The Gym No. 17: Le corps de corp
Caveat: No actual economic theories or legal expertise were used in the making of this letter.
In recent months, many of the corporations that my UX design colleagues and I work for, whether directly or indirectly, made efforts to cut spending by laying off workers. In response, understandably, workers attempted to convince their corporations that they should stay.
They appealed with logic, complaining that it doesn’t make financial sense to lay off people who have valuable experience and skills, people who could in fact save the corporation money if the corporation would only listen to their ideas.
They pointed out injustices: the corporation changed the rules mid-game, the corporation says one thing and does another, the corporation isn’t reciprocating the employees’ commitment to the company.
They told stories, in slide decks upon slide decks. In virtual meetings with virtual jazz hands at the ready, they performed the stories of their value to the corporation—value as in dollars we assign to our own heads. So we know and yet we have a hard time acting in accordance with this knowledge: You can’t make a corporation care about you.
The corporation as a cohesive, individual body is a mirage, existing in legal definition alone. Smart people have been warning us against ceding our autonomy to it since the nineteenth century. Recently, people have been more worried about how artificial intelligence might turn on us—you know, like when the bot designed to make paper clips starts killing us just to harvest the metal from our fillings and artificial joints. But in fact, we’ve lived under a headless, algorithm-driven monster for two centuries. Not unlike the paper-clip bot, the corporation is programmed to do whatever it needs to do in pursuit of profitability, growth, and good performance in the market.
It may seem, at times, that the corporation cares about some of the things we care about. We tell ourselves the stories we need to hear, and these become collections of stories told in branding, corporate responsibility statements, diversity, equity, and inclusion statements, and the like. But they are stories told by people; a corporation cannot care. Deep down, we know this, or I hope we do. When the jazz hands splay, pink slips follow.
From a Gen-X lens, the magnitude of our selling out is profound, crushing. In Harper’s, Justin E. H. Smith writes of the great failure of our generation—that we couldn’t save youth culture, or anyone, from our biggest fear:
The horror of selling out no longer has any purchase at all, since the ideal of authenticity has been switched out for the hope of virality. We tried, and we failed, to save the world from our parents—that is, to reverse or at least slow down the degeneration of the hopes that they themselves had once cherished.
We failed because the OG algorithm had been in motion for a century and a half already, machining our collective behavior with the pull of the corporation’s relentless, cranking tides.
* * *
I do worry that a handful of us Gen Xers are the last people on Earth (oh, our culturally centric, hyperbolic ennui!) to unequivocally know, to feel, our non–digitally mediated and latchkey humanness as completely separate from the corporation and the commercial. The horror of selling out is as ever present in my life as my smartphone is, but I also know there are limits to that horror’s usefulness. Just as many 1990s movies will tell you, when in fact we are part of the machine, buying our flannels at Abercrombie, the Gen X sense of honor quickly degrades into self-torment.
If Gen X views commercialism as polluted waters whose perimeters they edge around, wary of dipping in a steel toe, younger generations inherently grok that it’s the water we all swim in. Traitors as they are (sorry not sorry!), Gen Z attention to self care and refusal to consign themselves fully to any company or commercial promise offer us another way to live inside the corporate machine.
That way to live, as summarized in a viral TikTok by @Hoodrat2Harvard, is “do your job and go the fuck home.”
* * *
All this is to say, the mainstream usage of “corporation” has been bugging the hell out of me. The American economic corporation is a total naming fail and a legal one, too. Its only relationship to bodies is manipulative. We, a body of individuals with bodies, each with an enigmatic embodied experience, are the corporation✨. Let’s reclaim the word.
Our corporation✨ is plural, morphic, and infinitely expansive. Its edges and criteria for membership constantly shift and flex, depending on our individual perceptions and time-space locations at any moment. They’re simultaneous, too, as we’re incorporated✨ all at once with our cells, our neighbors, all of humanity and beyond, in the mind-extending webs of our environments, natural and built.
At any moment, we are at once an inefficient band of gooey movers, a school of wayward fish, a garden of wonky flora, a hive mind, a gut flora, a root system, a language tree inclusive of the verbal and gestural, a neural network, an internet-of-things network, a network of beating hearts.
We, members of the corporation✨, are too hot, too tired, too hunched from sitting, too rigid from standing.
We share patterns of repeated movement because of how we work, where we live, and how we get around.
We fill our days off with physical activity to make up for all the being still.
We fill our days off with passive entertainment to make up for all the performing.
We’ve jammed our fingers after moving a light switch or changing a door knob. We’ve opened the wrong drawers after rearranging our kitchen.
We laugh too much at work, adopt uncharacteristic gestures during videoconferences, and touch our face too much at happy hour.
We move together and similarly, with our own grace notes:
Like the performers in the Trash Project, who swung the garbage carts around with individual flair, a small kick of the cart here, a thumb in the pocket there.
Like my friend Melissa, who swims Barton Springs like a mermaid, deep and undulating, because she grew up attending the underwater shows at Aquarena.
Like my friend Alice and I, who, decades ago, both dancers working at Starbucks for the health insurance, glided and darted between our coworkers in the narrow space behind the counter, not even needing to say “behind you” because we knew we could slip through—we’d danced in the corps de ballet.
Like all my neighbors who share the same 1970 floor plan, groping for the same walls in the dark.
We know singularly, and we know collectively, as an ever-shifting body of bodies. What do we know, when we allow ourselves, the corporation✨, to know it, in all the ways?
We’re all in. Membership dues are presence and care.
—Jonelle
