inculcating strong value conformity and emotional 
commitment, financial gain is created through heightened productivity.23 The result, is the 
creation of a totalizing institution which “[fosters] an all-encompassing environment in which 
our very personhood becomes a loyal reflection of the company.”24 

For instance, in Kunda’s ethnographic study of a high-commitment organization in the 1980s 
pseudonymised as ‘Tech,’ a senior manager reveals the basic thrust– “Power plays don’t work. 
You can’t make ’em do anything. They have to want to. So you have to work through the culture. 
The idea is to educate people without them knowing it. Have the religion and not know how they 
ever got it!”– such that everything at Tech, from cutlery and crockery to team building exercises 
were designed to emanate its brand and values.25 Away from the pseudo-concrete grand subjects 

21 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 

22 Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda, “Design and Devotion,” 380. 

23 Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda, “Design and Devotion,” 382–383. 

24 Fleming, Resisting Work, 89. 

25 Gideon Kunda, Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High Technology (Philadelphia, 
PA: Temple University Press, 1992), 5. 

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that formed the basis of imagined communities during Fordist-Bureaucracy like ‘the nation,’ the 
era of culture management formed one around ‘the corporation.’26 

Against the systems-rationalism at the tail-end of Fordist-Bureaucracy, the organizational culture 
movement claimed to promote the autonomy of workers. Their interests, values, aims and 
preferences dove-tailed with that of the corporation simply because the employee supposedly had 
an organic affinity for it and it’s vision. The worker identifies with and personifies the 
corporation.27 Rightly suspicious, Hugh Willmott analyses the logic behind corporate culturalism 
through an Orwellian lens, highlighting the internal contradiction of the promise of autonomy 
and self-expression, but only within a prescribed value-system.28 “The real message underlying 
these strong cultures might read,” Peter Fleming writes, that “You can do what you like, just as 
long as you do what we tell you.” Summarizing Willmott’s argument, Fleming says further that, 
“Corporate culturalism forcibly binds the sentimental domain of the workforce to a singular set 
of values in order to deepen instrumental rationality. It renders behavior more predictable, 
calculable, and certain from a one-dimensional economic (or instrumental) viewpoint.”29 

26 Per Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda, “Design and Devotion,” 383: “To make the point, 
proponents employed an imagery of cults, clans, and religious conversions...Authors exhorted managers 
to become the ‘high priests’ of their organization's values, to appoint ‘mythical heroes,’ and to fabricate 
‘sagas.’” See also William G. Ouchi and Raymond C. Price, “Hierarchies, Clans and Theory Z: A New 
Perspective on OD,” Organizational Dynamics 7 (1978): 24-44; Terrence E. Deal and Allan A. Kennedy, 
Corporate Cultures (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1982); and R.M Donnelly, “The Interrelationship of 
Planning with Corporate Culture in the Creation of Shared Values,” Managerial Planning 32 (1984): 
8-12. 

27 Gideon Kunda, Engineering Culture, 11. 

28 Hugh Willmott, “Strength Is Ignorance; Slavery Is Freedom: Managing Cultures in Modern 
Organizations,” Journal of Management Studies 30, no.4 (1993): 526. 

29 Fleming, Resisting Work, 91. 

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The more things changed, the more they fundamentally remained the same. Even though the 
ascent of neoliberalism rode on rhetoric about decentralization and the death of bureaucracy, 

Mark Fisher firmly dispels this notion in Capitalist Realism (2009): 

Initially, it might appear to be a mystery that bureaucratic measures should have 
intensified under neoliberal governments that have presented themselves as anti-
bureaucratic and anti-Stalinist. Yet new kinds of bureaucracy – ‘aims and 
objectives’, ‘outcomes’, ‘mission statements’ – have proliferated, even as 
neoliberal rhetoric about the end of top-down, centralized control has gained preeminence. 
It might seem that bureaucracy is a kind of return of the repressed, 
ironically re-emerging at the heart of a system which has professed to destroy it. 
But the resurgence of bureaucracy in neoliberalism is more than an atavism or an 
anomaly.30 

While the old regimes have by no means disappeared, the character of control has shifted, in 

many ways precisely so as to conceal what hasn’t changed, as well as what has. Neoliberalism 

begins with the market becoming the organizing principle of society, throwing into crisis the 
bedrock of institutions that once held it together– the home, the school, the factory and office– 
“But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration 

periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until 

the installation of the new forces knocking at the door.”31 

Neoliberal Reason and Realism 

In Undoing the Demos (2015), Wendy Brown gives a compelling case for why neoliberalism 
impoverishes the political imagination and hollows out contemporary liberal democracy, the very 

thing it claims to enhance. Brown understands neoliberalism as a “normative order of reason 

developed over three decades into a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality, 

30

 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), 40. 

31 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” L’Autre journal, no. 1 (1990): 4. 

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neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavour, along with humans 
themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct; all 
spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics.”32 

Neoliberalism, as a paradoxically anti-normative normative-ideological project is characterized 
by the ‘economization of everything,’ extending even to quotidian activity where the distinctly 
human character of people relations is converted into economic relations. This is not literal, but 
“Rather, the point is that neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all 
domains and activities–even where money is not an issue–and configures human beings 
exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus.”33 Put 
simply, under neoliberalism, market values are extended to all spheres of life. 

Brown draws from Foucault’s 1978-1979 Birth of Biopolitics lectures given at the College de 
France, wherein Foucault cast neoliberalism as a governmentality or order of reason leading to 
the political rationality of the state becoming economic, so as to “regulate society by the 
market.”34 Sympathetic to Foucault’s initial analysis of its bloom, Brown captures its distinctive 
feature, inasmuch as its globalizing expansion is at once disunified and non-identical with 
itself:35 

The political rationality of the state becomes economic in a triple sense: the 

economy is at once model, object, and project. That is, economic principles 

become the model for state conduct, the economy becomes the primary object of 

32 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, New York: Zone 
Books, 2015), 9-10. 

33 Ibid., 31. 

34 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, ed. Michel 
Snellart, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2008), 145. There is a growing body of scholarship 
contextualizing Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism, where he viewed its anti-statist tendencies as a 
potential site for new subjectivities and minoritarian experiments. See Daniel Zamora and Michael 
C.Dehrent eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015) and Daniel Zamora and 
Mitchell Dean, The Last Man Takes LSD. Foucault after 68, (Forthcoming). 

35 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 21. 

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state concern and policy, and the marketization of domains and conduct is what the 
state seeks to disseminate everywhere. At the same time, the economy itself is 
denaturalized and loses its liberal status as autarkic. Instead, it is understood to 
require support and maintenance by the state. “Economy” is also detached from 
exclusive association with the production or circulation of goods and the 
accumulation of wealth. Instead, “economy” signifies specific principles, metrics, 
and modes of conduct, including for endeavors where monetary profit and wealth 
are not at issue. Again, neoliberal political rationality does not merely marketize in 
the sense of monetizing all social conduct and social relations, but, more radically, 
casts them in an exclusively economic frame, one that has both epistemological 
and ontological dimensions.36 

Neoliberalism’s veridiction of the ‘market as truth’, its anti-Stalinist and anti-Bureaucratic 

register that tries to establish itself as a project liberating the individual whilst simultaneously 

(and contradictorily so) indexing all of life to market values, thereby creates a totalizing reality, 

and what Fisher would call Capitalist Realism. Here, not only does any alternative raison de 

vivre seem unimaginable, but unreasonable. Neoliberalism has captured our imaginations such 

that we struggle to imagine a world without it, and where even our dreams are infected by it. 

Capitalist Realism thrives through neoliberalism, as “an order that effectively suspends history 

and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity.”37 As the emissary for capital, it is 

neoliberal realism that “entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable 

of reconfiguring itself at any moment.”38 Neoliberalism itself is a crisis, knowing not how to 

reproduce itself on its own terms. It is for this very reason that it relies precisely on that which it 

despises: that which goes beyond the reach of capital and the market.39 

Blurred Lines 

36 Ibid., 62. 

37 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), xiv. 

38 Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 54. 

39 Fleming, Resisting Work, 29. 

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Dreaming about your work is one thing, but dreaming inside the logic of your work is another. . . . 
[I]n the kind of dream I have been having the very movement of my mind is transformed: it has 
become that of my job. This is unnerving. 

–Rob Lucas 

The global economic and social unrest beginning in the 1990s painted a picture of the 
corporation very different to that of the ‘value holding and virtuous’ one under corporate 
culturalism. Not only did workers sense the falsity in the promise of autonomy within the limits 
of an uncompromising value structure, but a series of large scale corporate scandals, such as the 
oil wars, Wikileaks revelations, the growth of the anti-globalization movement and the fallouts of 
the 2008 global financial crisis made workers generally distrustful of corporations and their 
dubious doings.40 Along with the withering trust of workers, the specter of ‘there is no 
alternative’ emboldened corporations to steadily abandon the quest for public virtue, their 
corruption permitted because ‘it’s just the way things are.’ 

Neoliberalism, as it frequently does, encounters here a crisis of confidence around the 
organization of work. Neoliberalism slouches on, however, exactly because through valorizing 
market mechanisms it is driven by notions of flexibility and dynamism, eschewing durable 
frameworks such that “business organization is increasingly seen as a never conclusive, ongoing 
attempt ‘to form an island of superior adaptability.’ ”41 The logic of neoliberalism is to fight 
against the hostile world it creates. Although dynamic and expansive, this is not to say that 
control vanishes–instead with neoliberalism, “capitalism is inventive and productive, and to 
capitalize, it progressively leaves the factory and invades, like a parasite, all spheres of life and 
the life-world itself. At the end, it ends up, as we shall see, producing and consuming life 
itself.”42 

40 Ibid., 102. 

41 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 117. 

42 Frédéric Vandenberghe, “Deleuzian capitalism,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 34, no.8 (2008): 878. 

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There is major shift wherein corporations focus less on imposing or constructing behaviours, 
values and knowledge, but rather try to capture or enclose on that which the individual already 
has; namely the ability to self-organize, socialize and to utilize one's own experience to get 
things done. In order to exploit that which is out of late capitalism’s reach, new forms of control 
need to be devised. In order to capture limitless potential, control needs to become limitless 
itself. Writing of the condition of this post-disciplinary society, Zygmunt Bauman notes that, 
“Whatever else the present stage in the history of modernity is, it is also, perhaps above all, post-
Panoptical.” 43 

Gilles Deleuze was one of the first to apprehend what the implications of a post-disciplinary 
world was, one suffering a “generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure.”44 
The new social forms, in contrast to the old and with the market as cardinal principle, is that 
production becomes ‘meta-production,’ wherein “What [capitalism] wants to sell is services and 
what it wants to buy is stocks.” The longevity of the molehill is replaced by the skin shedding 
serpent. What this means is that, “the postfordistic network organization is a ‘lean’ organization; 
management, work(ers) and capital are decentralized, hierarchies are flattened, production 
processes [are] increasingly immaterial, products are no longer standardized but flexible, mobile, 
heterogeneous, differentiated, ‘knowledge-intensive’ and orientated on ‘niche-markets.’ ”45 

43 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 11. 
44 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 3. 
45Loacker and Chudzikowski, Beyond Bureaucracy, Fordism and Entrepreneurialism, 8. 

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In this ‘network society’ modeled in the image of developing information technologies where 
power is dispersed to multiple nodes, one of the first casualties are boundaries.46 The networked 
node nature of control makes it mobile. If “exploitation is considered a practice of spatial and 
temporal confinement since control is the central motif of exploitation,” then in societies of 
control where spatial confinements are increasingly blurred, exploitation and control become all 
pervasive.47 

In 2004, Peter Fleming and Andre Spicer conducted a field study of a large call centre 
pseudonymised as ‘Iocus,’ where social geography was reconfigured, and the line separating 
work from non-work was blurred. At Iocus, “training workshops and everyday cultural messages 
constantly stress that all of those experiences employees wait until after work to have such as 
fun, partying, joy, fulfilment, exhilaration, friendship and even sexuality are appropriate to evoke 
in the workspace.”48 They observed the work and non-work boundary dissolving first, by the 
transfer of the outside to the inside: non-work rituals such as consumption, leisure and spiritual 
development were encouraged on the site of production. Secondly, by the export of the inside to 
the outside, with internal corporate cultures exported to life beyond work, an example being the 
frequenting of a pub on Fridays which although independent, eventually came to be governed by 
the firm’s sexual harassment policy. 

46 See Weiskopf and Loacker, “ Individualisation and Subjectification in Post-disciplinary Regimes of 
Work,” 404: “A network consists of a number of interconnected nodes. In contrast to the positions in the 
Panopticon (confined cells), the nodes of the network are open and changeable. The Panopticon worked 
by cutting off communication between different points. In this way, it made sure that the central point had 
complete mastery of information…In the network there is no single centre of power; rather, power is 
distributed to multiple nodes, in which information, resources, etc. come together or are connected… 
Those in the network are not subjected to hierarchical visibility in the same way as inmates of the 
Panopticon. In the network the control of flows (e.g of information, resources, money) and the 
establishing of rules and access are important.” 

47 Fleming, Resisting Work, 106. 

48 Peter Fleming and Andre Spicer, “ ‘You can check out anytime, but you can never leave’: Spatial 
boundaries in a high commitment organization,” Human Relations 57 (2004): 83. 

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Drawing from Gaston Bachelard, Fleming and Spicer contend that our sense of space is as much 
a feature of social imagination as it is the physical dimensions of the built environment.49 At 
Iocus therefore, it is the case that “Although there was little difference between the built 
environment and what we would typically find in ‘industrial’ factories and office spaces, we 
observed a palpable difference in how workers experienced these spatial boundaries…the 
boundaries between work and non-work were blurred with little change to the built 
environment.”50 What Fleming and Spicer astutely point out is that transversing physical 
boundaries (between work and non-work) is instrumental in the often talked about psychological 
entanglement between life and work, wherein the two come to mean the same thing. Now, 
workers are asked to poetically endow or customise the workplace, to make it feel user designed 
and personal, in the hopes of invoking joy etc., unlike corporate culturalism which asked workers 
to find solidarity with the corporation’s values. 

To be sure, the older methods of management do not completely disappear but rather 
contemporaneously exist with the new in a combination that is erratic and schizophrenic–itself 
an essential characteristic of the new. What has begun to predominate though, is the 
transformation of the built environment to complement and augment what has already settled in. 
Through physical movement around the often open-planned and ‘station based’ workplace, 
Activity Based Workplaces (ABWs) hope to increase physical, mental and social health which in 
turn creates organizational health, heightened productivity and cost-minimization.51 Expressed 
by the American office furniture brand Herman Miller in their ‘Living Office’ product line: 

49 See Gaston Bachelard, The poetics of space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1958), 56; 
quoted in Fleming and Spicer, “Spatial boundaries in a high commitment organization,” 88-89. Lived 
space becomes a ‘concrete abstraction’: “The objective space of a house – its corners, corridors, cellars, 
rooms – is far less important than what it is poetically endowed with, which is usually a quality with an 
imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel: thus a house may be haunted or homelike, or 
prison-like or magical.” 

50 Fleming and Spicer, “Spatial boundaries in a high commitment organization,” 88. 

51 The earliest conceptions of office space through activity settings comes from American architects 
Phillip J. Stone and Robert Luchetti, “Your office is where you are,” Harvard Business Review 63, no. 2 
(1985): 102-117. 

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“People are the most critical asset to every organization. So why aren’t more offices designed to 
support their needs and activities?” 

More than simply being open-planned; comfortable and supposedly free-flowing ‘organic’ 
movement is prioritized, with a range of facilities dedicated to specific activities as opposed to 
performing all tasks from the desk, all day. What's emphasized is that you deliver results, which 
allows one to work however and wherever they want– these workspaces provide a variety of 
settings, and the workday is sliced into different types of activities such as meetings, private 
concentration and collaborative ideation. For an illustration, one might have a meeting in a cafe-
like commons for collaborative work, and then move to a sound-proofed pod for concentrated 
individual work, and then move again to informally sharing knowledge in a social kitchen. While 
the work itself might be continuous, this new spatio-temporal dimension punctuates the flow of 
productivity. Work feels less like a closed, uninterrupted period where it is performed, but a 
series of fragmented tasks completed in a given environment and celebrated as a minor victory 
before moving to the next; a series of finishing something without work ever ending. 

In Johannesburg, WeWork opened its doors for the first time this year– one in Rosebank, and 
another set to open in Sandton by December 2019. A tour of WeWork is enough to give a sense 
of its essential features (visited only a week after its official opening, it nevertheless bustled with 
life), although admittedly a more comprehensive empirical study is probably useful. WeWork in 
Rosebank occupies six floors of the Link, a stunning newly erected building housing offices at 
the doorstep of the Rosebank shopping complex, plus the Gautrain station (Africa’s first high-
speed underground rail transport). Upon entering the ground floor comprised of black tiles, 
lighting and a water feature, the atmosphere is dark, cool and tranquil. Instructed to take an 
elevator to the sixth floor, the doors open to the WeWork reception and light powerfully floods 
in– a bit disorienting. The core of the building is hollowed out for the waiting area, the WeWork 
offices inhabiting the building’s periphery behind transparent glass, all life within exposed. This 
liminal space flips the old Panopticon model. No longer a space associated with the fear of 
inspection by the big Other, it is instead injected with the warmth of welcoming and receiving a 

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potential ‘community member’. If the old Panopticon is a hellish prison-like fortress where you 
would hate to be behind the bars, WeWork at The Link is more like an ethereal heaven, where 
one longs for the other side, to be behind the glass – its seductive architecture and design 
deliberate. 

Once inside–by no means an easy process, security is tight and access around the building 
regulated by a passport-like access card– you basically walk straight into a coffee bar, which 
doubles as a (another) reception desk. While awaiting the tour guide, complimentary coffee is 
served (on this day by a deaf barista, an immediate grandstand to inclusivity and diversity of 
course, what Nancy Fraser calls ‘progressive neoliberalism’). The space is pimped out with fruit 
water dispensers, beer taps (for the time being serving ginger beer until an alcohol licence is 
obtained), table tennis, foosball… the works at WeWork! Indeed, the place is “all about the 
vibe.” The membership tiers at different prices range from private offices, hot desks, dedicated 
desks and lab desks each giving different benefits and utilities, all with access to common shared 
spaces such as sound-proof pods, communal areas and the programmes and activations. 

The day of this tour was a “Wellness Wednesday,” where WeWorkers are treated to a 
complimentary healthy breakfast, a salad bar throughout the day, a stretching and mindfulness 
session in the morning and a yoga workshop in the evening. Tenants are offered discounted rates 
to the nearby gym, and for convenience sake, there are showers downstairs. The Thursday after 
would have been a day experimenting with world cuisine (that week, Mexican Thursday) with a 
happy hour between four and five p.m. Following the weekend, members return to work, or 
given the 24/7 access, perhaps even staying at work until TGIM, “Thank God It’s Monday,” 
WeWork’s signature effort to kickstart the weekly rat-race with energy and enthusiasm by 
hosting motivational talks or treating members to a cultural performance (recently, acclaimed 
South African rapper Khuli Chana gave a silent concert, the audience tuned in via headphones). 

At WeWork, “everything is taken care of, all you do is focus on your work.” Members can even 
make WeWork their personal postal address and have parcels, bills and other goods delivered 

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straight to them. The WeWork community team focuses on creating “the experience that you 
want” through community, space and service. One of their “social strategies to bring people 
together” include their own social network with an internal currency system used for prebooking 
“brainstorm rooms,” as well as to connect with the WeWork community locally and 
globally, seeing details about other members’ business, projects and ambitions. And to create a 
uniquely African version of the WeWork experience, ‘African-styled’ artworks and design are 
dotted around the workplace. “You feel at home in being at work,” the tour guide casually 
remarks. WeWork is about “finding balance within the space.” 

Amidst the crisis of neoliberalism and the accompanying disillusionment with work, leading 
many to view it simply as a means to a paycheck, WeWork provides an answer: to “make a life, 
not just a living.” 

Working Life, Living Work 

We should understand WeWork as emblematizing the burgeoning Activity Based Workplace 
model, not as being the definitive example of this phenomenon, nor as an indication that older 
managerial regimes have faded. As pointed out earlier, what is happening now is more of the 
physical concretization (in the built environment) of a process whose material and ideological 
underpinnings have already taken hold. These new developments in the architecture and interior 
design of the workplace, if anything, are spurred on by technological advances– not driven by 
them, but made easier through them, such that the increasingly portable nature of technological 
devices and the ‘appification’ of the workplace allows one to be mobile whilst tethered to work, 
smoothing the dissolution of boundaries. 

Fleming adapts the Foucouldian concept of biopower to explain the corporate colonization of life 
by work, identifying it as another form of capitalist domination and exploitation. Biopower, per 
Fleming, exploits the human capacity to be socially, emotionally and cognitively intelligent, 
innovative and resilient. These qualities are developed outside of the workplace, and are 

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immeasurable by the formal dictates of economic rationality– in fact, they are antithetical to the 
anti-social precepts of neoliberal rationality which casts human beings as unimpeachably rational 
and self-maximising agents, homo oeconomicus. Fleming writes that, “A good deal of recent 
management thinking has concluded that it is very difficult to force workers to yield their 
goodwill and non-commercialized knowhow within a formal setting...Thus emerges a new and 
distinct method for exploiting living labor. These processes seek to access the independent 
competencies of employees through moments of capture rather than composition.” 

The truth is, key elements of biopower aren’t all that new. Marxist Feminists, for example, have 
for years described how social and reproductive labour performed by women, involving childrearing, 
domestic work and social provisioning are extra-work efforts in service to capitalism and 
its viability, but ignored and uncompensated for. Similarly, Marxist Feminists have described the 
affective labour involving human contact and demanding social affability which is required in 
the care industries (such as nursing) that are dominated by women.52 Neoliberalism sustains a 
conception of the family that stabilizes these roles by naturalizing women as caring, generous 
and compassionate – traits to be acted out both inside the home and family, and throughout the 
various jobs they occupy outside of it.53 

South Africa and other developing or post-colonial nations have unique and complex histories 
where the transformation of the work order happens variably, particularly given the already 
attendant precarity and casualization of the majority of the workforce prior to and with 
neoliberalism. As Karl von Holdt and Edward Webster point out, South Africa “never 
experienced the successful construction of a welfare state through the counter-movement of 

52 For a contemporary discussion of these concepts and women’s oppression amid a neoliberal assault on 
public services and communities, see Tithi Battacharya, ed., Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression 
(London: Pluto Press, 2017). 

53 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 99-107. 

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society in response to the market forces of the [settler-colonial/apartheid state] transformation.”54 
While formal racial integration into the workforce exists, persisting alongside this are the old 
lines of exclusion and inclusion bifurcated into core and non-core zones of formal sector 
employment, as well as peripheral work that is not about “earning a living” through regular pay, 
but “making a living” by creating one’s own income or through subsistence activities.55 

According to Franco Barchiesi, the South African crisis of structural underemployment then, 
requires for many, “Strategies of self-employment [requiring] the activation of social networks, 
life experiences and cognitive abilities that are mostly invisible and marginalized in the factory 
routine.”56 In the present age, “African post-Fordism is more about ‘out of luck’ than ‘just-intime’ 
as the future uncertainties of informal entrepreneurship are grounded in present assets that 
depend on social networks, chiefly the family, undermined by the same global dynamics that 
make waged work redundant in the first place.”57 South Africa’s history of rapid accumulation 
premised on the suppression and exclusion of its black population meant that the self-sustenance 
of the underclasses demanded putting life to work. In post-Apartheid South Africa, neoliberalism 
means life is put to work for the reproduction of the whole society. 

What is new about these contemporary instantiations of biopower, is it is no longer relegated to 
the shadows where its force is unseen, but instead enlisted explicitly in all forms of work even in 
the formal sector, and used to reproduce neoliberal society at large. Before, biopower was part of 
a societal underbelly, life to be occasionally recruited, but life before or beyond work. Now, the 
exercise of biopower has become fundamental to managerial strategy. 

54 Karl von Holdt and Edward Webster, “Work Restructuring and the Crisis of Social Reproduction: A 
Southern Perspective,” in Beyond the Apartheid Workplace: Studies in Transition, ed. Edward Webster 
and Karl von Holdt (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005): 34. 

55 Ibid., 4. 

56 Franco Barchiesi, Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in 
Postapartheid South Africa (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011): 202. 

57 Ibid., 204. 

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Biopower lives in Activity Based Workplaces rent free, and is extended outside of them as well. 
Liberated from spatio-temporal confinement, Melissa Gregg describes how work becomes an 
omnipotent reality through “presence bleed”, where workers are always mentally on the job; as 
well as “functional creep”, the widening array of work that depends on workers informal 
knowhow and self-organizing abilities.58 Penetrating through spatio-temporal confinement, 
“firm boundaries between personal and professional identities no longer apply. Presence bleed 
explains the familiar experience whereby location and time of work become secondary 
considerations faced with the ‘to do list’ that seems forever out of control.”59 

How do ABWs intensify this? The internal arrangement of ABWs are intended to be a 
simulacrum of real life, breaking work-time into splintered activities across different settings and 
environments. The very movement of life operates by the pursuit of settings to conduct an 
activity– a park for recreation, a supermarket for groceries, a clinic for treatment etc. Since no 
person views their life as something with end, in mimicking the constant passage of life, work 
colonizes time without end: 

This phantasmagoria of permanence or endlessness is one of neoliberalism’s 
crowning achievements. Indeed, we have known for a while that capitalism 
exploits us primarily through time: time at work, time thinking about work, 
time prepping for work. What makes neoliberalism so much more radical than 
earlier modes of capitalist control lies in the way it infinitizes the otherwise 
finite register of work, erasing any sense of end or beginning. After that, there 
is no alternative to working life.60 

58 Melissa Gregg, Work’s Intimacy (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011). 

59 Ibid., 2. 

60 Fleming, Resisting Work, 41. 

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Beyond this movement dimension, activities and amenities that signal ‘life beyond work’ are 
now part of ‘life within work.’ Leisurely and recreational rituals, such as drinking and spiritual 
development are enacted within the workplace itself under the guise of creating a work-life 
balance.61 Coinciding with the neoliberal assault on public goods, increasing privatization, and 
the triumph of a society of consumers, the worker now feels as if they have to be at work in order 
to be ‘balanced’– the park, the public gym, the post office no longer belong to the public domain. 
Leisure itself only moved into the realm of necessity because work was so insufferable, and 
because work was so insufferable, it recuperated leisure as its saviour. Escape from work is now 
in work. 

Another corporation opening new offices was Discovery, a popular company specializing in 
medical aid, life and car insurance, as well as banking. Their plush new headquarters in Sandton, 
curiously aren’t owned by them, instead they pay about $1.5 million to rent it each month. On 
top of incorporating agile working environments, the building contains an impressive collection 
of utilities: a mechanic, a carwash, a tailor, a medical centre, a gym, a rooftop basketball court, a 
rooftop running track, a home affairs, a collection of restaurants and coffee shops, salons and 
hairdressers, and a creche one kilometre down the road. Inside, ninety-two inidgenous trees were 
planted, earning Discovery a five star rating from the Green Building Council– “The air inside 
this building is better than the air outside,” boasts the tour guide, and workers are to plant a tree 
if they consume bottled water in the building. Employees are encouraged to keep fit, and are not 
allowed to take the elevator a level up or down. Community is encouraged through shared 
spaces, and the elevators compel employees to move through the general concourse area in order 
to enter or leave the building. 

Beyond work, an offering available to Discovery customers as well as their workers, are their 
numerous reward programmes, which include discounts on movie tickets, air tickets, gym 
memberships, supermarkets and retailers as well as transport like Uber. Discovery takes on the 

61 In a fascinating new book, Ron Purser examines how the corporate mindfulness movement and 
language of ‘self-care’ becomes a tool of compliance: Ronald Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness 
Became the New Capitalist Spirituality (London, UK: Repeater Books, 2019). 

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role of life giver, an almost benevolent God of capitalism, their clientele and employees remade 
as their citizens. While Foucault originally associated biopower with the disciplinary welfare 
state, in the neoliberal society of control, life is administered by the corporation. 

Biopower is neoliberalism’s response to it’s own, innate crisis tendencies, its inability to 
reproduce itself on its own accord, so it capitalizes and exploits that which lies beyond the 
clutches of the corporation. However, this was not enough to placate an already skeptical 
workforce who, firstly, were already disillusioned with work, and secondly could notice its 
colonizing effects making things worse. As work-related anxiety, burnout, purposeless and 
meaninglessness rose, this contributed to what Paolo Virno called a lasting sense of “not feeling 
at home.”62 ABWs provide the solution: to transform how you work– not why or what it is, but 
instead rendering it as something that can be fun when performed, and that offers us a balanced 
life with the prospects of self-betterment. ABWs bring life to work, and therefore make work a 
home. 

In spite of the totalitarian expansion of work into life and life into work, the worker is told that 
they possess unprecedented levels of autonomy and freedom in the workplace, exactly for the 
reason that the worker is asked to cheerfully bring their subjective experience to work. This 
mythology is constructed by the “integration of ever more aspects of social personality into the 
production process, [which] dismantles the usefulness of the boundary between work and life.”63 
ABWs are built having in mind what Jody Thompson and Cali Ressler call, a “Results Only 
Work Environment”, where work is organized primarily around output (as opposed to hours 
worked).64 This lends itself completely to the self-organization and free movement of the 

62 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Los 
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004): 34. 

63 Fleming, Resisting Work, 108. 

64 Carli Ressler and Jody Thompson, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: The Results Only Revolution 
(New York: Portfolio). 

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worker– “The message now is ‘Be yourself, say what you like, but submit to the demands of 
economic necessity.’ ”65 

The difficulty with immaterial labour which is communicative, affective, creative, symbolic or 
emotional, is that it is difficult to measure in economic terms–“When the inexhaustible facets of 
living labor come to the fore in the production matrix, it also inspires an almost limitless 
multiplication of surveillance and standardization.”66 The nature of work today involving highly 
subjective elements and processes makes managerial supervision according to objective dictates 
obsolete. Still, the class antagonism remains, and the presence of self-managing teams and the 
like go against management’s instincts to supervise, command and control. Therefore, “From 
capital’s perspective, the predicament of immeasurability is met by activating time-tested forms 
of domination: not less but an overabundance of regulation—just to make sure. Indeed, it is not a 
coincidence that at the very moment that “trust,” “empowerment,” and “just be yourself” enter 
the lexicon of neo-corporatism, we also see a tremendous rise in management distrust.”67 

Recall Fisher’s comments on the proliferation of ‘aims and objectives’, ‘mission statements’ and 
‘outcomes.’Although top-down control has flattened, regulation nevertheless continues, however 
dressed in nebulous language that obfuscates their coercive intention. Brown describes neoliberal 
regulation as, “[replacing] orders with orchestration, enforcement with benchmarks and 
inspection, mandate with mobilization and activation… Together, these replacements also 
vanquish a vocabulary of power, and hence power’s visibility, from the lives and venues that 
governance organizes and directs.”68 

65 Fleming, Resisting Work, 96. 

66 Ibid., 37. 

67 Ibid., 38. 

68 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 127, 129. 

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Even so, without the surplus regulation implemented by management, the discourse of 
empowerment is a sleight manifestation of the technologies of responsibilization– 
“Responsibilization brings individuals closer to the various clients (or customers) and makes 
their demands immediately their own personal concern.”69 Individuals undertake the aims and 
functions of management, becoming self-disciplining and self-regulating subjects. In self-
managing teams for example, the pressure to produce is horizontalized, “resulting in employees 
feeling inexplicably guilty or disloyal if they failed to meet a deadline.”70 Peer-to-peer 
surveillance does not only operate in teams, or even amongst colleagues in the same firm. At 
WeWork, for example, one is not productive because of the threat of a boss or colleague 
checking up on you, but rather through the unabating productive energies of those who surround 
you that would ostracise you if you were not productive too. In this case, by simply sharing the 
same space, one is surveilled even by those who are not directly working or affiliated with you. 

This networked surveillance is aided by the ideology of work itself, given new articulation in the 
form of “hustle culture.” What this means is that as much as the contemporary workplace 
supposedly facilitates the freedom of the individual, if the individual decided not to work, not 
only would the individual be cast as irresponsible, but as a failed enterprise. Networked 
surveillance is, “increasingly limitless, dynamic, free-floating and ‘creative’: the market operates 
‘like a telescope’, an ‘information machine’, a ‘machine of seeing’ – a ‘panspectron’ ; it 
continuously assesses and evaluates individuals, their information flows (instead of their bodies) 
and their performances. Within post-Fordism the disciplinary technique of ‘examination’ is 
substituted [for] the technique of ‘permanent assessment’ .”71 

69 Weiskopf and Loacker, “ Individualisation and Subjectification in Post-disciplinary Regimes of Work,” 
409. 

70 Fleming, Resisting Work, 36. 

71 Loacker and Chudzikowski, Beyond Bureaucracy, Fordism and Entrepreneurialism, 11. 

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An important thing is revealed in the new era of work: the transformation of worker’s 
subjectivity. As all social areas simultaneously become sites of work, production and 
reproduction, the worker becomes an “entrepreneur of the self,” transformed from their status as 
a waged-labourer into human capital. This reimagines the worker as both an enterprise and an 
employee, a so called “entreployee.”72 The worker becomes a capitalised asset of embodied 
skills, attributes and competencies which must be adaptable but steady, co-operative but 
independent, reliable but disposable.73More important than having a firm set of specific skills, 
individuals are obliged to ‘re-skill’ in preparation for potential prospective jobs (another instance 
of responsibilization), what Illana Gershon would call “The Quitting Economy”, wherein 
“employees are treated as short-term assets [that] reinvent themselves as marketable goods, 
always ready to quit.”74 

“If your goal is to get a job somewhere else, not all work projects are equally valuable. Workers 
must jockey for the tasks and projects that might lead to a job elsewhere. They must try to avoid 
tasks that, either due to intellectual property issues or for other reasons, are too companyspecific.”
75 Any free time is dedicated to looking for other, better jobs, re-skilling, or boasting 
about your love for work, and marketing yourself as a desirable, employable commodity over 
social media, from Twitter and Instagram, to LinkedIn and Academia.edu. This exemplifies how 
we ‘work to get work.’ The entreployee, made into capital and recast as an enterprising subject 
must always and everywhere stay on brand. 

Herein lies a fundamental contradiction about the new world of work. While the Activity Based 
Workplace seeks to create a social environment that gives and traps life, neoliberal reason that 

72 Ibid., 9. 

73 John Storey, Graeme Salaman and Kerry Platman, “Living with Enterprise in an Enterprise Economy: 
Freelance and Contract Workers in the Media,” Human Relations 58, no.8 (2005): 104. 

74 Ilana Gershon, “The Quitting Economy.,” Aeon, July 26, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/how-workchanged-
to-make-us-all-passionate-quitters. 

75 Ibid. 

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conceives of individuals as the anti-social homo oeconomicus perseveres. A supposedly life-
affirming workplace culture, is belied by the life-denying reality of neoliberal realism. Beneath 

the appearance of community and freedom, workers are submitted to the logic of competition 

and individualism, further atomised, further alienated. Not only does this eliminate conditions for 

workplace solidarity, but it obscures the class antagonism between workers and capital that forms 
the basis of building any resistance. 

The transformation of work to an ever-present, all encompassing pathology cuts through class, 
although distributing its material and psychosocial burdens unevenly. Writing of contemporary 

capitalist social relations, Fleming highlights that the problem is “not about having too little time 
away from our jobs. Contemporary cognitive capitalism requires that we have plenty of that. 

Some take holidays (if they are lucky), weekends, and so forth. Neoliberalism does not function 
by totally colonizing these non- work spaces. It wouldn’t survive if it did. All it needs to do is 

index them to the ideology of work.”76 The condition of our working lives and living work 

afflicts all– those employed, those precariously or underemployed, and even those unemployed. 

Indeed: 

This is more than just fear of possible unemployment or precarity. For that is an 
objectively rational response to the present situation. The widespread anxiety and 
hopelessness I am referring to is mostly needless, a political invention built into 
the very logic of work today. This makes its universalization seem inevitable and 
inescapable. In other words, when our jobs become the index for living as such, 
our fear becomes existential and seemingly without object. And the problem with 
fear is that it tends to individualize its victims, and we find it difficult to resist 
without turning on ourselves; it activates and promulgates the very power effects 

that we now need to refuse within the current biopolitical situation. 77 

76 Fleming, Resisting Work, 130. 
77 Ibid.,126. 

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The global, political, ecological and social breakdown that defines neoliberalism has led many to 
lose confidence in its ability to deliver a just and fair society, equitable for the majority. Despite 
this bumbling disaffection, it seems nevertheless to march on– here Gramsci is evergreen: “The 
crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this 
interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”78 Deleuze, however, warns that, 
“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons,” and Fisher gives us reason 
for the will to persevere: “From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is 
possible again.”79 We should grasp at neoliberalism’s own unravelings, and if it seeks to conquer 
and colonize life itself, then our path is clear, and so is our task: to remake life and work anew. 

78 Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, vol. 1, Quaderni 1–5 (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1977), 

311. English translation quoted from Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and 
trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 276. 
79 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 4; Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 81. 

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