The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century — Olga Ravn

Hello readers. I am sorry, again, for the delay. I was intending on posting this review in the weeks after Bali, but work got busy, and then in June, around my (cursed) birthday, I ended up in hospital for two weeks, and then spent many more weeks on the couch in recovery. That seemed like a good time to write a post, but alas, I had bought myself a Switch 2 as a little consolation prize and my brain just wanted to potato. So that is indeed what happened. Next thing I knew, I was back at work and in the vortex again, and everything felt like a lot, and I sort of just gave up. Sorry.

I’m OK, by the way. In 2010-12, I had three surgeries on my guts, which cured me of ulcerative colitis (which I’d had for 12 years) and replaced my large intestine with a new organ, called a J-pouch. It’s a pretty interesting and complex surgery, and one I was very worried about but ultimately survived and found that my life was drastically improved by. There was essentially a “before surgery” and “after surgery” era, which also marked my transition from a career in writing and editing to a career in technology (for better or worse).

In the 13 years since that surgery, everything seemed to be going well. It’s sort of hard to know, because with different insides, it’s not totally obvious if they’re working optimally. But I was healthy, lifting weights, running and cycling, and broadly living a normal life.

One thing that can happen, however, after any abdominal surgery, is adhesions. They’re a kind of scar tissue, and part of the body’s healing process, and can either be like sheets or fibrous strings, but are basically like cobwebs linking organs together. They can be problematic when they cause constrictions of those organs, but they are also hard to find because they don’t really show up on scans and can’t be observed from things like colonoscopies or sigmoidoscopies where the camera is inside the organs.

We don’t know for sure, but it seems like I had some adhesions and in combination with a bunch of food I didn’t quite chew well enough, ended up with a small bowel obstruction (I do not recommend this). TL;DR, I had a laparotomy and now have a rather large vertical scar down the middle of my abdomen.

Anyway, back to this book, where a different kind of visceral fleshiness ensues. I picked up The Employees in a bookstore in Brussels. Last year. Like literally a year ago. (FML I am bad at this whole reading-and-blogging thing.) I like metafiction (see: Interior Chinatown) and in my younger years, wrote my HSC major work in a very postmodern, metafiction style. And I like science fiction, literary fiction and experimental fiction, and only had a carry-on bag so its slender size was perfect.

It’s a fun little read. It felt relevant and timely. It grapples with ideas of human vs human-like androids, other intelligences and the mundanity of the modern workplace.

The story opens situated on a large spaceship, by way of reports from HR. We hear the feedback of a number of employees who work and live on the spacecraft that has acquired some new “Objects”, which appear to be not only alive, but somehow able to communicate with employees, via all sense including smell and taste. The crew of the craft (the Six-Thousand Ship) include both humans and humanoids, some sort of android, and the accounts are from both.

After reading the novel, I discovered that Ravn’s writing was inspired by a particular collection of works by artist Lea Gulditte Hestelund, which does make sense given the very visceral nature of the book. The book itself is fascinated by the objects and the narrative is crafted around them. They are described using smell, taste, touch as well as visually, and the prose is not very subtle in playing the attraction of the crew to the Objects as an uncomfortable mix of sexual, paternal/maternal, and obsessive. Hestelund’s artworks are crafted from marble, but clearly resemble sex toys and are often gently bound in leather harnesses, which evokes high-end fetish wear.

The crew of the Six-Thousand Ship encounter the objects that entrance, repel, attract and confuse them. Ultimately, the objects become a way in which the employees interrogate themselves and their humanity, their relationships to each other and to the concept of work. It is through the Objects that this interrogation unlocks a kind of mutiny, ultimately ending in tragedy. Androids and humans, confronted by the sensory, deep attraction to these mysterious objects, start to question the nature of their employment.

In the novel there is of course not art, only work. We meet people who believe and have been told that there is only work, there is no free time; there is sleep and work. It is a wonderful thing, at least that’s what they are told, so of course there isn’t any dreaming, there isn’t any art making, there isn’t falling in love, and touch is also almost out of the picture. When the employees on the ship get these different objects, from a planet called New Discovery, it is like these objects suddenly awaken love, nostalgia, dreams and maybe also a longing to connect with the world around them, in a way that only art can make you connect. 

Olga Ravn

And reader, I felt that. I felt the strange chasm that opens up between you and your job when you find something that really takes you, something that has no bearing on your ability to earn, but only on your ability to feel things. Perhaps that’s me with my little beep boop machines and my burgeoning interest in music-making. Maybe it’s you with your hobby.

Perhaps it’s work that forces us into a kind of soul-labour that really feels heavy. Zizek speaks about this in an extremely long and entertaining podcast interview, quoted:

“I think there is a big misunderstanding here which can be clarified even through Marx. The standard feminist line is that women shouldn’t be objectified. I don’t get it: isn’t the whole point of sexual desire that you are objectified?

We should learn from Marx here. Slaves or servants are not objectified; they are precisely, in a Marxist sense, pure subject. You just work; I don’t even notice you as a subject.

So something is deeply wrong here. I know what they mean by objectification: you reduce her to just an object, you sexually abuse, manipulate, but at the same time being object is the whole point of sexual attraction.

And I would give you proof: I am really proud of this analysis. In [cinema], the actor shouldn’t look directly into the camera. [They] can, but only if it’s a point of view shot. This holds for hardcore heterosexual traditional porn; the man is truly just an instrument. You usually don’t even see his face. The man just does it. The woman has to look all the time into the camera and express her satisfaction. So this is a very interesting feature which I think is even worse than objectification; you get the most horrible thing: fake and forced subjectivisation.

This tells us a lot. I read a complex claim that when you are a male chauvinist pig and you look at a hardcore sexual act, you don’t identify with the guy who is doing it. He is nobody; an instrument. You reduce yourself to your gaze, observing the woman’s enjoyment. You want to be sure that she enjoys, and that is her duty.

So this is a nice example of how being an object is by far not the worst thing. The much worse thing is enforced subjectivisation and this brings me to today’s capitalism.

In the good old times of more alienated capitalism, the worker is objectified. You work in the Ford car assembly factory and you just repeat the same mechanical gesture, blah blah blah. Now, with precarious work and all these more “creative” [jobs] you have something much worse: you are expected to get creative, engaged and so on but for a cause which is totally foreign to you. You don’t care about it. I find this much more oppressive.

I would almost prefer to be a worker in a big factory and just repeat some mechanical gestures. Why? Because it may be boring but it leaves your mind free.

Slavoj Zizek

It’s in the same way, I think, that Ravn takes these sort of suggestive, sexual objects, and instead of highlighting the obscenity of the relationship between the employees and the objects, turns the prism and instead shows the obscenity of the employees and the workplace. It’s pro-worker and I’m here for it.

If you’ll permit me another tangent; I’ve been thinking about the way we represent the workplace in contemporary media. Perhaps The Office is the canonical workplace story, satirising the management style of the modern workplace that emphasises positivity, wellness, fun and Mandatory Good Vibes that we subject employees to in addition to asking them to complete their typically mundane actual job duties. The Office sets the scene for the evolution of the cynical fictional workplace by laying

Most notably in recent years, Severance has offered us a glimpse into a world where a brain chip allows you to sever your work self from your outside-of-work self, promising the ultimate work/life balance, and in the process of doing so, allowing your mentally naive “innie” to be entirely subjugated by their employer. In the same way that Zizek understands it, your mind is still free… but at what cost?

I am also reminded of Mickey 17, Bong Joon Ho’s recent exploration of the future of work, sitting nicely alongside Snowpiercer and Parasite with its deeply dark take on the moral arc of late stage capitalism. In Mickey 17, Mickey (Robert Pattison) at the end of his luck, signs up to be an “expendable”, taking on dangerous work that often results in his own death, which is mitigated by the ability to 3D print a cloned version of himself as his own replacement.

With everyone quiet quitting (or loud quitting) over the recent years, perhaps against the backdrop of lockdowns etc, it has seemed like the world of work has really hit that late-stage-capitalism-era grind. The workers of The Employees aren’t so sure about it, after a taste of the ecstasy of art. Sometimes I wonder if it’s me that’s changed, or if it’s work that’s changed, or perhaps both? I’m never sure if I should try to retire so I can read, write and make music, or if work itself still holds some sort of of soul-value for me. For now, I think I’m going to keep trying to balance things, as much as one can balance 40+ hours a week with anything.

Anyway… I read this book a while ago. I want to get back into the rhythm of these posts. It’s a sad irony that the reason I couldn’t write sooner about the book I read while on holiday from work about a sort of revolution at work sparked by an encounter with art objects was because I had returned to work and didn’t have time to write about the art I was enjoying.

Take this as your sign to close the laptop and enjoy art.

Stray links and recommendations

• The Contingency Contingent by Leigh Claire la Berge at n+1

• Toward a theory of Kevin Roose by Albert Burneko at Defector

• Go see 28 Years Later. It’s great!

  • On the appearance of the Sycamore Gap Tree in the film

• Watch Flow. Made me cry.

• Thank Goodness You’re Here, a very silly, funny, surreal and quintessentially British game

• A Short Hike, a funny, sweet and very enjoyable low-stakes landscape puzzler with great dialogue and many side quests

• Zizek’s interview on Downstream