Dust of the Office

Martha Rosler’s Dust of the Office is a collection of HTML documents and supporting media focusing on the global biopolitics of control. The dominant themes are bodily confinement and surveillance in situations of highly rationalised, restricted office-cubicle life and battlefield terrain, and the concomitant internalisation of disciplinary strictures.

Dust of the Office evokes the bodily experiences of vast numbers of people around the world without suggesting that these experiences are equivalent: on the one hand, office or ‘knowledge’ workers – white-collar professionals, pink-collar secretarial workers, and those who fly on business – and on the other hand, the combatants and detainees, the individual actors on global stages of international conflict.

Philip K. Dick’s futurist novel Vulcan’s Hammer (1960), with its malevolent, post-apocalyptic, world-controlling computer that deploys death-dealing insect bots, appears alongside robotic flies and predator drones from the catalogues of modern-day war technology. As with other writing by Dick, Vulcan’s Hammer, as excerpted in Dust of the Office, also underscores the internalisation of disciplinary behaviours. Although the conditions of incarceration of Guantánamo and black-site detainees in the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT) cannot be equated with the confinement and regimentation of office workers, they represent the same impulses of regulation applied to different subject populations.

Fun, leisure, and entertainment as represented in Dust of the Office call to mind the eventful life imagined by the ‘salaried masses’ as the opposite of their stringent conditions of work: a sleek world of escapist glamour devoid – as Siegfried Kracauer explains – of the ‘dust of the everyday’. (In Kracauer’s analysis, industrial workers, at least in the Germany of the 1920s, still harboured hope for the transformation of work through communal labour struggles.)

It is part of the victimIn different sciences the term victim has different meanings. The term is most often use in criminology, religion, psychotherapy and New Age context ...’s symptomatology, perhaps, to fail to engender resistance or foment revolt; that would require an active renunciation of the status of victimIn different sciences the term victim has different meanings. The term is most often use in criminology, religion, psychotherapy and New Age context ..., a choice often confronted by Philip K. Dick’s hapless protagonists. Those imprisoned under the expanded reach of GWOT cannot be expected to bring about ‘regime change’. It is incumbent upon the rest of us to engineer that change.