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Passionate work and the good life: survival and affect after the recession

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Passionate work and the good life: survival and affect after the recession

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Passionate Work and the Good Life
Survival and Affect after the Recession

Renyi Hong

USC Graduate School
PhD, Communications
University of Southern California
August 2017

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ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines a contradiction: why and how are the narratives of passionate work
becoming more pervasive in the aftermath of the Great Recession? The financial crisis of 2008
had brought problems of wealth and income inequalities to the forefront of American public
discourse. Inequality was the theme of, to name some, the Occupy protests, Thomas Piketty’s
widely publicized book, Capital, Bernie Sander’s political campaign, and popular films like
Snowpiercer, The Hunger Games, and The Company Men. These varied cultural and political
reactions are significant because they unsettle the position of work as the symbolic center of the
good life, providing grounds for struggle and proletarianization.
But yet in what should be a moment of disillusionment, I argue that we can observe a
parallel dissemination in the cultures of passionate work. Focusing on subjects that are assumed
to reside outside the traditional boundaries of passionate work – the anxious unemployed, the
apathetic call center worker, and the lonely, detached freelancer – I demonstrate not just how
passionate work has become more pervasive as a culture, but also how its discourse had
transformed to become less romantic and more therapeutic. These populations are encouraged to
follow their passions precisely because of the existing problems of the economy; unlike the
conventional idea where passion is developed as route to happiness, passion is mobilized here as
means of enabling subjects to be shielded, at least partially, from psychic drain of economic
uncertainty and income scarcity.
Using a mix of methods across four contexts – management texts, career guides,
gamification software, and coworking spaces – I indicate the stakes involved in the study of
passionate work cultures. Passion is encouraged for the unemployed so that they might retain the
energy to continue with their job hunts and avoid falling into the quagmire of long term
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unemployment; call center workers stuck in boring dead-end jobs are provided gamification
software to zone out but yet remain productive, thereby retaining a fantasy of possible
advancement even as they are working on something brain numbing; and freelancers whose
middle-classed statuses are threatened are provided with the camaraderie and aesthetic pleasures
expected of desirable jobs so that they might find means of pushing back against the stresses of
impending class slippage. Cultures of passionate work thus recuperates ideas of the good life
even as they gesture towards changes in its shape and form.
This dissertation aims to expand the critical conversations that are currently undergoing
in the fields of labor and affect, expanding on the ways we can think about passionate work.
Taking seriously the political potential found in this historic moment, it attempts to provide a
different opening to how passion can be articulated, and the good that labor can do towards
opening a different imaginary of survival and solidarity.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are so many to thank with a project like this. I am most grateful to my dear advisor Sarah
Banet-Weiser for being supportive and encouraging of my work all the way. This dissertation is,
in a sense, very much hers as well; it began in her office one day talking about possible research
along the lines of “affective labor”. Thank you for believing in my work and for helping me
explore how this line of inquiry can develop. To my committee members: Larry Gross, Henry
Jenkins, and Mike Ananny: my utmost thanks for reading through my drafts and for
brainstorming how these chapters can develop. I had each of you in mind as I was working on
the chapters and your influence is imprinted in the words you read. Other mentors – Josh Kun,
Andrew Lakoff, and Tara McPherson – you were all crucial to my intellectual development and
this eventual dissertation. I am blessed to have so many wonderful teachers and I hope I had
done all of you proud.
Many peers had also played a crucial role in this dissertation. Lin Zhang, it has been my deepest
fortune to have you as a friend. I knew that you were going to be a thought companion when our
first conversation over coffee wandered to a critique of Empire. Tisha Demanjee, thank you for
roping me into the lovely dissertation writing group. In retrospect, it must have been traumatic
for everyone – Samantha Close, Raffi Sarkissian, Kelly Song, Diana Lee, and you – to go
through my lengthy chapters! But everyone did it bravely and meticulously. Thank you so much.
This dissertation was much improved because of all your inputs. Also to Aaron Trammell, I am
endlessly grateful for your inputs in my work. You had been a part of this dissertation more than
what you might have envisioned.
This dissertation took a hard and joyful three years to write and it would not have been possible
if not for the caring labor of loved ones along the way. So many thanks are due here. Komathi
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ALE, Mina Park, Cynthia Wang, Charlie and Paula Brown, Jin Huang, Nahoi Koo, Joshua Clark,
Flemming Rhode, and Wei Wang, each of you have contributed to the support, sustenance, and
care of me and my work in those three years. Thank you for making this dissertation experience
one littered with memories of friendship and love.
Thank you also to USC Graduate school and Annenberg for giving me the time and opportunity
to work on this project from a distance. Thank you especially to Peter Monge and Sarah
Holterman for ensuring that my funding for the project is in order. And to all who have
graciously offered their time to talk to me, and to discuss these topics, thank you very much.
I started on the first chapter of my dissertation right after the birth of my firstborn. Ariel, whom I
still have a video of holding a 1930 management text walking around. You had made my life
significantly harder, but also endlessly more wonderful and memorable. Further, thank you to
both my partner Jinny’s and my parents for being so supportive of us this whole time. I truly
appreciate the sacrifices that everyone had taken to support the writing of my dissertation. I want
to also thank my Lord for helping me hang on during the tough times. As everything, Your mark
is on this dissertation as well.
Last, but most important: I want to thank my constant companion, Jinny, who took so many
personal sacrifices to give me the opportunity, space, and energy to work on my dissertation.
Your love has been the greatest gift, and words fail to describe the gratitude that I have for you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Passionate Work and the Good Life 1
Chapter 1: From Happiness to Passion 25
Chapter 2: Jobless and Resilient 64
Chapter 3: The Compassionate Imagination 120
Chapter 4: Digital Suspension 172
Chapter 5: Urban Preserves 203
Conclusion: Passionate Openings 258
References 266
Appendix 308

1
Introduction: Passionate Work and the Good Life
Among the 47,361 employees surveyed in 120 countries worldwide, 25% report life
ratings high enough to put them in the thriving group. Among engaged workers, however,
the figure rises to 45%, while among those who are actively disengaged, just 13% are
thriving… There is much that managers and leaders can do to help employees around the
globe feel like they have good jobs -- and therefore good lives.

“A Good Job Means a Good Life” by Gallup Polls (2011)

Finding passion for one’s work is often described as a positive ideal. It is commonly held
in relation to the good life, something which hinges on the uncomplicated desire that work might
provide human life with purpose, financial well-being, and success. Richard Sennett (2008) has
described this as an instinct, or that the ethos of an artisan craftsman, “the desire to do a job well
for its own sake” is “an enduring, basic human impulse” (p. 9). However, he laments that this
yearning had been thwarted by modern conditions of work. Extrinsic motivations, such as the
competition for jobs, had made it difficult for workers to experience the pleasure that comes
from the mastery of creative skills. “Competition has disabled and disheartened workers,”
Sennett (2008) writes, “and the craftsman’s ethos of doing good work for its own sake is
unrewarded or invisible” (p. 37).
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Such longing stems from a longer lineage of intellectual thought, of whom one influential
figure is the young Karl Marx. Commenting on early works of Marx, Thomas Henricks (2006)
notes that “in the Marxian vision of the good life, people participate together in communities on

1
Sennett here is considering the other aspect of the equation in his mentor’s Hannah Arendt’s work. Rejecting her
thesis that only the homo faber is to able to “think,” he offers that the model of craftsman would be able to recover
this thoughtful process to labor even for the animal laboran, an individual who may not have the complete
ownership of the labouring process.
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terms of relative equality” (p. 36). Equality here is situated in terms of the ability to labor
according to the human will; in this world, labor “expresses the special privilege of human
beings to transform freely the conditions of their existence.” Like Sennett, this notion is built on
the model of “the craftsman and artist”: “the objects we create and the tools we use – not only
reflect the human abilities we share with others but also provide the basis for our public lives
together” (Henricks, 2006, p. 37).
These humanist visions describe the ennobling possibility of labor: the view that work
executed in line with one’s passions will realize our creative capacities and contribute towards
building a better social world. Certainly there are qualifications as to what Sennett and Marx
would endorse as passionate work. Neither, as the general overture of their scholarship suggest,
would support a model of craftsmanship that obtains passion at the cost of exploitation and a
precarious existence (Marx, 1867/1995; Sennett, 1996).
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Both have also produced highly
influential and critical accounts of capitalism. Yet, their visions, rooted in the notion of an
authentic inner life expressible through labor, indicates the persistence of passionate work as a
cultural imaginary for how the intricacies of everyday life is to be negotiated.
This vision of passion should be familiar to the contemporary reader. After all, as Miya
Tokumitsu relates, the media today is replete with images that project “pictures of work... as this
blissful thing” (Lam, 2015). A cursory search on a search engine would yield an assortment of
strategies to find your passion, with sites as diverse as Forbes, wikiHow, Tiny Buddha and
Lifehack providing their own twist on how passion may be found and capitalized on. It is also the
case that celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos have been ardent evangelists
of the passionate work ethos. The commencement speech delivered by the late Jobs at Stanford

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This is noticeable especially in Marx’s shift towards a structural explanation of capitalism in his later books.
3
University which admonished listeners to “do what you love,” remains one of the most popular
inspirational talks on Youtube, having accumulated over 26 million views at the time of writing
(Stanford, 2008). Such advice has since been developed into an aphorism that is repeated
endlessly within self-help literature, TED talks, inspirational quotes, and routine career advice.
The demand for passion has produced its own set of anxieties. The documentary One
Week Job, directed by Ian Mackenzie, features Sean Aiken, a young college graduate trying to
discover his passion by experimenting with 52 different jobs (Mackenzie, 2010). Aiken (2010)
explains that he was motivated by a common fear that young graduates have: “It wasn’t just the
thought of routine that scared me but the idea of not having passion in my life. Life without
passion meant finding trivial ways to pass the time.” To avoid this fate, Aiken tried a new job
every week, hoping that the process of experimentation would land him on a job he loves. Aiken
here voices the threat that a culture of passion brings: if passion is pathway to a meaningful life,
the absence must crystallize its opposite. This concern of a trivial existence has since birthed a
two year college program which prioritizes the discovery of passions over the attendance of
institutionalized academic courses (Wayfinding Academy, 2016). Aiming to “revolutionize
higher education,” the Wayfinding Academy hopes customize a curriculum directed towards the
interests of their students so that they might be geared to “live life on purpose.” There are also
other sources of help. Those hoping to forge a passionate career may turn to reviews of
companies in databases like Glassdoor and CareerBliss. This is the explicit purpose of
CareerBliss whose mission is to empower “you to choose happy” by ranking companies based
by on their “bliss scores” (CareerBliss, 2017).
At the same time, major corporations have become more involved in attracting and
developing passionate employees, especially since the 2000s. Companies like Zappos and
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Google have pushed this trend by creating the position of the Chief Happiness Officer, the
newest member to the C-suite whose “job is to spearhead different initiatives to make people
happier in the workplace” (Kjerulf, 2015). Others like Amazon have initiated “pay to quit”
policies, a scheme which offers a nominal sum for unpassionate employees to voluntarily resign
so that the company may be left with a more committed staff (Taylor, 2014). Those applying to
top job positions will also need to demonstrate some evidence of passion, usually represented as
voluntary work in a non-profit organization (Rivera, 2016).
And yet there is something more to “passionate work” that makes it tricky to define. The
outpouring of grief at the death of Steve Jobs - the makeshift shrines, memorial candles screened
through iPhones, the video testimonies testifying of his impact - gestures towards how passionate
work functions as culture: a language, aesthetic, narrative, practice, and ideology that resists a
straightforward definition. As Aaron Sorkin (Wallace-Wells, 2015) and Alex Gibney (Zeitchik,
2015) suggest in their biographical portrayals of Steve Jobs, Jobs’s endorsement of passion is
most effectively expressed not through words but through design. Many distinctive aesthetic
qualities of Apple products - its curvilinear rectangles, user-friendly interfaces, translucent cases,
and its playful form - is publicly attributed to Job’s drive for design perfection (Isaacson, 2012).
“We all participate in the world Jobs created,” writes Meghan O’Rourke (2011). Our affective
attachments to Apple products bring us into contact with Jobs and the mythology of his passion,
his insistence that “people with passion can change the world” (Gallo, 2015).
This is why, O’Rourke (2011) suggests, that so many have mourned the death of Jobs: we
grieve the death of man who had come to be a cultural symbol. Jobs “came to represent
something about the real possibility of change within a lifetime… whom pursuing tech-geeky
passion translated into extraordinary wealth and influence” (O’Rourke, 2011). But Jobs
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embodies more than a narrative of meritocratic success. In light of financial crisis and the
unscrupulous Wall Street bankers who have profited off people’s misery, Thomas Streeter
(2015) states that Jobs represents a vision of “good capitalism”: “a capitalism with integrity, a
capitalism where…. one’s inner life, one’s flaws, one’s passions are appreciated and lead to good
things” (p. 3119). Passion can serve as a cultural model of what good capitalism can bring; it can
bring us closer to a validation of our abilities, and convince us - following the humanist visions
of labor - of a world which our productive, passionate energies can improve without structural
change.
Cultures of Passionate Work
I came to examine the cultures of passionate work because I was interested and dismayed
at how contemporary forms of labor have become more affective and exploitative at the same
time. As Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) explains, the shift towards post-Fordism had engendered a
different logic of oppression. While the primary criticism of Fordism had been its experience of
alienation, the soul-sucking quality of factory work and assembly lines, the work provided by the
“New Economy” in the 1990s appeared to offer its opposite. The growing creative and
technology industry of the late 20th century, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter (2009)
observed, embraced rather than rejected the refusal of work as a philosophy. Instead of denying
workers their autonomy, or swamping them with bureaucracy and hierarchy, these companies
forged a post-Fordist work ethos which encouraged workers to freely express themselves, build
team relationships, and blur their spheres of leisure and work. Work in this regime strived to a
space for pleasure, intimacy, and personal identification, believing also that those qualities would
be best positioned to draw out the human qualities most valued in those industries: lengthy
creative and affective labor hours, and the relational capital of workers (Morini & Fumagalli,
6
2010).
By now there exists a considerable body of work which had addressed the problematics
of this work ethos. Studies of cultural workers, in particular, have highlighted how this such
autonomy is exchanged for short term precarious work contracts, lengthy hours, low or
fluctuating wages, pressures to keep one’s skills relevant, and the need to juggle multiple jobs to
make a decent wage (Ashton, 2011; Cohen, 2012; Duffy, 2013; Dyer-Witheford & Peuter, 2006;
Gill & Pratt, 2008; McRobbie, 2016; Peuter, 2011; Ross, 2003). As David Hesmondhalgh and
Sarah Baker (2010) have indicated, the freedom that characterizes creative work is at best
“complicated” and “ambivalent.” While many cultural workers do enjoy a certain degree of
autonomy and creative pleasure in their work, many are also subject, willingly or unwillingly, to
the problematics characterized of post-Fordist work. And this critique is not limited to
professionalized cultural workers alone. Development in the technological capacities of
crowdsourcing, videocasting, and the popularization of entrepreneurialism and internships
amongst others, have normalized this means of accumulation, and therefore, of its exploitation:
tapping into our affect and aspirations to get labor that is lowly or unremunerated, with little or
no job security (Fast, Örnebring & Karlsson, 2016; Hong, 2013; Perlin, 2012; Terranova, 2000).
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The critique has seeped into public discourse. Tokumitsu, Newport, Jachimowicz, and
McNerney, amongst others, have written eloquent accounts against passion on platforms like The
Atlantic (Lam, 2015), Jacobin (Tokumitsu, 2014) Washington Post (Jachimowicz & McNerney,
2015) and Harvard Business Review (Newport, 2012). Following one’s passion has been
publicly denounced as an alibi for overworking employees (Tokumitsu, 2015), and for producing
a “bruising workplace,” a work culture that expels all but the most passionate employees - one is

3
See Mark et al. (2014) for a review of the various issues surrounding digital labour.
7
willing to devote all their energies to the organization (Kantor & Streitfeld, 2015). The
individualistic fulfilment assumed in passion has also been described as fallacious. Jonathan
Malesic (2015), for instance, recently took issue with a popular venn diagram used in TED talks
that displayed four overlapping circles - representing respectively passion, wage, purpose, and
skill - with the word “dream job” located at its center. Labelling a portion that is covered by
passion, purpose, and skill, but short of a wage, with the term “exploitation”, Malesic (2015)
indicates the problems that exist in these zones of partial exclusion. This is a “forbidden
conversation topic,” he writes, but blind faith in the passionate work advice is dangerous because
most who follow their passion have to take a cut to their income. “Even in the best of economic
times, people rarely find remunerative work that they also love,” he offers, and high paying
dream jobs have become even rarer after the recession.
At the risk of simplifying this complex and important field of scholarship, I propose that
one underlying assumption of critiques - even if hesitatingly proffered due to the complexities of
human agency - is that people have, to varying degrees, been seduced into the fantasy of
passionate work. The problem, following the logic of exchange or the shift from Fordism to post-
Fordism, is that people have “traded in” their wages, time, job security (ideals assumed of
Fordism) for a fantasy of passionate work or self-exploitative pleasure. As Andrew Ross (2008)
writes of the exploitation of creative workers, “As far as corporate conduct went, it is fair to say
that one hand gave while the other took. In return for giving up the tedium of stable employment,
there is the thrill of proving yourself by finding out if you have what it takes” (pp. 35-6). The
unfairness of the exchange lies in how pleasure is used to trap individuals in exploitative labor
conditions.
There is certainly such a quality to cultures of passionate work. But I also noticed
8

Figure 1. Passion has become an art commodity (Hustle + Grind, 2017)
Figure 2. Criticism of the “dream job” (Malesic, 2015)
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something else as I began my examination of passionate work cultures: a different language to
passionate work where people are asked to follow their passions precisely because of the existing
problems of the economy. Further, what struck me was how expansive and transformed this
discourse was after the Great Recession. While it was common to hear of passionate work advice
for cultural workers, this discourse was becoming more prevalent for subjects who we would
typically not associate to as passionate workers: newly retrenched unemployed individuals, call
center workers, and people forced into the precarious work of freelancing. And the discourse
itself was also transformed. Though it still encouraged workers to follow their passions, its tone
was less romantic and more pragmatic. Very often, passion was mobilized as means of enabling
subjects to be shielded, at least partially, from psychic drain of economic uncertainty and income
scarcity. Instead of positioning passion as a cause for exploitation, this discourse described
passionate work as its solution, a means of allowing individuals to survive and overcome their
difficult circumstances.
This dissertation is an attempt at grappling with this aspect of passionate work cultures: a
culture that is not only becoming, as I argue, more invasive and economically relevant, but also
more likely to absorb its own critiques as reason for its necessity. I use the term “passionate
work” to describe a cultural context for labor, an emotional orientation that people have to
negotiate with in the course of their work. This affective element share similarities with what
Arlie Hochschild (1983) has called an “aspiration to feel,” but whereas Hochschild has
positioned this concept squarely on the personal desire of individuals to experience a particular
set of emotions, I understand this concept as an affective structure, a particular emotional stance
that subjects are made to turn towards because it has acquired the logic of being the way to the
good life.
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“Passionate work cultures” then refers to the various administrations, techniques, objects,
bodies, and discourses that are united by the passionate work dispositif. This may include the use
of computer software that promises to make work feel more like a game or architectural motifs
which imbue workplaces with aestheticized symbols of cool. The pervasiveness of passionate
work, however, does not mean that one would have to be passionate in order to be considered a
subject addressed by the discourse. In fact, it is my argument that rather than to use passionate
feelings as a barometer of success in interpellation (whether subjects are successfully made
‘passionate subjects,’ ‘duped’ or ‘bought in’), it is more important to highlight the variance and
utility in what the discourse of passionate work aims for within different encounters. Apparatuses
developed for call center workers, for instance, may rely on the same broader ideas of passionate
work, but have different expected results for them as opposed to Silicon Valley executives. As
orientation and structure, passionate work aims for different outcomes amongst different classed
subjects. It allows for multiple forms of recognition while maintaining passion as a good norm
for all to follow.
Some readers might dispute if it is accurate to define passionate work as culture rather
than feeling, and to associate the unemployed, call center workers, and freelancers to the
youthful, hip ‘do what you love’ movement characteristic of passionate work. I draw the
definition of culture here from Raymond Williams (1979), who describes culture as neither
isolated nor static. Culture can function, he explains, as a structure of feeling, a “pattern of
impulses, restraint, tones” which whilst having general organization, can vary for different
communities according to the specific conditions of their lived experience (p. 159). I have
chosen to characterize these individual phenomena as passionate work cultures because they
share a similar fundamental ideology: that work can offer an affective sense of pleasure which
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can also grant material rewards, including that of income mobility, happiness, status and so on.
Though the specific experience and expectations of passion may vary, they are united by the
recuperation in the optimism of work.
In thinking about passionate work, it is also important to avoid thinking of it as a form of
cultural appropriation, as “capital descending on authentic culture,” channeling personal desire
towards capital’s purposes (Terranova, 2013, p. 38). Tiziana Terranova (2013) challenges this
notion of an authentic culture harnessed by the economy, noting that all culture is always already
located within capitalist processes. Given this, she offers, it is more accurate to understand this
process as an “immanent process of channeling collective labor (even as cultural labor) into
monetary flows and its structuration within capitalist business practices.” (Terranova, 2013, p.
38).
Terranova (2013) makes an important point here. As Vivianna Zelizer (2005) tells us, the
economy and intimacy have long been thought of as separate spheres that would come into
contamination if they came into contact with one another. Part of this is influenced by the
gendered binaries of sentiment and rationality: the belief that feminine sentiment is endowed
with a quality of purity that risks corruption by masculine rationality and economic calculation
(Folbre, 2009). Consequently, an artificial binary between an authentic laboring self and a
capitalist process also upholds the fantasy of passionate work. As Kathi Weeks (2011)
rhetorically offers, “Why work less if work in its unalienated form as socialized production is the
expression of and means to self-creation?” If one believes in the dignity of unalienated labor (i.e.
passionate work), then critiques will always only aim to adjust and recover work, as opposed to
questioning the centrality of work as a norm in the present.
There is a need to resist this binary, but we also need to consider the different ways
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culture and the economy may intersect. While Terranova (2013) resists the artificial separation
between culture and economy, her conceptualization still indicates the primacy of a model where
culture is monetized by capitalism. Although culture is understood to be a part of capital, its
operation still involves “channeling [culture]… into monetary flows” (p. 38). However, if we
understand culture and the economy as inherently intertwined, then it is also possible to
conceptualize culture as operating from the opposite direction: where culture is understood a
response to the economy. Recognizing this dynamism is crucial towards understanding why
passionate work is getting more invasive and relevant in the present. How is it that passionate
work can maintain its relevance despite the growing problems of precarity and income scarcity?
And why is it that passionate work might be articulated to the subjects who are deemed to be, by
virtue of their job situation, to be the most dispassionate in his historical moment?
To answer those questions, it is important to not read passionate work cultures simply in
the vein of youthful countercultures but as affective structures that dictate how life is to be led
happily and well despite economic hardship. As I elaborate, passionate work involves more than
just the ‘seduction’ of workers and the capture of surplus value; it also gestures towards a culture
where passion is increasingly presented as an emotional stance that is crucial towards surviving
the hardships of the neoliberal present. This may appear contradictory: after all, the ethic of
passionate work has often been critiqued as being the cause for normalizing the characteristics of
‘bad jobs’ (Kalleberg, 2011), whether it be in terms of the wage, job security, or the ethic of
overwork. So then, how did passion come to become its solution? One reason, I offer, is that as
passion became more a part of a normalized post-Fordist affect, it also started to subtly shift
ideas about what the good life should encompass, and the priorities that people should hold. And
within this shift, it became possible for passion to be presented as an affect that could bring
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people closer to their desired forms of selfhood - a resilient subject capable of managing
economic disappointment and hardship.
The Naturalization of Desire
Before developing this, however, one might ask: why passion as opposed to terms like
‘happiness’ or ‘engagement’? Indeed, it is the case that the semiotics of passion are refracted
through many alternate terms: words like happiness, engagement, love, bliss, purpose, and
calling. Each suggest at how work can be a source of fulfilment, and they jointly describe a
positive inclination towards work. Yet, each term has its own genealogy and subtle differences.
In the first chapter (From Happiness to Passion), I consider how ‘happiness’ carries the
meanings of contentment and satisfaction which were deemed to be unfavorable to the
possibility of self-actualization in the mid-20th century. In this aspect, I offer that it is the
contemporary usage of passion, characterized by an energetic pursuit of desire that is most
relevant to the discourses of work available today. As Oxford English Dictionary defines it,
passion is “an intense desire or enthusiasm for something; the zealous pursuit of an aim”; passion
is, Reynold Lawrie (1980) writes, characterized by intensity and urgency, an active desire of
something.
Passion opens up inquiry into desire and the energetics that comprise it. Besides leading
us to ask what and why the desired something is, it also brings us to inquire about how the desire
appears in the first place. As several philosophers have remarked, the word “passion” embodies
the quandary of the passive/active, irrational/rational complex (Dixon, 2006; du Bois, 2003;
James, 1997; Terada, 2001). Although the contemporary use of passion implies activity, its Latin
roots (passio) connotes a form of suffering and endurance which is passive. Christian thinkers
and philosophers prior to the 17th century had understood passions primarily as external forces
14
arriving on the body that led one involuntary acts. (Dixon, 2006; James, 1997). Susan James
(1997) for example, remarked that Aristotle had considered passions to be passive because they
are "responses that have to be provoked in us by external things and as states that we suffer. We
do not have the power to experience passions unaided, but must wait on circumstances to excite
them." (p. 42). When insulted, for instance, we feel angry despite our wish to feel otherwise.
Anger becomes registered on our body, with flushes and heavy breathing. Even if
countermeasures are adopted to calm ourselves down, anger still displays its powerful effects on
us. As such, passions were likened to maladies that came upon individuals, hindering them from
acting according to their will and achieving their potential.
But beginning from the 17th century, passions started to become signs of a person’s
authentic inner self-motivations: “Instead of being reactions to invasions from something
external to the self,” Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (1982) writes, “passions became the very
activities of the mind, its own motions. So transformed they become proper motives, and along
with desires, the beginnings of actions” (p. 159). Rorty (1982) points out how the semiotics of
passion had coincided with the development of a modern self, where emotions were understood
to serve as a guide towards one’s true motive and desire, as opposed to an external force that
requires resisting. This gradually resulted in a replacement of the word “passion” with “emotion”
in public use, and the normalization of a modern self where individuals were understood to be
sovereign, and that emotions represented the interior, self-contained nature of subjects (Dixon,
2006; Terada, 2001). This collapse between emotions and self is described by Teresa Brennan
(2004) to be crucial to the development of Western individualism: “our self-contained individual
believes he acts of his own accord, and that his impulse and desires come from nowhere other
than the history embodied in his genes" (Brennan, 2004, p. 77).
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The injunction to “find your passion” showcases this fantasy of self-contained interiority:
the assumption that the object of passion is contained within oneself and that emotional
knowledge can confirm the reality of an external object as one’s natural, biologically engineered,
pursuit. A person reflecting on this question, for instance, may describe a liking for fiction as a
unique attribute of the self, which is then accompanied with autobiographical reasons for the
reality of this passion. People might recall the time they first felt overjoyed writing a story, the
pride they felt when they were commended for their effort, and the affirmation provided to them.
The question then becomes a source of reflexive selfhood, a moment where emotional
knowledge is both sourced and verified as a basis for genetic identity.
In thinking about passionate work, we can think through this history of interiorization,
where desire becomes symbolic of one’s true self as opposed to something accounted for through
struggle. Passion for work, Franco Berardi (2009) reminds us, is not a biologically natural want,
but an outcome of intervention into the fields of desire. What then might be the invisible
histories of our want for passionate work? One of the primary purposes of this dissertation is to
highlight how desire is transposable and transmutable: that one population’s desire can become
the desire of another population and that the history of this relationship becomes invisible once
passions becomes imputed as a sign of a ‘true self’. In this dissertation, I ask: what modalities
does the discourse of passionate work manifest? What does the discourse do, and how does it
transform subjects? Further, how does passion for work appear as a commonsense desire? From
whose perspective is passion made to be what is desired? And what are the consequences when
the desires of someone else is made symbolic of the desire of us all?
The goodness of passionate work functions as cultural truism because of its ambiguity; it
clusters many different promises - career success, financial returns, spiritual achievement, career
16
satisfaction, amongst others - while remaining vague about them so that people can transact with
it without being clear about what its returns will be. Breaking down what we want from labor can
then open the possibility of rearticulating passion as a political force. Politics is passionate: it is
passion that brings us into solidarity, and passion that drives us to make change (Gould, 2009;
Hall, 2002; Walzer, 2002). If passion could be understood as an external force, we have the
possibility of anchoring passion down on new things, or old optimisms in new ways; new
possibilities for attachment are possible if one does not assume that passion is fixed and
unchanging. Passionate work has often been positioned as an individual project, but instead of
talking about a passionate self, we might speak of a passionate ideal, an ideal which is
collectively shared, inherited from generation to another as a joint project. This offers us freedom
in how our passions may be materialized while holding on to a collective desire that can slowly
take shape.
Passion in a Moment of Disenchantment
Examining the cultures of passionate work at this historical moment may seem like a
contradiction. After all, this is one of the most protracted periods of economic disappointment in
America’s history. Four years after the Great Recession, 56% of Americans in PEW (2015)
surveys still express unhappiness and concerns about economic conditions of the country. There
is widespread anxiety about the lack of savings, low income, and the insecurity of retirement
(Currier & Elmi, 2016). Consequently, the optimistic trust in the American Dream, especially of
income and class mobility, has come under crisis (Cooper, 2015; Putnam, 2015). As a PEW
(2015) report offers, “In 2009, nearly 4 in 10 Americans said they felt it was common for a
person to start poor, work hard, and become rich. Five years later, that number had declined to
23 percent.” This is not surprising given the “opportunity gap,” the difficulty young adults have
17
in moving up the social ladder (Putnam, 2015): rates of real wage growth has averaged less than
1 percent annually since 1973 for most of the population (Kalleberg, 2011). In fact, the difficulty
of maintaining livelihoods and servicing college debts had seemingly eschewed this want for
income mobility. In PEW surveys, 92% of respondents had chosen financial security over the
possibility of getting a larger income (The PEW Charitable Trusts, 2015). Contrary then to the
description of a neoliberal subject who is driven to take risks with their career so as to exercise
their passions, the economic downturn had appeared to signal a return to older values of stability
and prudence.
Although the present economic situation can be traced back to the beginnings of
neoliberalism in the 1970s (Harvey, 2005), the Great Recession had marked an important
historical moment where issues related wealth and income inequalities had came to occupy the
forefront of public discourse in the United States. It was the theme of Occupy protests, Thomas
Piketty’s widely publicized book, Capital, Bernie Sander’s political campaign, and popular films
like Snowpiercer, The Hunger Games, and The Company Men. These varied reactions have
placed the theme of wealth inequality and hardship at the center of American consciousness and
its effects have had far reaching, complex consequences - even Donald Trump’s presidential win
has been attributed to his ability to tap into the resentment of the former middle-class and the
white working-class (CBS This Morning, 2016; Schilling, 2016).
But disaffection with the economy also presents an opportunity for proletarization and
struggle (Dyer-Witheford, 2015). The long economic lull had allowed more people to grapple
with the problems of neoliberalism, giving them time to reflect and analyze how lives have been
affected by the ideologies of advanced capitalism (Woodward, 2009). The emergent protest
movements in the last decade, including that of Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the Women’s
18
March, have heightened the awareness of different economic and civil right issues (Schram,
2015) and enabled the networking of different struggles, forming alliances with an eye towards
how capitalism has a totalizing effect on human life. Consider CNN’s observation of the
heterogeneity of political claims pushed at the Washington Women’s March: “Some were there
advocating for Black Lives Matter movement while others aimed to bring attention to
reproductive rights. Some focused on the fight for equal pay and their opposition to the rollback
of former President Barack Obama's healthcare law” (Reston, 2017). While the multiplicities of
priorities may obstruct the instrumental benefit of putting up a united political front, its
messiness enables an affective sense of solidarity within diversity, allowing the gradual
formation of “an ever greater mass of opposition to capitalist accumulation” (Dyer-Witheford,
2015, p. 30)
Berardi (2009) addresses the political potential of disenchantment at the conclusion of his
text, The Soul at Work. After writing extensively about how the desires of workers have been
directed to capital, he ends optimistically, relating the “crash in the global economy” to an effect
of the “bursting of the work bubble”: “We have been working too much during the last five
centuries, this is the simple truth. Working so much has implied an abandonment of vital social
functions and a commodification of language, affections, teaching, therapy and self-care” (p.
213). From this perspective, the crash provides us pause to rethink how life should be led outside
the normative demands of work. More people, he offers, will become creative in creating “extra-
economic networks of survival” as a means of resisting the compulsory demand to work and
survive:
In the days to come, politics and therapy will be one and the same. The people will feel
hopeless and depressed and panicked, because they can't deal with the post-growth
19
economy and they will miss our dissolving modern identity. Our cultural task will be to
attend to these people and to take care of their trauma showing them the way to pursue
the happy adaptation at hand. Our task will be the creation of social zones of human
resistance, zones of therapeutic contagion. Capitalism will not disappear from the global
landscape, but it will lose its pervasive, paradigmatic role in our semiotization, it will
become one of possible form of social organization. Communism will never be the
principle of a new totalization, but one of the possible forms of autonomy from capitalist
rule." (Berardi, 2009, p. 220)
Negativity need not always be negative if it can be directed towards new subversive
imaginaries. In line with a Marxian concept of struggle, Berardi (2009) suggests that the negative
feelings of hopelessness, depression, panic, can be channelled towards political awakening and
resistance. This represent what Paolo Virno (1996) has called the “neutral kernel” of
disenchantment, the lines of political potential which disenchantment can be channelled to. The
“big bang of a social movement starts with the transformation of emotion into action,” Manuel
Castells (2012) writes, and negativity can be the spur of political demand.
This is the source of Peter Fleming’s (2015) impatience at the “love thesis”: the “premise
that capitalist organizations today aim to woo their workforces in order to get what they want
from us.” Fleming (2015) argues that while there is an ideological basis for this critique, its
acceptance assumes, first, the earnestness of corporations and managers to make workers happy,
and, second, the success of its interpellation. Such an assumption is not only mostly untrue (there
are few managers who are truly sold on the love thesis), it also makes invisible the deceit
involved in corporate ideology. “Contemporary work is nothing like a love relationship,” he
writes. Workers are often coerced into working, and managers are there primarily to exercise
20
discipline, deciding on when workers will be cut. Therefore, Fleming (2015) argues that it is
crucial to adopt the perspectives of those at the underbelly of the love thesis - “unwilling slaves,
management enmity and most of all, abandonment” - since they reflect the cracks in ideological
indoctrination and the potential for struggle.
But what if abandonment, instead of being a result of passionate work cultures, function
as a cause and rationale for its circulation instead? While both Berardi (2009) and Fleming
(2015) view abandonment as cutting through the falsity of the passionate work promise, I
suggest that the process is more complex and ambivalent. It is true, as public critiques of
passionate work have shown, that there is a growing disillusionment about the advice to follow
one’s passion. But in the wake of Great Recession, there exists also an alternate vein of
passionate work cultures which adopt the openings that Berardi (2009) himself claims. Those
passionate cultures are therapeutic, sympathetic and inclusive towards those abandoned by
capital. Turning to therapy, and recognizing the difficulties in realizing the American Dream,
these variant passionate work cultures have reimagined notions of the good life and reattached
individuals to work as a means to survival and human expression.
In the following chapters, I illustrate several of these cultural forms. The objects I look at
include career guidance literature (chapter 2), gamification software (chapter 3&4) and urban
coworking workspaces (chapter 5). The discourse in each of these spaces addresses a particular
manifestation of disappointment, and provides its solution in form of a return to passion so that
people might cultivate the resilience required in hardship. Passion is encouraged for the
unemployed so that they might retain the energy to continue with their job hunts and avoid
falling into the quagmire of long term unemployment (chapter 2); call center workers stuck in
boring dead-end jobs are provided gamification software to zone out but yet remain productive,
21
thereby retaining a fantasy of possible advancement even as they are working on something brain
numbing (chapter 3&4); and freelancers whose middle-classed statuses are threatened are
provided with the camaraderie and aesthetic pleasures expected of desirable jobs so that they
might find means of pushing back against the stresses of impending class slippage (chapter 5).
Cultures of passionate work thus recuperates ideas of the good life even as they gesture towards
changes in its shape and form.
The Good Life
As a term, the good life gestures towards a loosely held constellation of objects and ideas
that is promised to grant one a sense of happiness, meaning, and moral satisfaction upon
engagement. We might think of the good life as a relation of optimism. As Lauren Berlant (2011)
writes, optimism is “a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to
expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just
that right way" (p. 2). The good life bundles the variegated objects and ideals that prompts
aspirational desire for the rightness and goodness which can place one in an affective trajectory
of progression. As Lawrence Samuel (2012) notes, the key quality of the American Dream - an
idea often associated to the good life - is “a utopian promise that one might achieve a progression
to one's life.”
Progression may be about a dream job, a home in the suburbs; it may be about adventures
and travel, or even it even be about a hope for revolution. Regardless of how it actually looks,
however, it is united in the idea that one has agentic control over the betterment of one’s fate. To
reiterate Samuel (2012), the good life is a utopian promise about achievement: the successful
actualization of x or y through effort and ability. The good life thus animates pursuit not because
it is fantasy, but because it presents a possibility that seems plausible and realizable.
22
But even if one is to believe in the possibility of achieving the good life, the pursuit of it
is ultimately situated in a political economy where opportunity for achievement and negotiation
is unequally distributed. In The Future as Cultural Fact, Arjun Appadurai (2013) expresses
concern about the horizon of futurized possibility for disadvantaged populations. He illustrates
this through a metaphor of navigation: “If the map of aspirations... is seen to consist of a dense
combination of nodes and pathways, relative poverty means a smaller number of aspirational
nodes and a thinner, weaker sense of the pathways from concrete wants to immediate contexts to
general norms and back again” (p. 189). Here, Appadurai (2013) is not just speaking about the
possibility of realizing those aspirations. His deeper concern lies with the capacities of survival,
the abilities of poor to creatively manage the relationships between desires and their immediate
contexts.
As he elaborates, what is at stake here is are the opportunities for “practice, repetition,
exploration, conjecture and refutation” that is crucial towards negotiating the demands of various
aspirations, and to consider, tinker, and to refute it should it be appear unconducive and
impractical to their situation (p. 189). The absence of opportunity restricts the creative
imagination from conceiving, practicing, and putting into place alternative aspirational utopias
that can better serve the goal of social justice. And without these capacities for creative
remodelling, survival for disenfranchised communities will tend towards terms dictated by those
in power, and fail to imagine the transformative change that aspirations can engender.
From this perspective, the potential problem of the good life does not lie within of
optimism or fantasy. The optimism involved in political subversion is also subject to fantasies; to
the extent that hope is crucial ingredient of political struggle, it must involve ideas of what good
life is (Cooper, 2014). What is crucial, however, is whether the optimistic relation, as Berlant
23
(2011) puts it, is cruel. Cruel optimism exists when “the object/scene that ignites a sense of
possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person
risks striving" (p. 2). In a relations of cruel optimism, one holds a fantasy of something that
serves to obstruct the broader change that one desires and hopes for.
In my dissertation, I address the pragmaticisms involved in the cruel optimisms of
passionate work cultures. Drawing from the potentials of the crash that Berardi (2009) points to -
the opportunity to merge with therapy with politics, to experiment with “extra-economic
networks of survival,” and to finds forms of happy adaptation – passionate work offer new
individualizing solutions to the problems of the economy. Workers are provided with new spaces
to socialize, taught to optimize their expenditures, recruit their social network as therapy, and led
to change their work habits. These function as the transformed icons of the good life, which also
resuscitates work as a normative site of aspiration and self-expression.
This conceptualization means that my critique of passionate work is fundamentally about
capitalism. It is about how capitalism is recuperating itself amidst a crisis, soothing the
revolutionary affects that economic disappointment can engender. The fact that this is placed
within a frame of survival does not mean that I am against survival. As I explain, the
ambivalence here lies in that resiliency is urgently required for many of the populations address,
but the forms endorsed in these cultures fail to provide the substantive change required to
challenge capital, inequality, and the problems of wages as a necessity. And by directing
energies towards such ideas of the good life, alternative imaginaries are stifled. We need to
change our investments of hope, or what Lawrence Grossberg (1992) has called a “mattering
map,” a cultural structure which influences what people decide as important, and consequently
where they want to invest their energy in.
24
Understanding the connections between post-recessionary cultures of passionate work
and good life is my way of beginning a conversation about a political impasse: where problems
of work seem to require turning back to some post-Fordist middle-classed ideal. Is this ideal even
still possible when the privileges of the middle-classes are under retreat (Lorey, 2015)? What we
need to refuse is not post-Fordist desire nor pleasure, but how desire and pleasure have been
directed away from political potential even in its therapeutic shape (Berardi, 2009). This moment
requires us to take seriously the need for therapy and survival, but also for us to sense new and
different imaginaries. This dissertation takes a tentative step towards that direction.

25
Chapter 1: From Happiness to Passion
In The Human Condition published 1958, Hannah Arendt relates a problem of political action to
the distinction between labor and work, and the dominance of the former in society. Labor, she
writes, refers to the state of the animal laboran, a slavish mode of being which focuses on
survival and subsistence. Unlike the homo faber, who “works” by producing things stable and of
lasting consequence to the world, the laborer is “imprisoned in its metabolism with nature”, his
energies spent on the sustenance of everyday life (Arendt, 1958/1998, p. 115). And in becoming
relentlessly concerned with self-preservation, the human being loses an awareness of the
potential within productive activity, and becomes deprived of the drive to ethically contemplate
how productive action can influence the state of generational and collective life.
The contrast between labor and work was directed, in part, as a corrective towards the
perceived pessimistic stalemate of Marxist theory. As Margaret Canovan points out, “Though
Marx spoke of making, using the terminology of craftsmanship, Arendt claims he actually
understood history in terms of processes of production and consumption much closer to animal
life” (Arendt, 1958/1998, p. xii). In Arendt’s opinion, Marx’s perspective rendered it difficult to
locate a site of optimism within productive action; all work was potentially labor subsumed into
the capitalist system. Such dissatisfaction with the bleak state of human labor, however, was not
solely held by Arendt. In the same period when this was written, management professionals and
academics were engaged in a similar debate over the debased quality of industrial work.
Theorists like Peter Drucker (1954) argued that people were primarily motivated not by material
incentives, but by the recovery of meaning and pride to their jobs. In The Practice of
Management published four years before The Human Condition, Drucker fought against the
dehumanizing nature of industrial work, and urged managers to tap into the entirety of the
26
worker’s skills, “his ability to make a whole out of many things, to judge, to plan and to change”
(p. 293). Hired hands, he insisted, need to be treated not as automatons, but as people with
capability to “drive themselves” so that they may cultivate a personal attachment to their jobs (p.
304).
Like Arendt, these management theorists weaved a language of morality around work. In
doing so they actively evoked an image of the good life that work could provide, but the
impression as to what the good life constituted differed. For the former, the ideal of work
referred to political action. Craftsmanship served as grounds for fostering an ethical commitment
to production for the betterment of the world. For latter, it centered on personal job satisfaction,
feelings of success, and industrial harmony. Such a disparity was, in fact, nontrivial to Arendt.
As she clarifies, the “goodness” that work offers should never primarily be centered on human
psychic experience.
4
Even if human labor were to be made less painful, it does not naturally
follow that it would induce the kinds of affective attachments necessary to foster ethical thought
in production. Though lives may be made less difficult, human beings may still remain trapped
as animal laborans: unable, or even unwilling to, engage in the thinking and discussion crucial
for deeper insight into the purpose that making should serve.
5

And yet Arendt’s philosophy was primarily appropriated through management discourse

4
Arendt indicates this in her critique of the technological argument that “every tool and implement is primarily
designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful”. She writes that this perspective understands the
usefulness of technology “exclusively in this anthropocentric sense” and that the “homo faber, the toolmaker,
invented tools and implements in order to erect a world, not—at least, not primarily—to help the human life
process.” I take this to mean that Arendt’s concern was more generally, structural than psychic. See Arendt, The
Human Condition, 151.
5
I found Micki McGee’s study of American self-help literature to be a useful interlocutor. McGee offers that much
of self-help can be categorized into the binary of endless effort and absolute effortlessness. In the former, readers
seek self-mastery through the effortful care of the self; in the latter, readers turn to New Age mysticism to seek out a
kind of effortless mastery. In both cases, however, readers are devoted, to self-transformation and self-interest, and
not a collective future which is shared. See Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
27
to deplore unsatisfactory human psychic states. For instance, Work in America, a federal report
in 1973, referenced Arendt in the introduction, but reduced the difference of the animal laboran
and the homo faber to self-worth. “Self-esteem is so deflated” for some workers, it lamented,
“that the distinction between the human as worker and the animal as laborer is blurred.” The
report proceeds, “What workers want most, as more than 100 studies in the past 20 years show…
[is] to feel that their work and they themselves are important” (O’Toole et al., 1973, pp. 5-6).
The slide from ethics in production to ethics in feelings reflects an imagined consensus in the
cultural idealisms of work. The wanting of psychic rewards from work is communicated here as
an uncontroversial, historically consistent mode of emotional desire, setting as orthodoxy and
common sense the importance of feelings in work. Such a portrayal does not only simplify the
complexity of what people want out of work; by framing psychic satisfaction from work as the
norm of the human want, it performs an ideological function by rendering it difficult to recognize
other possible ways in which work could serve the good life.
In taking passion seriously, we will need to question the seemingly natural association
between passionate work and the good life. Capitalism seeks to convince that work can be site of
true meaning if passion can be aligned with labor. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2005),
however, reminds that frames of the good life that capitalism provides will always attend to its
logics of accumulation: “No market operator wants to be the first to offer a ‘good life’ to those
he hires, since his production cost could thereby be increased… [but] on the other hand, the
capitalist class as a whole has an interest... in overall measures that make it possible to retain the
commitment of those on whom profit creation depends” (p. 415). Class interests contributes to
the sway of things in the good life promise. Even though the worker’s economic welfare has the
most direct relationship to labor, it is also the aspect least appealing for employers to highlight
28
because it chips at the bottom-line. The cost of labor under capitalism, Marx (1867/1995)
suggests, will always have the tendency to be forced towards zero. Although the zero of labor
cost is “always beyond reach,” capital “can always proximate more and more nearly to it” (p.
415). Thus, in the cultural ascendance of passionate work, it is not uncommon that corporations
repudiate the importance of wages, even as they affirm the deeply fulfilling life that work can
offer.
The dynamics of capitalism might elucidate why emotional satisfaction lie at the heart of
work’s good life imaginary. Various critical studies have suggested that problematizing feelings
is not only more cost-efficient than an increase in wages; it is also more effective in stimulating
productivity, getting workers to put more of their energies into their working hours, to
accommodate unpaid, overtime work, and to curb threats to the smooth functioning of business.
Addressing the psyche of the worker has also promoted the justification that work is an
indispensable component of a properly functioning social engine. Psychiatry, for instance, deems
subjects that are unhappy at work or unemployed to be at a higher risk from pathologies that can
affect the health of the family and society (Miller, 1986). To lean in to the normal, happy fold of
corporate life is thereby made a matter of social responsibility that the worker, corporation, and
state have a part in facilitating. This has resulted in the entry of productivist norms into social
life, something which, according to Lazzarato (1996), transforms the very nature of “the
worker’s soul”, aligning capitalism’s relentless search for profits with common beliefs and
practices (p. 143).
A Genealogy of Passion
Still, regardless of how effective the manipulation of emotions may be, we should neither
assume that is a historically consistent nor internally coherent corporate strategy. To denaturalize
29
passionate work, it matters that we understand how our demands from work are structured across
historical time. Who speaks from this demand, have our demands been different, and how, even
if we understand such emotional manipulation to be exploitative, has such exploitation varied?
My suggestion is that passionate work represents a particular kind of affective engagement that is
derived from a longer genealogy of emotional attachments, of which a significant one is
“happiness”. The point is not that workers have felt differently across time, or that the emotional
states can reduced to terms like happiness or passion. Feelings, after all, do not describe a fixed
phenomenological reality, but they represent, following Brian Massumi (2002), “an idea of the
idea of the affection”, cultural models that prescribe commonly held meaning to physiological
affects experienced (p. 92). The complexities of emotional lives also meant that workers have
certainly experienced more than just happiness and passion in the past and present. What I am
concerned with is how the change in terms from happiness to passion matter for the constellation
of meanings behind idealized models of optimism about work: the normative expectations people
have of its outcomes, the goodness these outcomes offer, and path by which these outcomes are
to be attained.
My argument, more specifically, is that happiness and passion inhabit in management
discourse what William Reddy (2001) calls “emotional regimes”, sets of idealized, normative
emotional stances that are accompanied with rituals and practices to facilitate development of
particular human emotional subjectivities.
6
Reddy notes that emotional regimes enter into
everyday speech as emotives, routinized ways by which we evaluate and transact with emotions
in everyday life. In one sense, emotives are performative: they facilitate particular kinds of
emotional interpretation of affective states, just as saying that one is angry transforms the very

6
I understand emotional regimes as the norms of emotional expression and interpretation. See also William M.
Reddy, “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions.”
30
feeling that one feels. But, the performantive quality of emotives lies also in what our emotional
sensibilities teach us to attend to and strive towards. As Barbara Rosenwein (2006) notes,
emotives do not simply revise felt experience, such sensemaking also “blank out other possible
interpretations of feelings.” She continues, “Emotives are choices - automatic choices, for the
most part - made from a huge repertory of possibilities. Most of those possibilities will never be
explored because most are not recognized, or hardly recognized, by the society in which an
individual lives and feels” (p. 19). When emotional regimes center on a particular set of feelings
– happiness or passion, for instance – they color not just the feelings people express they feel,
but also those they will express absence of. These emotions, whether in experience or as hopeful
desire, therefore become privileged over others.
Emotional regimes constitute the moral frameworks of corporate life, offering reasons
that legitimate the importance of specific emotional orientations, and prescribe models of
behavior across different social classes with the promise that adherence to them will lead to a life
of true fulfillment. Therefore, happiness and passion is used here to describe a normative system
of belief; it serves as pointer to the good life, but also a life that is outside the good life
imaginary, templates of thought and behavior that require correction if it is to be fitted within the
normal fold of good corporate living.
While business historians have done the important work of detailing the various
managerial philosophies that have influenced America and elsewhere, management history has
seldom been analyzed through the frames of affect and its instruments of optimism. Two
important works need to be mentioned here. Nikolas Rose (1999) had done a similar
genealogical analysis of “the productive worker” in the 20th century where he identified shifts in
subjectivities of workers over time. Moving between Britain and the United States, he argues that
31
psychological sciences (derived from research in the Second World War) was crucial to the
construction of productive subjectivity, and that such governmentalities have produced varying
subjectivities across time. Similarly, Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) have studied management
texts to examine shifts in what they describes as the “spirit of capitalism”, the individual and
collective justifications which serve as “ideology that justifies engagement in capitalism” (p. 8)
These scholars highlight similar changes to subjectivities across time, the steady move from the
rational, peaceful human relationships stressed in the mid-20th century human relations
discourse – which offered a fixed path to personal development - to one which stressed on
spontaneous self-discovery, genuine autonomy, and the setting of freedom offered by
organizations to employees so that they might blossom through the freedom of their labor.
My work is indebted to theirs in many ways, but while I am also interested in the
construction of productive subjectivities, my attention here lingers on the discourses that
structure our optimistic transactions with work, the ways in which our emotional lives are made
to intertwine with the subject of our productive activity. Importantly, my interest here lies in the
operations of these optimistic transactions – which as I will point out, has historically been
uneven and a product of struggle. In revealing the class politics behind work and the good life, I
hope to highlight how our imaginations of work have been closed off by these ideas of idealized
emotional outcomes. As Kathi Weeks (2011) argues, ideas of the good life ground the very
power of ideas. Without destabilizing our optimistic relations towards work, we close off
“possible futures" with “ready-made visions and predictable outcomes” (p. 90). The social
definition of good work can, as we see in the case of Arendt’s, silence other visions of work by
assuming that they are irrelevant to the human want.
A genealogy of passion can unsettle the grounds of our desires. In charting the contingent
32
optimisms of work, we can observe moments where provided frames of the good life turns out to
be less than satisfactory and when they require revision. What does it mean when the good life
has failed to satisfy and keep its place, when what is said to be what we want from work,
disappoints? For one, it may highlight the mutability of the human want, as management texts
did in conveying the new desires of countercultural youths. Or it may also, as Sara Ahmed
(2010) suggest, signal at a more fundamental problem in the conception of the “good”, where
limits to our beliefs about work and its rewards causes us to misrecognize the cause of our
persistent dissatisfaction.
7
I suggest that reading the notion of happiness, as it emerged in early
20th century management texts, its rejection in the mid-20th century, and the shift to the norms
of passion by the late 20th century, opens the important potential of disturbing, referencing Work
in America again, “what workers want most” (O’Toole et al, 1973, p. 13). It reveals the politics
of our emotional regimes, allowing us to understand which group speaks for the human want,
how one group’s interest is made the desire of everyone else, and how even challenges to our
good life fantasy cannot detach from the optimistic transactions with work.
To be sure, there are a panoply of entry points available into the discussion of work
cultures and its influence on emotional subjectivities. Historians like Andrea Tone (1997) and
Nikki Mandell (2002) had traced the management of emotions to welfare work in the late 19th
century America. In contrast to the dominant managerial ideology of Taylorism in the same
period, which assumed workers to be mindless brutes interested only in economic gain, welfare
advocates attended to the feelings of workers and sought to implement a variety of workplace
amenities to boost morale and loyalty. However, these attempts were met with struggle from its

7
Taking on Marx’s concept of false consciousness, Ahmed writes of how historical amnesia can lead to the wrong
identification of the cause in suffering: “False consciousness is that which sustains an affective situation (the
workers and the natives suffer) but misrecognizes the cause, such that the misrecognition allows the cause to
“cause” suffering” (p. 168).
33
working class beneficiaries, who resented the paternalistic quality of these policies. Others like
Paul Willis (1977) and Michael Buroway (1982) had taken the resistance of workers as their
analytical focus. They highlight how in being unwilling to assimilate the good life imaginaries
offered by schools and factories, the working class may adopt alternative emotional habitus
associated more to rebellion and mischief, engendering practices that range from coping to
creative resistance to direct antagonism.
My analysis of happiness and passion, however, differs in that it begins from the human
relations movement in the early 20th century. Human relations is particularly significant because,
as Reinhard Bendix (1959/2001) points out, it contributed to a shift in the conceptions of work
and the worker.
8
Prior to this period, workers were primarily framed in terms of virtue; virtuous
workers were thought to be able to climb the corporate ladder to success, while those steeped in
vices reaped their sins of poverty and hardship. The entry of psychological sciences into
industry, however, reconceptualized workers as psychological beings with unfulfilled needs that
work would fulfill. In this schema, “work was praised,” Bendix (1959/2001) notes, “for the
satisfactions arising from it rather than for the success to which it might lead” (pp. 284-5).
Work’s good life promise no longer needed to solely rely on outcomes from other spheres: it did
not need to frame itself as offering a comfortable life of consumption
9
, nor give a spiritual
promise of redemption
10
. Rather, the rewards of work may proceed from itself, the psychological
pleasures of work is reward enough.
In focusing on managerial discourse, I recognize that I omit a variety of other emotional

8
Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry.
9
The experiments characteristic to welfare capitalism, which beautified the environs of the workplace, and
improved workplace amenities drew inspiration from consumption. See Tone, The Business of Benevolence;
Mandell, The Corporation as Family.
10
The spiritual element of work is most clearly discussed by Max Weber. See Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism.

34
communities that exist in the complex culture of work. Yet, my goal here is not to chart what
workers “really” feel, but to highlight the strategies and conditions under which our optimistic
transactions with work are structured. In this aspect, the managerial discourse conveyed through
management texts and popular books, though representative only of a small facet of a larger
discourse on work culture, is nonetheless important in prescribing, spreading, and putting into
practice the normative good life fantasies of work. Analyzing cultural beliefs in idealized
feelings foregrounds the shifting trajectories, exclusions, and practices of the good life, revealing
how the relentless search for “true” fulfillment has invested and reinvested optimism within the
emotional rewards of work, situating it as the fundamental demand of what all workers want.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that all workers are interpellated into an emotional
regime, and become complicit in its offered view of the good life. However, as emotional
regimes, happiness and passion are not just, or even primarily, ideas. Rather, they are
philosophies that are built into the everyday as norms of actions, behaviors, and bureaucratic
policies. The fantasy of the good life excels not in offering true fulfilment but in flickers of
experience - momentary scenes that reinstate its potential and goodness. Once naturalized, it
sticks onto our assumed quality of corporate life, making it hard for cynical workers to question
the foundations by which this want is built upon.
In the following sections, I trace the emotional regimes of three different historical
moments. Each period describes a particular understanding of the nature of the worker, their
emotional needs, and the practices necessary for those needs to be fulfilled. From the early 20th
century, I examine how happiness in work took shape as the fantasy of good life promise.
Human relations emphasized the importance of emotional welfare and gathered all members of
administration, foremen, managers, and supervisors, to construct a happy atmosphere for line
35
workers who were generally presented as being incapable of recognizing the cause of their
persistent dissatisfaction. Management tried to convince workers that not only was happiness in
work possible, but that happiness was something that they should desire and reasonably demand
for. But by the mid-20th century, such rhetoric encountered a backlash. Concerned about the
conformity of American workers, the happiness which was lauded by human relations was
portrayed as manipulative, and inimical to the development of individualities. Such happiness
caused workers to suffer from a damaged structure of desire which made them apathetic and
passive towards their job. Dissatisfaction was then reframed as a sign of healthy individuality - a
model for the self-motivated employee who is unfulfilled because of the lack of opportunity to
properly demonstrate his worth to the corporation.
In the late 20th century, the idea of self-motivated employee has taken root, and
numerous texts argued that the many indications of worker dissatisfaction is a sign of a healthy
desire for fulfillment that remains frustrated. In one aspect, the ideas of passion that emerged in
this period carries on the argument by managerial theorists in the period before about how under
the right conditions, workers would voluntarily commit their own selves to work. However,
academics, management professional and popular writers also erased the conflictual history that
preceded passion, and presented the desire as a demand from workers themselves. And with this
new source of demand, it becomes possible to position passion as right which workers have won,
and something that needs defending from unenlightened labor leaders.
My analysis of managerial discourse is primarily derived from a reading of management
texts, but also popular texts that had influence on management thinking. This amounted to 48
books across the period of 1930 to 1980. The management books were sourced in several ways:
first, I used Personnel Journal, a trade journal for personnel executives and managers, to help
36
pick out relevant management books for analysis. Till the seventies, the Personnel Journal
included a monthly list of new publications and a robust review of books, which was helpful in
selecting materials for analysis. Second, several books in the thirties and forties included
comprehensive bibliographies, which was helpful for new materials. Third, I noted books
repeatedly referenced in management texts, and adopted them for analysis. This included popular
management texts like Douglas McGregor’s (1960) The Human Side of Enterprise, but also
popular best-sellers, like William Whyte’s (1956) The Organization Man and Studs Terkel’s
(1972) Working. This eclectic archive reflected the nature of management discourse: it was
responsive to popular opinion, and changes within the economy and society. Writers of these
texts ranged from academics to public intellectuals, and high-status professionals to and
consultants to major firms - with many having two roles or more.
Many of these books were targeted at managers, executives, and aspirational workers.
Unlike management books sold to an academic audience, these management texts were explicit
about their need to fit the practical, ongoing concerns of their audience. Most writers employed a
language that was accessible and compelling, and the books were organized into many separate
and subheads to facilitate easy reference. Though academe knowledge is often alluded to in the
texts, it was not uncommon to see intuitive reasoning, religious views, observations, and
personal experience. If research studies were offered, most were relatively unclear about the
rigor of their studies. Yet, it is inaccurate to critique these books as being ‘unscientific’. Rather,
the mixture of science, common parlance, and conventions on management knowledge, were
important in subjecting new management ideas to practical uses.
The goal of this chapter is to serve as critical ground for the ways we should read and
understand the discourse of passionate work in the present. This objective has given rise to a
37
specific method: to understand the shifts in emotional regimes over this historical period – and to
situate its achievement staunchly in the present - I have favored the use of broad historical
strokes over the careful dissection of individual cases in history. Indeed, this genealogical
analysis makes no claim to be a comprehensive history of management ideas, but it does attempt
to illuminate changes in the underlying politics behind the good life that work proposes to offer,
and thereby, showcase the varied ways in which management had attempted to struggle against
the basic banal idea of work.
The figures of happiness and passion organized through different period represent
heuristics to examine the influence of emotional regimes. Still, though their organization do not
describe historical breaks as opposed to overlapping emotional cultures that borrow, reject, and
subsume ideas from each other. The shift from happiness to passion does not imply the passing
of happiness as a concept within managerial discourse, as much as it describes the shifts in the
idealized work subjectivities that the emotions imply. Therefore, the term of happiness used in
management discourse today adopts as background different cultural assumptions than what it
implied in the early 20th century. Documenting these shifts, and its intersections with economic,
cultural, political structures would provide deeper insight into the assumptions undergirding
passion today.
Producing The Happy Good Life
In 1938, a manual directed towards managers titled How to be a Leader prefaced that “there is
probably no one other thing which can contribute to the attainment of a well-rounded, successful
and happy life than an ability to understand and influence people” (Malesic, 1938, p. xi).
Happiness is presented as an ends and a means. To get at happiness, one needed to make others
happy. Influence, it continued, implied following the golden rule, to “always take every honest
38
opportunity to say and do those things which make people feel bigger, better, more important”
(p. 31). Here, happiness is presented as a product of its own circulation, as if happiness
repeatedly circulated will produce a happy society. In this assumption, an important relationship
is implied and configured. Two figures, the manager and the worker, are offered here as bonded
by a common social want: a want for happiness, which if secured, would have the potential to
resolve the decades of industrial strife that preceded the 1930s.
Such a social relationship was central to the dominant managerial philosophy known as
“human relations” in the early thirties. Human relations was a management philosophy that
stressed that managers needed a set of emotional competencies to build happy relationships in
the workplace, and that the emotional wellbeing of workers and supervisors was crucial to the
productivity of the enterprise. This view of work relations, as historians noted, was deeply
influenced by Elton Mayo and his role in the Hawthorne plant experiments. Mayo (1933/1960)
had initially considered workers to be psycho-physiological beings influenced by workplace
conditions. However, he soon realized through his experiments that the traditional objects of
focus in industrial psychology, like fatigue and monotony, were inadequate to account for the
efficiency of workers. To illustrate this, he compared repetitive work between two plants and
noted the odd finding that while workers in one plant became bored and unproductive, workers
in the other had “a real interest in work” and even experienced “an accumulation of it as the day
wore on” (p. 36). Mayo attributed this to the emotional states of the workers, and the human
relations of the enterprise - the small group relationships that workers shared, and the inter-group
relationships that existed with their supervisors – and argued that the emotional well-being of the
workforce and its constitutive human relationships was no small factor in governing corporate
productivity and profits.
39
The humane language which Mayo enshrouded his findings with ensured that human
relations was primarily advanced through a moral framework. As Rose (1999) writes, the
psychological sciences were “not simply a matter of ideas, cultural beliefs, or even of a specific
kind of practice”, rather, they were a means of "political power, making it possible to govern
human beings in ways that are compatible with the principles of liberalism and democracy" (p.
viii). Those who advanced human relations spoke through the rhetoric of humanism and
democracy, identifying themselves as progressives, advocates of industry democracy, and
humanists. The bible of human relations, and the title of Mayo’s book, The Human Problems of
an Industrial Civilization, is suggestive: it implies that the commitment of human relations was
not to industrial productivity but towards the health of society. Drawing from Émile Durkheim,
Mayo (1933/1960) argued that the displacement of workers from traditional ways of life caused
them to suffer from “anomie”, a “planlessness in living” that was disruptive to happiness (p.
125). Following this, industry has the moral obligation to reforge the social relations of society,
providing workers with the human networks to relieve themselves from the unhappiness of
industrial alienation. Such an interpretation of Durkheim’s work, James Dingley (1997)
observes, was at best partial - Mayo appropriated Durkheim’s concerns without adhering to his
moral philosophy, which was critical of the capitalist system. Regardless, the piecemeal
understanding of Durkheim had an important effect of giving human relations a tint of moral
legitimacy, allowing business to become the moral savior of an alienated society.
Very specific roles were allocated for to manager and worker in the new emotional
culture theorized by human relations. Eva Illouz (2008) explains that the therapeutic emotional
style of human relations had largely transposed the hierarchical relationship of the therapist and
the patient to that of the manager and worker. Workers were framed as irrational beings unable
40
to articulate the source of their unhappiness, and who had to rely upon a class of trained
administrative elites to help them uncover and release these negative emotional states. And even
when managers were tasked to attend and relate to others more emotionally, they were told to
exercise self-control, especially withholding from the influence of emotional states which
workers exhibited. Expressions of anger, disgruntlement, and sorrow had to be patiently listened
to but left unassimilated. This therapeutic style of emotional expression and control was
developed by Mayo through a tendentious interpretation of experimental results. Historians like
Richard Gillespie (1993) showed that Mayo had selectively interpreted the findings of his
Hawthorne plant experiments, downplayed the acts of resistance employed by his experimental
subjects, and turned "any challenge by workers of managerial control into evidence of
psychiatric disturbance”, in order to hype the efficacy of the human relations doctrine (p. 73).
The dismissal of the workers’ capacity of thought had an important effect on the relationship of
power within industry: when workers are described as irrational, managers then can have the
proper intellectual authority to dictate how workers should feel and think.
The reshaping of the good life imaginary proceeds from this backdrop of intellectual
authority. In a section titled “the worker has no word for it”, David Houser (1938) in What
People Want From Business suggests that workers are fundamentally unable to articulate the
cause of their dissatisfaction. Drawing from surveys, he points out that even though most
workers describe pay and advancement to be the most important factors contributing to their
unhappiness, what workers “really” want are things that cater to their dignity and self-worth, like
recognition from supervisors for a job well done. Workers, in this schema, suffer from a problem
of misrecognition. They may give “good reasons” for their unhappiness, complaints which seem
culturally appropriate, like that of a low wage, but fail to name the “real reasons... deeper and
41
undisclosed” which are the true cause (Schell & Gilmore, 1939, p. 81). Management, in other
words, was able to ignore reasons for dissatisfaction which relate to class exploitation by using
studies which “show” that workers do not have a good grasp on what they really want. The
irrationality of their desires can only be revealed for its true need in the scientific studies done by
management.
Unsaid but central to this claim is how the good life is reframed from a context of
structural justice to one of psychological justice, an issue of whether desire coheres with
idealized emotional states. There is no reason to suppose that the fight for wages, security and
job promotion, advanced by unions and workers, was primarily aimed at a sense of psychic
fulfillment; rather, it would be more accurate to describe this struggle as directed towards the
power differentials inherent within the capitalist system. In making feelings the telos of the good
life, however, psychologists changed the conversation around work, and shifted the normalized
objects of proper desire. Things that workers demanded were now disregarded as coming from
an undeveloped will, a structure of desire that failed to tap into the reality of their psychic needs.
As Houser (1938) points out, “the employee cannot say: “My sense of personal significance is
constantly offended; my craving for decent consideration is consistently defeated”... He does not
think or speak in such abstractions” (p. 73).
And yet, the problem of articulation here is not so much that of an undeveloped will, but
an issue of ownership - a question of who owns the will. As Illouz (2008) astutely observes, the
Hawthorne experiment subjects used to build the theory of human relations on were women, and
Mayo’s initial findings were “(unknowingly) gendered, reflecting women's emotional culture, in
which nurturance, care, display of affection, outward expressions of support, and linguistic
communication were central to social identity and to the performance of social bonds” (p. 70).
42
However, not all expressions of pleasure are awarded the same social weight. Mayo and
practitioners of human relations spent the next decade erasing feminine attributes from the
human relations discourse, enshrouding it with a masculine scientific language so that human
relations could gain credibility. It is not accidental that the practitioners of human relations -
psychologists, managers, and foremen - were all assumed in management texts to be white men.
Its view reflected reality: there were few women in high status corporate positions in the thirties
and forties, and discrimination along the lines of gender and race rendered white males the only
possible practitioners of human relations. Women and colored workers were deemed,
biologically, to be overly emotionally excitable, and mentally incapable of managing the
emotions of others. In one management text, managers were told to spend more effort ensuring
that female workers are able to keep calm, indicating that women were far too emotional to
partake the rational emotional work that human relations needed (Schell, 1924/1942). In another,
blacks were said to have a poorer “general mental ability” that was “inborn in the individuals…
which neither education nor a favorable environment can lift” (Laird, 1925/1937, p. 58).
I highlight these prejudiced views to demonstrate how the fantasies of happiness
cultivated by human relations was built upon racist and sexist foundations. As mentioned, Mayo
had relied on women’s emotional culture to build the theory of human relations. His later erasure
of women’s expressions and needs from the theory describes an appropriation and exploitation of
a disenfranchised population. Using the happy expressions of Hawthorne women, like their
afternoon parties with cake and tea in the office (a special treatment offered to them by basis of
the “experiment”), and decontextualizing it as happiness in factory work, not only disregards the
specificities of gendered, raced, classed, expressions and interests. Fundamentally, it relies on
sexist attitudes to repurpose the use of pleasure - the grounds of happiness was robbed from
43
women workers to become signs of potential for business profits and industrial harmony. Once
that purpose was served, these feminine pleasures were devalued as stemming from an infantile
will, an undeveloped structure of desire, which a stronger will - a white male will - can change
for a rational, proper state of wanting.
The paths to happiness, which depended on right and wrong desires, was thereby
intrinsically tied to the subject of strong and weak wills. Human relations endowed the rational,
masculine, managerial class with the mandate to fulfill needs that weak willed workers were
unaware. On the subject of leadership, for instance, management texts argued that main objective
of leaders was to “show the way” by bringing to light the deep desires of workers (Halsey, 1938,
p. x). “Voluntary action,” he writes, “springs from the desire of each person for certain things,
tangible and intangible, the possession of which he believes will bring him satisfaction or
happiness” (p. 9). If workers performed poorly, it was because they had the wrong orientation to
happiness. Their visions of the good life did not conform the managerial norm. Leadership
involved expertise in altering the structure of desire, changing the impression of things that
would proximate happiness. As Ordway Tead (1977) reiterates, the art of leadership should
involve “modification in the desires and purposes of those being managed and of himself that,
over a period of time, what he wants and what they want comes to be much the same” (p. 4).
Still, human relations understood that this alteration of desire was easier said than done.
Workers had ways of thinking that were historically sedimented, and that persuading them
differently would require effort. The subsequent choice in persuasive techniques employed by
human relations in his period had patterns that extended beyond the workplace. Historian Roland
Marchand (1998) noted that corporate public relations efforts in the 1930s translated efforts to
humanize corporations into communicative styles that emphasized “the language of ordinary
44
people”: "To speak in the idiom of average citizens meant also to place the topic in the context of
everyday experiences. Many corporations and advertising agencies considered this strategy an
apt response to the constantly repeated warnings about the need to humanize the corporation” (p.
218). The simplification of language implied a particular understanding of the audience.
Assuming that workers were simple-minded, and incapable of grasp difficult arguments,
managerial theorists, as do advertisers, decided that persuasion should be directed at emotional
states instead. Even though human relations was a scientific enterprise that stressed rational
thought, its advocates emphasized that its implementation needed to be affective, circumventing
the thinking processes of workers.
The happy good life of industrial harmony was not just made to be an intellectual idea. Its
persuasive success depended on how emotionally compelling it was, the extent to which its
techniques could evince the experiential possibility of the good life. For workers to be attracted
to the promise of industrial happiness, Tead (1935) noted that the manager needed to “to invest
his cause with some excitement and glamor” (pp. 90-1). Workers could not just be convinced in
their minds, they needed to feel “aroused, attracted and energized” (p. 91). The linguistic,
behavioral, and material changes that saturated the workplace - the smiles of managers, their
considerate attempts to listen, greeting of workers by first names, implementation of suggestion
boxes, and also, the restraint in public reprimand, and the disappearance of threats - were all
scattered objects aimed at persuading workers in the optimistic possibilities of work. Human
relations hoped that the varied attempts to make workers feel better, would also convince them of
the ideological possibility of a cooperative happiness between managers, capitalists, and
workers.
The demands of the emotional regime of happiness meant that this ideology was equally
45
directed towards the administrative class as to workers. Before administrators could be
ambassadors of this new good life promise, they themselves needed to internalize its system of
belief. In one of the best-selling self-help book to date, How to Win Friends and Influence
People, Dale Carnegie (1936/1981) opens by trying to convince readers the importance of human
relations. To motivate them to learn the new practices of emotional conduct, Carnegie
(1936/1981) advises readers to repeat to themselves “over and over” the mantra: “My popularity,
my happiness and my sense of worth depend upon my skill in dealing with people” (p. 13).
Readers, however, did not just have to internalize the value in mastering skills of human
relations. To convince others of this good life philosophy, they themselves needed to evaluate
and change their own affective dispositions. Relationships, management texts warned, was not
something that ambitious managers could simply manipulate to advance their own interests.
Ultimately, success in forging happy relationships depended on the sincerity of the manager’s
feelings. The art of good human relations, Erwin Schell (1924/1942) wrote, was “dispositional”
in nature. They do not simply constitute certain phrases or acts but “form an atmosphere or
background” to the words and acts themselves (p. 13). An executive seeking to convince workers
of the significance of their work, for instance, needs to feel equally enthusiastic about it: “he
appears excited; he is confident and assured; he waves his arms and uses gestures… he feels the
way he talks and acts” (Wilson, 1937, p. 223).
Management texts did not assume that the alignment between desire, feeling and action
was easily achievable. As a means of governmentality, the good life fantasy was normatively
built into the evaluative mechanisms of institutions. Many management texts of this period came
bundled with series of checklists, surveys, and questions. Some of these were reflexive in
quality; managers are expected to reflect on their skills of emotional conduct, and work on them
46
if they are found lacking. Schell (1924/1942), for instance, gets readers to ponder on various
dispositions, like “enthusiasm”, “cheerfulness”, and “calmness”. In these sections, executives
were tasked to consider how they might best incorporate these emotions as a lifestyle. In a
section on cheerfulness, for example, they were asked to ponder if “cheerfulness something that
you can... discard when your work day is over, or is it a quality which must become habitual” (p.
13).
More effective, however, were stories of executives who were fired because they lacked
emotional skills, or those who were promoted because they possessed them. Management books
were clear in warning readers that their skills in human relations would be evaluated by their
superiors, and that their careers depended on these qualities. A checklist in How to Train
Supervisors, told executives look out for a range of attitudes in workers and foremen, ranging
from “interested”, “energetic” to “surly”, “antagonistic”, and “irritable” (Beckman, 1944, p. 90).
Such a binarization of good and bad emotional attributes were common in texts of that period,
and these checklists provided management with an easy means of incentivizing and punishing
various attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, the greater emphasis on happy relationships, the
more important monitoring became. While the disciplinary actions themselves became more
considerate towards the feelings of those chastised, the need to quickly spot and address cracks
in happiness grew more pressing. This was because management discourse understood that
happiness was fundamentally a fragile emotion in conflict with classed interest. As a text notes,
even if a happy atmosphere was successfully cultivated, "thoughts, suggestions, ideas are
pouring in continuously from all sides, and any one of these may supplant the idea we have so
carefully planned”

(Halsey, 1938, p. 14). Managers, therefore, will have always to be alert to
protect the happy facade; they are even advised to be suspicious, looking out for the absence of
47

Figure 3. A rating program for emotional skills required of “leadership.”
Such apparatuses were common in the texts of the period (Halsey, 1938)

48
malcontent because “silence is a sign of danger”, a dissatisfaction boiling that is unarticulated
(Wilson, 1937, p. 17).
The happy atmosphere of the workplace in the early to mid-20th century came about
from this complex amalgamation of discipline, fantasy and seduction. To be sure, human
relations was never entirely successful in convincing workers and managers of this new good life
fantasy. Yet, as Bendix pointed out, human relations left an influential “new vocabulary of
motivation” which fundamentally reframed the idea of human desire (Bendix, 1959/2001). It
replaced traditional objects of demand with psychic desire, and cultivated in work an optimistic
possibility. Rather than seeing work as a site of struggle and toil, it was now positioned as a
pathway into the good life, a sphere able to grant happiness. However, by the early 1950s, the
facade of happiness was starting to show its cracks. The roles that human relations relied on, the
irrational worker and the agreeable manager, were now repudiated for its manipulation of human
affect. Happiness came under attack for being a mask, producing the unfeeling smile of the
‘cheerful robot’ removed of individuality and will (Mills, 2000, p. 172).
Conformity and Apathy of Happiness
America experienced a major cultural transition in the mid-20th century which implicated the
human relations discourse on happiness. As Fred Turner (2013) relates, the recent occurrence of
the Second World War, and the ongoing Soviet Cold War had arisen concerns about the
personality of American citizens. Intellectuals had primarily attributed the atrocities of the war to
the fascist “authoritarian personality”, a personality type which assumed a model of unthinking
docility. These individuals lacked a reasoned mind, were prone to rhetoric that swayed emotions,
and had the tendency to look to others for affirmation and direction. Thus, there was a fear that
such a personality type could cause American citizens to be fervent adherents to the dangerous
49
ideologies of a charismatic leader. The development of mass media technologies in the same
period, especially the penetration of radios into homes, worsened concerns that propaganda, if
presented with an unguarded mind, could spread rapidly through the mass American psyche. At
this point, intellectuals turned towards the ideological opposite of the authoritarian personality -
the democratic alternative - to correct the perceived fragility of the human psyche. Different
techniques, ranging from public art to education practices and advertising, internalized this
system of thought to combat conformity, and to encourage the development of a person’s unique
individuality.
11
The notion of a robust individuality was tied to a critical mind of reason, a
pluralistic spirit of empathy, and a creative, authentic self - all features that amplified the general
welfare of society.
On the corporate front, many writers in the fifties, like Wright Mills (1953), William
Whyte (1956) and David Riesman (1950/2001), saw in organizational America a blueprint for a
culture of conformity. Whyte, especially, who was a writer for Fortune and a best-selling text,
offered strident critiques which had an important influence on managerial discourse. In The
Organization Man, Whyte (1956) pointedly questions Mayo’s belief in the “social ethic”, the
hypothesis that “ultimate need of the individual” was to find a sense of belonging in the place of
work. Whyte not only disbelieved in the importance of social belongingness, he also attacked the
foundation on which this argument rests. He observes that by dismissing the worker as “a
nonlogical animal incapable of rationally solving his own problems or, in fact, recognizing what
the problem is,” human relations effectively made it impossible for the views of workers to be
taken seriously and therefore “comes perilously close to demanding that the individual sacrifice

11
The fear of conformity had an important influence in many fields. See Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative
Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Thomas
Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago:
University Of Chicago Press, 1998).
50
his own beliefs that he may belong” (pp. 35-6).
The attack against human relations made its purported promise of happiness suspect as
well. “How good is “happiness”,” Whyte (1956) asks, if the price for happiness is one of
voluntary self-repression (p. 349). To be happy, he notes, the individual “must not only accept
control, he must accept it as if he liked it. He must smile when he is transferred to a place or a
job that isn't the job or place he happens to want. He must appear to enjoy listening
sympathetically to points of view not his goal” (p. 151). Unhappiness masquerades in the form of
hollow smiles and empty cheery gestures under the norm of coercive happiness. If that is not bad
enough, writers like Riesman (1950/2001) tell us that the repeated portrayal of false happiness
can permanently disrupt the proper expression of emotion. “White-collared workers cannot so
easily separate coercive friendliness on the job from a spontaneous expression of genuine
friendliness off the job”, and so the mimicry of superficial happiness at work actually carries a
more serious consequence of thwarting the development of deep relationships and true joy in life
(p. 266). Far from being an authentic mode of self-expression, happiness is presented as an
instrument of deception and manipulation, a tool to suppress the individuality of workers, and to
produce the docile yes-men for the insecure egos of corporate leaders.
And yet, when considering the repudiation of happiness, we need to think about how this
cultural narrative reinvests in the fantasy of the good life imaginary, and how it interacts with the
political economy at large. Thomas Frank (1997) observed that though conformity was presented
as friendly to the corporate agenda, management theorists had actually long recognized it to as a
problem of bureaucracy that risked profits and innovation. Changes to capitalism in the fifties
and sixties, towards an information, creativity-based economy, required a modification to the
qualities demanded from workers. “Old values of caution, deference, and hierarchy” were now
51
thought to deny the characteristics of creativity and flexibility important for business (p. 28). As
such, countercultural texts which painted corporate life as a “technocracy”, a meaningless,
bureaucratized system which robbed people of spontaneity, joy, and freedom, was not as
adversarial to business objectives as the arguments first seemed to suggest (Roszak, 1969, p.
4).
12
Management elites did not dispute the bland view of the work presented by counterculture.
Instead, they sought to absorb this criticism to produce a new, revitalized image of working
America. By admitting to the disappointments of work, management elites strove to implant new
ideas as to what constituted “true” happiness and unhappiness so that new worker subjectivities
might take root.
Consider, for example, how the unhappiness involved in conformity differs from that of
the unhappiness caused by anomie. The model of unhappiness in human relations took the shape
of a belligerent but misguided worker. Industrial maladies were argued to be rooted in a general
dissatisfaction with life; the loss of one’s bearing in society caused industrial strife when workers
misdirect their unhappiness towards their supervisors, peers, and jobs. By contrast, unhappiness
for the conformist may not even look or feel unhappy at all. Conformist corporate culture had
taught workers to repress their desires, to bottle up unhappiness, and to seek compromise by
turning to superficial sources of pleasure. Chris Argyris (1957), an influential management
theorist at the Harvard Business School, writes about how workers are forced to change their
psychological expectations when they learn that their work is unable to provide for the deep
satisfactions they require. In upholding the dogma of happiness, conformist corporate culture
“blocks the expression of inner needs and emphasizes the expression of peripheral or skin-
surface needs”, causing an artificial disruption in the structure of desire (p. 92). He illustrates this

12
See also Charles A Reich, The Greening of America (1972).
52
by describing the concessions that a hypothetical employee would have to take if he chooses to
stay in the organization.
"One way for Dick to defend himself is to reduce the psychological importance of the
work situation. He may say (unconsciously) in effect, "To hell with it; I am not going to
permit myself to become involved. Why should I pressurize myself to leave and to stay?
Why should all this mean so much to me? I'll do just enough to get by. I'll block up my
need for self-actualization until I get out of work. Then I will live!" (p. 90)
The happiness that human relations provided was not just insubstantive, its biggest
problem was that it warped the human want and detracted workers away from the paths of the
good life. As evidence, management texts equated happy workers who were passive and
apathetic, who seemed to have given up hope for a fulfilling job, to individuals who have given
up hope for a fulfilling life, and who have learned instead to find contentment in bland but secure
ordinary existence. Argyris (1957), for instance, offers his surprise in discovering how the
“apathetic, uninterested worker on the assembly line" had become the model of worker “adapted
and adjusted” to factory work (p. 121). Such workers were punctual and gave little trouble to
management, but were otherwise inflexible, and uncommitted to the quality of work performed.
Happiness had taught workers to settle for a life of apathetic compromise; they no longer
demand interesting, rewarding work, but have psychologically accepted the exchange of
mundane existence for secure, superficial contentment. The push to change the nature of work
was thereby ethically charged; it involved the need to produce truly satisfying work so that
workers would not just be passively contented but find authentic, driven joy.
In this sense, the critique of happiness were not fundamentally about happiness, as about
rethinking the models of subjectivities important to business interests. In one early mass
53
interview of assembly line workers in 1952, Charles Walker and Robert Guest described talking
to workers who expressed genuine gladness to engage in repetitive, monotonous work. As
mentioned before, I am skeptical of the happiness that work promises to offer. Still, it is
significant to ponder as to why such expressed forms of happiness have been summarily
dismissed as pathological, and are reframed as a sign of the apathetic unhappiness that pervades
within industry. Indeed, apathy itself is not new as an industrial problem, but its renewed
emphasis signals at the new demands on workers. We may choose to register apathy as a coping
mechanism, a passive adaptive resistance to the regimes of capital. Such emotional existence,
even if were to promote industrial harmony, however, was now judged as inadequate to tap into
the creative, affective energies of workers required of the information-based, creative economy.
A new emotional regime, more germane to this new market system, was needed to guide the
subjectivities of workers that would carry on into the seventies and beyond.
Management elites like Douglas McGregor, Frederick Herzberg, Peter Drucker, Chris
Argyris, but also popular writers like William Whyte, and Abraham Maslow, created ground for
this emotional regime by diverting the attention from organizational groups and its human
relationships towards that of the individual and his or her personal sense of fulfillment on the
job. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, published 1954 in Motivation and Personality, was especially
influential in providing a framework that management elites used to support their argument of a
deep human need in work. For Maslow (1954/1970), the highest need of Man was that of self-
actualization. Unlike other needs rooted in belongingness or esteem, self-actualization, defined
as a need for the individual to be “doing what he, individually, is suited for”, is inherently tied to
the exercise of physical, psychic, and creative labor. This was unambiguously stated when
Maslow begins explaining self-actualization by alluding to acts of creative production: “a
54
musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write.” His argument, that self-
fulfillment can only come when the individual is “actualized in what he is potentially”,
enshrines, and simultaneously constructs, a unique productive potentiality in each human being
which needs enactment to inspire sustained fulfillment (p. 46)
Positioning doing as crux to the good life, the hierarchy of needs offered a powerful
metaphor for managerial elites to promulgate a new selfhood. Herzberg and his colleagues
incorporated this in their influential dyadic scheme that separated the factors of “satisfiers” from
“dissatisfiers”. They argued that dissatisfier factors, like wages, were only important up to a
point; it could prevent workers from feeling badly about their work, making work tolerable, but
it could not produce the satisfaction that people wanted. To engender true happiness, it was
necessary to cater to “the individual’s need for self-actualization”, structuring the work process
so that people “may realize their ability for creative achievement” (Herzberg, Mausner &
Snyderman, 1959, p. 114).

Douglas McGregor’s Theory Y concept of management was one
influential development of this philosophy. McGregor (1960) starts off in his book upending the
traditional view of human desire, explaining that contrary to popular opinion, people did not
naturally dislike work, nor did they want to be directed and avoid responsibility. The flaw of
human relations, he argues, is that they took on these assumptions in their Theory X model of
management, which while well-intentioned, was autocratic at its core. Instead of trusting workers
to develop their own efficient objectives, work processes and standards, Theory X provided only
hypocritical modes of employee autonomy which required workers to adhere to the ideas and
principles directed by management.
As solution, McGregor suggested a Theory Y mode of management which exhorted
managers to be patient, optimistic nurturers. Managers were encouraged to help workers discover
55
their own personal goals, to guide workers in aligning those goals to the interests of the
organization, and to give them the support and resources needed to develop in the direction they
desired. Unlike human relations which predicated authenticity on genuine emotional expression,
authenticity in this new emotional regime stressed on sincerity in fulfilling the self-actualization
needs of workers. Managers needed to have a new set of beliefs: they had to have “a relatively
high opinion of the intelligence and capacity of the average human being” and they needed to see
“most human beings as having real capacity for growth and development, for the acceptance of
responsibility, for creative accomplishment” (McGregor, 1960, p. 140).
This view of human nature served as backdrop for the transition of happiness to passion.
The emotional regime invested in a new condition of reciprocal exchange: management texts
argued that if provided with an appropriate job placement and autonomy, workers would awake
to their own desires for self-actualization and become self-motivated, responsible, and driven.
Passion retained the fantasies of happiness, posing work as route to the good life, but it revised
the subjectivities that entry into the good life imaginary required. Experiential happiness was no
longer made the objective in this emotional regime. Even though happiness might be an outcome
of passion, management texts made clear that happiness had a more complex relationship in the
overall scheme of passion. After all, the ugly underbelly of happiness was that of passivity and
apathy, behaviors that directly contradicted passionate conduct.
With passion as the ideal, negative emotional states like unhappiness and anger may not
be entirely unfavorable. The refusal of simple passive happiness may be a sign of passionate
conduct, a displeasure that is active in “pressing for change, improvements, innovations, better
ways to get the job done” (Spates, 1960, p. 185). While the emotional regime of happiness
deplored negative emotional states, like anxiety, unhappiness, anger, and dissatisfaction, the new
56
regime of passion regarded such negative traits as signs of a healthy relationship with work if
they drove individuals to demand more from their job. In which case, these negative states were
not meant to be simply supplanted with happiness. Rather, they needed to be carefully channeled
and managed so that individual could be motivated to adopt proper practices of economic
conduct (Drucker, 1954). Therefore, the shift from happiness to passion was a complex
transformation that did not just involve a switch from one ideal to another. It detailed changes to
the very idea of what the good life represented: the good life was now not exempt from moments
of anxiety or dissatisfaction, but understood those negative states as a component that could
induce the motivations necessary to produce true fulfilment.
The Passionate Demand
The emotional regime of passion gained ground in the late 20th-century as the issue of work
satisfaction entered into the public arena framed as a want articulated by workers. As Harold
Sheppard and Neal Herrick (1972) note, by the early seventies, the problem of “blue collar
blues” and “white collar woes” was no longer a topic confined to the discussion of an elite
managerial group. Bled into public consciousness, the unmet want for good work had become
recognized as “a major area of societal concern”, a subject that required the attention of the
government, intellectuals, and public discourse (p. xiii). Newspapers, magazines, and popular
publications described dissatisfaction as an ailment that afflicted the American working
population, especially its youths, who had come to demand more from their jobs. Judson
Gooding (1972), a writer for Fortune, indicated that while people used to accept “the necessity
of working unquestioningly”, they now insisted on meaning to their work, and would even
terminate their jobs if they found it unlikeable or uninteresting (p. 2): “a job is no longer for life,
but is just for as long as the worker likes it and it satisfies him” (p. 6).
57
While texts of the previous periods had argued that workers could not grasp the
psychological significance of work, texts in seventies reframed the desire for self-actualization as
something that workers were cognizant about, and which they actively demanded. Gooding
(1972), for instance, described as “striking” the “uniformity about the demands being made”
when he talked to "hundreds of workers, foremen, and managers in every part of the country for
months on end, focusing on what is wrong with their jobs, and what should be done to make
them better" (p. 6). Their dissatisfaction did not come about from wages, rather, they complained
about their lack of passion, indicating that work did not cater enough to their own aspirations and
talents. Academic research funded by the federal government lent scientific credibility to this
view.
13
The surveys conducted by Survey Research Center in the University of Michigan, with
their large sample sizes, were often marshaled as evidence to indicate the reality of the innate
need for self-actualization. A study which interviewed over a thousand workers stated, for
instance, that workers, themselves, had reported wanting more meaning to their jobs, and that
their satisfaction at work primarily depended on whether their talents were tapped into and
whether the job was interesting (Harold & Herrick, 1972).
These self-reports presumed a transparency in the self-knowledge of desire, as if desire
was an object located within the individual uninfluenced by circumstances outside, and that it
was possible for individuals to objectively assess and rank what they want most. But if the
dominant corporate belief is that a good job corresponds to good feelings, and that good feelings
in work are related to the good life, then the response to the question of what you want is
necessarily already imbricated with ideas about what you should want. Assumptions about what
leads to good life constitute the value-laden categories which influence the basis of what we

13
Work in America was one of the most significant probes into working life organized by the U.S. Department of
Labor. See also the The Quality of Working Life.
58
describe as our desire. Besides, studies did not just measure the want of workers; they also
interpret the findings as evidence of the innate need for passion, providing grounds for Work in
America to claim that “what workers want most, as more than 100 studies in the past 20 years
show, is to... feel that their work and they themselves are important” (O’Toole et al, 1973, p. 13).
The depiction of passion as historically consistent, a revelation supported through “more
than 100 studies in the past 20 years”, erases the conflictual history of desire, the struggle over
its construction, and the consequences of its articulation. Instead, passion is made natural and
uncomplicated to human nature, as if discomfort with work may be traced back to the lack of
passion. Studies which correlate passion to fulfilment also teach that passion is inherently good;
it suggests that in discovering and pursuing our organic desire, we may experience the good life,
finding meaning, recognition, and other elements that constitute conventional fantasy. With this,
it is possible to portray passion as something that needs defending, an attachment that
necessitates protection from the forces of mechanization or unwise managers who refuse the
acknowledgement of individual talents and personalities. Ralph Nader, for instance, overlooks a
long, complex history of desire when he writes that “the quest for meaning in work - as
distinguished from the quest for work - is one of history's least chartered courses” and advocates
more research in motivation studies (Lasson, 1971, p. 261). The suggestion is not just that the
attention to the psychological want is new, but that its newness is indicative of long-fought
victory for workers, an important element which corporations and society have refused to attend
to.
This position renders passion a moral right, a point not exaggerated given how texts in
the seventies had illustrated the consequences of dissatisfaction. Studs Terkel’s bestselling book,
Working, published in 1974, for instance, used vivid oral histories to give the hardships of work
59
an intimate veracity uncharacteristic to the discourse of the periods before. Terkel (1974) is
candid in his critique of work: “the book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence
- to the spirit as well as to the body” (p. xiii). Assembling 128 interviews across numerous
occupations, like garbage collector, service staff and sex workers, he builds nuanced, colorful
images of the challenges experienced in everyday working life which affects not just the
immediate work situation but the entire quality of a person’s life: “it is about ulcers as well as
accidents, about shouting matches, as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as
kicking the dog around” (p. xiii)
But even as the worker’s plight is emphasized, Terkel (1974) notes the fundamental
desire for meaning to work does not disappear. The difficulties of the job does not stop one for
searching for “for daily meaning as well as daily bread,” because the former is what
distinguishes “between a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying” (p. xiii)
To be precise, it is not that Terkel believes in the efficacy of passion as a solution to hardship;
rather, it is that he reminds us that passion, even if remains as fantasy, can sustain a
compromised kind of existence. The drearier a job is, the stronger the impulse becomes to escape
into fantasy and play, so that make work feel more interesting and meaningful. The dissipation of
this hope, on the other hand, is what causes the slow death of a healthy psyche. Like the critiques
of apathy in the mid-20th century, management discourse note that it is the loss of the hope for
psychological fulfilment that is most harmful. The feelings of entrapment in an unhappy situation
causes a damaging effect onto the human psyche, leading to social ills like drug use, poor
citizenship behaviors, and dysfunctional families:
To go to work each morning is to face a daily beating of the ego. The family naturally
feels this. A child, whose father expressed deep dissatisfaction with his job, said: "Daddy
60
is cranky all of the time. He used to take us to the movies, but now he doesn't anymore."
His wife remarked: "He is very unhappy with his job and it naturally reflects in his
attitudes and conversations at home. His naturally happy-go-lucky attitude is
disappearing.” (Westley & Westley, 1971, p. 92)
Relying on these ideas, management discourse built upon what was expressed in the
sixties, alerting managers to the human “need for achievement, creativity, and self-fulfillment”
(The Conference Board, 1971). This contributed to the institutional implementation of the quality
of working life movement, a program which enlisted corporations to reengineer work by
providing job enrichment and enlargement opportunities. This composed of organizational
policies like rotated work roles, autonomous work teams, or an expanded job scope, strategies
which aimed to help workers experience a better set of working conditions over time.
At the same time, managers warned that these schemes had their limits. The idea of
passion assumed that each worker had unique sets of aspirations and talents, and a general
corporate scheme cannot fully address such complexities. The fostering of passion, Clair Vough
(1975) advises, needs to be personal. It requires the alignment of work responsibilities with the
workers’ personal identities so that work may become a source of pride. Successfully doing so
would produce passionate involvement even in low-status work positions. Vough then relates the
story of a janitor who comes to him with the complaint that nobody recognizes his contribution
to the cleanliness of the office. To resolve the problem, the janitor asks that he, and nobody else,
be responsible for one section of the plant, adding that, “All I'll ask is that you look at my section
every morning and compare it to someone else's section. I think I can do the best job on the crew
and I want to prove it” (p. 81).
The discourse of passion is democratic in its scope. While it acknowledges differences in
61
satisfaction amongst jobs, it nonetheless positions as common the human desire for fulfilment in
work. The janitor, therefore, is as likely as the executive to demand for self-actualization, and
corporations are tasked equally to provide for both. But there are costs involved to this. When
passion is prioritized as the want of workers, other ethical responsibilities are made invisible or
neglected. Vough (1972), for instance, emphasizes psychological justice at the expense of
considering other factors, including the wage differentials between the janitor and the executive,
the extent to which job motivation could translate to higher pay, and the security and welfare
provided to these different positions. Sar Levitan’s and William Johnston’s warning in 1973,
about the naivety of assuming that workers would willingly “sacrifice much of their pay for
"better quality" work,” is important to consider (p. 79). The discourse of passion involves a
politics of attention. Even though managers would not claim that pay is unimportant, the norm of
passion provides new grounds to dismiss traditional concerns of work. It allows, amongst other
possibilities, the criticism of union leaders who downplay passion and stress the importance of
wages. These leaders, Gooding (1972) suggests, are out of touch with the realities of the human
want, and proceed with their demands only as a desperate attempt to feel needed in a changed
economy. Worse, unions which continue to push for wages may be dismissed as a hindrance to
the reengineering of work, holding back new workplace policies due to their skepticism of
corporate intentions.
When psychological fulfilment is made the goal of work, it becomes possible to name
objects that hinder the achievement of passion as obstacles to be removed. Richard Irish’s (1976)
wordy, but aptly titled management text, If Things Don't Improve Soon I May Ask You to Fire
Me, illustrates the productive dynamics of passion. Irish is unambiguous in his view that passion
should be everybody’s goal: “work is what we want to do, not what we must do” (p. 49).
62
However, he also believes that not all conventionally good job situations are helpful in the
cultivation of this emotion. Expressing that people have the natural tendency to “lie low in a bad
situation… and die the slow death of the occupationally dissatisfied”, he argues for a new,
positive view to the layoff of employees (p. 7). Firing unpassionate workers “puts an end to this
on-the-job charade”, and creates an “enormous growth in self-esteem” because workers are
finally rid of their unhappy jobs, and have regained the freedom to re-embark on the paths of
sourcing for passion (p. 20). The importance of psychological fulfilment, therefore, helped
support the dismantling of job security, and the production of precarity, proposing that those
circumstances provide the most human freedoms necessary to find passion.
Passion gave work a cast of optimistic luminosity which support variegated forms of
precarious life in neoliberal capitalism. The loss of security, Virno (1996) argues, had produced
an emotional climate of anxiety endemic to the present. However, passion is not necessarily the
opposite of anxiety. Managerial discourse of the fifties, sixties and to the seventies reminds us
that “all excellence demands pain, tedium, frustration”, and negative emotional states are
positive as long as they can serve as a driver for purposeful economic action (Irish, 1976, p. 51).
As I would elaborate in the following chapters, the fantasy of passion and the good life, maturing
in the seventies, would develop and gain in importance towards the 21st century, providing both
therapy and seduction to legitimate exploitation, and to cope with the repercussions that such
exploitation engineers.
The Elusive Search for the Good Life
The good life can be thought of as an orienting object: it directs our agencies based on its utopic
promise of where it resides. When something is said to lead to the good life, it becomes good,
magnetizing energy and positive affectivity. Management discourse had, over the decades, made
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passion that good object, arguing that it fulfills the need for self-actualization that is common to
all human beings. By doing so, the good life of work has also prioritized psychological justice,
making fulfillment the main achievement to work.
But contrary to the common narrative, there is a history to our demand from work, and it
is a conflictual history of a struggle over the rights to articulate desire. Positive emotions, like
happiness and passion, have been used to shape and legitimate the want from work, but these
emotional regimes come also bundled with models of behaviors and beliefs which privilege the
interests of capital. After all, people are not just told that right feelings in right jobs lead to the
good life; they are told to transform themselves, to actively seek out the means of experiencing
those right feelings. The shift from happiness to passion illustrates the political qualities of this
demand, it reminds us that it is important to consider who articulates the demands from work,
how one group’s demands are made the demands of everyone else, and the effects such demands
have.
My aim in this chapter is to unsettle the basis of our psychological need from work.
When passion is thought of as being necessary or good, an innate human need, we make the
goodness of passion a fact, which, as Rei Terada (2009) points out, suggests the “illegitimacy of
any desire to refrain from endorsing the given” (p. 3). To create room for critique, it is necessary
to first create room for dissatisfaction with the norm of our want from work. There is no need to
assume that that dissatisfaction is bad, and that it needs to be quickly fixed with work that might
fulfil. Withholding judgement to consider the different stories that dissatisfaction can tell may
also produce different optimistic relationships, different imaginative possibilities of the good life.

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Chapter 2: Jobless and Resilient
We were in one of the worst recessions on record… So what started out as a
story of a man who simply fired people for a living… became a movie about a
man who was trying to figure out who and what he wanted in his life. And in
addition to that, I had to cut out all these kind of satirical firing scenes that made
sense when I first started writing the movie, but in this moment, don't make any
sense.

Jason Reitman in an interview with Terry Gross (Gross, 2009)

Faced with the Great Recession and mass unemployment in 2009, Jason Reitman, director of the
film Up in the Air, decides to replace satirical scenes of corporate firing with "authentic"
vignettes of retrenched workers reacting to news of their layoffs (Gross, 2009). Some of the most
striking scenes early in the film provide a glimpse into its original direction. One depicts Ryan
Bingham, a professional corporate downsizer, delivering a clichéd speech on passion to a newly
laid off worker, only to quickly seize his keycard and direct him out the door when he looks
momentarily placated: “Anyone who has ever built an empire or changed the world sat where
you are right now. And it’s because they sat there, they were able to do it.” This line was meant
to mock a longer lineage of commonsense career advice – the stereotype that unemployment
could present a positive moment when one rediscovers passions and pursues a better life – but in
light of the recession, Reitman worried that the satirical tone had sounded “fake” and
disrespectful (Gross, 2009).
To remedy this, Reitman recruited laid off workers from St. Louis and Detroit and
included them in the film, reenacting their shock and anguish to news of their layoffs. Critics
reacted favorably to this change, calling it an “amazingly prescient” display of national suffering
(Morgenstern, 2009) and the “truer tragedy” of the hardship that many Americans are forced to
65
face in the recession (Dargis, 2009). The depth and authenticity of this national hurt was
supported by Reitman himself who stated that he had to do little to get these workers to reveal
the pain of job loss. During shoots, subjects reverted to their “sense-memory” almost
immediately upon being told they were fired: “their body language would change, their shoulders
would fold, their eyes would turn, one girl broke into hives.” (Thompson, 2009).
Somewhat ironically then, passion transforms from the subject of satire to become the
film's redemptive object. By the film’s end, enlightened by familial and romantic relationships,
Bingham starts pondering about the meaninglessness of his life and career (Gregg, 2011). As Ian
Fraser (2013) notes, the final scenes hint that Bingham might leave his job to find something
more fulfilling. This transformation, Reitman tells us, relates to the subject of purpose: “where
do you find purpose in life and what do you want in your life?” (Popsugar, 2009). This was also
a direction that was inspired through his interviews with the unemployed. He explains that the
loss of income “rarely came up” during conversations. Rather “what people said, time and time
again, was: ‘I don't know what I'm supposed to do’... It was really about a lack of purpose.”
(Gross, 2009). Purpose was thereby impressed not only as something that workers once had but
lost; it was also framed as the primary cost of job loss and the main crisis of the recession. Given
that, the recovery of passion, the rediscovery of things that matter in your life, takes on new
cultural significance.
Up in the Air illustrates how the recession has transformed the narrative of passion into a
social good, an object that animates recovery for the “lost” sense of purpose and hope
experienced by those laid off.
14
Where passion might have once been read as a cliché, its critique

14
Notably, the sense of loss here is, as Gregg (2011) points to, recovered through a normative notion of the family
and heterosexual romance. James Hoberman (2009) writes in Village Voice, “As articulated by the movie's several
subplots and clinched with a concluding rainbow montage in which the unemployed extol the comfort of their loved
ones, the cruelties of the free market can be ameliorated by a sentimental faith in Family Values. Up in the Air warns
66
is now nullified through an acceptance in the necessity of its existence. Reitman is unwilling to
mock passion because of a shared belief of the narrative’s significance in molding a purposeful
world. In fact, it is loss itself that makes the cliché powerful and worth circulating: we return to
ideas of normative family values, romantic relationships, and of course, the purpose found in
work, when there is a breakdown that needs rebuilding. Though a cliché, the story of passion
acquires value in a moment of economic disenchantment, providing a promise that personal
growth and purpose is capable of erasing the negative affects of job loss, and opening a space of
hope and self-transformation.
This chapter explores the entanglements between unemployment and passion, focusing
on how unemployment – positioned as psychic loss – enables and even necessitates the intense
circulation in the discourse of passion. In the previous chapter, I have provided a history of how
work is constructed to offer individuals a glimpse into the good life, an aspiration constructed
through multiple actors, including surveys which “proved” that the desire for passionate work is
something innately found within ourselves. How might this aspiration be affected in a condition
of normalized unemployment?
While employment has never guaranteed passion, it is often recognized as a requisite for
passionate work, and a necessity for the materialization of good life. The institution of waged
labor under capitalism, and the steady decimation of cultures and practices that provide self-
sufficiency has made employment important to one’s survival and hopes for the future. Only
with employment can one imagine a progressively economically well-off future, upward class
mobility, and consumer comforts.
The Great Recession, however, had problematized this by normalizing a culture of

that you can't go home again—and then, full of false cheer and false consciousness, pretends you can.”
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unemployment into everyday life and consciousness in America. By speaking of unemployment
as a culture, I am referring less to the literal state of unemployment, as opposed to an affective
structure of it. Indeed, at the time of writing, United States had achieved a historically low
unemployment rate: a “9 year low” of 4.6% in November 2016 (Rugaber, 2016). But, media
reports are often less than enthusiastic about this news, often following it with warnings, like
what Forbes did, that these rates just reflect the “momentary calm before the coming economic
storm” (Hansen, 2016). Such discrepancy has resulted in a mistrust of unemployment figures
(Clifton, 2015), and those numbers have seemingly become open to different interpretations
depending on one’s political agenda (Irwin, 2016).
I recognize that a number of complex factors – including the problems in the calculation
of unemployment rates, the large difference in conditions of employment across the U.S., the
slow level of wage growth, the loss of job security, amongst others – have contributed to this
view. But what these views jointly indicate is that unemployment is also a cultural experience: an
affective experience rooted in knowledge and practices (for instance of austerity) that is now
common even in periods of employment due to the ever looming threat of job loss and a
recession.
My goal in this chapter is to reflect on the formations of passion under such conditions.
One key argument that I am forwarding is that unemployment actually provides permission for
the intensification circulation of passion because passion is promised to impress employers,
shake off the stigma of job loss, and make their subjects more resilient during the difficult
process of job hunting. Therefore, far from creating an army of discouraged workers,
unemployment in post-recessionary America strengthened the existing discourses of passion.
I begin my analysis by situating career guidance advice in post-recessionary United
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States. Offering that job hunting is now normalized as a perpetual state of affair, I describe how
the historical construction of unemployment as psychic loss provides a context for an intensified
turn to passion as a mode of recuperation. Particularly, the historical association of
unemployment to passifying unhappiness, (a) requires individuals to perform passion so as to
distance themselves from these negative models of personhood, and (b) they legitimate
workfarist stipulations on welfare on the pretext that “discouraged” workers will need a push to
go back to work to be personally happy and to ensure the happiness of society. Following which,
I embark a close analysis of career guidance literature to illustrate the different ways passion is
purposed towards enabling resilience in subjects, and how that contributes to a neoliberal
subjectivity. Last, I consider how online job hunting and anti-passion discourse recruits workers
to attach themselves to an optimistic relations to work despite repeated encounters of
disappointment.
A “Psychological Recession”: Career Guides and Normalized Unemployment
In the years following the financial crisis, a cultural “turn to passion” may be observed in the
sphere of work as masses of newly unemployed workers are advised by career guides to take the
opportunity to pause and consider their passions and dreams. “What do you like”, “what makes
your heart sing” are the various therapeutic clichés offered to workers who have to reenter a job
scarce marketplace. This fixation on self-discovery is perhaps not unusual given that career
guides fall under the genre of self-help which has traditionally prized self-knowledge as the route
to empowerment (Rimke, 2000).
Career guides, however, differ in a number of ways from the general overture of the self-
help genre. Often turned to in moments of unemployment, career guides are read not just as
inspirational materials, but books offering practical tips that can help readers secure a job
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(McGee, 2005). The espousal of ‘passion’ as a necessary affective disposition for the job search
frames passion in two ways: It is an object readers are encouraged to find to acquire meaning in
work and it is also something highly pragmatic to the job hunting process itself. As Steve Dalton
(2012), writer of The 2-Hour Job Search, plainly states, “In my experience, those who find the
job search process least stressful are the ones who combine their aptitudes with their personal
passions… When you have both passion and knowledge, people want to hire you immediately.”
Passion’s allure arises from this juncture of survivalism and optimism. Promising that the job is
located precisely at the site of desire: passion both soothes and empowers.
Career guidance literature was eagerly sought after when unemployment rates hit a 26-
year high of 10.2% in 2009 (Goodman, 2009). That year, the Association of American Publishers
reported strong sales for career guides despite a general fall in publishing figures. Continued
problems with unemployment in the years after also normalized the need for such advice. When
US Bureau of Labor Statistics released reports seven years later describing a recovered economy
and a healthy unemployment rate of 5% (Schwartz, 2016a), numerous sources questioned the
comprehensiveness of the numbers and the positive outlook it implied (Fox, 2016; Gregory,
2016; Wells, 2016). Sarah Kendzior (2016a) writes in Quartz stating that the “unemployment
rate feels like a lie for many” because many individuals have personal experiences that differ
from the report. Unemployment figures are increasingly unrepresentative of societal wellbeing
due to changes in schemes of employment. The rise of self-employment and flexible/temporary
labor, for instance, have pressed wages down and increased the insecurity of jobs, creating more
poverty and financial precarity (Walters, 1996).
These problems, Arne Kalleberg (2011) offers, stem from a long process of neoliberal
economic restructuring. Since the mid-1980s there had been a gradual shift in the conception of a
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corporation, changing from a “stakeholder model” towards a “shareholder model” (Kalleberg,
2012 p. 492). While the corporation in the former is deemed to be responsible for its employees
and the communities it serves, the latter renders the interests of investors its primary
responsibility, incentivizing corporate leaders to decrease wage bills and to aim for short term
profits. Hence, the recession and the oversupply of labor provided an alibi to implement cost
cutting measures like long term wage freezes, lower staffing ratios, and general pay cuts
(Kalleberg, 2011). Further, layoffs offered an opportunity to streamline work processes. This
included the replacement of workers with automated systems and the breakdown of mid-level
jobs into piecemeal work which can outsourced to low cost or temporary labor (Dyer-Witheford,
2015; Kahn, 2016). This had the effect of producing a high labor supply, job scarce marketplace
which had kept unemployment high and median wages down.
Systemic racism had also contributed to the variability of the unemployment experience.
As Eddie Glaude (2016) argues, the rhetoric of economic recovery suffers from a “value gap”
where recovery for a specific population of white Americans is poised as recovery for the nation
as a whole. News of recovering economy obfuscates the disproportionate number of racial
minorities unemployed and their struggles with poverty. The national rate of unemployment for
black Americans is at least twice that of whites (Glinton, 2016), and they are getting reemployed
at a slower rate (White, 2015). This discrepancy has also led to what is called a “two American
economies” (Kendzior, 2016b), where expensive coastal cities, like New York and California,
experience “rocket-shiplike growth” while other states, especially those in the Rust Belt,
continue to be mired in poverty (Schwartz, 2016b).
15

Put together, these incidents create an affective sense of an ongoing crisis, where firings,

15
This sense of divided enfranchisement is particularly evident – and growing – along the lines of political
affiliation.
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underpaid and precarious jobs have become the new normal. This public sensibility is noted in a
2015 Public Religion Research Institute poll where 72% of its respondents expressed feeling that
they are still in a midst of a recession. Tony Beshara (2012) describes this as a “psychological
recession” in The Job Search Solution, where it has become the norm for people to constantly
“worry” about their jobs, even if they are already employed. Featured as an expert on job
placement in Dr. Phil, Beshara echoes the rhetoric of career coaches in expressing that workers
today have to be prepared for layoffs at any moment, and that job hunting has to be seen as an
ongoing act that people have to engage in at multiple times in their lives. However, the climate
of anxiety arises not only because people are afraid of losing their jobs, it comes about because
of the traumatic and difficult nature of job hunting itself. As Beshara relates, job hunting is an
emotionally draining task that people have to repeatedly attempt because it is a “numbers game”
that is unlikely yield results with a single offer: “You are going to be depressed, dejected,
rejected, refused, denied, forgotten, ignored, lied to… and after all that abuse, you are going to
get up and run the risk of its happening again.”
The difficulty of job hunting has fueled the demand for career advice, where readers are
taught to manage their expectations, given pep talks for the grueling process, and given practical
tips on how they might better present themselves. Although no public report for the sale of career
guidance literature is readily available, independent research firm Marketdata Enterprises
estimates the self-improvement industry to be worth $9.6 billion in 2015. The coaching industry,
a field closely related to career guidance, was estimated to be worth $2 billion in 2012
(Brodesser-Akner, 2013). In addition, when I first analyzed career guides in Amazon.com in
2013, I found that 746 of 1200 books under the ‘new and popular’ listing in the category of ‘job
hunting and careers’ were published after 2007. Of these, 169 titles were published in 2013.
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Supplemented with seminars, counseling sessions, boot camps, and online writing assignments,
career guides contribute to a burgeoning market for career advice.
Unemployment and Necessary Psychic Loss
It is necessary to critically examine the histories that structure our beliefs in the relations
between work, unemployment, and human wellbeing. Maurizio Lazzarato (2009) reminds us that
“unemployment, employment, and work are not 'natural' realities that have an objective
existence” (p. 111). And yet, it is not surprising that unemployment feels like an objective
reality: national unemployment figures and its ties to other economic indicators had caused
unemployment to take on a cast of a scientific truth (Walters, 1996). Still, the histories of
unemployment have shown that the meanings of unemployment are not fixed. Unemployment
had acquired different meanings at different points in time, and its construction had historically
been tied to different concerns and ideologies (Walters, 2000; Welschman, 2006).
In this section, I intend to denaturalize one common belief of unemployment - its
assumed quality of emotional suffering. The term itself provides us a sign of this assumption.
The “un” in “unemployment” presumes an absence, a lacuna that is translated into other kinds of
lack, including that of emotional well-being. People who lose their jobs are expected to
encounter some negative state, including that of depression, anxiety, frustration, confusion, and
stress, states that are assumed in the titles of numerous career guides like The Panic Free Job
Search (Hill, 2010), Keeping Your Head After Losing your Job (Leahy, 2014), Finding Your
Career Path Without Losing Your Mind (Fisher, 2013). The aspect is crucial to passion because
job loss has often been construed as accompanied with a loss of purpose. The popular narrative is
that job loss can result in depression, causing laid off have become too ‘discouraged’ to look for
another job. Passion and its qualities of zeal and meaning are hence read as means to recuperate
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this sense of purpose, soothe the disappointments of job loss, and to open the reopen the
possibility of career happiness and success (Finney, 2009; Fisher, 2013; Leahy, 2014).
We can begin interrogating the relationship between unemployment and emotional
suffering through Matthew Cole’s (2007a) re-examination of Marie Jahoda, Paul Lazarsfeld, and
Hans Zeisels’ influential 1933 ethnographic study of mass unemployment in the Austrian village
of Marienthal. In a 1971 forward to the classic study, Lazersfeld writes that one of the main
theses of the Marienthal study was that prolonged unemployment is accompanied with profound
psychological consequences. Specifically, people who suffered long term unemployment had the
tendency to become apathetic, unable to “utilize any longer even the few opportunities left to
them” (Jahoda et al, 1933/1971, p. vii). Such individuals had tendency to lose hope – Lazarsfeld
describes them as having a “reduced level of aspiration” – becoming drifters who are
psychologically impeded from being productive and happy.
The study of Marienthal provides us insight into a historical moment where
unemployment and psychic loss was twinned. In a re-examination of their work, Cole (2007a)
argues that the study had largely construed the problem of unemployment not through the loss of
the “instrumental benefit” of paid work - “the means of subsistence” - but its “human costs,” the
ways in which unemployment had affected the identities of its adult men, their sense of purpose,
perception of time, and the community at large (p. 1135). To be precise, it was not that the
researchers did not catalogue the problems of the loss of wages - Jahoda et al (1933/1971) did
collect data that reflected the deprivation of nutrition caused by the poverty – but its emphasis,
and also the interpretations of those that followed their work, had largely focused on the
psychological outcomes of unemployment.
This shift away from the emphasis of poverty to psychology, made the Marienthal study a
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precursor to a different sociological understanding of unemployment. Here, unemployment
possessed its own inherent ill effects because it removed people from the structured conditions of
waged jobs.
16
In this argument, employment was presented as a basis for normal, healthy human
functioning. The suggestion is that without work, workers seem to lose their sense of purpose,
suffer a disruption of routines, experience diminished mental faculties, encounter threats to
identities as working men, which led to ‘idling’ and ‘drifting’. This normalizes the psychic
qualities of a wage; personal and communitarian life outside a waged context seems implausible
for losing the wage itself would unhinge the worker from a sound mind and a social context.
Such a perspective was not atypical of how unemployment was constructed in the inter-
war years. William Walters (2000) notes that while unemployment in the decades prior were
discussed in moral or a statistical terms, a social-psychological discourse had taken over during
the Great Depression in the 1930s to present a subjective dimension to unemployment. Prompted
by the prevalence of long term unemployment, researchers became interested in the
psychological dimensions of unemployment, and extended concepts like ‘motivation’, ‘attitude’,
and ‘mental health’ to describe the unemployed. The new language opened a new psychological
dimension to unemployment, which then allowed the researchers to speak about the psychic
costs of non-work especially for the long term unemployed which puts them at risk at being
“discouraged”:
The breaking of the social bonds formed in the workplace, a loss of structure to the day, a
loss of self-respect and status connected with working and earning, an absence of the

16
As suggested, it would not be fair to state that Jahoda et al (1933/1971) had not discussed poverty at all. There are
a number of poignant depictions of how unemployment had resulted in severe poverty, causing pressures on the
community’s ability to afford substance for both adults and children. However, the later chapters of the book were
primarily focused on the psychological dimensions of unemployment, and it was those later aspects as well, that
become characteristics of what we describe as the Marienthal study.
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physical and mental stimuli provided by work. These factors are seen to produce a host of
psychiatric disorders in the subject, including anxiety, stress, and depression. They can
also result in feelings of anger, bitterness, and isolation (Walters, 2000, p. 85)
With this, the governance of unemployment took on a distinctively psychological cast
from the 1930s. Unemployed club movements were organized to provide a context for the
unemployed to socialize and engage in some simple productive activities to fight off the isolation
and discouragement that came about with job loss (Walters, 2000). At the same time, educators
started an alternate pedagogical program that encouraged youths to develop a different
psychological relationship with their labor, hoping that it could minimize the condition of
discouragement produced through unemployment. Juvenile Unemployment Centers, for instance,
encouraged youths to discover a sense of fulfilment in productive activity by aligning job
training with their personal interest (Miller, 1986, p. 158).
This history reveals the very specific construction of what is often assumed to be a
naturalized relations between unemployment and psychic loss. In highlighting this, my purpose
is not to dispute the “truth” of how unemployment feels. Certainly, it is possible that the
deprivation of a wage and the deviation from social expectations of work can lead to feelings of
depression and ineptitude. However, directly relating unemployment to psychic loss
decontextualizes the many reasons for unhappiness and prescribes work as a part of human need.
As critics like Burchell (1994) and Cole (2007b) have pointed out, the diagnosis of a direct
relationship between unemployment and emotion suffering conflates the complex emotional
effects of other factors surrounding unemployment – for instance, the gendered norm of a
working male, our reliance on employment for income, sociality, and biographical coherence –
with the direct cause of unemployment itself. Then with the complex factors hidden, we are more
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likely to advocate employment as a cure to the “suffering” of unemployment as opposed to
challenging a dominant social order that makes work a priority and necessity to human existence
(Cole, 2007b; Weeks 2011).
Personal Unhappiness
What does the historical assumption of unemployment and psychic loss mean for
passion? Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzers’ (2002) which seeks to bridge the field of happiness
studies with that of economics, offers a glimpse of this relationship. Providing a comprehensive
review of previous literature, Frey and Stutzer (2002) makes the unequivocal statement that
research over many sources have shown that the unemployed are significantly unhappier than
those employed. Citing one article, they write, “The analysis, which controls for a large number
of other determinants of happiness, such as income and education, finds that the self-proclaimed
happiness of unemployed persons is much lower than employed persons” (p. 419). And bearing
legacy of research on unemployment, they continue that these statistical results relate to the
“pure” effect of unemployment, which controls for factors like “income loss, as well as other
indirect effects” on happiness (p. 419).
In this claim, Frey and Stutzer (2002) establish the scientific and economic norm of what
Jahoda et al’s (1933/2002) had observed in her ethnographic work. We have reason to mistrust
this strong conclusion, especially given the variegated concerns in the measurement of happiness
(Krueger & Schkade, 2008), the generalizability of results (Deaton, 2011), and the difficulty of
operationalizing the many “indirect effects” of unemployment (Burchell, 1994)
17
. Regardless of
the validity of the statement, however, this assumption allows Frey and Stutzer (2002) to make
an alternative proposal about the expected direction of the causation. Instead of assuming that the

17
Aronczyk (2014) offers a good overview of the problems involved in the measurement of well-being in happiness
economics
77
former has caused the latter, the relationship could work in reverse: “unhappy people do not
perform well and get laid off. Happy persons are fitter for working life, which makes it less
likely that they will lose their jobs” (Frey & Stutzer, 2002, p. 419).
Emotions, Ahmed (2004) tells us, can become “stuck” to signs through circulation: “the
more signs circulate, the more affective they become” (p. 45). Here, we witness here how
unhappiness becomes “stuck” to the sign of unemployment as represented through a correlation.
The “pureness” of the correlation led Frey and Stutzer (2002) to the supposition that
unemployment may be an effect of the worker’s defective personality. Whether or not this
hypothesis is true
18
, the inference widely believed: if unemployment causes unhappiness, and if
unhappiness is seen as a sign of poor work fitness, then it follows that the unhappiness caused by
unemployment would make the worker less hireable. Unhappiness becomes an affect that is now
stuck to the bodies of the unemployed; an unhappy job hunter carries the negativity involved in
unemployment, a stigma of personal incompetence.
This is not a casual proposition: as career coach and columnist Harry Freedman (2013)
admits to, “being positive” during a period of unemployment may be difficult, but it “is a vital
pre-condition for your job search.” Positivity is especially important in the American context due
to the emphasis placed on the “chemistry,” the emotional feeling of connection between the hirer
and the candidate (Sharone, 2014). “Most individuals lose out in the job-seeking game,” Beshara
(2012) writes, “because they don't develop passionate intensity and enthusiastic approach to the
process of looking for a job.” For one to be hireable, one must maintain a “sellable semblance”
(Elraz, 2013) by projecting an optimal image of likeability, cultivating a “mood of success”

18
Frey and Stutzer (2002) follows with the statement that while there is evidence of this, “the main causality seems
clearly to run from unemployment to unhappiness” (p. 419). But it is not just scientific validity that is at stake here.
A cultural acceptance in relation between unhappiness and employment allows us to make different inferences about
how unhappiness can become both a result and cause of unemployment.
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(Freedman, 2013).
Unsurprisingly, the context of unemployment and psychic loss surface a pragmatic
purpose for the affective state of passion. As Kitty Martini and Candice Reed (2010) write in
Thank You For Firing Me, passion provides the zeal that can “bulletproof” job hunters from a
capricious employment market: “If you do what comes naturally and it's work you honestly love,
you're bulletproof. Being bulletproof means that nothing will stop you from doing what feels
right, even if you are fired. Your passion will always sustain you.” (p. 13). Philip Fisher (2002)
tells us that affects may be strategically deployed as blockages, to intervene in pathways between
events and emotional outcomes. Just as how a commander may arouse anger so as to repress fear
amongst troops, here passion is used to prevent and control the ‘natural’ outcome of anxiety and
depression that follows job loss. The enthusiastic dimension of the affect is pragmatically
purposed towards providing job hunters with the drive to constantly apply for jobs in a job-
scarce marketplace, and to replace the negativity of job loss with a “progressive attitude” where
they might have “optimism and humour” about the future (p. 29).
Such stories of emotional transformation are especially valuable in the context of the
“mood economy” (Silva, 2015), a neoliberal context that prizes stories of emotional self-change.
In her interviews, Silva (2015) observes that many of her working-class young adult interviewees
are apt to identify themselves through a therapeutic discourse, where “difficult emotions” are
organized “into a narrative of self-transformation” (p. 115). Prompted by a therapeutic culture,
emotional management has taken on significance as signs of a competent self. If it is unavoidable
that one might feel disappointed by unemployment, then turning to passion allows one to acquire
the valuable narratives of self-transformation; instead of being crippled by unemployment,
individuals can present themselves as resilient subjects, workers who are able to make the most
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of difficult circumstances and continue pursuing their goals.
In this way, unemployment can even be presented as a positive event for workers to be
reacquainted with passion. Layoffs, Martini and Read (2002) write, is an opportunity for people
to be “drifting with a purpose,” licence for them to reconnect with their true passions (p. 19).
Unemployment may be the reset that readers need to get out of a hateful job and to start on a
career that could yield them happiness and success. They advise workers against heading back
into the job market immediately and to take the chance to consider their passions, such that they
might recover “a sense of adventure and purpose” about their career rather to be persistently
trapped in “a survival game” (p. 3)
But at the same time, the connection with passion is precisely about survival – if of a
different kind. The comforting advice on passion is primarily delivered to help readers survive
the hardships of unemployment and to get a new job, to provide them some enthusiasm needed
for an interview and to overcome their present negative thoughts. This modulates the affective
experience of unemployment, and may give readers a better chance of getting a job, but it does
not, fundamentally, provide any guarantees of good employment. In this sense, the approach is
also conservative: rather than challenging the experience of negativity involved in job loss, or the
ways individuals are burdened with the structural problems of the economy, we rely on passion
to circumvent the stigma involved in unhappiness.
Social Unhappiness
The unhappiness assumed in job loss also has a propensity to be transposed from the
personal to the social. As Frey and Stutzer (2002) continue to write, “general unemployment”
can cause “people to be unhappy… even if they are not themselves out of work.” (p. 420).
General unemployment causes general unhappiness, they offer, because it unravels the good life
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that employment seems to cohere: perceptions of job security, a good economy, good use of tax
contributions, low crime, and a peaceful society. Employment is presented here as a glue that
binds the happiness of communities, and the unemployment of others threatens this cohesion by
projecting imaginations of how the unemployment of others could hurt one's own future well-
being. Such shared horizon of happiness can involve pressures of conformity (Ahmed, 2010). If
one's unhappiness makes other unhappy, then the drive to happiness remains no longer remains
just a matter of personal responsibility. While it does not necessarily follow that unemployment
should spoil the good life for others, the belief that it should and will makes employment a social
project.
The discourse of passionate work advances this view by making personal decisions of
non-work appear illogical and irresponsible. By situating work as a site of happiness and
fulfilment, the discourse of passion puts into question why individuals would refuse to enter
employment. This is especially so because passion is often presented as a potential found within
every unique individual. Drawing from a theistic slant, for instance, Dan Miller (2010) of 48
Days To The Work You Love describes a passionate job as “a calling,” a means that for people to
fulfil their “unique God-given characteristics.” Likewise, “doing what you were born to do” is a
popular cliché of passion that prescribes work and happiness as biological destiny. The norm of
the working adult and its relationship to general happiness vilifies the personal decision not to
work: not only does it keep one unhappy, it also causes unhappiness for others. In this,
employment becomes an injunction: something that individuals should strive for, and something
that society should incentivize so that so that the happiness of all can be maintained.
This had profound implications for the dismantling of the welfare system in the United
States. As Sam Binkley (2014) argues, the cutbacks to welfare relates to a destructivist neoliberal
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enterprise that punishes individuals for failing to conform to arrangements that optimized social
happiness. The welfare reform in 1996 was, for instance, primarily advanced on grounds that one
of its programs, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) incentivized recipients,
often non-white single mothers, to be lazy, dependent and promiscuous (Chappell, 2010). This
rhetoric is derived from a longstanding “perversity thesis,” that contrary to a logical charitable
view, welfare provided to the poor actually had “perverse incentives” that led the poor to be
dependent on welfare and stuck in poverty (Somers & Block, 2005). For instance, conservative
academic Lawrence Mead, whose views were influential to welfare reform, argued that the long
term unemployment was rooted in a culture of poverty, where the poor “are simply defeatist
about work or unable to organise their personal lives to hold jobs consistently” (quote from King
& Wickham-Jones, 1999). In this sense, welfare provided without conditions attached
perpetuates the misery of the poor: “Although the poor feel defeated, society has allowed them
ways to avoid functioning that other people lack… It no longer tells the poor clearly what they
are expected to do” (Mead, 2011).
The words “defeated,” “discouraged,” and “demoralized,” the terminologies used to
describe the inertia of those on welfare can be contrasted against our contemporary
understanding of passion. The psychological states assumed of welfare recipients are passifying,
lacking in confidence and hope towards the object of work which leads one to unwilling to get a
job. Perhaps it is not that Mead expects the poor to be passionate about work, but that passion,
nonetheless, forms the normative backdrop for the expectation of the “right” attitude: an
orientation of purpose towards work. Mead (1986) offers that the problem of welfare is that
welfare recipients are allowed to be passive about work, to see work as voluntary rather than a
social obligation. The “passifying” qualities of welfare, its encouragement of “dependency,”
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have enabled recipients to be psychologically unaligned from the “right” orientation towards
work, which threatens the good life of society at large.
Here, we witness how discipline can be exacted on those who are seen to have forsaken a
desire for the good life. As Cheryl Mattingly (2014) points out, a good life is characterized not so
much by attainment but by “moral striving,” the efforts and sacrifices an individual makes in
order to come towards the attainment of an ideal. A shared horizon of the liberal good life – of
working hard so as to achieve economic independence and income mobility, for instance – thus
functions as a collective moral principle that facilitates trust amongst members of a community.
Here, individual striving is read to provide the conditions for community advancement.
Attachment to the same images of the good life allows each member will do the best they can for
themselves, and this desire will benefit the community as a whole. Correspondingly then,
disavowals of the good life implies a moral crisis: a population who may now infringe on the
good life that members hold on to. Therefore, it becomes imperative that these populations be
disciplined back to the formal boundaries of the good life.
In Mead’s (2011) lexicon, this comes in the shape of a “charity rooted in love.” The
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) welfare program which replaced the AFDC
inherited this outlook through workfare stipulations. TANF included mandatory requirements for
recipients to find work or to engage in job training, and exercised cuts on the length of time that
recipients can receive aid so that they would be driven by a deadline to find a job. This “tough
love,” as The Guardian puts it (Ramesh, 2010), was meant to replace the “dependent outlook” of
the welfare recipient with the “self-interested, competitive conduct” that neoliberal happiness
represents (Binkley, 2014, p. 163). The problematic psychologies assumed of the welfare
recipient can be observed from the nature of job training programs provided by TANF, which
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focuses on the affective states of workers as opposed to their skills and education. As Sanford
Schram (2000) remarks:
From the moment applicants first walk into a welfare office, the emphasis is on assessing
them for personal problems that might prevent them from being “job-ready.” The goal is
to get recipients to change their behavior, change their psychological outlook, reduce
their personal problems, make themselves not just more motivated but more attractive to
employers. Less emphasis is given to assessing a recipient’s need to enhance her
employability through education and training… If skills are stressed, they are “soft skills”
of fitting into the social relations of the workplace more so than the “hard skills” of
training and job competencies. “Soft skills” development in and of itself suggests that the
administration of welfare is being medicalized as it turns to assessing and monitoring
recipients’ ability to behaviorally and psychologically integrate themselves into the
workplace. (pp. 87-88)
The replacement of AFDC with TANF indicates how beliefs about social happiness can
legitimate the exercise of sovereign violence to eliminate even the conditions of survivability for
those who fall outside models of optimized social well-being. After all, those who fail to meet
the requirements of welfare stipulations are not just chastised or warned; under the pretext of
curing their “defeatist” mentality, these subjects are made to let die through the deprivation of
nutrition, shelter, and medical aid (Binkley, 2014). This might explain why life expectancies for
the America’s poorest experienced one of the largest drops between 1990 and 2008, when TANF
was implemented (Geier, 2012).
These implications leads us to a question that is seldom asked: why should
unemployment necessarily lead to psychic suffering? The difficulty of raising this question
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signals the degree to which the norm of a paid work identity is entrenched in capitalist societies –
instead of understanding employment as one possible identity, we inherit the idea that labor is
necessary to life and that it fulfils a part of our biological destiny. As I would further elaborate
through the in-depth analyses of career guides, this assumption is also key to the rise of
passionate work advice. In a moment of disappointment, passionate work is mobilized to provide
an impression of a happier future, a different path that the individual can follow, so that work
may be accepted as a norm of society. In this, the discourse also masks the problems of work and
neoliberal capitalism. Instead of getting us to critically consider the origins of the negative
feelings of job loss, and to challenge the dominant social order, the discourse of passion equips
subjects to be resilient, and to handle structural problems through their personal effort.
Unemployment and the Re-education of the Self
This individualistic solution to unemployment is rooted in the discourse of
“employability,” a contemporary political rationality in the US and UK that has influenced
policy decisions and organizational norms. As Anneleen Forrier and Luc Sels (2003) point out,
while employability was used in the early and mid-twentieth century to describe reskilling
initiatives for the persistently unemployed, it had, by the 1990s, become more generally applied
to the workforce so as to reference shifts in structural conditions and expectations of
employment. As political rationality, however, employability does more than describe the
decline of job security – it also explains policy decisions, state-corporate alliances, and practices
that have transformed notions of how individuals are made to understand and manage their
employment status.
Simply put, the shift from “lifetime employment” to “lifetime employability” (Forrier &
Sels, 2003, p. 103) has tasked individuals to be responsible for the development of their own
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human capital so as to improve their employability and to secure consistent employment across
different organizations (Chertkovskaya, Watt, Tramer & Spoelstra, 2013). This new norm
indicates a new “psychological contract” (Hiltrop, 1995, p. 286), where organizations are now
positioned as “enablers” providing developmental resources to workers so that they might
advance their employability. Therefore, in this scheme, organizations and governments recede in
background as support agents for the workers’ personal decisions while workers are made the
key actors of the labor market.
The concept of employability has been promoted as a means of “empowering”
individuals to exercise more control over their careers in a precarious labor market. The decline
of job security had made the proposition of personally managing one’s career more attractive: if
corporations are unable to provide job security, then having control over one’s employability
can, at least hypothetically, provide smooth transitions from one job to another and ensure a
prospect of ongoing employment (Clarke & Patrickson, 2007). This level of personal
empowerment is also described to fulfil a social good. The Labor Party in the UK, for instance,
had advanced employability on the basis that unemployment was primarily caused by the the
unwillingness or inability of workers to improve and develop skills relevant to the flexible labor
market (Quaid & Lindsay, 2005). From this perspective, the dispensation of resources to increase
employability will solve the fundamental problem of unemployment and increase national
productivity without inflationary pressures (Finn, 2000).
Numerous critiques have been levelled against this positive outlook. As mentioned, the
political rationality of employability has been responsible for cutbacks to welfare and workfarist
stipulations, leading to increased poverty for many vulnerable Americans (Chappell, 2010). At
the same time, employability absolves the state of responsibilities in job creation and places the
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burden of employment squarely on workers, who are driven towards an ambiguous,
undetermined goal of achieving an employable self (Cremin, 2009; Bloom, 2013). This does not
only place unfair pressures on individuals, it is also ineffective as policy because it fails to
provide a long term solution to the shortage of jobs, and that it exacerbates entrenched class,
race, and gender inequalities through the celebration of personal initiative (Chappell, 2010;
Lazzarato, 2009; Peck & Theodore, 2000; Vesterberg, 2013).
While these critiques are important, they are also primarily directed towards the nature
and conditions of employment. What I want to highlight, however, is how this concept has
normalized a serial pattern of unemployment. Under the scheme of employability, workers are
made to expect and treat joblessness as natural, inevitable events that will happen multiple times
over the course of a lifetime, varying only in duration and circumstance. The ordinary nature of
joblessness, I argue, causes unemployment to take on a different significance. Since the success
of job hunting depends on the worker’s ability to embody the subjectivities and skills valued by
capital, the increased frequency and widened distribution of joblessness renders unemployment
an important site of re-education.
This argument can be considered in light of Carlo Vercellone’s (2007) discussion on
cognitive capitalism. Vercellone (2007) describes cognitive capitalism as the contemporary post-
Fordist stage of production where the primary struggle centers on the “intellectual powers of
production” (p, 17), the ways in which the intellectual capacities of humans can be expanded and
tapped into. It is in this context that the “free time” of unemployment takes on a new role.
Drawing from Marx’s work in Grundrisse, Vercellone (2007) notes that free time can increase
the potentials of intellectual labor; it can be deployed as “time for the full development of the
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individual, which in turn reacts upon the productive power of labor as itself the greatest
productive productive power” (Vercellone, 2007, p. 28).
Here, we can consider the coincidence of unemployment and potentials of free time.
Notably, not only does unemployment provide an extended period of free time, it is also
unwaged and highly amicable to forms of re-education. As Vercellone (2007) writes, the success
of this process depends on the “socialisation of education,” the degree to which technologies of
development are effective in incentivizing workers to develop the aptitudes and skills required
by capital (p. 28). Anxious about their future prospects, the unemployed are probably most
incentivized to seek out knowledges provided by career experts to improve their employability.
Accordingly, normalized cycles of unemployment provide a powerful opening to reschool of
massive numbers of workers, and offer the voluntary readjustment of subjectivities.
I will use analyses of 31 different career guides to ground these arguments in the
following sections. Career guides are chosen as materials for analysis for three reasons. First,
they are assumed to be one of the most readily accessible, comprehensive materials that people
can turn to for advice when anxious about their careers. Second, career guides are understood to
articulate an already existing discourse circulating in the larger mediascape of radio programs,
newspaper advice columns, YouTube videos and how-to websites. Third, many authors of career
guides also directly contribute to public discourse when they brand themselves as gurus which
websites can turn to for advice.
The texts were sourced from the Amazon.com categories of ‘job-hunting & careers’ and
‘job-hunting’ and from libraries. I favoured those which were ranked high in the “new and
bestselling” list on Amazon, and examined books only published after 2007. I also looked for
some texts through key words, like “job loss,” and “online job hunting.” Historical comparative
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analyses were also done of Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color Is Your Parachute and Martin
Yate’s Knock ‘Em Dead. Both series are republished every year with a new edition. For Bolles, I
examined different editions of his text starting from 1983 to 2013, for Yate, I examined his texts
from 1985 to 2016.
There are three broad overtures to my analysis. First, I consider how passion relates to
resilience, the capacity for workers to endure the hardships of job loss. Passion, I offer, is not
only used to encourage optimism towards work, it is also used to facilitate the ongoing process
of endurance in a condition of normalized unemployment. What classed politics does this
discourse hide, and what are the possibilities foreclosed, are the questions I seek to answer in this
first portion.
Second, I conduct comparative historical analyses of 2 job hunting texts - What Color Is
Your Parachute and Knock ‘Em Dead - to understand how career guidance instruments have
varied in their production of a neoliberal subjectivity, and how online technologies have
gradually transformed the labor required of job hunting. In this process I demonstrate that the
individualistic quality of passion had not arisen with neoliberalism in the 1970, it had also been
transformed within neoliberalism itself, effecting changes in the expected display of
communicative and affective skills.
Then I close with an analysis of counter-passion discourses. Coming against passion
during this period of massive unemployment, these career guides resonate with the cynicism
some populations may have of work. Having criticized passion, however, these career guides
offer advice that circuitously leads readers back to passion itself, reinforcing the common
imagination that work can be a panacea to human suffering. Taking these examples, from the
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affectively painful to the hopeful to the cynical, I seek to understand how passion is reinstated as
a common feeling amongst working populations.
In understanding these arguments, it is important to remember that they relate to a culture
of unemployment, as opposed to unemployment per se. Career guidance discourse is often used
by its subjects in complex ways that may even prove subversive to the message intended of its
authors (Fodge, 2011). I am not of the assumption that readers will follow the advice without
modification, but as a whole, the discourse speaks about individual expectations in a condition of
normalized precarity. What are the dominant discourses made available to job hunters when they
are in need and eager for career advice, and how does that respond to the precarious present?
Passion as Resilience
Bolles introduces his 2013 edition of What Color is Your Parachute with a chapter on finding
“hope” where he stresses the importance of “attitude.” “I learned that I can teach the most clever,
unorthodox, and effective techniques,” he writes, “but a job-hunter can undo it all if they have
the wrong attitude.” As examples, he offers archetypes of right and wrong attitudes. The person
with a wrong attitude is “smoldering with anger,” “sullen, gloomy about his future,” and feels
that “his life as he knew it is over.” In contrast, the person with the right attitude abounds with
hope despite being “just as depressed about how his life has turned out.” He “essentially sees his
life as an adventure, and is willing to wait patiently for the next Act to unfold.” In these
examples, Bolles shows that right and wrong attitudes are characterized by the presence of
“hope,” the affective disposition that allows two equally depressed workers to react differently to
a job loss. This depiction is interesting, for it suggests that good attitudes rely not upon the
erasure of all negativity – in fact, the person with the “good attitude” is ‘just as depressed about
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how his life has turned out’. What distinguishes a person with the good attitude is the
maintenance of hope that allows coping and patience to proceed.
Taking this as a starting point, I wish to analyze how passion can be directed towards the
production of endurance, survival and resilience. Throughout this chapter, I have argued that
normalized unemployment had transformed the object of passion, rendering it not just a route to
happiness but also a means of arousing endurance in the subject. Life coach Michal Fisher’s
(2013) argument about passion illustrates this view. In Finding Your Career Path Without Losing
Your Mind, she presents passion and hope as intertwined affects: passion manifests when there is
a “hoped-for self” that readers wish to materialize. But Fisher (2013) does not only relate passion
to “enjoyment and success” as the word typically invokes. In an exercise meant to help readers
discover their “hidden dreams,” she highlights the other purpose of passion - to cultivate the
“tenacity and determination” to ensure that job hunters stay motivated through the process of job
hunting. “Hidden dreams,” she writes, are crucial towards producing resilience, in enabling the
subject to “get up in the morning and continue to insist, to fight for yourself… in the face of
setbacks, disappointments and crises.”
We need to consider this agentic dimension of passion - how its energetic drive surfaces a
means to help job hunters endure the “setbacks, disappointment, and crises” that one will
inevitably experience (Fisher, 2013). Career guides warn readers to prepare for disappointments
because the journey of job hunting is full of twists. Interviews and applications that people feel
strongly about may not yield a positive result, and it is also not uncommon for hirers to make
verbal promises that they will not keep, to criticize applicants, or even to rescind job offers that
are made (Beshara, 2012). “The effort it takes to run a good job search is often much more
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intense than work itself,” Jean Baur (2011) of Eliminated! Now What? writes, and by having
passion, job hunters will be more affectively prepared for the onslaught of disappointment.
Resilience is made to be especially necessary in light of the structural shift in
employment, where downsizing is deemed a legitimate strategy of profit maximization
(Kalleberg, 2011). This had normalized the incidences of layoffs. Drawing from BLS statistics,
for instance, Miller (2010) notes that the average length of job is now 2.2 years, and that a person
would have held ten jobs by age 42. “Nobody gets “fired” anymore,” he writes, pointing out that
even the language of being “fired” has changed to that of being “laid off,” “downsized,”
“rightsized,” “restructured,” or “put in the mobility pool.” The depersonalization in the language
of layoffs, Miller (2010) suggests, hint at the shift in attitude that laid off should have, namely,
that they need to take layoffs less personally and understand these as ordinary transitions in a
longer career trajectory.
While these statements may provide employees with a realistic view of the labor market
and dampen the self-doubt that the laid off feel, they also efface the operations of power that
underlie precarity. Instead of understanding precarity as tied to constructed capitalist structures,
it is rhetorically presented as inevitable, abstracted economic phenomena. The burden of
managing precarity then falls onto workers, who are often presented as psychologically
unprepared for the new economy. “We were taught to work jobs, not build careers,” author of
multiple career guides Jon Acuff (2015) argues, and the latter requires more than just good skills
- it necessitates a different mental approach to work (p. 9). Too often people are mistaken into
thinking that they need only to be resourceful and motivated when they apply for their first job.
But when jobs are a small part of a longer career trajectory, the “fear” that accompanies the
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change becomes “not a dragon to be slain once” but “an ocean to be swum daily” (Acuff, 2015,
p. 17)
In a serial model of unemployment, workers are not just expected to feel badly when they
lose their jobs. Instead, the sense of anxiety accompanied by precarity becomes something that
workers experience all the time. Crucially though, career guides are not so much against
emotions like anxiety or fear, as opposed to be against its paralyzing side-effects. Fear which
motivates workers to engage in perpetual learning and constant networking is regarded as
positive – a realistic experience of the labor market – and workers without fear are often those
who are most unprepared for the realities of the labor market. “Fear does not bother the stuck
because they're already out of the game,” Acuff (2015) writes, but at the same time, negative
affects can become a problem when it causes job hunters to feel defeated (p. 211). The goal of
career guides, therefore, is to teach individuals to be resilient, to manage their negative emotional
states, and “know how to get up off the floor when they’re knocked down by job loss” (Baur,
2011).
But the resilience provided through passion is fundamentally an optimistic affect that
supports a positive attitude towards work. Resilience comes from both ends of both ends of the
emotional spectrum because, as Jay Levinson and David Perry (2011) point out in Guerrilla
Marketing for Job Hunters 3.0, employers are not just looking out for people who are resilient,
they are also looking for passionate workers who can “challenge others to stretch and open their
minds to new possibilities.” Passionate workers are often favoured by corporations because they
have a good work ethic and are a positive influence to the company. They “work harder, put in
more hours,” and produce a “positive energy” that drives the productivity of their coworkers up
(Schawbel, 2013).
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Such a drive helps in job hunting as well. Resilient workers can get rid of their “garbage
emotions” quickly (Beshara, 2012), cope well with their drastically reduced incomes (Leahy,
2014), and control their anxiety through the process of job hunting (Baur, 2011). But it often
takes passion to make workers bold and creative about their application process. For instance,
Levinson and Perry (2011) tell applicants to demonstrate their confidence and zeal by applying
for the job in unconventional ways. Many of their suggested “commando tactics,” like writing a
white paper on an industry topic, walking straight into offices unannounced and asking to speak
to managers, or sending in resumes in a box with a coffee cup and then calling the manager
persistently to ask for a coffee date, require a significant amount of labor and boldness – drawing
from and representing their affective states of passion. Job hunters who accomplish this are then
named “survivors” (Levinson & Perry, 2011), and celebrated for their relentless persistence
(Schawbel, 2013), capacities of self-reliance (Finney, 2009), and their purposeful “grit” (Acuff,
2015):
“Grit makes you feel like throwing up. Grit feels like crying. A lot. Grit feels like losing
sleep. It’s hard. Next time you feel like a coward because you’re about to make a difficult
decision and you feel like throwing up, don’t beat yourself up. Next time you cry those
tears that feel so stupid because you think brave people wouldn’t, stop listening to that
lie. Look at grit the right way. Grit never feels like bravery because it’s not a feeling, it’s
a choice." (Acuff, 2015, pp. 212-3)
This image of grit transforms the hardship of unemployment into a masculine narrative of
overcoming, where abject somatic symptoms – crying, vomiting, and sleeplessness – becomes
evidence of laudable perseverance rather than dejected signs of reactions to precarity. Instead of
seeing these bodily signs as a problem, those who choose to persevere are celebrated as heroes
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who follow their passion, people who are willing to do whatever it takes to realize their dreams
(Acuff, 2015), or people who are in obedient pursuit of God’s calling (Miller, 2010). Such an
inversion may flatter the individual, but it also erases the politics of the emotional labor involved
in job hunting, and romanticizes the neoliberal injunction of resilience as signs of personal
strength.
Resilience and Privilege
The problematics of such a construal of passion and resilience can also be read through
its connection to privilege and oppression. In “Selfcare as Warfare,” Ahmed (2014a) reflects on
how privilege can act as a “buffer zone” to “reduce the costs of vulnerability, so if things break
down, if you break down, you are more likely to be looked after.” Ahmed (2014a) notes that the
potential for resilience is mediated through privilege: for those who have savings, a working
spouse, a good educational pedigree, or who never have to face institutional obstacles in getting
rehired, resilience comes easier. Perhaps it is not a guarantee that the privileged will be resilient,
but they have more resources to aid them in enduring and that the failure to endure comes with
lesser consequence.
This can be observed in the many strategies of resilience provided in career guides. For
instance, in The Gift of Job Loss, Michael Froehls (2011) presents layoffs as opportunities to take
a "dream vacation," "learn a new language," "spend real quality time" with a loved one, or have
"passionate sex" at a "sunny spot." Surely these happy activities can dispel the unhappiness of
layoffs and provide a good space for the unemployed to do some soul-searching, discover their
passions, and to recover their energy and enthusiasm for the job hunting process. But all those
activities also clearly depend on a certain degree of privilege – to take time away from work is
already a privilege, an indication that one has a buffer of saving that can tide the loss of
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immediate income. The capacity to pay for some of those consumer activities, to take a class or
vacation, depend even more on the existence of savings. And for those who are in expedient need
of cash flow, the prospects of losing one’s house or feeding one’s family can produce the stress
that makes supportive family or romantic ties difficult.
This is not to say all advice on resilience are without a measure of austerity. For instance,
the advice to change one’s diet, to include more “fresh fruit and vegetables” (options that cost
more), can be coupled with the advice to do proper accounting of one’s expenses (Martini &
Reed, 2010). Encouragement to exercise may also be followed with suggestions that one could
run in a park if a gym membership is unaffordable (though parks are not always located in safe,
convenient locations for the poor) (Leahy, 2014). However, such advice still proceed from
middle-classed norms, and they falter when applied to the laid off who are truly without the
means. When advising readers to head to the gym, for instance, Martini and Reed (2010) suggest
that spending on a gym membership is wise even when individuals do not have money to pay
their bills: a gym can offer “a place to watch the news if your cable has been turned off, and a
place to shower if you didn't pay the water bill.”
What I dispute is not the soundness of the advice, but how such advice is deeply
entrenched in the presence of a buffer, and how those without a buffer are still expected to
display the same degrees of positivity and resilience as those who have it. In this case, the
improvement of one’s fitness is deemed as an act of responsible self-care that is expected equally
of someone with means, and another who is at risk at losing their source of shelter. And the
problem here is not just that some are asked to be resilient in ways that they cannot be. When a
worker is deemed to be competent only if they are “energized” and “full of optimism,” the lack
of resource may serve as grounds to deny someone of a job (Froehls, 2011)..
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But privilege does not just make resilience easier; we also need to understand privilege as
making some practices socially recognizable as resilience, and others not so. As Berlant’s (2011)
concept of “slow death” reminds us, even the legitimacy of self-care practices are laced with
power relations. For some populations “worn out by the activity of reproducing life,” she writes,
self-care “can be an activity of maintenance” rather than that of repair (p. 101). The contradiction
between the “obesity epidemic” and possibility of eating as a site of “relief” reflects this: for
those who are those are already worn out, eating can be a site of reprieve, a moment of pleasure
that shields from the ongoing trauma of life (Berlant, 2011). Perhaps it is not that vulnerable
populations are not resilient, but that their practices of self-care is already coded as destructive
and unwise, which makes resilience impossible and inapplicable to their situation (Ahmed, 2014;
Povinelli, 2011). We should not romanticize the attrition that is in slow death, but an
unwillingness to understand the complexities of self-care often humiliates and worsens the states
that many of the poor have already found themselves in.
Demands on the Social
Instead of addressing the problematic demand of passion and resilience, however, career
guides often just extend the need for it deeper and deeper into our social milieu, recruiting family
and friends to participate in crafting it as a compulsory subjectivity. In Keeping Your Head After
Losing Your Job, for instance, psychiatrist Robert Leahy (2014) directly addresses family
members and friends, instructing them on tactics to help the recovery of the laid off. People can
support the laid off by providing a listening ear and by leaving notes of encouragement. Young
children are also given a role: job hunters are advised to speak honestly about their predicament
to their children so that the family can jointly produce an “epic family narrative” of overcoming
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that will bring them closer together, and to nurture the children into resilient adults (Finney,
2009, p. 89).
These statements reflect on how the normalization of unemployment implicates not just
the immediate people who are laid off, but their family members as well. As Rob Walker (2015)
offers in The Workologist, the advice column for work hosted by the New York Times, it is not
uncommon for spouses to seek help for their depressed, laid off partners. In fact, as the letter
notes, spouses are often driven to get career coaches to help their spouses, to demand
accountability from them, so that they can still appear supportive and refrain from ‘nagging’ at
them. Strangers, acquaintances, friends, and family are trained to be sources of support and
participate in becoming the buffer from a normalized condition of unemployment.
And there is an element of coercion involved in this, Family members and friends are told
not only demanded to re-socialize workers back into capitalism, they are also reminded to
carefully withhold themselves from words and deed that can interrupt the recuperation of those
who are laid off. Some of this applies to familiar territory of familial relations, such as when
Leahy (2014) tells spouses of the laid off to withhold from blaming their partners even though
they might feel disappointed because it would only worsen the guilt that the unemployed feel.
But even friends, career guides express, need to carefully chosen lest they inhibit one’s pursuit of
passions. Readers are warned to distance themselves from discouraging friends who are “actively
working against your dream” (Acuff, 2015), or those who leave a “fear of desire” by inciting
hesitation to go for one’s passion (Fisher, 2013). But even those who are “eager to commiserate”
might be a hindrance to the development of the “tough mindset” since such sympathy “sap away
your energy and self-esteem” (Levinson & Perry, 2011). Timothy Ferriss (2009) advices a tough
approach to these toxic friends: speak to them honestly about their negative impact, and if they
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agree to change, “spend at least two weeks apart to… diminish psychological dependency” and
have a “trial period” which “consist of pass-or-fail criteria.”
Under the political scheme of “employability,” the role of governments and
organizations, Chertkovskaya et al (2013) write, are to be “enablers,” providing the backdrop for
the capacity for individuals to make the best choices to be employable. However, we see here
that organizations and governments are not only agents of this backdrop – the entire socius is. In
this way, employability carries a broader implication. The subjects of the discourse of resilience
are not only the laid off, but everyone in interaction with precarity, for they are demanded also to
be positive, understanding, caring, and ultimately supportive of the dominant discourses of
passion and resilience that underlie the condition of normalized unemployment.
Foreclosure of Dissent
How does this broad recruitment of subjects transform the potential for dissent? When
subjects are penalized for not being positive, people will be more reluctant to express critical
opinions. This is doubly problematic because mass unemployment is precisely a context for
shared public dissent, for people to think and consider the ways capitalist structures had damaged
their lives. But the discourse of endurance forecloses this by penalizing negativity and advising
readers to move negative emotions into private settings for therapy and transformation. Instead
of serving as a source of diagnostics, to reveal the problems of work, these negative public
emotions are depicted as backward and stultifying, something that hinders readers from getting
what they want out of life (Ngai, 2005). For instance, in Rebound, Martha Finney (2009)
repeatedly reminds readers about the professional ways of handling emotions like grief and
anger. While they are normal reactions to job loss, these emotions are also ones that need to be
dealt with privately, in the home or car, away from workplace and co-workers.
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To sustain these affective performances, techniques of resilience are weaved into the
fabric of everyday life as mantras, brainwave therapies, meditation, pills and exercise. One
exercise, for example, advice readers to “find one short word or a quick phrase that you can
focus on, such as ‘my family comes first’ or ‘I’m okay’” and repeat it as they are escorted out of
the workplace. Techniques for conjuring positivity are also central. Readers are asked to
visualize a moment where they felt successful and produce an “anchor” for it “by making a
physical move… as well as screaming out a word that feels powerful” (Hill, 2010). These
actions, like the fist pump and the shouts of ‘yes!’ which the book suggests, become the
compromised solutions to the injuries inflicted by capitalism.
The production of resilience in this situation does not relate to any form of enlightened
social or political understanding. It purely focuses on a change in affective experience. Baur
offers an example of a client who has mastered the art of endurance. The client who “cried,” felt
“lost and hollow” and “pretty worthless” the first time she was laid off, reacts two years later in
her second job loss hanging out with friends, having enjoyable conversations and eating freshly
baked chocolate chip cookies (Baur, 2011, p. 56). While I do not wish to trivialize the comfort
offered by the familiarization of the job hunting process, the prioritization of these affects rid the
opportunity where negative public affects may be galvanized as moments of self-reflection and
political dissent. Instead, structural problems are assigned from the institutional level to the
individual, and then displaced to simply “a state of mind” (Finney, 2009, p. 157), just an
emotional reaction toward an abstracted, inevitable, economic outcome.
As Woodward (2009) offers, some emotions which are infrequently experienced may feel
puzzling and even unwelcome when they are first felt. The confusing nature of these emotions
may stem from the fact that they reside outside dominant emotional ideologies, making it
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difficult for people to immediately understand why they feel the way they do. Yet, this is the
reason why these emotions have the most potential to illuminate larger social problems. Time for
proper self-reflection, however, is necessary for the political potential of these emotions to
surface. The advice to disregard negative emotions as quickly as possible rids it of such a
possibility. Furthermore, those who choose to try to make sense of these emotions bump up
against an emotional hegemony. Sharone (2013) notes that it is difficult for people to articulate
negative feelings about job searching because they risk being dismissed as ‘negative’, ‘lazy’ or
‘unproductive’ for not taking time to develop the right professional personality. In this sense,
endurance serves a larger ideological function. By encouraging people to gloss over and to see
their hardships as personal trials, endurance also diverts attention and accountability from the
deep-seated structural problems made apparent in the crisis.
The Formation of Passion
In this section, I want to examine historical variances in the ways passion has aligned with
economic values, and how technology has changed the kind of labor involved in performing a
passionate subject. Central to this is a question of ‘empowerment’: subjects are often encouraged
to find their passion or to perform their passions because this would empower them to get a job
more easily. How does passion facilitate this process of empowerment, and what are transactions
involved in accepting this as truth? I will examine this through the historical study of two
popular texts: Bolles’ What Color is Your Parachute and Yate’s Knock ‘Em Dead.
What Color is Your Parachute numbers amongst many other career guides that provides
what I call “passion exercises,” a guide that claims to help readers to locate their passion. Some,
like Do What You Are for instance, guide readers to identify their personality types through
complex personality tests so that they might align it for with a personalized “ideal job” (Tieger,
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Barron & Tieger, 2014). Others, like The Panic Free Job Search, may provide simpler categories
of interest for readers to get a hint of they want to do. I use What Color is Your Parachute as an
urtext for this because of its popularity and historical importance. Described as a “job-hunter’s
bible,” the book has been revised yearly since its initial publication in 1972, and has since sold
over 10 million copies worldwide. Further, Bolles’ text was crucial in making passion a cultural
truism. As the Chicago Tribune noted in 1975, at a time when most career guides had focused on
the skills of workers, Bolles’ method of job hunting had proselytized a more comprehensive
approach, incorporating desires and preferences as a guide for careers (Houston, 1975). In the
1983 preface, for example, Bolles lamented about the high rates of unemployment, and then
writes:
What we know for a fact is that the enthusiastic job-hunter is infinitely more likely to be
the one who finds a job than the matter-of-fact job-hunter. The more you’ve identified a
job you’d really love to do, and know what things are your greatest enthusiasms, the
more you increase your change of finding a job. (Bolles, 1983, p. viii)
By the 2013 edition, passion is presented clearly as the most powerful job-hunting technique,
providing an “86% success rate” of finding a job. Bolles’ confidence in this method stems from a
belief in the affective possibilities that passion can produce. Passion is depicted here as a source
where positive emotions cluster, of which its possession will allow for an alternate motivational
structure to emerge:
After doing the homework on yourself, with a description of a job that would really
excite you, you pour much more energy into your job-search. Before your job-hunt may
have felt more like a duty than anything else. Now, with your vision, you are dying to
find that. So, you redouble your efforts, your dedication, and your determination when
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otherwise you might tire and give up. Persistence becomes your middle name, for a prize
worth fighting for. (Bolles, 2013, p. 36)
Finding ‘that’, the object of passion, is achieved through an instrument Bolles calls the ‘flower
exercise’. Although variants of such exercises are found in many career guides, Bolles’
instrument is the most comprehensive, and probably the most used, of all the career guides I have
analyzed. Described as a means of self-discovery, it requires readers to consider seven aspects
(‘petals’) of their desires and skills. Respectively, the seven sections are as follows: their favorite
forms of expertise, workplace relations, personal skills, workplace conditions,
salary/responsibility, place(s) to live and their goal, purposes and mission in life. By completing
these sections, and then mapping them on a single image, the reader receives a thorough and
complex picture of what their passion entails. The goal here, Bolles explains, “is to find the kind
of work that matches all seven sides of you … your dream job, where you would shine.”
Prior to 1987, however, another method, titled the ‘parachute exercise’, was used as the key
instrument of the book. While the flower exercise was present then (if in a more rudimentary
form), it was slotted into the appendix section. In the 1987 preface, Bolles explained the move of
the flower exercise into the main chapters saying that “the exercises found within it [the flower
exercise] are so essential, that in my view no conscientious reader, job-hunter, or career-changer
should omit doing them. But because readers were not finishing the book, they never discovered
[it]” (p. xiii). With this shift, the flower exercise became the key instrument of self-discovery.
The parachute exercise, in turn, was removed, leaving only a few parts scattered through the
sections of later editions. The switch of exercises here provides an interesting context to observe
how the discourse of passion is produced and transformed through the instruments. Comparing
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the flower and parachute exercise, I wish to demonstrate how the emergence of passion is
progressively entwined with an economic language.
While the parachute and flower exercise differ in a number of ways, a comparison of the
recall techniques used in both provides the most telling example of their difference. The recall
techniques – titled the “diary” in the parachute exercise and the “offline blog” in the flower
exercise – guide readers into chronicling their past to discover the skills they possess. In the
diary, readers are asked to write from a free flow of memories, focusing particularly on happy
thoughts – hobbies, things they did that were enjoyable, events that filled them with pride, and
the like. After writing everything down (Bolles suggests the diary should number around 30–200
pages), readers are instructed to analyze their diary and pick out “things I want to have or use for
my future career” and “things I want to avoid” from those accounts.
This process begins differently in the offline blog. There, readers need only to write seven
stories, each containing five components: the goal, the obstacle, how it was overcome, the
outcome and possible quantifiable products. After which, an extensive diagram called ‘the
parachute skills grid’ is used for analysis. This diagram holds a checklist of different skills which
readers are supposed to parse through and mark if the story had described its use. 62 skills are
divided between categories of “people,” “data” and “things.” In the section of data, for instance,
readers provided with 24 skillsets, including “use my intuition,” “imagine,” and “analyze, break
down into its parts.” Each story needs to be analyzed in the same way and readers are tasked to
see “patterns – the transferable skills that keep reappearing in story after story.”
The differences between these techniques, while seemingly small, are nontrivial if we
consider career guides as materials meant to develop subjectivities of ideal workers. The offline
blog, more than the diary, serves a pedagogical program where readers are educated in the
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language of self-economization. This effort parallels the trend in neoliberalism to consider
increasingly large parts of our lives in terms of market values. While both instruments attempt to
capture the positive affective memories so as to align them to the formalisms of the market, it is
the newer offline blog instrument that offers a precise set of vocabularies that aid the reader in
spinning an affectively charged economic narrative about his or her use of skills. Questions
about the obstacle faced, its breakthrough and quantifiable outcomes help readers understand
their skills in a way that fits within the norms of the marketplace. The clear, distinctive
statements of skills also help convey competence and economic self-awareness. This connection,
when understood in the larger framework of the creation of ‘passion’, showcases how Bolles had
managed to connect emotional attachments to an economic imaginary.
Such a trend transverses the entire organization of the parachute and flower exercise. The
parachute exercise moves the reader through three sections: the past, present and future, which
correspond approximately to the processes of introspection, self-reflection and futurist
projection. Organized around methods, however, the parachute fails to offer an underlying
narrative to the reader. The flower exercise, on the other hand, is organized around the petals –
each describing desired elements of a career, like the use of particular skills, workplace relations
and the location where the job is situated. As the reader moves through each section, the product
is transposed in terse sentences onto a single page where an empty flower diagram is located.
Filling each petal steadily, the reader ‘blossoms’ and undergoes a teleological process of
economic ‘self-discovery’. Since career guides present passion as a naturalized object residing
within the individual, waiting only to be discovered, this narrative supports the underlying claim
of self-realization.
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The production of passion is also supported by a variety of other techniques in the flower
exercise. Almost all his sections rely on some form of large data gathering and organization. In
the section, where the reader is tasked to find their favorite knowledge, for instance, Bolles
immediately breaks the question down into four parts – “what you know about your favorite
mediums that enable you to work most confidently in that medium,” “what you know from your
previous jobs,” “what you know about, outside of work,” “what fields, careers, or industries
sound interesting to you.” As these prompts illustrate, what seems at first to be a relatively
straightforward question quickly expands, prompting deeper introspection. But even then, these
questions are but a guide. “Jot down everything,” he instructs, every “bright idea,” “hunch,”
“dream,” and “intuition”; all aspects of a person’s experience and preference are worth
capturing. Once everything is written, then a process of organization begins. Readers are usually
asked to map their answers on a grid. In the case of knowledge, these are placed onto a table with
the axes of high–low expertise and enthusiasm. In other cases, the answers are broken into items
that are quantified in terms of priority and then placed on a chart based on scores. Finally,
answers that are the “best” – those that are most attractive to the individual – are transferred to
the “flower” diagram in short terse points.
While Bolles’ exercise certainly does not use any form of computerized data analysis, his
technique, which prioritizes the gathering of massive information, before narrowing it down,
mimics the computerized analysis of big data to some degree. As Louis Amoore (2011) notes,
the contemporary forms of big data analysis rely upon an ‘ontology of association’, a means by
which disaggregated data can be brought together through associational protocols for purposes of
prediction. The comparison of forms reveals the associative imaginary this exercise employs.
Ideas gathered through prompts and muses now become developed, evaluated and labelled as
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something central to the unique individual. These various aspects of the individual, which had
previously, perhaps, nothing at all to do with passion, now acquire through these associations, a
new meaning. Bringing a constellation of these preferences together, Bolles suggests that the
object of one’s passion is within everybody’s reach, and that individuals need only to look within
themselves to seek it out. Crucially, whether or not readers actually believe that the flower is
their “dream job,” this image provides a reference to their passion, conveying the optimism that
the passion may not have yet materialized but is there. Such an organization respects the
autobiographic authenticity of the individual, and translates it into an individualized autonomy,
the freedom to realize what is “inside” and pursue it on the “outside.”
The overlap of the economic with the emotional and intimate references a particular
configuration of the neoliberal subjectivity. While readers are still tasked to be economically
empowered and self-reliant (Ross, 2008), What Color is Your Parachute suggests that control
over one’s economic destiny ultimately resides within the intimate sphere. Since what leads to
success is the discovery of passion, and that passion is dependent on an analysis of personal
history and preferences which is available to everyone, the logical conclusion is that nobody is
excluded from the state of economic self-empowerment. Bolles produces this fantasy by glossing
over the traditional impediments to employment. The lack of skills or education is now possible
to overcome with a convincing personal story woven with an economic vocabulary. Therefore,
the transformation of preferences and memories into an economic narrative not only teaches
readers to speak the economic lingo required of the neoliberal subject, but it also produces the its
attractions, a fantasy that access to the abundance of economic opportunity and freedom requires
only the right feelings and mentality.

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Passion and Job Hunting Online
The fantasy of passion is fundamentally a fantasy of empowerment: a belief that will still be a
job “out there” despite economic conditions because of one’s resourcefulness, resilience,
intellect, determination, eloquence, and so on. To describe it as a fantasy is not to say that it has
no effect. As I have offered, passion can indeed make the possibility of a job more tangible
because believers in it are empowered with the culturally valuable narratives that could make one
more attractive to employers. But even in its effectiveness, the narrative of passion is still rooted
in the notion of comparative personal value: that one will get a job because a demonstrated
capacity to produce something of additional value compared to other job candidates.
While I have talked about how passion and resilience constitute this dimension of
personal value, I have discussed less about how the Internet had transformed it. Digital
technologies and human agencies, José van Dijck (2013) reminds us, often intersect in complex
ways. In particular, he offers that though social media platforms are often presented as “neutral
stages of self-performance,” the platforms do steer users towards particular constructions of
identity (p. 213). The affordances and organization of the LinkedIn interface, for instance, its
reliance of a professional narrative, its capacities of professional recommendations, and the
workings of its algorithms, both guide and restrict users from particularized understandings of
their professional selves. The construction and representation of identities occur in a struggle
between the users’ own attempt to represent themselves and the technologies’ steering
mechanisms. In this section, I want this consider struggle in light of online job hunting, thinking
about how digital technologies have influenced the performance of comparative personal value.
We can begin by looking into another longstanding job hunting series, Knock ‘Em Dead,
a best-seller that has been written and revised yearly by Martin Yate since 1985. Unlike What
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Color is Your Parachute, which emphasizes on self-discovery and the development of passion,
Knock ‘Em Dead has historically focused on the traditional components of the job hunt:
strategies on resumes, interviews, job selection, and so on (Dyer, 2012). This has also meant that
Knock ‘Em Dead is not necessarily the most innovative or comprehensive “digital” job guide - a
niche that has now been populated with titles like The Power Formula For LinkedIn Success
(Breitbarth, 2011), Maximum Success With LinkedIn (Sherman, 2013), and The 2-Hour Job
Search (Dalton, 2012). But while I will employ the latter titles in my analysis, I choose to use
Knock ‘Em Dead to open this argument because it provides a more contradictory image of the
empowerment that online job hunting offers.
In the 1985 edition, Yate advises job hunters to combine research in a library with their
application of jobs. Most job hunters, he laments, believe that job hunting just involves an
application to an advertisement in a newspaper. But such an approach is ineffective because
“there are always well-qualified people looking for the best jobs” (p. 22). Job hunters, Yate
insists, can only get a job if they rise above their competitors, and so it is imperative that they
present themselves as the “best prepared” candidate by going through reference books so that
they might demonstrate knowledge of the company’s services and products, the members of the
board, and recent changes to its business. Only by complementing research and the application
would job hunters “shine,” leave a “favourable impression,” and have a chance of landing the job
(Yate, 1985, p. 21).
In these statements, Yate makes clear that job hunting is fundamentally a competitive
endeavour: mastery in the skills of self-presentation through resumes and interviews are crucial
because there are always multiple qualified applications. With the oversupply of labor, the
chances of landing a job then hinge on the qualities of marginal advantage that can set one “apart
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from the herd” (Yate, 1985, p. 21). Though offered as advice in 1985, this belief is still held as
truism today – perhaps even more so given how the Internet had made it easier for people to send
applications electronically (Freeman, 2016). This is also one of the main selling points of career
guides. Career guides seldom provide readers with new technical skills or information about the
companies they are applying. What they promise, however, is the development of the readers’
abilities to hone and express their qualities of comparative advantage through their resumes,
interviews, networks, and so on.
Thus, it was not surprising the Internet was originally perceived through this lens: a tool
to empower job hunters to get an advantage over rival job candidates. In the 1994 edition of
Knock ‘Em Dead, Yate introduces the “electronic job hunt” enthusiastically as the “new weapon
in your arsenal” (p. 59) and provides several optimistic suggestions of how the technology,
though expensive and complex to use (Internet databases are typically only available then in
libraries for a fee), can be of significant help towards getting a job. For instance, Yate (1994) was
excited about the potential of electronic classifieds not only because of the size of its job
database, but also because the electronic format affords a more comprehensive description of the
job requirement. With this additional information on hand, job hunters can “customize
paperwork and focus your expertise in the appropriate direction” and gain a “substantial edge”
over job applicants who applied through traditional newspapers (Yate, 1994, p. 62).
His deepest enthusiasm, however, is reserved for database services which can provide job
hunters with massive information about a prospective hiring company in short notice. He offers
the example of calling a database service before an interview with the 3M mega-corporation.
With a short query over the phone, a “truly remarkable” amount of information can be faxed
over: “over fifteen pages of data providing a complete overview of 3M from its inception to the
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present day” (Yate, 1994, p. 63). And this is but a slice of what is possible. If one desires, it is
possible to get more information by requesting for a compilation of business articles that featured
the firm. And all this additional data would will give the job candidate a substantive edge. It
would made “blindingly obvious at the interview,” Yate (1994) offers, “that you were twice as
sharp as any other applicant” (pp. 63-4):
In a tightly run job race, being able to ace the “What do you know about us?” question
could make all the differences [sic]. On-line services can often yield more detailed
information about a specific company than you’d ever imagined impossible. (p. 63)
Yet, the edge that the Internet provides will be normalized in the years after when
personal computers become more widely available. In fact, by 2000, Yate had significantly
curbed his enthusiasm for the technology, leaving only a short section on electronic job hunting
in the main text and guiding readers towards the appendix if they needed more the topic. He also
cautioned job hunters about over relying on the Internet. “Use this amazing new tool to stack the
odds in your favor,” he writes, “yet despite all its allure and promise do not rely on the Internet
exclusively” (Yate, 2000, p. 20). Yate (2000) is responding here towards the technologized
culture of job hunting which allows applicants to “send your resume to thousands of employers
and headhunters in thirty minutes” (Yate, 2000, p. 20). Ironically, the efficiency of online job
hunting had made electronic job applications increasingly unreliable for getting a job. With large
number of electronic applications, the likelihood that a resume will be read and considered
without some other factors involved has diminished (Levinson & Perry, 2011).
Though Yate appears to be less enthusiastic about the Internet, he is not advocating a
move away from digital technologies. Indeed, one cannot escape from this technological shift
even if one wishes to – digital technologies have become incorporated even into offline job
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applications. Back in 1998, Yate is already aware that it is important for resumes to be written in
a “computer-friendly” format because offline resumes are likely to be scanned through an
“automated resume-tracking system.” And such software have even become more sophisticated
over time. Resumes will need to have the right keyword to even have a chance of it being seen
by a person – or else it would simply be filtered from the massive database of resume
applications (Gillis, 2012).
The ambivalence that Yate displays, I suggest, relate rather to the recognition that digital
culture is starting to structure a different performance of the self. This is most apparent within
the many texts that talk about the importance of self-branding online. As Banet-Weiser (2012)
points out, branding is more than an act of commodification; while the latter refers to
transformation of something to be bought and the sold in the market, the former is rooted within
culture, attached to affective ambiances, and fertile for the construction and validation of
identities.
Consider the difference between the resume and the professional brand. A good resume,
Yate writes, is written in relation to the values of the market. Readers are told to list down their
personal accomplishments, and to quantify them if they can, providing a clear indication to the
prospective employer the amounts they have contributed to company’s overall profits so they can
play to the employer’s interest in the bottom line. In contrast, the self-brand is more of a
“professional persona,” a “distinctive and memorable image” that is “substantiated by your work
habits” (Yate, 2013). While a resume is part of a brand, the brand signals at something larger – it
needs to communicate not just one’s competencies, but one’s unique “drive” and “passion”
(Levinson & Perry, 2011)
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The emphasis on the brand changes the performance of the comparative advantage. As
Hills (2010) writes, job hunters used to be concerned about “fitting in,” adjusting their resumes
to fit their prospective employers, but brand environments require individuals to be “constantly
proactive by creating an irresistible offer online that employers are attracted to and are compelled
to act on” (p. 116). In a branded environment, people sell their identities – its uniqueness,
authenticity, personality, drive, fit, and so on – which includes but exceeds the bullet-points on a
resume. Production of this, however, necessitates consistent work. Readers are told to devote
significant time towards the production of their brand, understanding it as an ongoing, long term
project that cannot be slacked. The recommended list of activities include the creation of fan
pages on Facebook, the posting of regular articles and opinions on LinkedIn, a blog where one
writes about latest industry trends, and a careful regulation of one’s personal brand in all online
communications:
Ask the following questions before you post, comment, share, join, like, +1, post on your
wall or someone else's wall on Facebook, share your blog with your network, or reach out
with an e-mail or a LinkedIn InMail, message through Facebook, or Tweet using Twitter:
Who is my audience? What's in it for them? Is this going to achieve my networking goals
or hurt my ProfessionaliBrand? Does this add value? Is it scarce information or
commonplace information? Are people getting to know me better? Is it a consistent
message? (Hills, 2010, p. 144).
Passion becomes an affect that people have and which they show through the labor that
they repeatedly perform. The writing of blog posts, opinions, articles, and attempts to join the
right networks serves as evidence of the individual’s authentic passionate interest: it is passion
that motivates their labor and their desire to do well. This is why I consider self-branding to be
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affective practice of passion – a successful brand implies that the individual is passionate about
their field.
While prevalence in the practices of branding may have many historical reasons, I
suggest that the rise of it as a practice to develop one’s comparative advantage is very much tied
to digitization of the job hunting process. Or more precisely, the new capacities of information
retrieval and transmission, has made visibility and relatability more important than before. In
explaining the importance of brands, Levinson and Perry (2011) write that it is not that “tried-
and-true methods of finding a job” are no longer important – it is necessary for readers to
continue to work on traditional components of the resume and interview – but these methods
“don’t provide an adequate amount of exposure to potential employers.” The decrease in the
number of jobs through technologization, and the ease of applying for jobs electronically, they
explain, have assured that there will be “many other candidates whose qualifications look like
yours.” To “leapfrog over other competitors,” it is necessary to not just showcase your skills and
experience, but to actually tie it into a convincing statement that one is at the top of their field.
Not surprisingly, efforts at producing a brand is often focused on the popular professional
social networking site, LinkedIn. Besides having to structure one’s LinkedIn like a pitch, career
guides also advice readers to think of using LinkedIn routinely as a means of establishing one’s
professional branded reputation (Schepp & Schepp, 2011). Readers are often advised to be active
on the platform, to join and be active in professional groups, and to connect widely to
professional associates, especially those who can make important hiring decisions. Having those
people as your connection is important, because they will be able notified of the articles you
write, and therefore, your effort at being identified as knowledgeable in the field. During the
process of job hunting, the social media site also provides important leads. LinkedIn allows users
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to search at different levels of connection; by being networked to enough people (The Power
Formula For LinkedIn Success recommends at least “75 to 100 quality connections), users are
will typically be able to get at least a second level connection to people working in most
organizations (Breitbarth, 2011). Getting a recommendation through your network can take away
the sting of the “cold call,” and allow job hunters to more effectively connect to important
decision makers in the organization (Schepp & Schepp, 2012).
Furthermore, career guides offer a number of “hacks” if one is without links to a
professional contact. Freeman (2016) calls this the “x-ray” search, which involves using a variety
of boolean commands on the search engine Google to crawl for public profiles on LinkedIn that
users can then try to contact. Using the “intitle” boolean allows readers to specify locations and
professions which Google can search through to reveal LinkedIn public profiles outside a
person’s social network. Dalton (2012) suggests that readers be creative in contacting these
individuals. One technique involves searching for recent articles written by them and then
disguising the cold call as a “fan mail,” expressing interest in the article, and then asking to have
a more personal chat about it.
When does a method of empowerment become a part of compulsory promotional labor?
Cremin (2009) has written that the power of employability lies in its fantasy of unachievable
self-mastery. The injunction to be employable is so speculative and ambiguous that it is
fundamentally unachievable; we have some hints about how one can be employable, but even
these are just signs and never guarantee an employable self. Yet, given how this projected ideal
is rooted in doable practices – one is promised to be more employable through a better resume, a
more skilful presentation of the self, and so on – this projected ideal also drives individuals to
constantly prove themselves as employable subjects. Or more simply, the relationship between
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desire and impossibility of its fulfilment is one of “productive failure” because it entices subjects
to reattach themselves to the fantasy even when they encounter disappointment with its promise
(Bloom, 2013, p. 792).
This continuous attempt to network and brand oneself may demonstrate one’s
professionalism, and convey the valued attributes of passion. But it also happens in the context
where others are demanded to do the same. Thus, if employability is not an absolute standard,
but a relative one, it is logical to ask: where does this need for more branding and networking
end? The Internet obfuscates this need for heightened labor by providing a vision of
empowerment. Workers who fail to find a job and given remedies in specific terms: a network
that is too small, insufficient time devoted to the development of the professional digital identity,
carelessness in curating one’s image online, the lack of understanding of how one might tap into
digital networks, and so on. This reasoning strokes the ego, animates the process of “productive
failure,” and directs attention away from the impossibility of employability. Further, because
figures of success are always culturally available, the common condition of precarity is overlaid
by a desire for domination; one is more likely to tap into a discourse of deservingness by
highlighting one’s relative employability than to collectively come into an understanding of how
employability is an untenable target (Lorey, 2012/2015).
Distrust of Passion
In the last section, I analyze texts published after the financial crisis which I consider to
be ‘counter-passion’ texts to think about the discourse that lies outside productive failure.
Timothy Ferriss’ (2009) The Four-Hour Workweek, Jon Acuff’s (2011) Quitter and Cal
Newport’s (2012) So Good They Can’t Ignore You, are all counter-passion texts because they
express a mistrust of the narrative of passion. Locating themselves in the economic context after
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the crisis, they express how passion in work has failed in reacting to the precarity of both
financial and labor conditions. Newport, the most ardent speaker against passion, takes aim at
Bolles, who he claims had spread this idea of passion, saying, “The passion hypothesis is not just
wrong, it’s also dangerous.” In his account, passion is depicted as inadequate advice. It is
exclusionary since many people are unable to find work they feel passionate about, and it is also
“dangerous” since the injunction to seek it may lead individuals to make bad economic
decisions. When the promise that passionate work is able to bring the good life is undelivered or
distrusted, individuals may turn against passion, decrying it for its failure to satisfy. But what
exists outside it? What are the other forms of optimism individuals can turn to?
Work, according to Weeks (2011), takes on such a central role in social life that it has
become an ideology, something seen as a social necessity and a requirement rather a social
convention. The lack of alternative, substantial visions underscore how counter-passion
discourses are able to take on a circulatory reasoning, criticizing passion but yet lead back to it.
Without a different “mattering map,” to use Grossberg’s (1992) term, the absence of passion may
only produce new forms of individualistic empowerment that may produce more troubling
consequences than passion itself.
In the accounts of Ferriss (2009), the enemy is “Corporate America” which has soaked up
the time of workers, leaving them as empty husks. Using the calamity of the crisis as an
opportunity, therefore, Ferriss advocate readers to rethink the lifestyles they want. His solution –
consumption – “mini-retirement plans” where individuals take flight to foreign countries,
enjoying themselves and immersing in new learning opportunities. Directing passion for work to
passion for consumption, he unpacks the different attitudes readers need to have. This involves
becoming more efficient, and most preferably, an entrepreneur. He explains, “The vast majority
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of people will never find a job that can be an unending source of fulfillment, so that is not the
goal here; to free time and automate income is.” To do both, however, an individual needs to be
trained in the basics of exploitation and entrepreneurship, to find low wage workers to outsource
mundane tasks to, to consolidate a group of friends you can take information from and to
understand workings of differential global markets.
The accusations against passion shift in Newport and Acuff, who argue that the dangers
of passion lie in the possibility that readers would leave their jobs and end up in dire financial
straits. Both authors, however, diverge in their beliefs of passion. Acuff anticipates that readers
already have a passion, but the passion is their hobby, rather than their day job. Warning readers
that hobbies often don’t pay well, Acuff advocates that a more fulfilling life may be attained
through the development of a deeper affective relationship to the day job via the hobby. He
argues,
If you demonize your day job… it becomes a prison you’ll try to escape from… The truth
is, we need to learn to fall in like with a job we don’t love because it’s actually the best
way to set up your dream for success.
“Falling in like” summarizes the entire argument of Acuff’s, where he tries to develop
meaning in the work by asking readers to consider the different ways jobs and dreams can
benefit one another. In a similar vein, Newport criticizes what he calls ‘courage culture’ which
advocates individuals to quit their jobs so as to pursue their passion. Suggesting instead that most
people who claim to have passion actually started their jobs without passion, Newport argues
that individuals need to be persistent, and build their skills even at something which is not
enjoyable. It is only through this process that individuals can earn ‘control’, the capital that
underlies feelings of passion itself.
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Criticizing passion, but yet leading readers back to work as a site of optimism, these
career guides showcase the deep ambivalence that lies at the heart of this discourse. Since
passion includes a complex degree of meanings, career guides can afford to distrust passion but
yet maintain some proximity to it. Advocating individualistic empowerment, counter-passion
discourses attack the rhetoric of passion without changing its status quo.
It is possible to dismiss these counter-passion discourses because they are career guides
– objects meant to spread a particular kind of knowledge. Yet, these are the same materials
people turn to when laid off, disenchanted with work or suffering, and its content has permeated
into culture, sustaining a common imagined affective experience. So when Scott Adams (2013a),
the cartoonist of Dilbert recently wrote in Time that passion is overrated, and that only people
who are successful can claim to be passionate, we immediately grasp what he is talking about –
the ironies of passion. We may then read some Dilbert and both laugh and cry at his satirical
depictions of office culture. Finally then, we might pick Adams’ (2013b) newly published self-
help book, whose exact chapter which disparage passion highlights the importance of energy in a
career. The poverty in counter-discourses of passion shows how passion acts as an emotional
hegemony. We may believe in passion without physically experiencing it; we may also seek for
it while being cynical about it. Passion thus accepts a variety of positions without requiring a
fundamental change in the structural inequalities that constitute our everyday lives (Berlant,
2011).
One of the goals of this chapter has been to challenge the common belief that passion is
an unquestionably desirable affect. In critiquing it, however, we might also seek out what Virno
(1996) has called the ‘neutral kernel’, a space where passion might be rearticulated for
revolutionary potential. Conventional articulations of passion hinder a proper understanding of
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the inequalities that structure our lives under capitalism, with the result that passion, while
affectively important, comes cruel in its failure to address the substantive social changes needed
for labor conditions to improve. In this setting, passion becomes an apparatus of capital,
something used to offer momentary solace and endurance, while producing the subjectivities that
render workers more susceptible to exploitation. Discourses that express a distrust of passion
also fail to offer a substantive, alternate vision.
Career guides foreclose this affective future by making bad feelings wrong. But bad
feeling can be right in so many ways, especially as a diagnostics for the injuries of capital (Ngai,
2005). To produce an alternate affective imaginary, the possibilities in bad feelings need to be
resuscitated, given an opportunity to air as a collective recognition of pain rather than framed as
a source of division needing personal transformation. This will also mean reevaluating the things
that we invest our affect into, not just the literal enjoyment of work but the fundamental qualities
of livelihood, wages, benefits, security and autonomy. This means recognizing the material
realities of our lives and the substantial change that needs to happen before feelings of passion
can really manifest.
In this alternate vision, passion should no longer be something just to be found within the
self. Rather, it should be recognized as always relationally intertwined with the broader culture
of work. In this way, passion for work can avoid solely being a source of therapeutic
transformation, or an individualistic form of empowerment. If work matters for all, then one’s
own preference, whatever it might be, needs also to condense and take shape as a collective
demand for social justice (Hesmondhalgh, 2010), a wanting for substantive change to produce a
society of fairer, better work.

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Chapter 3: The Compassionate Imagination
Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his
aspect sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are involuntary. He is useful to me. I
can get along with him. If I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some
less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth
miserably to starve… But this mood was not invariable with me. The passiveness of
Bartleby sometimes irritated me. I felt strangely goaded on to encounter him in new
opposition, to elicit some angry spark from him answerable to my own.

Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivner”

Total Engagement published by the Harvard Business Press in 2009 opens with a hypothetical
psychological transformation of a call center worker. We first witness Jennifer in a surveilled
workplace where her lunch break is monitored to the exact minute. Then she returns to the
cubicle where she receives calls for itinerary changes on a cruise line. A rude customer dials in
and Jennifer keeps her emotions in check because a supervisor might be listening in. Then as end
of workday draws near Jennifer finds herself alone. Her colleagues have left hurriedly and she is
bereft of collegial company. Jennifer’s unhappy situation, authors Byron Reeves and Leighton
Read (2009) imply, is representative of an injustice done to workers, where dehumanizing, and
unrewarding work inhibit workers from achieving their potential. Though initially optimistic and
driven, the environment erodes Jennifer’s enthusiasm, making her a typical unengaged employee
over three months.
At this, Reeves and Read (2009) suggest that Jennifer’s unhappy situation can radically
be altered if game elements were introduced into her work. In the new scenario, Jennifer works
from home and is greeted by a personalized avatar when she logs into the computer system. Her
avatar is connected to a twenty-person team, with each member having their performance made
publically visible on a dashboard. Since they advance as a team, Jennifer is motivated to reach
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out to an underperforming team mate with an encouraging message. The main portion of the
interface displays a pirate ship sailing to an island. The software converts performance into
points in real time, which adjusts the speed at which the pirate ship moves. Jennifier is excited
because she knows that the faster she levels up, the quicker she would be promoted to her
“dream job”, an agent soliciting proposals for her company's charitable foundation (p. 3). And
when the ship, driven by her team performance, is first to reach an island, Jennifer is told that she
has won a real-life reward for her hard work: a paid vacation. In this new scenario, Jennifer is not
hindered by the nature or value of her work. Using game design to ease her work, she is now
able to experience passion in her job and earn the tangible rewards of it.
The scenes above demonstrate the utopic implementation of what industry practitioners
have called “gamification,” a movement that became popular in the spring of 2010. Gartner, a
consulting firm on the trend defines gamification as “the use of game mechanics and experience
design to digitally engage and motivate people to achieve their goals” (Burke, 2014). Practically,
this is accomplished by borrowing from the tropes of games - points, badges, levels,
leaderboards, and rewards - and designing them into a digital interface to encourage behavioral
change (Zichermann & Linder, 2013). Some aspects in the example offered by Reeves and Read
(2009) represent the common aspects of gamification design. Tracking and translating
performance to points, awarding badges for small tasks, providing levels as feedback,
encouraging competitiveness through leaderboards, and incentivizing tasks through rewards,
gamification interfaces purport to be able to increase the motivation of its users in a variety of
settings, ranging from fitness to education, employee engagement to brand engagement.
19

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Gamification has acquired a broad usage, and has been attached to different initiatives. This chapter focuses on
what is commonly called “enterprise gamification” or “internal gamification,” the kinds of gamification that is used
to increase engagement of employees.
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While there are multiple threads to the beginnings to gamification, the crucial factors to
its ascent is described by its community to have taken place in February 2010, when game
designer and academic Jesse Schell (2010) spoke at the Design, Innovate, Communicate,
Entertain (D.I.C.E) conference, describing a future where games design is incorporated into
everyday smart gadgets, tracking and granting points whenever someone engages in a coded list
of approved activities. Schell (2010) opened the narrative of a gamified future through the
example of a toothbrush, describing how a chip embedded in a toothbrush could give points
whenever someone brushes their teeth, and bonus points when it followed up with other
desirable behaviors. Behind him, an image of a toothbrush with numbers chalking up was
projected, the strange combination hinting at the possibility to things that could be made game-
like.
20
As the talk proceeded, Schell pushed this logic to its limits, spinning gamification around
dreams, bus rides, and digital tattoos. Though sometimes read as dystopic for the implied
capacity of technology to monitor extensive aspects of our lives, the video caught on to popular
imagination and became a viral hit. Stephen Totilo (2010) from Kotaku wrote: “people keep
tweeting and e-mailing... did you see this speech?” Yes, I saw it. This is today's must-watch
about the future of gaming - and the future of life.”
In March, a more benign version of this future was painted by Jane McGonigal’s viral
TED talk, “Gaming can make a better world” (TED, 2010). McGonigal, who is the director of
games research and development at the Institute of the Future, a think tank based in California,
spoke to thunderous applause about how games could bring about “the best version of
ourselves,” and galvanize the potential to solve the urgent problems faced as a human species.

20
This vision is now a reality. According to a press release by HIT consultant, a smart toothbrush now allows users
(brushers?) to earn lives while they brush their teeth. The lives can be used to play “Boulders and Band-Aids” in a
mobile app. See HIT Consultant (2010).
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This grandiose projection of this future was brought close to the present through the familiar
cultural objects of digital games. Journalist Adam Penenberg (2010) who reported on the talk,
underscored the closeness of this reality, noting that the average gamer is already working in his
thirties, and had brought the skills and creativity gained from games into the real world,
Figure 4. Gamified toothbrush as shown in D.I.C.E talk (Schell, 2010)
Figure 5. Dashboard of gamification software Habitica (Habitica, 2017)
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infiltrating “our culture and our business landscape in ways that are barely recognized.” Or as
McGonigal (2010) explained: “the average young person today in a country with a strong gamer
culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games by the age of 21.” What matters is
simply channeling that same time and emotional quality towards real life issues. As the
excitement about the potential of games spread, apps and digital platforms deployed before 2010,
like Nike+, Foursquare, Chore Wars, and StackOverflow became the retrospective success
stories of gamification.
The use of the term surged in 2011 and the years after. It was to become the theme of an
annual summit in San Francisco headed by Gabe Zichermann and the topic of several
international conferences and educational programs. A 12-week program named ‘gamification’,
taught by professor Kevin Werbach from the University of Pennsylvania on the digital open
education platform Coursera, for instance, drew 80,000 registrants in 2013 and 70,000 in 2014.
In 2011, the meme was circulated enough to be shortlisted for Oxford Dictionaries “word of the
year” (OUPblog, 2011). Economic projections were a crucial factor to the hype. Companies like
M2 Research estimated in 2011 that gamification will produce revenue exceeding $2.8 billion by
2016 (M2 Research, 2011). Similarly, Gartner claimed that more than half of companies that
handle “innovation processes” will gamify those processes by 2015 (Gartner, 2011). TIME also
vouched for the trend, noting that there were sufficient startups and large consultancies - like
Badgeville, Bunchball and Deloitte - for gamification to take off (Belsky, 2012). These
corporations meld gamified API (application programming interface) systems with consulting
services to provide a series of gamification “solutions” to the engagement of employees and
consumers. Meanwhile, newspapers, trade journals, blogs built the hype on gamification. Framed
as a novel service that could provide a competitive advantage to companies, gamification fed the
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corporate thirst for innovation and gained rapid traction amongst business communities (Flew,
2013).
Game Thinking and the Human Will
We can start thinking about gamification by considering the relationship between game thinking
and the human will. Gamification proponents emphasize that gamification is distinct from games
in that while the latter may be purposeless, the former is centered on real-life consequences and
motivational science (Paharia, 2013; Burke, 2014). In her essay, “I’m Not Playful, I’m
Gameful,” McGonigal (2015) points out that gamification conceptually differs from Johan
Huizinga’s influential notion of play. She argues that while games focus “on a particular
outcome - a specific goal that we are trying to achieve,” (p. 654) play for Huizinga (1980) stands
“consciously outside "ordinary" life as being “not serious”” (p. 13), representing an activity that
is deliberately frivolous and inconsequential. Huizinga had modelled play after the behavior of
children, idealizing it as an innocent, creative, imaginative venture that is unfettered to
economics or utility. “Really to play, a man must play like a child,” he notes, once strict and
elaborate rules are introduced into it, like when play is made into a sporting competition, an
element of the “pure play quality” is lost (Huizinga, 1980, p. 199).
Play in gamification, however, is unapologetically productive. The romantic reference of
child at play is exchanged for an utopia based on productivist values and the charge of corruption
reclaimed by the conjecture of a happier future where the human will is seamlessly aligned with
one’s personal goals. “Reality is broken,” McGonigal (2011) writes, because “reality doesn’t
motivate us as effectively,” it “isn't engineered to maximize our potential,” and it isn’t “designed
from the bottom up to make us happy” (p. 3) By identifying the brokenness of the present,
McGonigal makes implicit the reality she claims to be ideal: a world where we are guided by our
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passions to be fully engaged, whether it is for self-gain or for the improvement of community
and society. Gaming forms the foundation of her vision. “In our real lives, hard work is too often
something we do because we have to do it,” but if hard work could be structured as satisfying as
challenging games, then such work would no longer feel hard: “What a boost to global net
happiness it would be if we could positively activate the minds and bodies of hundreds of
millions of people by offering them better hard work" (McGonigal, 2011, pp. 28-9).
It is tempting to disregard gamification as yet another corporate cliché - and that would
not be entirely mistaken. The reformative fantasies of work animated by play has a long history,
one which Hannah Arendt (1958) traces back to F. Nitti’s thesis in 1895, who expressed that the
pain of labor “is a psychological rather than a physiological fact” (p. 127). And yet, there is
something about the example of Jennifer told by Reeves and Read (2009) that is striking. Unlike
accounts which just discuss the psychological possibilities to play, gamification frequently
invokes a humanitarian narrative which uses familiar gaming tropes to extend compassion
towards occupational groups that are oppressed by the structural conditions of their work, where
the pay is low and the work is banal.
The example of Jennifer is unexceptional in that regard. The desperate subjects of bad
work used to forward the potential of gamification include Target cashiers (Zichermann &
Linder, 2013), assembly line workers (Paharia, 2013), McDonald’s servers (Werbach & Hunter,
2013), and Starbucks counter employees (Collins, 2015). In these situations, gamification is
praised for its ability to transform the experience of banal, mind numbing work. For instance, in
her article in Fast Company, Lydia Dishman (2015) uses provocative terms to describe the work
of traditional call center employees. Call center workers were termed “digital slaves” working in
an “electronic sweatshop,” performing “soul-sucking” work for a “minimum wage.” And then
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gamification is presented as a panacea to this problem. By gamifying work, Dishman suggests,
employers can help “call center employees not hate their job,” and even radically make these
unhappy jobs enjoyable. Another popular example is cited by Zichermann and Linder (2013)
who note how a simple game could inject fun into the repetitive work of Target cashiers. The
Target Checkout Game, as it colloquially known, flashes “G” or “R” on the checkout screen
depending on the amount of time that passes between each item scan. The introduction of such
“game mechanics,” Zichermann and Linder (2013) continue, gives “people doing a repetitive job
a sense of control,” allowing them to recover their sense of “agency… the belief you are in
control of your destiny.”
Certainly there many problems with these accounts. However, the compassionate terms
of this narrative - the identification of the pain of another and the inclination to help - is
productive. By framing gamification as an ethical venture, it is able to stir agencies, get people to
be evangelists of the movement and to consider suffering and the reform of work in the terms
prescribed by the logics of compassion.
To take one example: in 2014, Andrzej Marczewski, an avid blogger of gamification,
wrote a well-publicized rant criticizing detractors who speak against gamification because it is
“manipulative.” He argues that while gamification is manipulative, its manipulation is of the
“benign” variety: "If we are honest, very few jobs are meaningful," and gamification helps
change that because it creates “more efficiency, better work environments, better systems, more
engagement, higher levels of motivation." Marczewski (2014) makes clear that gamification is
not meant to correct foundational problems, like that of “pay” or “unfair treatment” that could
leave workers disgruntled. But if these issues are not present then "why not make happy
employees happier?" Marczewski’s (2014) rant may be read as an instance of compassionate
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anger, a righteous indignation against those who are delaying him from the urgent work of
alleviating suffering. He rages at detractors to “stop being part of the problem... and let the rest
of us get on with what we are trying to do.” The moral legitimacy and ethical urgency that comes
from compassion can protect gamification from criticism and make critique the objects of
critique instead. And in doing so, it can inspire belief in what gamification wishes to achieve.
Yet, this justification is strikingly unambivalent. Instead of seeing feelings, wages, and
power as intertwined, these topics are framed as discrete issues that warrant their own solution.
This glosses over the complex reality of how feelings arise, and ignores that good intentions
aside, gamification is often implemented without the consent of its users.
I begin my critique of gamification in those terms, thinking of its humanitarian logic as
an instrument of governance, a means to help those who are left out of the “will” necessary to the
good life. Such a logic may only sustained if the absence of passion is seen as suffering. Here we
witness a slippage: the suffering of call center workers is not centered on the structural inequality
of power, their inability to challenge for higher wages or better conditions, but the lack of a
psychological state - engagement - which then radiates to the lack in other fields, like the
possibilities in social mobility, promotion, and better wages. Then, to prescribe gamification as a
solution to its lack, the movement also construes in advance the centrality of the will to
economic and social life, an object on the path to the good life that everyone has the right to
possess.
The human will, Sara Ahmed (2014b) offers, is an object of experienced intention and
desire: “To will is to put one’s energy into becoming accomplished in this way or that. This
sense of the will as energetic, as getting the body “behind” an action is important… If willing is
an energetic relationship to a future possibility, not all possibilities can become an object of will,
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not all possibilities require energy to be actualized.” (italics included, p. 37). In the previous
chapter, I had discussed how management texts had struggled to articulate the wants of workers,
tying wrong wants to weak and wrong wills. An apathetic worker, a worker does not desire to
find passion in his work, is also presented as a worker with a defective will: a will which is either
too weak or oriented wrongly towards the optimistic possibilities of the good life. However, what
happens in situations where “right” intentions exist - where worker wills “correctly,” intending to
do well in their jobs and to achieve the good life through their efforts - but where institutional
configurations are at odds with the realization of these intentions? Here, the problem is not so
much that of a right or wrong will, but that situation of work itself is too trying for the energetic
dimension of the will to be sustained. The example of Jennifer is suggestive. In this imagined
situation, it is the structure of work rather than Jennifer’s attitude that is at the crux of the
problem. Jennifer has a good attitude, but the nature of call center work prevents her from
achieving her potential. Even if she could stir enthusiasm for the first couple of months, the
structural conditions of the workplace would eventually enervate that enthusiasm and cause her
to become yet another unmotivated worker.
Neither is the issue here easily addressed by any kind of restructuring process. The
examples of such jobs expressed in gamification texts arrive from a longer lineage of unhappy
work situations, usually jobs that too unvalued, repetitive, and banal to be profitably
transformed. These occupations are those which Herzberg, Mauser and Snyderman express in
1959 to exist outside the limits of enlightened management: “the large segments of our society to
which these prescriptions [of work reform] cannot possibly apply” (p. 138). And so attempts at
motivation usually follow what Werbach and Hunter (2012) describe as the antiquated method of
“carrots and sticks”: “Cashiers at McDonald's are probably not asking "Do you want fries with
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that?" because it's fun. Salespeople work longer and harder because their end-of-year bonus is
dependent on sales. Employees know if they get a bad performance review, they don't get
promoted.”
For Werbach and Hunter, such methods are not just ineffective. By enforcing motivation
through discipline, these methods are fundamentally unethical because they stir unhappiness and
keep workers in their place, unable to enjoy social mobility. It is not difficult to imagine the
unhappiness of servers at McDonald’s, employees who are mistreated, unappreciated, and
thereby removed of the motivation to improve their situations by working better and harder. The
reductive ease by which these bad jobs can be imagined is telling; the simplicity itself gesturing
towards our beliefs of the conventional limits towards which the ideology of meritocracy and the
promises of good life may be sustained.
The compassionate imagination ensues from gamification’s capacity to transform the
conditions hostile to the materialization of the energetic will. Werbach and Hunter (2012)
explain that the will is most effective when you do something that “you really, really want to
do,” when intention merges effortlessly with affect - or in short, when you work on something
you are passionate about. Gamification expresses the hope that the feelings of passion can be
fairly distributed, altering the feeling of “a stultifying job” by transferring some the feelings
typical to good careers to “jobs that are just that: jobs” (Penenberg, 2013, p. 192). Points,
leaderboards, game aesthetics, mechanics and code are looked to as the instruments of
redistribution. Using automated systems to offer instantaneous feedback, and game mechanics to
increase the fun of these jobs, those who work “in the context of tasks that are often repetitive
and dull,” may still reserve hope for “a sense of purpose and aspiration” usually available only to
good careers (Reeves & Read, 2009, 4).
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What agencies do compassion coalesce, and if impulse is to recover for hopeless working
subjects a chance at the good life, then what exactly is the shape and form of this good life? And
what are the compromises involved in accepting the good life that gamification offers?? In the
two chapters to follow, I unpack how compassion is represented in the gamification movement,
what the consequences of the compassionate imagination are, and how affective dimensions of
compassion can be intertwined with the intersecting properties of digital operations. To be clear,
I am not implying that gamification was intended to be compassionate: Reeves, who built the
anecdote on Jennifer, for instance, developed his ideas about games and work in his first
commissioned work by IBM (Deterding, 2015). His task was to inspire creativity amongst
software developers rather than call center workers. Yet, Jennifer’s hypothetical example is
compelling because it illustrates a particular aspect of utopic thinking: a capacity for digital
games and its culture to offer the psychological sensibilities for transformative change outside
the transformation of structure. To understand why gamification is so easily extended to
suffering populations and so productive for compassion thinking (which is, in fact, not just
relegated to workers), we need to understand the survivalist theoretical thread built into the
discourse of productive play. Untangling how game thinking is intertwined with survival can
help illuminate how certain subjects denied access to the good life due to the value of their work
may yet be brought into the folds of passion and its promises, sustaining the optimistic promises
of work in the precarious present.
Using two historical cases of gamification for analysis, I illustrate how game thinking,
especially those centered on the avoidance of hardship, may produce utopic imaginations of the
good life that center more on survival than flourishing, on avoiding hopelessness rather than
gaining real hope, and on relief rather than change. Compassionate accounts of gamification
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emphasize how its implementation can give workers a feeling of agency, enjoyment, and fun.
However, I argue that these compassionate accounts may also constitute a state of nontraumatic
survival, where subjects experience not so much happiness, but a numbness to the banality and
precarity of working life.
In this chapter (The Compassionate Imagination), I make this argument through a critical
reading of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow and in the following chapter (Digital
Sovereignty), Stewart Brand’s theory of New Games. My goal in this chapter is offer a different
means of understanding the phenomenological product of gamification: its purported capacity to
offer passion or engagement. Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow provides a way to understand
how gamification may represent a numbing object, a computerized means of diverting subjects
away from unhappiness by distracting them from reality. Contrary to the suggestions that
gamification produce states of engagement that is empowering, I offer that gamified systems
contribute to self-erasure, which provides a bulwark against routine attrition (Berlant, 2013).
Gamification allows the self to be suspended, eliminating feelings of boredom which can keep
workers more productive. At the same time, however, such forms of psychological resilience
leaves the basic structural issues of work unchanged, and mistakenly celebrates survival as a
means of flourishing.
In the following chapter, I continue to discuss why digital operations are useful for the
utopic thinking that underscores gamification. Brand’s theory of New Games is a useful
interlocutor in helping us understand why games are useful in romanticizing the states of
survival. Contrasting New Games with contemporary discussions of gamification, I highlight
how digital affordances - including interactivity, parameters, and interfaces – can produce an
imagination of user sovereignty. When screen is made responsive to the user’s input – no matter
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the banality of the input involved – and when such interactivity can be enhanced with game
aesthetics and narratives, it becomes easier to imagine that empty gestures may represent a form
of empowerment. The aesthetics and digital logics of games, therefore, enable the confusion of
survival for empowerment. Together, these cases highlight why a compassionate account of
games is compelling both historically and in the present; and they describe how the cultural
fixation of passionate work and the good life may also constitute a politics of numbness.
Compassion, Neoliberalism, and Affective Ideal
The similar Latin roots to the words compassion and passion - pati which connotates suffering -
provides a basis by which we can consider the relationship between the affects of passion and
compassion. The Latin word for passion, pati, Page du Bois (2003) notes, has traditionally
implied a passive state of suffering, a condition of being beset by an emotion imposed externally
that needs endurance by the victim. The addition of the prefix com to make the Latin word
compati (compassion) communicates a state of empathic suffering, a fellow feeling where one
experiences the pain of another. The participation in suffering is typically understood in moral
terms: the synergies in feeling is experienced for the undeserved suffering of others, which
drives an impulse for the correction of this injustice (Nussbaum, 2013).
Clearly, the suffering implied in pati differs significantly from the contemporary use of
the word passion, “an intense desire or enthusiasm for something.” Previously, I had discussed
how the change in the meanings of the word “passion” may be understood as a shift from a
passive to an active conception of desire. Amélie Rorty (1982) writes that the change in the
meaning of the term coincided with the historical construction of the modern self. “Instead of
being reactions to invasions from something external to the self, passions became the very
activities of the mind, its own motions” (p. 159). The modern conception of passion - a
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directional feeling to be heeded as opposed to an affliction of an emotion that needs struggling
against - aligns with a notion of an autonomous, contained modern self, an individual whose
emotions spring from an internal psyche that could reveal the ‘truth’ of one’s psychological self
(Dixon, 2006).
We can read the “passion” in “compassion” through the lens of this transition, from states
of passivity, “reactions to invasions from something external to the self,” to states of activity,
“the very activities of the mind, its own motions.” In gamification, suffering is diagnosed to be
non-engagement, a lacuna of passion which interrupts the achievement of the good life. The
feelings that come about from this - apathy, loneliness, unhappiness - are all passive emotions,
not only because they sap energy leading the body to inertia, but also because they are feelings
that can thwart the will, affecting us even when we wish them not to do so. During such states
our bodies are felt as hindrance: the lethargic body, the clouded mind, and the persistent failure
to be positive, all fail to align to the affective states that best enables the achievement of our
wants. In this sense, the state of non-engagement is passifying; it enervates the energetic
dimension of the will and leaves the body to involuntary states of passivity where they are
experienced as obstacles that have to be worked against to fulfill our desires.
Engagement, on the other hand, describes a frictionless relationship between wills and
bodies. McGonigal (2011) defines engagement as the “right frame of mind” where “all kinds of
positive emotions and experiences” are generated (p. 28). When engaged, our bodies and minds
are attuned to conditions of our desire: “all our neurological and physiological systems that
underlie happiness - our attention systems, our reward center, our motivation systems, our
emotion and memory centers - are fully activated” (p. 29). Passionate individuals experience the
world as laminated surfaces; bodies are optimally aligned in the paths to the good life. Unlike
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those who are unengaged and who have lost control over how they wish their lives to proceed,
engaged individuals - to return to Zichermann’s and Linder’s problematic but telling definition -
have a feeling of “agency,” “belief that you are in control of your destiny.”
Compassion in gamification entails removing workers from pati, and directing them to
the modern understanding of the word passion, a state of enthusiasm and zeal. The shift from
passivity to activity, from being unengaged, suffering emotions that are beyond the capacity to
control, to being engaged, in control of energies and driven to direct it well, corresponds to the
states of optimal being. The implication is that with passion, workers are ready to be experience
happiness, their psychological states are tuned correctly, and their wills are properly equipped to
expand energies according to their desires.
A narrative of benevolent rescue is embedded within this shift from passivity to activity.
Marjorie Garber (2004) observes that unlike the emotions of sympathy and empathy which can
imply a concordance of sentiments between subjects of equal standing, compassion is inherently
built on grounds of disparity. The exercise of compassion is only possible when an individual is
superior to the one in distress. One needs to be, or imagine oneself to be, in a privileged position
to exercise compassion towards another.
In gamification, we are told that the workers suffering from unengagement are they, the
call center workers, cashiers, and servers, workers we encounter or read about, but who are
remote from our personal professional experience. On the other hand, the model of the engaged
worker which gamification holds as ideal is built after us, our own experiences and beliefs
towards our career. This insider/outsider distinction is embedded in the discursive structure of
gamification: gamification discourse is advanced by entrepreneurs, software developers,
journalists, academics, public intellectuals, and directed towards their own peers, people with
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strong professional aspirations and identities. Penenberg (2013) makes this clear when he
distinguishes between a job and a career, noting that while “anyone who has held a stultifying
job can attest to how slowly the day passes,” the experience is “a completely different story for
most of us with careers” (p. 192). This statement assumes a particular audience - readers are
already passionate and who think of their work ethos as superior. This then captures how the
passive-active shift is symbolic of classed feeling; an extension of aid by an affective public who
is higher in corporate hierarchy towards those who are trapped in the unvalued job positions they
seek to transform.
If compassion comes about from members of unequal social standings, then to feel the
pain of another is necessarily also a reflection of our imagination of what pain is and the
emotional state that we think the person should be in. Adam Smith (1759/1984) points this out in
The Moral Sentiments, noting that the imagination is central to compassion because the human
senses is incapable of properly experiencing someone else’s suffering. Senses can never “carry
us beyond our own person,” he writes, “it is by the imagination only that we can form any
conception of what are his sensations” (p. 9). Smith (1979/1984) understands that the accuracy of
this imaginative sensation will always be in doubt, but he holds faith that the sentiments will
yield sufficient similarities to drive altruistic action. Though the imagined suffering “can never
be exactly the same with original sorrow,” he insists that the feelings will have “a
correspondence with one another… though they will never be unisons, they may be concords”
(p. 22). Smith positions the state of imaginative feelings - not necessarily its form or intensity -
as a barometer to action. It matters less whether our imagined feelings of suffering is accurate;
the act of imagining suffering itself is capable of driving altruistic action that can alleviate the
pains of others.
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However, neither suffering nor its solution lie outside emotional hegemonies, normative
ideas about of how we should feel and act (Jagger, 1989). As Lee Edelman (2004) points out, the
extension of compassion is always already guided in some form by norms structured in society in
advance. Judgments about who is deserving of compassion, how it should be offered, the
appropriateness, and extent of its expression, are all bound up within the consideration of the
compassionate act. This normative aspect to compassion is critical - for in being driven to deliver
someone from suffering, we also have to imagine the suffering the subjects are in, and the ways
by which their suffering can be absolved (Whitebrook, 2014). For suffering to be recognizable as
suffering, it must violate a sense of moral rightness. This also means that there are limits to the
feelings of compassion. Not only must the sufferers fit into the model of injustice, a scheme that
suggests they do not deserve the suffering that is inflicted, the suffering in question also needs to
conform to models of pain that are socially recognizable (Berlant, 2004).
The lack of passion in gamification requires minimal justification precisely because it is a
normative kind of suffering. It is a suffering that resonates within the public sphere, whether it is
through self-help texts, medical advice, Gallup surveys, or the ideology of the American
Dreame. And it is this normative quality that allows the imagined suffering to slide from
imagined to real subjects, and from the particular to the general. The hypothetical scenario of
Jennifer, for instance, becomes the imaginative scenario that drives the real implementation of
gamification, and the bodies of those described, whether call center workers, cashiers, or servers,
becomes representative of the generalized others whose labor suffer the same fate of being
unmotivated and devalued. Then, the drive to alleviate the scene of suffering is influenced by the
same normative beliefs of what an experience without suffering is. The ideological synergy to
feelings lie at the heart of the compassionate imagination: the desire to feel right through the
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compassionate act hinges on ideas of how the suffering subjects will feel right if we help them in
the ways we think is right. The “right” feelings, wills, experiences suggested by gamification
advocates are the socially accepted ways in which these unhappy situations are to be altered.
The connection of passivity/activity to them/us may then be deemed as what I had
previously argued as an enforcement of normative classed feelings, a question of who is willing
correctly, and what the right feelings to the will are. To describe them as passive implies that
passivity is negative, and their wills are wrongly aligned, which erases the existing ways in
which agency is already exercised by workers. In the same way, to describe the active as ideal
also enshrines activity, and makes gamification’s definition of work-based agency the only kind
of agency that is worthy in labor. This entails a misrecognition on two levels: a misunderstanding
of what the true cause of suffering is, and the misidentification of how such suffering is supposed
to be alleviated.
Gamification then comes at this juncture, promising that software can stimulate the
passion necessary to ensure workers freedom from the psychological distortions that had
previously kept them passive and dependent. Like how the fate of Jennifer ends - with a better
position and a vacation overseas - gamification promises the hopeful resuscitation of the good
life, and thereby “fixes” a lapse that was previously existent. The argument is that now fully
psychologically engaged, workers can participate on equal footing in the promise of meritocracy,
achieve their full potential as human capital, and reach towards the good promises of work that
they had been previously denied.
Limits to Critique
One criticism of this vision is voiced by game designer and professor, Ian Bogost (2011), who
derides gamification as bullshit. Bogost adopts the term bullshit from moral philosopher Harry
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Frankfurt (2005) and describes it as an instrumentalist discourse concerned with the achievement
of self-interest without regard for the truth. Bullshit, he notes, is often used to “conceal, to
impress or to coerce,” so that one’s ignorance may be hidden and agenda advanced. Gamification
is bullshit because it is a movement intent on corporatizing the art form of games for the
purposes of business gain. It has no real interest in changing the lives of those whom it cites; its
primary concern is that of selling - to concoct the rhetorical strategies that could make the term
look as impressive and effective to its corporate clients as possible.
Advocates of gamification, Bogost (2011) argues, are not interested in games as much as
in its rhetorical power, its “mysterious, magical, powerful” aura which promises the possibility
of transforming the psychologies of everyday life. But in being narrowly interested in what
games can do instead what games are, gamification does violence to its object of inspiration. It
scrapes games of its narratives, aesthetics and ludic logics, and leave behind its raw states -
points, badges, and leaderboards - which are made repeatably commodifiable: “This rhetorical
power derives from the "-ification" rather than from the "game". -ification involves simple,
repeatable, proven techniques or devices: you can purify, beautify, falsify, terrify, and so forth. -
ification is always easy and repeatable, and it's usually bullshit.” This issue had also led other
game designers, like John Ferrara (2013) and Margaret Robinson (2010) to describe gamification
as a “lie” and “con” that relies upon the rhetoric of games while ignoring the most meaningful
dimensions of what a game constitute.
While I have sympathies with the critique of corporate appropriation, Bogost’s (2011)
account inadvertently sets up a problematic binary between the authentic and inauthentic, games
that lie within the spheres of the market and those that don’t. Popular digital games, Nick Dyer-
Witheford and Greig de Peuter (2009) demonstrate, are one the largest cultural industries in
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America, and games have become integrated in the cultural industry as a common media mix.
Our experience with games transact around their status as commodities. Games are purchased,
embedded with advertisements, integrated with the brand, used as simulations to train future
employees, and for military simulations. The commercial value of games are also sustained by
different kinds of free user-generated labor, in reviews, discussion on forums, contributions to
mods, to name some. Neither does the production of games happen outside the market or
politics: labor costs, gender and race stereotypes, marketing, product deadlines, and the interests
of consumers, routinely feature into the design decisions of games.
One result of this critique is that gamification is reified as an assemblage of software
affordances which Bogost (2011) calls “exploitationware,” rather than a cultural phenomenon
tied to the capitalist enterprise. Situating the criticism of exploitation on the “ware” leaves the
relationship between games, productivity and happiness uninterrogated, which then allows new
instantiations of gamification to emerge with adaptations to the term.
By 2015, a number of writers had observed that the popularity of gamification had
significantly declined since its heyday in 2011. Sergio Nouvel (2015), a technology entrepreneur
notes that while gamification used to be the “darling of business talk,” the term today “sounds a
bit outdated and tired.” He and others attribute this to the sullied brand of gamification, citing
how the term had the unfortunate effect of simplifying gamification to a system of points,
badges, and leaderboards which is often implemented with little consideration to what people
really want. This observation is accompanied by a number of disassociations. Jane McGonigal
distanced herself from gamification on such grounds, saying that, "I don’t do gamification... I
don’t think anybody should make games to try to motivate somebody to do something they don’t
want to do” (Feiler, 2012). Stack Overflow, a platform for programmers to offer programming
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advice, insists that its success depended from its users own volitional interest to “help other
people” and “learn something new,” rather than the gamified system of reputation built into the
site: “at best the points, and the gamification, and the focused structure of the site did little more
than encourage people to keep doing what they were already doing” (Hanion, 2013). Paharia, the
creator of the gamification platform Bunchball, also answered with nonchalance to the decline,
"Whether or not the term sticks around, I don't know and I don't care. At the end of the day, my
definition of gamification is about motivating people through data” (Snider, 2014).
These individuals strategically disassociate themselves from gamification on account that
its implementation was either too simplistic or manipulative. Then under different terms or
emphases, like “big data” and “motivational science,” or with the absence of the term
gamification itself, the existing relationship between games, passion, and the good life, continue
to be promulgated. One recent example is the publication of SuperBetter by McGonigal in 2015.
The book’s subtext, “a revolutionary approach to getting stronger, happier, braver and more
resilient - powered by the science of games,” shows how this cultural imaginary can persist
despite its disavowal. The portrayal of gamification as a thing rather than cultural imaginary also
allows its criticisms to become a resource by which advocates can use to claim how their work is
different or superior. The problems of gamification had spurred efforts to sell “gamification 2.0”
- a new improved version which promises the “right” implementation of gamification with an
emphasis on “player centered design” (Hay, 2014). Productivist norms remain unchanged in
these new instantiations of gamification.
In Loyalty 3.0, for example, Paharia (2013) answers to the criticism of gamification by
urging his readers to talk to those whom gamification is implemented for. His attempt to
distinguish between the good or bad implementation of gamification is framed through a
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democratic norm, an inquiry into the “rich deep lives” of users “that affect and color how they
interact with us.” Paharia’s (2013) approach may be deemed as user-centric, and may even be
praiseworthy for encouraging conversations between management and its lay workers. But
despite offering some examples of the responses workers might give, Paharia’s (2013) later
remarks make clear that these conversations are not aimed at understanding the lives of workers
as opposed to figuring out what “motivates and drives other people” so that gamification can be
better designed: “You don’t even need to talk to many people... to get the best results from
usability tests, you don't need to talk to more than five users.” Paharia’s (2013) attempt to
reconcile the instrumentalist critique of gamification - the accusation of simplicity and
manipulation - incorporates the very norms of efficiency which it tries to disavow. The
contradiction, manifested within the ethical call to understand the “rich lives” of users and its
conflicting representation of these same lives as standardized and generalizable, reflects on how
utilitarian principles continue to influence the moral conceptions of what gamification should
achieve.
Compassion and Survival
Rather than starting from the standpoint of corporate appropriation, my intent is to embark by
taking “bullshit” seriously, not because I am convinced of the effectiveness of gamification, but
because I am interested in what its productivist discourse reveals about utopia in contexts where
possibilities to the good life are excluded. In this aspect, bullshit might even be generative.
Frankfurt (2005) whom Bogost draws from, explains that bullshit is a creative act directed
towards invention rather than falsehood:
“A person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus
is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain
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falsehood at a certain point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that
point or intersecting it… the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and
less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and
independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative
play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the “bullshit
artist.” (52-3)
The case of Jennifer, the deserving call center worker restricted from the good life, may
be considered as a kind of “imaginative play,” a thought experiment in the potential of games.
Although such play may disappoint or even revolt those who see games as an art form, it is
precisely this nonchalance with the “truth” of games that allow consultants, entrepreneurs, and
futurists to imagine how play can ameliorate the problems of humankind. Freed from rules of
how games should be, gamification practitioners have greater room to imagine the
transformative possibilities of gamification. Though problematic, this discourse gives us a
glimpse into the kinds of utopias that capital constructs in the present, especially with regards to
the longstanding limit of management’s transformative impulse - repetitive work that is too
unvalued to hold redemptive value for restructuring.
This perspective takes into account how technoculture has the propensity to open a
“utopian sphere,” a space where “idealized visions of the future can be elaborated without instant
dismissal.” (Friedman, 2005). Friedman explains this while relating to discourse of work. He
notes that while work-related discourses that challenge capitalism - like a political right to a
forty-hour workweek - have become almost unthinkable in the American public sphere, a similar
argument expressed by futurist who claim how machines can reduce the labor hours of workers
is given space for public discourse. He elaborates, “Couched in this science-fictional language,
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there’s even room to suggest that capitalism itself might some day be rendered obsolete.”
At the same time, however, gamification does not just open space for an intellectual
debate. Rather, the cultural object of digital games and its presumed universal pleasures provides
materials for an imagined common emotional existence. The imagined similar experiences in the
play of games, the intense concentration and the excitement they produce, foster a sense of what
Arjun Appadurai calls the “communities of sentiment,” geographically dispersed populations
who unite in their ability “imagine and feel things together” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 8). By thinking
through games and their experience - rather than culture, politics, geography, or social norms -
gamification advocates are able to build a psychological sense of similarity with those who are
otherwise different from themselves. As McGonigal’s (2010) TED talk implies, differences in
social circumstance does not hinder the similar sensations we can have when playing a good
game. In this sense, gamification constitutes the cultural idiom which enables the intimate utopic
thinking of distant others (Streeter, 2011). Using games as a source of common emotional
experience, gamification advocates are able to stand in their imagination about the problems of
work and how these problems are to be addressed.
What kinds of life are then enabled for the subjects of gamification’s compassionate
impulse? In his discussion of affective labor, Michael Hardt (1999) notes that even as affect is
increasingly commodified in the postindustrial economy, there yet remains potential in the
possibility of a “biopower from below,” the affective labor which can produce new, oppositional
subjectivities (p. 99). Hardt sees affective labor as having two sides: if capitalism is routinely
extracting and directing our affects, commodifying them and channeling us towards particular
means of existence, then the biopower from below also show how this capture is not entire. The
caring, loving affective labor of individuals creates new possibilities to thinking and solidarities
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which can escape the entrapment of normative ways of life imposed by capitalism.
Hardt (1999) had imagined biopower from below to be oppositional to the accumulative
tendencies of capital. The situation that gamification offers is more ambivalent, but its aspect of
resistance should not be cursorily dismissed. We can turn to McGonigal’s (2011) insistence that
hard work without engagement is “depression” to understand the politics of life around
gamification. Cvetkovitch (2012) defines depression as “another form of biopower that produces
life and death not only by targeting populations for overt destruction, whether through
incarceration, war, or poverty, but also more insidiously by making people feel small, worthless,
hopeless” (13). Her definition highlights the invisible and ordinary kinds of death that a
biopower from above instigates. Its means of killing is usually represented as suicide, but may
also be attached to varied rationales unevenly distributed along lines of class, race, and gender
(Tiesman et al, 2015). Some clear cases of work-related suicides have become a subject of public
discussion - like those of Orange France, a French telecommunications company, China’s
Foxconn factory, and Monsanto, an agricultural firm operating in India - but many others happen
without the same public attention (Berardi, 2015). In each of these cases, workers were driven to
suicide due to the humiliating and hopeless conditions of their labor. This is related, Berardi
(2015) argues, to the affective formation of neoliberalism, where workers are encouraged to
divert their psychic energies from class solidarities towards that of work. This redirection
impoverishes their psychic worlds outside work, making workers feel powerless, trapped, and
alone, when work conditions deteriorate and fail to provide hope for a better future.
McGonigal (2011) suggests that gamification can intervene in such hopelessness by
blocking out the unachieveable to focus on smaller achievements which can give individuals a
sense of control over their lives. She explains that depression arises when someone repeatedly
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encounters failure to achieve the goals that they wish for. Here, depression is related to a
condition of hopeless stuckedness, where one’s present situation is unhappy, and betterment in
the future seems impossible to achieve. Observing that games can create situations where people
fail happily, McGonigal (2011) suggests that a distillation of game principles may create
conditions that “help us realistically believe in our chances for success” (p. 71). This new
orientation towards success constitutes a kind of biopower from below, opening spaces which
allow relief from the everyday humiliating and hopeless conditions of waged labor. And this is
made possible through the logic of realistic expectations rather than revolutionary hope: "We can
opt out of whatever "the dream" is supposed to be, and focus our efforts instead on goals that
give us real practice at working hard, getting better, and mastering something new" (McGonigal,
2011, p. 71) Freed from the constant disappointment of striving for unachievable goals,
individuals may now find solace or even happiness in the smaller achievements that gamification
makes possible.
Taking this as the starting point, I want to examine how the good life offered by
gamification - at least its compassionate narrative - aspires not for the exceptional, but for the
quotidian feelings of tiny successes that make amiable conditions of survival. These feelings
involve the substitution of the impossible for the possible, large dreams for those we can settle.
Emphasis is placed on making do with what one has been served so that happiness may yet seem
attainable and life may persist. This encapsulates a dimension of what Lauren Berlant (2011)
calls “post-Fordist affect,” an affective state that is uncertain, painful, but yet optimistic about
the possibilities for transformation. She observes that part of capitalism’s reproduction centers on
the production of affective spaces that make hopeful possibilities about the future possible. These
spaces manifest through flickers of conventionality, moments where one feels in pace with the
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ordinary expectations of how happiness is meant to be achieved. Work is a site of such a
possibility. Even if the job is lowly paid or exploitative, under certain conditions the mere
possession of a job may be able to give someone a feeling of conventionality that makes
“possible imagining living the proper life that capitalism offers as the route to the good life”
(Berlant, 2011, p. 164).
Methodological Clarification
As mentioned, I will make these arguments through historical case studies of Csíkszentmihályi
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and his theory of flow, as well as, in the next chapter, Stewart Brand and his theory of New
Games. My goal here is not to offer a history of gamification, knowing also that the archive to
gamification is multiple and ambiguous. The history of gamification may be investigated through
its rhetoric (Deterding, 2015), attached to a longer history of institutionalized leisure in business
(Andersen, 2009), or connected to technological predecessors, like loyalty program cards and
team bonding games (Turco, 2014). My interest, instead, is to demonstrate how historical
instantiations of compassionate play - the ways play is taken up at certain moments to provide a
solution to suffering - can offer the heuristics to understand the politics underneath the act of
compassion in gamification. In this sense, the acts of compassion in gamification are deemed to
derive from a longer history of intellectual thought connected to experiments of compassion
through play. The insights of these events have both directly and indirectly influenced
contemporary imaginations of how gamification can provide a means of survival for those who

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This analysis drew from Csíkszentmihályi’s books and publications, media interviews, and his TED talks from the
period of 1950 to 2000. Csíkszentmihályi is a prolific writer and a broad thinker; the materials examined included
his personal stories in The New Yorker, his interviews with several magazines, six of his published books, and over
40 different articles. I read the materials, and analyzed them critically as discourses, focusing on his rationale for the
inspiration of flow theory, his development of the positive psychology discipline, his theoretical work on games, and
he ways he tied flow to survival and human resilience.
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are left out of the good life.
The figures I examine, Csíkszentmihályi, the influential theorist of ‘flow’, and Brand’s
influence in the ‘New Games’ movement, were significant in the intellectual rethinking of how
people could use play to help adults deal with trauma or unhappiness. Emerging in the 1970s,
these ideas propagated that play can be useful for non-game objectives, like to aid people to
move beyond the boredom of work or to relieve the hardship of activism. Both theories were also
developed on compassionate grounds: Csíkszentmihályi was initially drawn to flow because of a
desire to help others overcome the traumas of the Second World War, and New Games was
experimented with in the shadow of forced military conscription in the Cold War.
While neither Csíkszentmihályi nor Brand are direct participants in the gamification
movement, their intellectual influence may be observed in how they are often invoked in
arguments about why gamification works or how it should be implemented. Csíkszentmihályi’s
flow theory is an influential psychological theory, integral in informing digital game design and
gamification frameworks, demonstrating how an optimal psychological state may be produced
when the challenge of a task is carefully calibrated in relation to the player’s skill.
Brand’s New Games theory is a thesis of how social change can be produced through
games. This theory had left a profound impact among important figures in the gamification
movement. In an interview with Brand at The Long Now Foundation, a think tank devoted to the
speculative thinking, McGonigal spoke of her intellectual debt to the New Games, saying that it
is a movement that she recommends everyone to be acquainted with (The Long Now
Foundation, 2010). In Reality is Broken, she writes, “many of today's leading game developers
grew up playing New Games at school and local parks - and it's not hard to see the influence of
New Games on multiplayer and massively multiplayer game designers today” (McGonigal,
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2011, p. 143). Further, New Games offer an interesting context for analysis because like
gamification, it was took inspiration from one of the earliest digital games, Spacewar, and
directed it towards solving a real world problem. In that regard, we might even consider New
Games one of the earliest instantiations of gamification, a movement which had adopted the
logics of digital games for behavioral change in the real world.
Both New Games and flow theory are chosen as objects of analysis because they are
cultural objects that have made vividly possible how games can be brought into real life for the
transformation of non-game situations. Their intellectual influence in gamification adds to their
importance in the contemporary context. Still, I am drawn to these cases for another reason. As
previously mentioned, both flow and New Games were driven by a compassionate impulse; they
were developed in relation to the events of the Second World War and the Vietnam War. As
such, these theories were also very much about survival, resisting the difficult conditions faced
during that period of time. What then are the consequences when ideas rooted in compassionate
practice become transposed from one context to another? And how do these compassionate
responses facilitate not just the historical, but the spatial movements of ideas founded on
surviving? Reflecting upon this intellectual history allows us to address some of the qualities in
gamification and think about how compassion and play interact to form an imaginative solution
to suffering.
Csíkszentmihályi, Flow, and Compassionate Agency
To begin, we might turn to Csíkszentmihályi’s earliest book publication on flow, Beyond
Boredom and Anxiety, published in 1975, which is still used as material for gamification texts
today. The book opens with an important story of survival of the Lydians. Herodotus, the author
of the history whom Csíkszentmihályi cites, describes the Lydians fighting famine for eighteen
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years by absorbing themselves in play during the reign of King Atys. Famine is coped with
through an alternation between games and good; one day, the Lydians would eat, and the next
they would play to ward off the hunger pangs. This allowed them to stretch their meagre supplies
for eighteen years. Herodotus had only used this story as a “casual anecdote to enliven the
history of Lydia” (Holland, 1937, p. 377). But to Csíkszentmihályi, the power of this story was
more than historical – it represented the ahistorical potential of play. “People do get immersed in
games so deeply as to forget hunger and other problems,” Csíkszentmihályi (1975) wrote, “what
power does play have that men relinquish basic needs for its sake?” (p. ix)
In this tale, play was not just made significant to life - the very simplicity by which
famine could be gamed implies that hardship could be experienced in ways that is nontraumatic.
Its playful method of survival is utopic: suffering is not only effectively absolved, its means of
absolution is painless as well. And this story, repeated by Csíkszentmihályi, became also the
point of inspiration for McGonigal in gamification. Three decades after Csíkszentmihályi,
McGonigal (2011) resurfaced this example in her book, using it in the introduction and
conclusion of Reality is Broken.
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Whereas Csíkszentmihályi acknowledged the ambiguity of the
anecdote’s historical veracity, McGonigal (2011) amasses evidence to support its accuracy.
Elaborating on several recent findings which back the plausibility of the anecdote, she argues
that what was commonly thought of as a legend now offers the “astonishing claim” that “we may
owe much of Western civilization as we know it to the Lydians’ ability to come together and
play a good game.” This cultural ancestry then becomes ground for the justification of the
replicability to play, survival, and utopia in the present. (p. 353)
The transposition of the story across historical time - from an anecdote to

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Following McGonigal, this story has also inspired other gamification articles.
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Csíkszentmihályi to McGonigal - reflects on the inherited quality of an imagined utopia. As
Csíkszentmihályi (1975) makes clear, one important purpose of Beyond Boredom and Anxiety is
to illustrate how play is a psychological orientation, a perception and interpretation of an act
rather than an act itself. The pleasure derived from play lies not within the game, but arises as a
result of the factors of the game - a situation where goals are clearly stated, feedback is
constantly given, and where skills are properly matched with the challenge of the task.
Therefore, a certain replicability exists in this pleasurable experience. Even though flow may be
more commonly experienced in chess or rock-climbing, such feelings may be reproduced if
conditions could be tweaked to resemble the structure of games. “Almost any object or any
experience is potentially enjoyable,” Csíkszentmihályi insists, all it requires is a change of the
psychological orientation towards the object or experience (p. x).
This view led him to critique the distinction between play and real life. Most studies of
play, he observes, maintain this separation by construing play as games rather than a
psychological experience that is mobile and flexible. He especially attributes this misconception
to Roger Caillois’s (1958/1961) work which developed a theory of play through a taxonomy of
games. This equation of play to games, he argues, misrepresents how fluid play is, and
mistakenly suspends possibilities of playful enjoyment from real life, non-game situations. He
continues, “By downplaying the structural distinction and emphasizing the experiential one, we
are better able to deal with the esprit de jeu... the central issue of the phenomenon of play”
(Csíkszentmihályi, 1975, pp. 185-6). The experiential possibility to play is framed here as pure
potential, which can instate itself even in the most unlikely scenarios. Thus, Csíkszentmihályi
(1975) forwards a curious genealogy of playful figures - the adherents of the Protestant work
ethic, businessmen in pursuit of wealth, English master weavers, and indigenous farmers and
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hunters - the odd choices manifesting his attempt to universalize the potential of play outside
culture, history, and circumstance, especially where it comes to the area of productive activity.
The good feelings of play hinge on the experience of “flow,” an optimal experience of
human freedom that is absent of boredom and anxiety. He describes flow as an experience of
deep concentration in a task where all distractions and feelings of uncertainty are eliminated and
replaced with a strong sense of control. Those in flow describe the vanishing of self-
consciousness. The awareness of the body slides away, crowded out by an intense focus on the
task, and removes along with it the negative bodily and psychic feelings of everyday life, like
discomfort, pain, fear, unhappiness, fatigue. Time flies by without the person’s realization, and
though one does not necessarily feel happy during the state of flow since feelings are blocked
out, retrospectively, the sensations are described as enjoyable. In fact, these feeling are so
desirable that flow is described an autotelic experience, an intrinsically rewarding experience
that drives individuals to seek it out for its own sake and nothing else (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990).
In this sense, flow might be named a phenomenological theory of passion, since involves
the same qualities of enthusiasm, engagement, and concentration that passion implies. To name it
as such may not be off the mark since flow was initially modelled after the work ethic of artists,
an exemplary model of the self-sacrificial, passionate neoliberal cultural laborer (Ross, 2008).
Csikszentimihalyi’s early work as a graduate student was accomplished with his advisor Jacob
Getzels, who was interested in the subject of creativity (Csíkszentmihályi, 1965).
Csíkszentmihályi (1975) focused his dissertation on artists and noticed that they “were almost
fanatically devoted to their work… yet as soon as they finished a painting or a sculpture, they
seemed to lose all interest in it” (P. xii). This suggested that there was something of a playful
pleasure in the act of creative self-expression that rendered people willing to take on personal
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sacrifices in order to continue their activity.
The first context that Csíkszentmihályi’s (1975) addresses extensively, in Beyond
Boredom and Anxiety, is that of work. Such attention locates him in a larger community of
researchers in the 1970s aimed at improving the quality of working life in America (Ross, 2003).
As previously explained, government sponsored research in the late twentieth century had
contributed in important ways to the discourse of passion. Much of these studies sought to frame
the absence of passion as the primary problematic of working life. Csíkszentmihályi (1975)
makes the claim that the unhappiness in labor can be narrowed to two paradigmatic negative
affects - the feelings of boredom and anxiety, or phrased differently, apathy and stress - the
emotions that threatened the joy and productivity of workers.
Flow was envisioned as a means of coping with this ailment. The goal was to cultivate in
workers the experience of flow which would make them intrinsically motivated rather than
extrinsically so. Or in other words, flow was envisioned as a means to coach workers to find joy
in working for its own sake, rather than rely on external incentives, like a promotion or an
increase in wages. As psychologists Mark Lepper and his colleagues (1997) remark, the
distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is not neutral: extrinsic motivation was
deemed to make people “pawns of external environmental forces,” while intrinsic motivations
allowed people to “see themselves as origins of their own purposeful actions” (p. 25).
Csíkszentmihályi’s theorization of flow and his description of it as an intrinsic motivation, is an
attempt to reposition this possibility. He wanted to consider flow as a resource, a potentiality
found in all human beings that could be tapped into to produce happier lives without changes to
external circumstances. By mastering the production of flow, an activity which required extrinsic
rewards could became enjoyable in and of itself. And it is this quality, the possibility of feeling
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what McGonigal (2011) describes as being “fully alive, full of potential and purpose,” that draws
gamification practitioners to the theory of flow (p. 36). In the years to come, flow as a theory
and idea would steadily gain popularity and enter popular parlance, aided by his prolific use of
the theory in both academic and popular presses.
Playing in the War
In this aspect, Csíkszentmihályi’s thesis might read no different from what management had long
sought to understand: the various means workers could be made happier and more motivated.
Yet, beneath the theory of flow lies a logic of survival and compromise. In an attempt to justify
the importance of flow, Csíkszentmihályi insisted that psychological change is important because
one is not always able to alter the structural conditions of society - the political, economic, and
social conditions - that can make life unbearable. In a chapter titled “Happiness Revisited” in
Flow, he writes, “There is not much that we as individuals can do to change the way the universe
runs. In our lifetime we exert little influence over the forces that interfere with our well-being”
(Csíkszentmihályi, 1990, p. 9). He elaborates, “It is important to do as much as we can to prevent
nuclear war, to abolish social injustice, to eradicate hunger and disease. But it is prudent not to
expect that efforts to change external conditions will immediately improve the quality of our
lives.”
Here, a relationship may be observed between Csíkszentmihályi’s distrust of structural
change and the circumstances of his personal life. Csíkszentmihályi often indicated that his
interest in flow stemmed from his experience of the Second World War. At a TED talk, he
described being inspired to understand the human psyche when he observed “how few of the
grownups… were able to withstand the tragedies that the war visited on them, how few of them
could even resemble a normal, contented, satisfied, happy life, once their job, their home, their
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security was destroyed by the war” (TED, 2008)
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. By starting from the psychic rather than the
structural, one is at least guaranteed of a modicum of personal happiness even if conditions of
happiness were to be eradicated.
Yet, his relationship with play and the suffering of war is more intimate than what this
statement suggests. At the age of ten in 1944, young Hungarian-born Csíkszentmihályi was
brought to Bellagio, Italy, where his father worked as a diplomat under the Hungarian Nazi
regime (Csíkszentmihályi, 1962). The war was drawing to a close, and in less than a year the
Allies would enter Bellagio and raid the hotel where Csíkszentmihályi and his family were
staying. It was during that period of time that Csíkszentmihályi learned about the power of play.
In an interview with Omni, he explained that he managed to escape his personal tragedy - the
death of relatives, friends, and his sibling - through chess: “I discovered chess was a miraculous
way of entering into a different world where all those things didn't matter. For hours I'd just
focus within a reality that had clear rules and goals. If you knew what to do, you could survive
there” (Sobel, 1995, p. 76)
I do not point to this example to make a reductive relationship between
Csíkszentmihályi’s past, the theory of flow, and the notion of survival. Nor am I suggesting that
the theory of flow is entirely built on the experience of war. However, to appreciate the cultural
and psychic complexity of flow, and its implication on gamification, it is necessary to understand
the grounds from which it emerges. In a forward to the field of positive psychology,
Csíkszentmihályi clarifies that his intention had never been to construe a “value-free”
psychological theory of the “average” human being (Seligman & Csíkszentmihályi, 2000, p. 7).
In fact, he was primarily intrigued not by the suffering of those affected by war, but the “few

23
Interestingly, this is not a casual reference. The WWII origins of flow is often repeated within his books and
articles, suggesting that the connection between flow and the war is not a weak one.
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who kept their integrity and purpose despite the surrounding chaos.” “They were not necessarily
the most respected, better educated, or more skilled individuals,” he explains, but they “kept their
decency during the onslaught of World War II.” And these individuals, he insisted, “held the key
to what humans could be like at their best,” representing the models of the idealized
psychological theory he wished to build (p. 7).
The theory of flow thus aims to be an idealized expression of a resilient human psyche -
modelled after a survivor of war. This dimension may be observed in the accounts of survivors
of war he cites in his books, many of which are individuals who had survived imprisonment
through improvised play. These include Christopher Burney, an operative who endured solitary
confinement by learning ways to make ordinary objects interesting, Eva Zeisel, a ceramics
designer, who played chess in her mind, Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect who devised for himself
a walking game on the prison yard, pretending that he was travelling on a journey to far off
places (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990), and Gyorgy Faludy, a poet who recruited other prisoners to
help retain memory of an elegy he made for his wife (Csíkszentmihályi, 1993). He admired these
individuals for being able to find a space of solace in their trying circumstances. “Even the most
degrading situation can be transformed into a flow experience,” he offers, then proceeding to cite
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who used poetry to help manage the oppressive conditions of the Gulag
camps (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990, p. 92):
Sometimes, when standing in a column of dejected prisoners, amidst the shouts of guards
with machine guns, I felt such a rush of rhymes and images that I seemed to be wafted
overhead .... At such moments I was both free and happy.... Some prisoners tried to
escape by smashing through the barbed wire. For me there was no barbed wire. The head
count of prisoners remained unchanged but I was actually away on a distant flight."
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This statement highlights how Csíkszentmihályi understands flow not only as a means,
but also an idealized experience of survival. Like the Lydians who gamed famine, these
individuals survived seemingly without the scars of survival. While other survivors may have felt
the pain of survival, and could have been left traumatized by their imprisonment, these survivors
felt “free and happy,” and remained psychologically untainted by their circumstance.
As contrast though, we may turn to a different account written by Giorgio Agamben
(1999) in Remnants of Auschwitz, where he quotes Primo Levi (who, in turn, draws from the
witness accounts of Miklos Nyszli, a Jewish Hungarian physicist), of a soccer match played
between the SS and the representatives of the Sonderkommando, the Jews assigned to the
disposal of gas chamber victims. The soccer match here seemed to function as a brief interlude to
reality. “Other men of the SS and the rest of the squad were present at the game; they take sides,
bet, applaud, urge the players on,” Levi writes, “as if, rather than at the gates of hell, the game
were taking place on the village green.” But where “this match might strike someone as a brief
pause of humanity in the middle of an infinite horror,” Agamben (1999) personally considers it
“the true horror of the camp” (p. 25-26). His dismay is sparked from the realization, as one who
had not encountered the camps, of how casually evil can be hidden behind a facade of banality:
“those who did not know the camps and yet, without knowing how, are spectators of that match,
which repeats itself in every match in our stadiums, in every television broadcast, in the
normalcy of everyday life” (Agamben, 1999, p. 26)
24

While Csíkszentmihályi celebrates the heroism of endurance and survival, Agamben’s
account cautions us about the evil that such narratives might screen. Crucially here,

24
This admittedly, is a truncated version of Agamben’s longer argument about the challenges of testimony and
witnessing.
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Csíkszentmihályi’s theory of flow might be likened to the metaphor of Agamben’s soccer match,
a subject inspired by a difficult context that is transposed to so many accounts that its original
context has become erased, and even, irrelevant. Indeed, universalization, and therefore, the
irrelevance of the original context is the very goal of his psychological theory. When Gonzalo
Bacigalupe (2001) critiques that the field of positive psychology hide racist values because it is
primarily conceived from a white scholarly community, Csíkszentmihályi replies that he believes
that “our common humanity is strong enough to suggest psychological goals to strive for that cut
across social and cultural divides. Just as physical health, adequate nutrition, and freedom from
harm and exploitation are universally valued, so must psychologists ultimately aim to understand
the positive states, traits, and institutions that all cultures value” (Seligman & Csíkszentmihályi,
2001, p. 90). His prioritization of abstraction and circulation is evident: where something stems
from is less important than how it might be made to be applicable more generally.
This standpoint might be understood as an effect of compassion. The desire to absolve
the pain of another may drive one to be strategic in the imagination of a solution. Abstraction and
circulation are pragmatic decisions aimed to make a solution more universalizable, and therefore,
more useful to those who are suffering. This desire, to feel right and do right, Berlant (2004)
offers, constitutes the agentic impulse that lies at the heart of compassion. But the pragmatic
approach to compassion may also incorporate a misrecognition of suffering, and, as I argue here,
the conception of the solution (Woodward, 2004). If compassion involves the compulsion to aid
another whose circumstances is radically different, a theory which legitimates universal
psychological sameness will be useful in producing a path for help to proceed. But such a
compassionate solution also carries the consequence of repressing difference, and the eagerness
to offer an uncomplicated, wholesome panacea to pain can gloss over deeper issues that are more
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difficult to address.
I intend to resist the optimism that Csíkszentmihályi and those who adopt his theory in
gamification forward, looking instead for the politics that survival might encompass. Trauma,
Cvetkovich (2003) writes, has been reified as a medical condition in the public sphere, with fixed
causalities and symptoms. But this, she observes, elides how trauma is an ambivalent experience
that can deny easy public representation. The effects of trauma may lie outside common
medicalized categories, and its emergence can come about as a ghostly presence, a haunting or
trace that emerges in material practices and the psyche in obscure ways. Cvetkovich (2003)
helpfully points us towards the politics that a denial of trauma can produce. The desire for a
nontraumatic consequence to survival is appealing; and flow’s theoretical application to many
contexts, including gamification, highlights the productiveness of the theory. Yet, the same
impulse to produce survival without trauma, I argue, incorporates a politics of forgetting,
suspension and glossing. And the transposition of flow to gamification as both theory and
inspiration, especially through the foundation of the motivational science that gamification
prides, influences the compassionate politics of work in the present.
Politics of Flow, Survival, and the Compassionate Solution
One of Csíkszentmihályi’s earliest application of flow - assembly line work - can illuminate
flow’s politics of survival (Sobel, 1995). Like call center workers, assembly line workers are the
commonsense targets of compassion in the seventies. As John Zerzan (1975) notes, the headlines
of national magazines in that period provide a telling indication of the “blue-collar blues” in
America, the feelings of disenchantment amongst workers that manifested in high absenteeism
and turnover rates in factories. “Luddites in Lordstown,” published in Harper’s Magazine
(Garson, 1972), “Boredom Spells Trouble on the Line,” in Life Magazine (Mauney, 1972), and
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“The Job Blahs” in Newsweek (Serin, 1973), are but some of the many stories circulating in the
public about the crisis of the sentiment in work. And federal reports like Work in America offer
that assembly line work are one of the worst sites of this disaffection (O’Toole et al, 1973).
Assembly line workers are usually low or unskilled laborers who have limited access to other
work opportunities. Trapped in their situation, they often feel frustrated when positive changes to
their jobs are rare and slow in coming
Csíkszentmihályi intervenes in this by arguing that psychological change can still bring
workers access to the good life. Here, the call center worker, Jennifer, is replaced by a
respondent, Rico Medellin, as the exemplary model of the deserving resilient worker. Rico is an
assembly line worker tasked to a set of repetitive operations, but where “most people would
grow tired of such work very soon… Rico has been at this job for over five years, and he enjoys
it.” Rico’s enjoyment stems from his ability, like the survivors of war, to make a game out of
hard labor. “Like the runner who trains for years to shave a few seconds off… Rico has trained
himself to better his time on the assembly line... He has worked out a private routine for how to
use his tools, how to do his moves. After five years, his best average for a day has been twenty-
eight seconds per unit.” (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990, p. 39). Control over consciousness has allowed
Rico to transform his experience of the situation, and which as Csíkszentmihályi argues, would
give him a chance at a better future due to his ability to stay motivated in the face of hardship.
By framing hardship as a problem that needs overcoming by the individual, however,
Csíkszentmihályi brackets the broader issues of power that are present in the assembly line, and
neglects the ways structure contributes to the feelings of oppression. And perceived similarity in
psychological experience is allows him to casually compare the work of people across a
spectrum of class positions, from surgeons to shipping clerks, secretaries to housewives. Since
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feelings of flow are most clearly observed in elitist activities - like chess, rock climbing, and
surgery (Mabley, 1976) – there is a case here that Csíkszentmihályi is using the assumed
commonness of psychology to elide problems related to social context. In Chicago Tribune
article, he offered that surgeons “get a great enjoyment out of their jobs because they know what
they must accomplish,” and suggests that other workers improvise challenges like the surgeon to
experience happiness in their jobs. Shipping clerks need to “take each truck-loading job as a
fresh challenge,” possibly treating it as a puzzle, figuring out the “best arrangement of crates or
boxes in the available space.” Secretaries should learn “what the possibilities are with the
equipment” that surrounds them, and housewives should “set standards for themselves” in their
housework. “A woman,” he notices, “who determines that four strokes of an iron is more
economical than six strokes, feels better with her accomplishment when the job is done”
(Houston, 1976).
Since the psychology of games is common to human nature, it is possible for shipping
clerks, secretaries, and housewives, to experience the same feelings of flow as the surgeon. All it
takes is the creation of the same challenge in those other jobs. In this way, the differences
between the work conditions are made incidental rather than central to the flow experience.
But as the work of Csíkszentmihályi (1975) himself reflects, some elements of these
differences stand as constant refusals to the generalizability of flow. In his study of chess
players, he found that men and women had different experiences of chess games. Women were
more likely to see chess as a risky and an anxiety inducing activity as opposed to men who see it
as a socializing one. This results from gender norms which impact how people of different
genders experienced the game. Women, for instance, were more likely to feel guilty for spending
time and effort on it because they felt that this took them away from the household which had no
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clear separation between the time of leisure and work. Further, they were often patronized and
condescended to during game matches, which influenced their reactions to the game.
Csíkszentmihályi relates this discrepancy to the masculine cultures of chess, but glosses over its
contradictions, favoring the development of a general theory.
The compassionate desire to resolve the pain of another can motivate one to
underemphasize the importance of differing standpoints. However, this refusal to admit
differences in circumstance can also individualize the hardships that people face. As Ghassan
Hage (2014) suggests, the celebration of the universal human spirit to endure carries a
disciplinary opposite: that if survival is possible, and that some have endured and survived, then
the inability to survive can be attributed to the psychological deficiency of the individual in
question rather than the conditions that produced this hardship in the first place. Thus,
Csíkszentmihályi (1990) tells the story of an assembly line worker Julio Martinez who is unable
to concentrate on his work because he notices that one of his car tires is getting flat, and that his
paycheck could arrive only at the end of the following week. The realization that the tire would
be unfixable till then fills Julio with great anxiety, affecting his mood through the workday. He
was irritable and unproductive, his mind is preoccupied with worries about whether he could
return home with his flat tire, and whether he could come to work the next day.
The subject of wages, wealth, or unions are not raised as issues in Julio’s case. Instead,
Csíkszentmihályi chides Julio for failing to interpret this information in a positive way. “The
outside event appears in consciousness purely as information,” he explains, “it is the self that
interprets that raw information in the context of its own interests, and determines whether it is
harmful or not” (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990, p. 38) Julio’s problem is attributed to his lack of
knowledge about credit, his poor networks, and his low self-confidence. Flow here slides from
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being an idealized to a normative theory of survival. What had started as a means to help the
survival of individuals has changed to scheme of privatized blame; the focus on individual
psychological change has made each person responsible for his or her own feelings.
Although gamification texts seldom express the redirection of culpability in the same
terms, we can witness the exercise of this idea in the ways how its writers emphasize the
possibilities of “opting out” of a gamification implementation. This opportunity to reject a
gamification exercise is often used to justify the earnest altruistic objectives of gamification. The
argument is that gamification should not be enforced on workers, and that workers should be
given an option not to play if they choose so (Marczewski, 2014; Nouvel, 2015; Zichermann &
Linder, 2013). This equates volunteerism to freedom, but if happiness and productivity are not
value neutral notions, then opting in or out are not neutral options as well. When the route to
happiness is offered as a possibility, its rejection can make one look ungrateful, uncooperative,
unmotivated, and unwilling to get on with the flow (Ahmed, 2010). Furthermore, it is the tacit
assumption that those who will correctly, those who are motivated to get a better life in the right
ways, will reap the benefits of gamification. If gamification is a good thing, then its rejection
signifies problems in other areas: the workers might be too skeptical of management’s intent or
worse, too unmotivated to seek out a better life. Volunteerism thus becomes a means where
individuals can be blamed for failing to will properly.
But this leads to another question: is there validity to the rejection of gamification? Is the
experience of flow always healthy and empowering? Natasha Schüll’s (2012) study of slot
machine addicts is useful here. Schüll (2012) observes that although slot machine addicts were
deeply involved in the play of slot machines, their experience was not the “exhilarating,
expansive, enabling experience of which Csíkszentmihályi wrote” (p. 179). Instead, she notes
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that experience here is liquidating and annihilating; addicts got so deep in concentration that they
became chained to their machines, unable to leave until their bodies and bank accounts were
depleted. Indeed, it is suggested that players were not “playing” as much as being trapped by the
machine. The addicts would vomit, wet themselves, or even come close to diabetic coma while
playing, and yet these abject bodily responses would be resisted, held in abeyance while the
individuals continued to “play.”
The experiences of slot machine addicts allow us to grapple with valences in the
experience of flow. It reminds us that absorption may not always be enabling and engagement is
not always empowering. In his criticism of McGonigal’s book SuperBetter, Nathan Heller (2015)
argues that McGonigal had misrepresented the positive phenomenological qualities of digital
games. McGonigal (2015) had argued that games could help us lead happier and healthier lives
by liberating us from the unhappiness of “ordinary negative events.” Drawing from a study
conducted by psychiatrists, she suggests that games like Tetris, the popular tile-matching video
game, can block out unhappy thoughts because they absorb a large amount of our visual
processing abilities. When playing Tetris, it becomes more difficult for us to recall negative
events, or have negative events impact us. She points to a findings which showed that individuals
who played Tetris were more capable of recalling painful images without their traumatic
consequence. However, if this is true, as Heller (2015) observes, then it is also possible to
interpret games as numbing objects, things which produce an evasion of trauma only by
distracting us from reality: “The immersive world of video games… numbs us to our own.”
Schüll makes a similar argument: she offers that players are often addicted to slot
machines because the machines produce a feeling of safety. The odds of slot machines are
weighed against the player, but they are predictable; their familiar operations and foreseeable
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losses gives people a sense of control in a world where they would be otherwise overwhelmed
with worries and anxiety. In the same way, we can think of digital games as offering this space
of compromised respite. Scott Richmond (2015) writes that casual games like Tetris offer a sense
of “vulgar boredom,” an experience of “an ambivalent retreat from desire” (p. 32). Here, desire
is not met as much as suspended. The individual experiences an erasure of himself, and becomes
“relieved of wanting, waiting, or acting” (Richmond, 2015, p. 32) The draw of these games
comes not from the fulfillment of the deep desire of the individual, it lies in how the
disappointment of these desires can be temporarily forestalled.
The stories of survival that Csíkszentmihályi cites - whether of the Lydians or the survivors of
imprisonment - are often framed positively, a means by which individuals can survive in difficult
circumstances without suffering trauma. But this nontraumatic consequence may also be
understood as a result of self-erasure.
25
The disappearance of desire which Richmond (2015)
describes, the relief of “wanting, waiting, or acting” is what allows one to be numbed from the
pain of hardship. The pain of unfulfilled desire will not have its sting if desire is absent. This
gives us a different understanding of McGonigal’s (2011) substitutionary gesture, to replace “an
unattainable dream for a realistic dream that is more rewarding” (p. 71). The “rewarding” aspect
of this realistic dream may be less about empowerment, and more about survival - creating a
zone where hardships are temporarily forgotten because desire itself is suspended.
It is in this aspect that I would like to add to the criticisms of gamification and the
survival that it advocates. Miguel Sicart (2015) and Tae Wan Kim (2015) offer that the main
ethical problem of gamification is that it offers ready-made packages of what the good life

25
There are similarities between the psychiatric condition of ‘disassociation’ – the state of being ‘here’ but ‘not
here’ - and the numbness that I talking about. But the main difference lies in that the former is understood as a
negative way of coping, a repressive way of distancing oneself from the immediate source of trauma, while the latter
is simply a state of suspension, going with the ‘flow’ such that one entirely absent of trauma.
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entails. Gamification, they argue, implies that engagement is a good thing that people should
strive for. This ignores how an ethical consideration of a good life requires a reflection of the
moral worth of the objectives in question. As Sicart (2015) emphasizes, “The good life is not
only the practice of activities, it is also the capacity to reflect about the role of those activities in
one's life and sense of well-being (225-6).” This perspective is in line with Graeme Kirkpatrick’s
(2015) argument that gamification narrows lines of possibility and directs them towards
preordained routes that privilege the capitalist system. If play has traditionally implied a creative
act which broadens potential in the “radical imaginary,” then gamification, he argues,
appropriates this potentiality and “channels it towards the requirements of the system,” which
renders these radical possibilities unthinkable.
But while Sicart, Kim and Kirkpatrick assume thinking and potentiality to be the desire
of the human subject, I offer that such potentiality may not be of much relevance to subjects who
have historically been restricted from the good life, and who are now burdened by suffering. As
Berlant (2011) offers here, what survival seeks is oftentimes not the grandiose but the ordinary,
the spaces of relief from the pressures of the external world. In this sense, the suspension of the
self - the numbing nonthinkingness that game elements can offer - may also provide a bulwark
against routine attrition. Jean Baudrillard (1985) is optimistic on this account. In “The Masses,”
he suggests that the escape from desire may be an “ironic and antagonistic” reaction to a world
which constantly seeks an affective response from the individual. Disappearance, for him, is a
means of escaping capture.
However, the disappearance of the human subject here is not political; those who partake
in gamification may be cynical about it, but this cynicism is like Virno (1996) had described, a
cynicism that is absent of political possibilities. One reason is that this “biopower from below”
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seeks not to recuperate to oppose, but to recuperate to be docile. One does not survive to be
enabled, but to survive in order to move on (and presumably perform as a docile laborer).
Returning to Baudrillard (1985), the disappearance of desire does not necessarily exclude
capture. Instead like a survivor of war, the individual just stands psychologically relieved of a
hope that would disappointed. Gamification, as such, may slow the attrition of the human
subject, but it fails to provide a true radical possibility for substantive changes in their
conditions.
The absence of radical change, however, does not diminish the optimism that advocates
invest in nontraumatic survival. In her critique of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean (2005)
explains that computer may serve as a fetish that substitutes our own desire to engage politically.
This exchange is fueled by the convenience of communicating on the internet. The ease of
mediatized self-expression, from comments, to likes, to blogs, to shares, she argues, can make
political action in real life seem redundant, inefficient and even unpleasurable. What we have
here is a politics of the pragmatic will - how the simplicity of things can sometimes take the
place of deep thinking. Or to take the vantage of compassion, how a desire to help others can
spur the imagination of easy solutions (Berlant, 2004).
The binary thinking developed within Csíkszentmihályi’s theory of flow fits this schema
of simplicity. Csíkszentmihályi often explains the theory of flow through graphs that indicate a
match between the skills of the indi vidual and the difficulty of the task. One graph elegantly
represents this with “skill” listed on one axis and “challenge” on the other. A channel titled flow
cuts diagonally across these two axes, reflecting the emergence of flow in situations where
challenges meet up the individual’s skill. When challenge exceeds skill level, one falls into
anxiety; when the opposite happens, one feels bored. Another graph adapted from Massimini and
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Figure 7. Movements of points to enter ‘flow channel’ (Csíkszentmihályi,
1975b).
Figure 6. Chart of affects across 2 axes (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990).
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Carli (1988), highlights the different psychological experiences a relations of skills and
challenges produce - ranging from apathy, worry, to flow and relaxation. In Finding Flow,
Csíkszentmihályi (1997) titles this graph “the quality of experience as a function of the
relationship between between challenges and skills” (p. 31).
The graph and its two axes makes it efficient in the communication of knowledge - it
plainly shows the interaction between the concepts of skills and challenges. But this efficiency,
as Johanna Drucker (2014) points out, relies upon a reduction in the complexity of the
phenomena in question. The graphical parameters of a graph, she writes, “gives a powerful
rhetorical force to the visualization, and decisions about relative scale of the (decidedly spatial)
metrics on each axis are crucial to the ways these relations among elements take shape.” (88-9).
The persuasive power of the graph is tied to the processes of selectivity and reductivity - it
focuses on certain ideas while leaving others out, and the reductivity of this process is what
makes the graph an easily digestible form of knowledge.
In particular, the graphs produced by Csíkszentmihályi suggests that flow can simply be
aroused by “tweaking” the challenge or the skills of individual. Csíkszentmihályi (1975b)
illustrates this by commenting on the movement of spatial points on the graph (fig. 1). “People in
a state of worry can return to flow through an almost infinite combination of two basic vector
processes: decreasing challenges or increasing skills,” he explains (p. 60). Alignment to the zone
of flow simply requires adjustment in the magnitude of the two basic factors of skills and
challenges, which are represented vector movements towards the diagonal zone of flow.
To be clear, Csíkszentmihályi does include other components to the theory of flow. As
Sebastian Deterding (2011) explains, one problem of gamification has been its tendency to take a
reductive approach to scientific theory, in which case reducing the theory of flow to a match of
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skills and challenges, while ignoring the other components, like feedback, autonomy, and the
absence of distractions. Deterding (2011) criticizes this as a sloppy use of theory, but it is also
important to note Csíkszentmihályi’s interest in simplifying his own theory. As I had previously
indicated, the compassionate wish to alleviate the suffering of others may lead one to simplify,
universalize, and render abstract, so that the theory can be made useful for thinking.
Such theory is especially seductive for game thinking because the binarized emphasis on
skill and challenges, and the quality of feedback, fits well into a model of digital gameplay. As
McGonigal (2011) explained, the only problem in the theorization of flow was it came too early,
before digital games could be mass produced. While flow in real life required a period of
learning, “video games made it possible to experience flow almost immediately” (41). The
physical and processual of digital gameplay, the algorithm which can steadily match a player’s
skills with the challenge, and visual interactive feedback produced by video graphics, makes it
possible for someone to experience flow quickly, and at different skill levels. It is therefore not
surprising that the theory has inspired the design of gamification. Using the graph as model, Jon
Radoff (2011) describes how games can produce different experiential states and how these
gamified systems allow for a seemingly endless number of alterations through the variables of
skill and challenges. He notes one may implement multiple routes to winning a game to change
how challenging a game feels, a new rule might be introduced to match with the player’s skill, or
the perception of skill itself might even be augmented by having computers give hints to players.
In the following section, I investigate this utopia thinking built into the digital processing
of gamification more deeply. Turning to Stewart Brand’s influence in the New Games, I suggest
how modes of digital thinking can animate the hope of nontraumatic survival. The cultural
operations of the digital that was present in the inspiration for New Games, Spacewar - its
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parameters, interactivity, and interface - contributed to ways Brand envisioned New Games as a
mode of competitive therapy, a model for building a neoliberal self, an empowered personhood
who is also psychologically resilient. This expands on the notion of survival and compassion that
have been discussed, but tries to understand how the cultural logics of the digital can facilitate
the optimisms that are present in gamification. Doing so would allow us to understand more
clearly the politics of numbness that constitutes the compassionate wish of gamification to
correct the situations of workers like Jennifer.

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Chapter 4: Digital Suspension
In 1978, an article in Time wrote about the unusual philosophy of play forwarded by the New
Games workshops happening around America. The objective of New Games, John O’Connell,
the co-director of the New Games Foundation explained, was not to win but to catch “the flow;”
a feeling of being “so involved you lose track of time... feeling light, as if in love” (p. 54). And
where the pressures of achieving flow is usually placed on the individual, here, the games are
customized “to meet the flow needs of the people.” Games that were too hard would be made
simpler, and those that were too simple will be made more challenging; each game met the
individual at where their skills to produce a feeling of flow (Raskin & Males, 1977). Relating the
theory of flow to the New Games movement, Time captured the symbiosis between the two
popular ideas of play emerging in the 1970s, particularly their potential for producing a new
consciousness.
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The idea for New Games was born when Brand was asked to stage a public event for the
War Resisters League at the San Francisco State College in 1966. In his opinion, the war
protesters had taken pacifism too far, and “were starting to project a heaviness on a personal
level that was just as bad as the heaviness we were projecting in Vietnam” (Fluegelmann, 1976,
p. 8). Brand felt that aggression constituted a natural human expression, and that in rejecting its
manifestation, the protesters had also rejected themselves. They had repressed their energies,
disengaged from their bodies, and were inhibited from relating with others and themselves in
healthy ways. Moreover, many protesters in the War Resisters League were young men drafted
into the war. Brand had wanted to create a space where these protesters could experiment

26
Materials from this chapter came from an analysis of the two New Games ‘textbooks’, a study of over 20 articles
and videos of New Games and Spacewar, and analysis of the operations that came with the play of Spacewar online.
I also examined the promotional videos provided by gamification platforms Bunchball and Badgeville to understand
the interface operations. Spacewar may be played and tinkered with at: http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/
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creatively with how aggression could be expressed differently (The Long Now Foundation,
2010).
To do so, Brand produced a number of games under a rubric of “softwar.”
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Softwar
describes games that had “fairly intense physical interaction between players” (Fluegelmann,
1976, p. 8), but which had conflict tightly controlled so that serious injuries may be prevented. It
puts players into close contact with one another, touching, pulling, pushing, and built a
cooperative spirit by requiring them to play together as teams. At the same time, rules were
implemented to equalize the disparity between the capability of individuals. When playing with
children, for instance, adults may be asked to play on their knees. In a tug of war, the side which
is gaining ground might be asked to defect and move to the team losing. Fundamentally,
however, the ethos of non-aggressive physicality was expected to be internalized by the players
themselves. Fluegelmann reminded participants that while the goal of these physical games were
to elicit “maximum performance,” maximum performance did not mean the self-interested use of
force like in the case of most competitive games. Rather, maximum performance here involves
challenging one’s personal limits and the cultural conventions of success. It meant “not using the
most force but using the least possible force - and never more than what your opponent can
handle” because the objective is not winning, but to experience the joy in playing together: “if
you and your opponent ever stop enjoying playing, you've lost the game” (Fluegelmann, 1976, p.
102). Thus, softwar repurposed competitive games to develop cooperation, empathy, and
solidarity, rather than enmity and self-gain.

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Brand stopped being involved in New Games after the first few years. And in the years after, the aspect of
aggression started to be reined in. In a conversation with McGonigal, Brand said that "somewhat more candy-esque
games wound up in the book. The violent ones that I thought was way more fun for people that was much more
grab-ass."
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The first New Games Tournament was held on the grassy 22000-acre rolling hills of the
Gerbode valley north of San Francisco. One of the highlights of the games, Slaughter, took place
on a large wrestling mat with two teams of about twenty, on knees and barefoot to prevent
injury. The rules were simple: players scored by either dunking their team’s ball into the
opponent’s hole, or by tossing everyone from the opposing team out of the edge of the mat. As
expected, Slaughter turned out to be an intense, frenzied, physical game. As with rock music
played in the background, people rushed towards one another, got their bodies entangled, and
wrestled to push others out and keep themselves in. The game, Brand notes, ended up not being
only safe. Protesters who were previously pacifist laughed as they struggled bodily with one
another, learning another dimension of themselves. Another highlight was named Tournament
Earthball, its name referencing the use of a gigantic pushball of about six feet in diameter and
fifty pounds in weight, painted with oceans, clouds, and continents to resemble the earth. Players
here are assigned to two teams which are required to push the ball from one side of the field to
the other. Again, bodies quickly become chaotically amassed as people strained to push, lift, or
throw the ball in various directions.
Although Brand had named these games softwar, their enactment and rules of play were
in sharp contrast to the simulations of war games happening in think tanks like the RAND
corporation at that time. In those centers, war games were simulated to enact different scenarios
of a nuclear war. As Turner (2006) points out, the war game simulations were deemed to be
necessary because “nuclear weapons brought with them a paradox—their use was literally
unimaginable, and yet, by defense planners at least, it had to be imagined” (p. 108). The
objective in these simulations were to win and the stakes for winning were high because failure
involved consequences too enormous to be comprehended (Edwards, 1997). But the young
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adults in New Games were taught the opposite: how not to win, but to express themselves
cathartically, and develop playful harmony to build a different world - an outcome that was both
utopic and antithetical to the bureaucratic logics of Cold War America. The New Games, as
such, was political; it served as a laboratory for the social worlds that young adults wished to
create. In playing in these games, Andrew Fluegelman (1976), the editor of The New Games
Book remarks, players rediscovered “their bodies and their imaginations,” and with that, regained
their capacities to imagine and enact a different future (p. 13).
Spacewar and Parameterization
On the surface, New Games seemed to have few similarities with gamification and digital
games. While digital games appeared on the screen, with bodies in relative inaction, the New
Games emphasized the movement of bodies in physical spaces; while digital games were ordered
and rule-bound, New Games were largely spontaneous and rule-free. But the New Games shares
an interesting relationship with the digital. Included in The New Games Book is an article titled
“Theory of Game Change” written by Stewart Brand, where he describes Spacewar, one of
earliest digital games, to be the source of the inspiration for New Games. In this sense, we might
even understand New Games as an early instantiation of gamification, a movement which
adopted digital logics for the compassionate purpose of changing the ways young adults could
express conflict. Of course, New Games is a historically specific form of experimentation in
play, but I argue that New Games’s relationship with Spacewar, particularly its transposition of
digital logics into the real world, offers a model of the utopic potentiality that digital operations
underscore. And like gamification, the potential in play had been used to prescribe a means of
survival, a way of coping with the difficult affective conditions of the Cold War.
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To be clear, I am not suggesting here a direct relationship between New Games,
Spacewar, and gamification. There are links between them all which I will elaborate on, but each
movement is also a complex constellation of historical and creative forces which defies a simple
one-to-one association. What I am interested here though, is how Brand’s encounter with one of
the earliest games, Spacewar, had inspired him to produce another entirely different game in the
real world – New Games – which was directed towards the utopic forms of social change that
gamification also strives for. Furthermore, as Brand writes, the inspiration was not just based on
the absorbing quality or novelty of digital games, though that had most likely had an effect, the
inspiration was rooted in the design of Spacewar, which appeared to give material for the design
of New Games and the more grandiose goals the movement had hoped to accomplish. The
design relationships between Spacewar and New Games are thereby taken as heuristics to
understand the compassionate agency and utopic thinking that underlie digital operations that
appear within gamification programs.
Spacewar was first developed for the DEC PDP-1 minicomputer at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology by Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen in 1961. It was a
fast-paced, button-mashing competitive game designed for two players. Players each controlled a
spaceship was screened on a CRT display. The spaceships circled around a star which exerted a
gravity force that drew them in. Players needed to fight against the gravity, maneuvering their
ships to avoid collision with the star while trying to shoot down their opponents down with
photon torpedos. Ships could enter hyperspace to avoid the missiles, but they reentered at
random positions, and each re-entry puts them under risk of spontaneously exploding.
Brand encountered Spacewar in a visit to ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency),
where he saw how the programmers and technicians were using their insitution’s computer for
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playful leisure. The players of Spacewar, he writes, were “out of their bodies… for hours at a
time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons,” while
“wasting their employers’ valuable computer time” (Brand, 1972). Such playful subversion, he
lamented, had become mostly absent in counterculture by the seventies, which “is laid low and
back these days, showing none of this kind of zeal.” Spacewar showed Brand how play could
involve the utopic subversive potential that aligned with countercultural ideals. Praised by him as
“one of the most compelling new games of the Twentieth Century,” Spacewar not only opposed
the bureaucratic logics of technocracy, it also did that in a joyous, exhilarating fashion.
From Spacewar, Brand learned about the concept of parameterization, a theory of design
which understood games as composed of multiple controllable components which could be
adjusted to change the game’s overarching experience. The idea of parameterization was
originally derived from Russell who told Brand that he had to “fiddle with the parameters” of
Spacewar to get “a really good game” (Brand, 1972). “By changing the parameters,” Russell
elaborated, “you could change it anywhere from essentially just random, where it was pure luck,
to something where skill and experience counted above everything else.” The parameters of
Spacewar consisted a number of components, including the number of torpedoes each spaceship
has, speed of its reload, acceleration of the spaceships, trajectory of missiles, and number of
times each ship can enter hyperspace (Landsteiner, 2015). Each of these parameters were
changeable, and the idea was that any alteration would yield a different game experience. Graetz
(1983), for instance, explained that the early iteration of Spacewar was a shootfest “heavily
biased towards motor skills and fast reflexes, with strategy counting for very little.” To make
Spacewar more strategic, a star with a gravitational pull was introduced as a parameter. Once
introduced, the feature changed the experience of the game. With gravity, players could take
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advantage of the star’s gravitational pull to swing over to the opponent territory, before
launching a sudden ambush of close ranged missiles.
Parameterization thus establishes a causal relationship between individual game
components and the larger experience of the game. To encourage others to experience the game
differently, Russell even presented a list of commonly changed parameters in each version of
Spacewar. In this sense, parameters were envisioned from the beginning as an extension of
human agency, means by which gamers (or hackers) can tinker with games to achieve a desired
effect (Graetz, 1983). In his homage to hackers, Steven Levy highlights the agentic quality of
these parameters, noting that their alteration could open an “endless” number of variation to the
game: “By switching a few parameters you could turn the game into “hydraulic spacewar,” in
which torpedoes flow out in ejaculatory streams instead of one by one. Or… someone would
hack up a warping factor, which would force players to make adjustments every time they
moved” (pp. 53-54) Each variation influenced the way Spacewar was played - it could make the
pace of the game faster, make it rely more on strategic thinking, increase its randomness, or even
make it perform like a piece of art, a game played for the aestheticized pleasure of observing
interesting pixelated processes.
The magical causality that parameters involve - each small tweak representing itself with
a change of how processes feel on the screen - underscored the optimism that Brand felt about
play. But such interactivity, which encapsulated the feelings of omnipotence that countercultural
youths had wished for, had to involve the screening of the sociomaterial circumstances of the
computer’s use. As Tung-Hui Hu (2015) points out, the enjoyable experience of spacewar was
dependent on time sharing technology. Early computers were bulky, expensive machines, too
costly for individual users to own. And so most computers were bought by institutions and
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shared amongst research teams, leading computational processes to be slow and cumbersome:
“The usual way of using computers at that time was called batch processing, in which users
would submit punch cards or magnetic tape to an operator and receive the results in hours, even a
few days later" (Hu, 2015). Batch processing was also highly unforgiving. If a user’s program
were to have any errors, the entire process would have to be repeated, resulting in another
lengthy stretch of wait time. Since errors were common, the use of early computers was
generally tedious and frustrating (Abbgate, 2000).
The interactive experience of play in Spacewar, however, was made possible through
time sharing operating systems. Using time sharing technology, a PDP computer could split its
processing capabilities between multiple users and create an impression of instantaneous
feedback. Instead running programs in a series, from beginning to end, and having a spaceship
move hours after an input, by alternating between the processing of multiple programs for
fractions of a second, a computer can seemingly respond immediately to its users. This
instantaneity, Hu (2015) points out, facilitates an illusion that the individual is “given the full
attention of the computer” where there was fundamentally only one computer shared between
multiple users. The exciting play that happened in the room where Brand was at, with players
excitedly manipulating their joysticks in reaction to the instantaneous movements of spaceships,
obscured the fact that there was only one computer - a PDP-10 - that was serving multiple users
in another room. When “the position of each person’s spaceship showed up on-screen in a split
second, rather than several hours later,” Hu (2015) writes, “each user could think of the $250,000
computer in the backroom as his or her own.” (39)
Brand’s understanding of parameters intersects with this fantasy of instantaneity,
immediacy, and intimacy provided by the time sharing technology. Time sharing system allowed
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the computer to feel like a personal machine - a computer that belonged to the individual rather
than the institution. Tellingly, in recounting his experience of Spacewar, Brand (1972) begins not
at the level of gameplay, but at an interactive user-friendly console that was enacted prior, where
the player (in this case Robert Gorin) was asked to key his preferences for the game’s
parameters. Brand clearly lists the interactive process of parameter setting; the monitor would
flash a question, like the number of space mines that Gorin wanted, towards which another
question would flash once Gorin gave his response. The game began immediately upon the
setting of the parameters. The way that Brand unveiled the actual game of Spacewar illustrates
Brand’s fascination with the magical causality that the easy input of the game’s parameters had
provided. “Immediately the screen goes dark and then displays,” he writes, “Five different space
ships, each with a dot indicating torpedo tubes are loaded, five scores, each at zero, a convincing
starfield, and four space mines orbiting around a central sun” (Brand, 1972) The results on the
screen, the five players, visibility of scores, and the number of space mines, were directly related
to parameters that Gorin had set a moment before, constraints which could be revised to produce
a different game.
Therefore, my argument is that in transposing the design approach of Spacewar to New
Games, Brand adopted not only the idea of parameterization but also its fantasies of use. As
Wendy Chun (2011) suggests, the interactive operations of the computer implicate our
experience with computer use, but also the ways we navigate the world. She writes, "Our
interactions with software has disciplined us, created certain expectations about cause and effect,
offered us pleasure and power - a way to navigate our neoliberal world - that we believe should
be transferable elsewhere” (p. 92).
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In the “theory of game change” that Brand drafted, each abstracted desire of the game
designer was tied to a set of parameter correlates - concrete constraints in rules - that could
produce the complex outcomes that the designer wished for. This approach to design assumed a
relationship between the micro-controllable components of game design, its parameters, and a
larger abstracted consequence, which in turn, provided the games with a heightened feeling of
potential. As Turner (2006) notes, the elements of New Games, “the arrangement of players and
observers on the field, the construction of rules (or the lack of them), the deployment of
technologies and techniques in and around the space defined for play,” were read as the tools
which had potential “to rearrange the structure of society itself” (p. 108). The implication was
that by placing the right parameters together, Brand could not only produce the game effect he
wished, but also the ideal world that he had envisioned: a society where individuals could
express themselves freely and spontaneously, but yet possess sufficient self-control to withhold
themselves from tragic animosity (Power, 1974). Slaughter, one of the games which embodied
the ethos of softwar best, was described as being invented by Brand through a cobbling of
different parameters. To make “something violent and not harmful,” Brand introduced a
parameter that involved physicality: a rule that players should pull rather than push or hit their
opponents since that was still physical but it resulted in less harm (Fluegelman, 1976, p. 139).
Then, to make the game intense, Brand tweaked other parameters: he made it possible to
eliminate players by wrestling them out the mat, and he created multiple ways in which a team
could win, which drew the player’s full concentration in the game.
Brand did not assume that the relationship between parameters and quality of the game
were fixed. Rather, parameters were thought of as hackable components, each customizable and
contingent much like the parameters in Spacewar. Changes to one parameter can be reversed if it
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fails to achieve its desired effect, new parameters can be added depending on the outcome the
designer wishes to achieve. Indeed, Brand treated his theory of parameters with an attitude of
playful nonchalance. Though he suggested how certain parameters could change a game’s
“forgiveness,” “suspense,” “wit,” “competitiveness,” and “ritual,” he also made them highly
provisional, remarking that he is uncertain if the parameters he suggested “could be any use at all
in designing games” (Fluegelman, 1976, p. 139). This stance relates to his philosophy of game
change - that parameters are useful to the extent that they facilitate the designer’s intent. The
customizability of the parameters, Brand explains, is symbolic of the flexibility required of the
human spirit: "Changing games seemed to me to be a useful thing to do, a way to be, a set of
metastrategies to learn… It is a way they can better deal with their lives” (Power, 1974, p. 30).
Accepting changes to parameters, therefore, meant also cultivating a mastery over changing
circumstances, being creative to redefine oneself in relation to different conditions that one is
faced with.
Parameters, Empowerment and Sovereignty
We can observe how this approach embodies the digital logics of Spacewar. Not only is
each individual feature of the game thought of as a parameter that causes a larger effect upon
adjustment, its cause-effect relationship is exercised under the complete control of the designer,
if in an experimental, emergent fashion. Lev Manovich’s (2013) discussion of parameters
elucidate this quality. The Photoshop CS5’s basic brush tool, he notes, has the parameters of
size, hardness, mode, airbrush capacity, opacity, and flow. Each of these parameters can be
adjusted numerically, in miniscule increments, executed without changes to the other parameters,
and slowly combined or retracted. This gives the user flexibility to change how the brush tool is
used in a controlled manner. But a real brush does not afford the same capacity of control. A
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potentially infinite number of factors come into play when small brush is exchanged for a larger
one. The stroke will not only be larger, but the paint effect will also vary with factors that are
influenced by the new brush, like the stiffness of the brush hairs, the flow of the paint, the
previous oils left uncleaned, the strength of the exertion and so on.
In this sense, parameters do not only allow control, it is a means of thinking about control
– the parameters provided is what allows for the capacity to think about what is possible. If
“opacity” is not provided as a parameter, for instance, it would become much harder to think
about painting in terms of transparency. Or put in another way, our ideas about what is possible
is often structured by the software parameters we know to exist; our sense of possibility is both
inspired and limited the parameters that we encounter in software operation.
Further, like technologies of time-sharing, such parameters are built around a logic of
simplification and invisibility. The brush that Manovich (2013) describes, for instance, is one
contained within the interface of Photoshop CS5, where they are presented as sliders and
scalable numbers, rather than complex code which the user has to recode - even though the latter,
as Manovich (2013) indicates, is the very thing that user changes at the level at the interface.
This quality, the user friendliness of the interface, reflects on how parameters still involve an
illusion when personal computers are made the norm. Even though modern computers no longer
rely on the time sharing technology of early computers, the accepted simplicity of its operations -
a mouse click or a keyboard stroke producing a complex chain of computing processes on the
screen - still requires the interface to screen the code that makes these changes possible.
It is in this manner that the obfuscation of complex code and hardware operations is
necessary to the empowerment of the user. In the same way that time sharing technology had
produced an illusion of machinic intimacy by obscuring the sociomaterial relationships of
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computer use, the user can only feel in control of his or her machine when the interface hides the
complexity of computational code to prevent the feelings of powerlessness and ignorance that it
would otherwise produce. Interfaces constitute what Wendy Chun (2011) calls an “empowering
obfuscation” a procedure where users are unburdened from the unnecessary and tedious
cognitive labor of coding (p. 59). This automaticity is deemed to what empowers; freed from
these lower level details, users might then spend their intellectual energies on more productive,
creative activities (Galloway, 2012). Therefore, by hiding the complex and incomprehensible,
interface parameters produce an ideal model of causality, a world where simple actions can lead
to complex results under the control of the user. Chun (2011) notes that it is precisely “this
paradoxical combination of visibility and invisibility, of rational causality and profound
ignorance,” that “grounds the computer as an attractive model for the “real" world.” (59).
In this chapter, I want to consider how this notion of causality facilitates utopic thinking.
The term I employ here is “user sovereignty,” a feeling of possibility produced through the
qualities of parameterization, interactivity and instantaneity. Parameterization, as I have
suggested, is a way of thinking about possibilities – how small changes can create larger results,
and how ‘tweaking’ can open the experimentation of achieving ideal outcomes. Thinking about
control this way gives users and designers a feeling of sovereignty, it makes thinking about
difficult outcomes possible because all it requires is the right combination of parameters – both
in degree and type.
We can witness this sense of user sovereignty at work in New Games. Brand had not only
envisioned New Gamers to survive the pressures of the Cold War. Ultimately, he wanted New
Gamers to take away a feeling of possibility - an impression that psychological reactions to
events were multiple, and depended on the interpretations by the self. Softwar brought out the
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energetic, spontaneous side of players, but it also did so while coaching them about restraint and
flexibility. This kind of selfhood - a person who was fully in control yet fully authentic - is what
Brand hoped to cultivate in New Games (Binkey, 2007). As he explains, “In the New Games you
try to go to that point where there is pride and there is real contest, but you stay short of the point
where you are doing in the system—human, ecological, social or governmental. Right now our
battles have outgrown our battlefields." (Power, 1974, p. 31). Softwar allowed for the expression
of conflict and aggression, but it also taught players about control and restraint - keeping what
they were doing within the “system” of ethical consideration. Parameter thinking sparked this
optimism. Tying game components to larger ideas that center on intensity and control, Brand
made survival not just thinkable but also nontraumatic and even utopic: pleasurable,
empowering, and pregnant with possibility.
As an early instantiation of gamification, New Games enables a reflection on the
relationship between machine-enabled visions of sovereignty and the compassionate
imagination. The same enthusiasm which Brand had in his encounter with Spacewar may not be
too removed from the present even though the first version of the Spacewar had appeared more
than five decades ago. As Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter (2003)
explain, the interactive dimensions of Spacewar, particularly the tight feedback loop it
established between input devices and processes on the screen, served as a model for modern
computer gaming. Independent game designer Steve Swink (2009) describes being surprised at
how compelling Spacewar continues to feel despite its passage of time. Playing Spacewar at the
Tech Museum in San Jose, he describes being able to “imagine the breathless enthusiasm of the
young technicians crowding around their PDP-1 supercomputer, exhausting hours of valuable
computing time on endless rounds of Steve Russell’s creation” (p. xiii). These coincidences in
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feeling and the imagination, hint at how the same feelings of sovereignty that was present in the
New Games still exists within gamification today.
User Sovereignty and Gamification
Gamification by Design, a book written by Zichermann who regularly chairs design workshops
at gamification conferences, is useful in opening a study of user sovereignty. In the initial pages,
Zichermann and Cunningham (2011) already makes clear that gamification is not about
producing games, but about distilling games down to their essential components – those that able
to spark a clear causal effect on players – so that they will be to control the effect they want to
produce on players. The elements retained are the “core elements that will produce the greatest
impact for our players,” and labelled the “mechanics,” “levers of the game” which gives the
designer “the ability to guide player actions” (p. 25). Readers of the book are given this sense of
power through a behaviorist model of cause-and-effect. Zichermann and Cunningham (2011)
write, “The mechanics of a gamified system are made up of a series of tools that, when used
correctly, promise to yield a meaningful response (aesthetics) from our players” (p. 26). Each
tool is depicted to have a response, and the key is to gather the right number of tools such that
the responses will be what is desired.
These mechanics are broadly categorized as points, badges, leaderboards, levels, and
rewards, and can be further broken down into smaller categories. For instance, they suggest that
points can be thought of as experience points, redeemable points, skill points, karma points, or
reputation points, each with unique characteristics tailored to elicit a particular behavior. These
are then built around parameters that a gamification designer can tweak to produce the maximum
desired effect. As example, experience points serves as the overarching feature, a point system
that is tied “to every activity in the system,” which is meant to “align your behavioral objectives
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with the player in a long-term way.” Skill points, on the hand, are tied to the completion of
specific activities, and used to “direct the player to complete some key alternate tasks and sub-
goals.” Experience points can be assigned to routine acts, which award more for valuable
behaviors. Skill points could be crafted as part of “missions,” training programs that workers
have to undertake in their own free time.
When parameters are carefully calibrated, users will be directed towards the actions that
the designer finds valuable. A demo of the Badgeville gamification platform expresses that is
possible “to be very prescriptive in which behaviors you want to drive more of by rewarding
more points for more valuable behaviors” (Badgeville Inc., 2015). The Badgeville system in
question is an API (application programming interface) that built on the Salesforce cloud
application, one of the most popular networked platform for managing employees (Salesforce,
2016). The demo of Badgeville continues to how their API works through the example of a
telemarketer, Jason, who receives a notification informing that he has received 6 points when he
enters a sales opportunity into the system. The points are added to the total score, prominently
displayed on the interface on the left of the screen underneath his profile image. The simulation
explains that follow-up acts will get him more points. As Jason schedules a contact with a lead,
more notifications spring in the bottom right corner of the interface. He is told that he has
received 20 points for scheduling a contact with the lead, and 15 points for doing it faster than
normal. Presumably, he would be awarded more points for closing a deal, and as the demo
proceeds to explain, each deal closed would contribute toward the “lethal” badge, a symbolic
icon he would receive if he closes a specific number of deals (Badgeville Inc., 2015).
In the demo, each act of the user is tracked and fed into algorithms which trigger changes
on the interface based on the parameters set. And the demo explains that these parameters are
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easily customizable and scalable through the API interface. By clicking a button, the supervisor
can edit a mission and its reward, directing it towards specific individuals or groups, or put new
conditions in place, adjusting the kinds of behavior desired, the points offered, or make the
mission time-sensitive. The demo shows a number of menu-driven rules that the designer could
adjust. The graphic interface mediates this feeling of possibility; editing the parameters simply
involves choosing between scalable options which the designer can easily tweak to produce a
desired effect.
This sense of user sovereignty, however, is not just built for the designer. It just takes on
a different meaning for the designer and the worker. While it is the designer that has more
control over the rules of the parameters, it is the users who will be able to experience these
parameters working, and to adjust their behavior in a way that they desire. The goal is to make
behaviors that the workers themselves desire, more frictionless – or in other words, gamification
hopes to make their workers feel sovereign, in control of their behaviors and the affective
outcomes they relate to.
The friendliness of the user interface, Chun (2011) points out, is fundamentally addressed
“from the perspective of the worker - more precisely of the neoliberal worker who decides to
work” (p. 66). User-friendly interfaces were purposed to provide users with a feeling of mastery
over their machines, which accordingly, replaces feelings of frustration with enthusiasm, the
emotional states that facilitate the development of an empowered neoliberal subjectivity. Thus
good interfaces are invisible and unobstructive. They enable users to express agency without
having their presence felt. With regards to gamification, a well-designed program should help
workers be who they idealize themselves to be at work: productive, energetic, a team player, and
so on. It should repress the psychological difficulties of achieving these idealized personhoods.
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Most enterprise gamification systems possess no game narratives, the game it describes
to provide is designed into the work interface itself (Zichermann and Cunningham, 2011). This
system relies on the parameters of points, badges, levels, to make a game out of the interface,
engaging workers by making them feel appreciated for every task they do. Tools like points are
most easily used for this purpose. Werbach and Hunter (2012) write that points “are among the
most granular of feedback mechanisms. Each point gives the user a tiny bit of feedback, saying
that he or she is doing well and progressing in the game.” By attaching points to every action the
worker performs, the worker is made constantly encouraged through a notification of point
achievements. But this feedback can also be produced through other less intrusive means, like a
progress bar that gradually fills up, a greyed out badge that blooms in color, leaderboard ranks
that the individual climbs, or mission criterias that are steadily reached. The gamified system is
designed to be in a state of ambient response, ready and eager to enact a processual operation
whenever the worker accomplishes even the most mundane of acts.
Neoliberal Visions
This constant feedback enacts a fantasy of recognition, value, and acknowledgement - the
sort of Theory Y management style which good managers are told to employ, but which
unvalued workers seldom experience. As previously explained, the subjects of gamification’s
compassionate impulse are those who are denied of access to the good life. Even if these workers
were motivated to improve their lives, the bad conditions of their work, especially its banality,
fails to instigate the energetic will characteristic of the neoliberal worker. Here, however, the
computer acts as a close, caring mentor who guides the worker in their career paths,
personalizing advice to their needs, and encourages them every step of the way. Besides offering
points as constant pats on the back, the interface presents a clear range of goals a worker could
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Figure 8. “My Missions” tab in demo (Badgeville Inc., 2015)
Figure 9. Editing reward criteria in the interface (Badgeville Inc., 2015)
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strive and be recognized for. A variety of acquirable badges, for instance, are displayed in the
Badgeville “missions” tab, each tagged to different conditions, like the number of deals closed,
the phone calls logged, the speed of closing deals, and so on (Badgeville Inc., 2015). These
badges give a direction to the behaviors the organization finds valuable. Once they are acquired,
the achievement would be automatically shared with on a communication channel with co-
workers, praising the worker publically.
The effect of gamification’s parameters, as such, is modelled after an ideal scenario of
work - a meaningful job where a worker’s effort is constantly acknowledged, valued, and placed
in a larger scheme of self-advancement. With this sense of achievement, Zichermann and Linder
(2013) suggest, a worker would also feel empowered and in control of his or her own destiny.
However, at the same tim, these feelings of empowerment comes about through the
automatization of management, which involves outsourcing humane management to the
machinic operations of algorithms. Ironically then, this transference indicates how a devalued
worker is made even more dehumanized and tangential to the corporation. A video produced by
gamification company Bunchball illustrates this dynamic. In the promotional video, an abrasive
customer service representative is noticed by a supervisor (BunchballNitro, 2013). However,
instead of chastising him directly, the supervisor heads to the gamification API to issue him a
personal mission on “etiquette training” - a standardized educational program built into the
system. The scene here is supposed to evoke the beauty of gamification; accomplished this way,
both the supervisor and worker are freed from the discomfort that a confrontation might
otherwise produce. However at the same time, this seemingly ideal treatment of the worker is
also produced through a standardized protocol that is distant and depersonalized. By relying on
the system, the manager is made oblivious to the personal reasons for their workers’ behavior. In
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fact, the work of supervision is now automatized, and may not be even understood being under
the supervisor’s purview. And, in this way, reprimand, and as we might expect, demotions or
dismissals would become increasingly centered on the pure efficiency of metrics: the numbers
and charts that the gamified system captures through the routine work of employees.
Yet, for workers who are already devalued, the change from human to machines care may
even feel utopic. As McKenzie Wark (2007) note, algorithms in games can feel safe and
empowering. Winning at a digital game involves understanding the algorithms that comprise of
its operations. These algorithms are inspired from the real world but presented as “the digital in
its purest form, where the transforming of analog into digital is always consistent, repeatable -
and a word, fair.” In the case of gamification, the algorithmic operations are clearly displayed
and even stated outright. Badgeville, for instance, requires the designer to input the rules of a
reward in clear, unambiguous terms: a badge will be earned when a particular behavior is
performed a particular of times, within a certain time frame (Badgeville Inc., 2015). And the
rules which undergird these badges are displayed on the interface for the worker to see. Unlike
supervisors who are inconsistent in their praise, gamified systems are clear and encouraging -
uncertainty is soothed by progress bars, anxieties curtailed by reassuring notification of points,
boredom interrupted by a mission which would expire in 20 minutes.
Further, the gamified systems have a perfect memory. Any achievement acquired would
automatically be noted and recorded into the system and displayed on the profile for the rest of
the worker’s time in the organization. Werbach recommends designers not to just think of badges
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as fancy icons but possible substitutions for diplomas, symbols that indicate the worker’s
competence in particular area. The potentiality of badges are displayed in a visual titled by
Badgeville as the “future of work,” which prescribes a neoliberal utopia where every single act of
the worker is potentially translatable into accretion of an economic personhood (Badgeville,
2015). This image shows a profile an employee with various trophies: a level three “western
region expert,” “big thinker,” and a “voice of change,” amongst others, all of them suggestive of
not just how competent the worker is, but how those badges might seen as currency for a self-
brand that workers can use for a future position.
Game badges and achievements thus facilitates an optimistic belief in the possibility of
self-improvement, a feeling of what McGonigal (2011) calls a “blissful productivity” (p. 53).
McGonigal explains that blissful productivity is achieved when a game meets the player at his or
her level of skill but stretches it just a little so that player can improve in an anxiety-free, realistic
way. In gamified systems, this self-improvement is clearly represented as badges, points or other
Figure 9. “Future of Work” from Badgeville (Badgeville, 2015)
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features which drive a sense of self-efficacy. Where workers of bad jobs have previously felt
stuck and unable to acquire more human capital, the gamified interface now suggests that career
progress is steady, rewarded, and possible. It recruits workers left out of the good life into a
scene of conventional possibility, offering to them that the neoliberal dream of self-responsibility
and self-improvement is now made readily available. The worker is no longer as Penenberg
(2013) offers, stuck in a “stultifying job.” Instead, he or she now has a “career,” a relationship to
work that is pregnant with the possibility of advancement and personal satisfaction (p. 192). The
good life dream is thus reanimated: even in the absence of ‘good work’, workers may still
experience economic mobility and respect through the dint of hard work. Computerized badges
are the rewards of their labor: a currency of the self-brand that they can leverage on in their
careers.
Here, we observe a convergence between the ideas of survival forwarded by flow and
those of gamification. Citing Joe Edelman, a social entrepreneur, McGonigal (2011) writes that
digital technology and gamification “gives us, for the first time, the opportunity to change the
rules of the game, to tune the incentives, and to create much more flexible access to resources...
all without creating the huge bureaucracies and informational inefficiencies.” She continues to
describe this as what Edelman calls a “third option” outside political conditions of “capitalism
and socialism,” where we have “an opportunity to make things more equitable, more sustainable,
more intimate, and also more beautiful and fun” (p. 259) Edelman speaks of a digital utopia, a
world where existing problems - structural constraints, limited resource, or maps of power - are
no longer hindrances. Initiatives like gamification perform in this space as elegant solutions: a
means of creating a fair, engaging and pleasurable world, without the complexities of the
government, market, or politics.
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There are clear problems with this view, but what makes it productive is how seductive
and possible this fantasy of survival seems. The better life that gamification offers requires no
change in ideology, no struggle. Experiencing it is as simple as tuning in to an interface with the
right parameters set. The pleasures of gamification intersects with pleasures of control -
gamification reassures users that their labor has value, no matter how insignificant or alienated it
might appear. As Brian Upton (2015) notes, one of the important quality of play lies in an
interactive feedback loop, where actions are made capable of producing a reaction on a screen.
By creating a responsive interface that reacts to every act of the user, gamification counters the
disappointment that McGonigal (2011) describes, a situation where acts of the worker feel
incapable of changing the unhappy fates that he or she is trapped in.
In videogame arcades, one sometimes see a forlorn child, who has run out of tokens,
pretending to play a game that is in “attract mode” (a pre-recorded loop of gameplay
designed to entice passers-by to play the game). The child moves the controls to mimic
the canned action, but that doesn’t influence anything. No matter what choices he makes,
the events on the screen always play out in exactly the same way... In order for an action
to feel playful, it must produce a change in the game’s state... If our actions don’t affect
the state, or every action has the same effect, the game feels pointless. We are no longer
freely navigating a system of constraints; we’re merely performing a sequence of empty
gestures. (Upton, 2015).
Gamification strives to make “empty gestures” feel meaningful; it seeks to replace a
sense of forlornness with a state of absorption. In this way, Alan Liu (2004) writes, the user
friendliness of the interface serves “not just an instrumental value but finally an ideal of the
philosophic good life” that aligns with the “postindustrial repositioning of leisure within work”
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(p. 163). The good life no longer symbolizes the large things - not annual vacations, a pay raise
that could buy a new house - but “micro-leisure,” objects which “inject doses of comfort
throughout the day” (pp. 163-164). These small outcomes of gamification - points, a badge, a
reward - feel soothing and convenient. They offer a respite from the sense of entrapment that
individuals may otherwise feel, and may even replace that with a feeling of empowered
possibility, making survival feel utopic.
To tap into this fantasy, however, one is required to act. Games, Alexander Galloway
(2006) reminds us, are “action-based media.” While music and books can be enjoyed in relative
inaction, the body is required to work in order to play a game; a game can only progress if the
hand moves, the eyes shift, or the brain processes. And the gamified interface is expertly
designed to invite the body back into action. Whether it is the image of greyed out badges or the
rise of scores of competing teams, everything is reminding the worker that the game is going on
while they are absent. Gamification texts remind us that one of gamification’s strengths lies in its
capacity to stir the competitive spirit. By ranking scores on leaderboards, or by assigning
workers to groups with a team score, each individual would feel pressured to contribute and
avoid being listed as last on the list. The always-on processing of the machine generates a
“charged expectation” to this situation (Galloway, 2006, p.11). It reminds workers that they too
can head back to the computer and move up that additional rank, but at the same time, it also
generates a sense of anxiety that previous achievements would be superseded by others while
they are being “unproductive,” sleeping, resting or taking a lunch break.
Anxiety merges with what Zichermann and Linder call a “dopamine release loop.” They
write, “Dopamine is known to encourage a number of positive behaviors including relaxation.
Even more, it encourages us to want more of it by activating its five known receptors.”
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Gamification seeks to start this process of dopamine desire by designing “a single engaging
challenge that anyone can overcome.” The injection of dopamine that comes from that
achievement would then “drive our desire to get that dopamine again.” It is clear how this
“dopamine release loop” may be considered an addiction, a state that traps rather than empowers.
Furthermore, their use of Tetris as an example of this relates to what I had previously described
as a numbed existence, a way in which gamification encourages survival, not by empowering its
users, but by numbing them to the difficult realities that they face.
Like in Tetris, where bricks flow continuously without halting, gamification produces a
sense of pleasure through an uninterruptive flow of challenges and rewards. The notifications of
points regularly spring at every action, and each action is tied to a mission that a player can
complete if they only work a little bit hard, a little longer. Any kind of negative affect here is
regularly interrupted by a dopamine release; the constant number of things to do not only makes
them productive, it also distracts them from being able to think about the problems of their
situations. This constitutes the numbness that exists within the scheme of nontraumatic survival.
The difficult elements of life, the low wages, the lack of respect, the absence over their lives, are
suspended in this space of constant realizable challenges and rewards.
Potentiality in Play
Here, a difference can be observed between New Games and gamification. While New
Games had intended the games to inspire players into new, creative modes of action,
gamification was built to trap them within the pleasures of algorithmic completeness. Brand had,
in fact, been proud to announce how players had managed to subvert the rules of one of his
games, the Earthball Tournament. The objective of the game was simple: to push the large
pushball past an opposing team. However, in the course of exuberant play, this rule was
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forgotten. Players would defect to the losing team as the ball neared a finishing line; without
making a rule for it, players started to play just for the sake of playing (Fluegelmann, 1976).
When this instance was cited in a conversation between McGonigal and Brand (Long
Now Foundation, 2010), McGonigal was interested in how that game signaled the potential for a
game to continue endlessly. This conclusion seems logical, given that the players seemed intent
on keeping the game going by defecting. But we can read the laudable outcome differently. It
was not that the game was continued. In fact, the game was changed, if not discontinued, the
moment the rules broke down. Players weren’t just defecting; they were trying to experiment
with something else. And in this playing, they were not escapists, disconnected from reality. As
Michael Saler writes, play has potential in that it allows individuals “to be more responsive to
others, to the natural world, and to human finitude” and this allows them to critically investigate
the contours of the world they are given and investigating the prospects of having concrete
change (p. 7).
Having a collective purpose of understanding the Cold War differently, the players of the
Earth Tournament were able to experiment with how victory can be differently understood, and
how aggression may be purposed towards a collective goal of making sure that no one wins. This
delicate balance of keeping the ball in the center requires trust and collective effort; it wasn’t just
that people ‘defected’ – you needed to trust that they would defect to ensure that there will be no
victory. It is necessary to break the parameters of the game to ensure that it can have this
potential; people must see value in having a game without its fixed parameters and that the game
needs to provide space for people to negotiate the utopia they hope to produce (Flanagan, 2009;
Sicart, 2014; Wark, 2007).
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Gamification, however, is much less permissive. Since everything of value is made
computational, there is no room for the player to act outside the algorithm - or more precisely,
there seems to be no value to behaviors that are exercised outside the logics of an algorithm.
Thus, most comprehensive gamified systems are designed for occupations with fixed,
standardized operations, like those call center workers and telemarketers, whose work processes
can easily become part of metric caught within the system. Little room is left here for the
imagination. Unlike Michael Saler’s (2012) notion of a “double consciousness,” where
immersion in play is used to critically probe the contradictions of the real world, understanding
its shortfalls in a creative fashion, the acts of play in gamification enforces what David Golumbia
(2009) describes as the pleasurable sensation of “algorithmic completeness, a “snapping” sense
that one has completed, with digital certainty, a task whose form may or may not have been
made clear from the outset” (p. 191). The pleasure that gamification offers is thus also a pleasure
seduces a player back into a fixed route of action with a locked series of processes and
possibilities. It does not cultivate faculties of thought nor foster solidarities crucial for struggle
(Saler, 2012)
Certainly, not all would believe in the possibilities that gamification affords; its
manipulative intent is transparent to the user. At the same time, however, it must be remembered
that most gamification systems entail only a change to an interface that had previously been
more disciplinary. The recording of metrics is a standard procedure of call center workers -
gamification aestheticizes it, adding more features and replaces the cold language of “metrics”
with “experience points,” “training programs” with “missions,” and the like. The change,
therefore, is easily experienced as comforting. Under its warm parameters of points, badges,
missions, levels and so on, the hardship and value of such work may even be forgotten.
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A space for forgetting can feel comforting for unhappy workers who experience their
circumstances as struggle and hopelessness. The feeling of boredom in banal work makes it
difficult to forget their troubles. As Wark (2007) writes, “Boredom is something a body does
when space will not let the body enter it in a way that transforms the body into something else,
so that the body can forget itself. Boredom is suspended animation, but also a suspended self-
awareness, made possible by the absence of a certain relation to space, a certain quality of
labor.”
Gamification, however, is built to help the body forget itself; in gamification, one
survives by being psychologically absent. The most profound pleasures of computer gaming,
Friedman offers, happens when one enters into a “computerlike mental state: in responding as
automatically as the computer, processing information as effortlessly, replacing sentient
cognition with the blank hum of computation.” One suspends reality as one experiences a state of
sovereignty through the computer. A gamer deep in the concentration of the game is in flow; the
tight feedback inputs and rewards creates an “almost-meditative state,” where “decisions become
intuitive, as smooth and rapid-fire as the computer’s own machinations.” Such pleasures are
comforting. And as Richmond (2015) reminds us, one effect of these games is to help us be
“relieved of wanting, waiting, or acting,” the desires that could arise feelings of helplessness,
anxiety, and incompetence. But gamification displaces these feelings without providing
possibility for better change. Instead, the feel-good produced by the system is offered as a
compensation of the good life that these workers are unable to achieve. Placated and dismissed,
gamification thus perpetuates the devaluation of their labor.

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Compassionate Imagination and the Good Life
The story of Jennifer that we started off with is a happy one: it speaks of a conventional
form of victory, an overcoming of a difficult circumstance that she faces with. Notably though,
the key optimism conveyed through the story centers on a possibility rather a realized reality:
Jennifer does not get her “dream job,” though the paths are now open to her. In other words, the
story’s sense of hope resides not in the good life but its possibility; her chance of advancing her
career and being happy - or in short, her chance of entering back into an ideal of neoliberal labor.
Gamification provides this space for wishful thinking. Its parameters - which might be bullshit -
is also what makes the compassionate imagination possible. In gamification, simple actions lead
to complex results; transformative happiness is only a tweak away.
But what is the compromise that this hopefulness exacts? One important point that I have
argued in this chapter is that compassion enacts its own ideology: that pragmatic desire to help
others at the level of feelings misrecognizes the problem and solution, ending up the power
relations that undergird the feeling of apathy itself. This diverts attention from structural change
towards survival, the individualized schemes of getting by which can produce the happiness that
workers wish for but do not receive. McGonigal (2011) suggests that such forms of survival can
teach us to stay “urgently optimistic in the face of failure,” forestalling the depression that
unattainable goals produce. By offering users small objectives that they can achieve, workers are
provided with “emotional stamina,” an energetic will that motivates workers to do better work,
tackle more difficult challenges, and to resist the kinds of resignation that failure can produce (p.
69). Survival is made untraumatic and enabling. McGonigal suggests that realistic chances of
successes, or the small missions that the gamified systems provide, can dispel the hopelessness
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that people would have otherwise felt with repeated setbacks in the achievement of “the dream”
(p. 71)
However, as flow and the digital operations suggest, this feeling of survival is achieved
only through the self-erasure of the worker, a suspension of the worker’s desire. Therefore, we
may understand the animatedness that gamification hopes to achieve - the worker’s drive to
make another sales call, to close a deal, or to contribute another training article - as a process
where the worker steadily becomes a mechanized. The play of games, Galloway (2006) writes,
involves a synchronization of the user’s experience with the rhythms of the machine (p. 19). He
cites Ted Friedman who notes that “to win you can't just do whatever you want. You have to
figure out what will work within the rules of the game.” The logics of games are produced
through algorithms that gamers have to figure out and adjust to. In gamification, these win states
are enacted quickly and in rapid succession, drawing bodily and psychological processes close to
the machinic processes. This experience might take workers away from suffering, but it does not
remove the true cause of their problems. Gamification’s insistence that it resolves problems of
structure, therefore, only overlays electronic highs over its existing issues.
The historical transposition of games and utopia indicate that the potential in
compassionate game thinking is not relegated to gamification alone. In times of crisis, play may
be looked to as a means of nontraumatic survival. I do not deny the relief that gamification
affords - but this software is not positioned as relief but a solution, a means to end the
conversation rather to begin one. But the problem of gamification does not just lie in its
technological fantasies of utopia. Positioning the problem of work as a problem of passion
already poises gamification in a problematic frame; it seeks to deny how structural conditions
should be addressed to correct the situations of unequal human flourishing.
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Chapter 5: Urban Preserves
On campus, all was familiar. On campus there was no friction. She didn’t need to explain
herself, or the future of the world, to the Circlers, who implicitly understood her and the
planet and the way it had to be and soon would be. Increasingly, she found it difficult to be
off-campus anyway. There were homeless people, and there were the attendant and assaulting
smells, and there were machines that didn’t work, and floors and seats that had not been
cleaned, and there was, everywhere, the chaos of an orderless world.

“The Circle,” by Dave Eggers

In December 2014, Clive Wilkinson, the designer responsible for the Googleplex, presented The
Endless Workplace, an architectural proposal which layers a large suspended open office over
the roofs of buildings in London. Conceptual schematics depict a glistening, glass-covered, sunlit
structure meandering across the London skyline, punctuated by floating circular courtyards that
reveal the sights below. According to Wilkinson, this design addresses a “technologically
liberated future” where workers become untethered from a fixed worksite through
telecommunication technologies. By building the workplace over apartment buildings accessible
through an elevator ride, workers can avoid the tiresome London commute and enjoy a
comfortable, temperature-regulated ecosystem meant to foster creative and intelligent work. The
building, he elaborates, will encourage collaboration between “coworkers from different
disciplines,” relieve them from “numbing isolation of working at home,” and foster “village-like
communities,” where professional relationships can be made personal (Deezen, 2015).
Designed for the edgy Los Angeles fashion magazine Flaunt, this hip architectural vision
shows how urban infrastructure can condense the longing for utopia within information work,
where work takes on the aesthetic embodiment of cool, and where life is made convenient and
everyday relationships more stimulating and intimate. Clearly, this structure was not designed
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Figure 11. The Endless Workplace by Clive Wilkinson (Clive Wilkinson
Architects, 2015)
Figure 12. The Endless Workplace by Clive Wilkinson (Clive Wilkinson
Architects, 2015)
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with everyone in mind; it is directed towards the entrepreneurial, creative class, the workers
emblematic of the New Economy. But exclusivity, Antara Jha (2015) critiques, is the least of its
problems. The realization of the utopic vision rests upon the creation of a dystopia: the world
underneath the workplace, which would be blanketed in shadow by the floating structure. Only
the “the scenographic beauty of London,” its monuments and landscaped parks, would receive
sunlight provided through cutouts on The Endless Workplace (Brownlee, 2015). The workplace
would deprive the majority of the city from natural sunlight, leading to a dank, gloomy London
for its inhabitants beneath.
In this sense, The Endless Workplace does not only blur or prioritize the world of work: it
divides the sensory encounter of London along the hierarchies of labor. In On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin (1939/2006) considers how labor can transform the experience of
urban life. The haptic shocks of crowds and traffic, he writes, characterizes the experience of the
modern city, but not all its inhabitants are equally vulnerable to its ill effects. While skilled
workers may still resist the shocks of factory life by grasping the unchanging rhythms of the
machines they handle, the unskilled worker has no such privilege. “His work has been sealed off
from experience; practice counts for nothing in the factory” (p. 192) Denied of means to security
and constancy, unskilled workers are expected to be adept at handling the shocks of perpetual
changes in their labor arrangements. Economic precarity manifests a state of trauma in their
everyday consciousness. Unskilled workers, Benjamin (1939/2006) propose, are most likely to
constitute the mechanic crowds that had both fascinated and horrified modern writers. Faced
with an endless series of shocks, these workers learn to become mimetic shock absorbers,
preemptively reacting to the shocking stimuli so to minimize its effects: “if jostled they bowed
profusely to the jostlers” (p.187).
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This account of Benjamin’s, Frederic Jameson (1984) comments, transforms the “abstract
and pervasive power of capitalism into something that can be felt” at the level of everyday life
(p. 42). But even if shocks were to be ubiquitous in the city, accommodation to its ill effects is
not equally distributed amongst its inhabitants. For those with the means, the city provides
various commodified sites of relief. Benjamin (1939/2006) describes how the wealthy may take a
reprieve from the shocks of city crowds within hotels. Freed of their immediate sensate
encounter, the crowds may even be observed from windows as an inspiring artform. Such
splintered urbanism - its implied access to protection from the damaged developments of the
urban city (Graham & Marvin, 2002) - is central to Wilkinson’s imagined utopia. To drop out
from The Endless Workplace means being denied from mechanisms that support life; it entails
being forced to navigate the dark, damp, and congested streets of London below without the
protections that the workplace offers. Therefore, the consequence of being dislocated from
systems of value, as it were, involves falling out of a system that collaborates to ensure your
welfare.
I open this chapter with The Endless Workplace to highlight a relationship between
material infrastructure, passion, and precarity. In the previous chapter, I considered how
passionate work may be understood as a means of survival for those whose labor is unvalued.
But passionate work, as I continue to argue here, is also a site where the anxieties of economic
precarity may be held in abeyance and exchanged for the continuation of one’s comfort in the
present. How is the relationship between work and the good life maintained for the middle-
classes amidst a precarious economy? Certainly new optimistic objects are produced in this
process, but the maintenance of the good life promise, I offer, does not just rely on aspiration or
hopefulness - notions that subjects can achieve a better life through their labor.
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Wilkinson’s fantasy gestures towards the binaries of aspiration and fear, the good life and
the bad life. In his concept, embodying the ethos of passion does not just create access to the
amenities, prestige, and community of The Endless Workplace. Those who fail to inhabit its ethic
would lose their classed privileges and the life-supporting technologies tied to it. This attempt to
model the workplace after a sanctuary is not limited to Wilkinson’s imagination. Consider the
statements of Rex Miller and his colleagues (2014), consultants on office space, who advise
corporations that they have to provide “a safe space for employees… marked by relief, hope,
focus, and achievement.” They describe the world outside the workplace as an “external jungle”
filled with stressors too numerous to count: “People around you seriously struggle with special-
needs kids, long commutes, economic pressure, teenager and marriage problems, health
challenges, single parenthood. aging and infirm parents.” Given the hostile conditions of urban
life, they argue, it is necessary to have offices as therapeutic refuges if corporations wish to
cultivate “engaged and inspired” workers.
These discourses highlight a different aspect to the perceived function of the workplace.
Here, amenities are aimed not solely, or even primarily, at igniting the aspiration or productivity
of workers. Rather, the infrastructure is designed to resist the anxieties of social and economic
dislocation. My understanding of urban infrastructure as an affective response to the economy
draws from Berlant’s (2011) theorization of the affective conditions of the middle-classed when
“the promise of the good life can no longer mask the living precarity of this historical present"
(p. 196). Berlant (2011) is especially skeptical of the claim that a shared condition of precarity
could unite workers across geography and class, giving rise to the political sensibility of the
global precariat. She highlights that precarity is a profound affective condition, and subjects
conditioned to class privilege might even hold on more firmly to structures which propagate
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inequality out of a fear of dislocation. The fear of slipping, in other words, may encourage a
tightened grip over one’s class privilege and its implied fields of social survivability.
This chapter gives an account of the ambivalence involved as urban infrastructure
perform the function of the tightened grip. I begin with The Endless Workplace because it
provides a clear ideological vision of the architectural context I wish to explore: the coworking
movement. As Wilkinson relates, the ideas involved in the concept, from the open office, to its
emphasis on community, are all built within coworking. The Endless Workplace was envisioned
as an “endless co-working space,” a space which “will develop relationships with coworkers
from different disciplines, ideally forming village-like communities” (Deezen, 2015). Using the
movement as context, I intend to highlight the collaboration of human and non-human actors in
maintaining a structure of coherence for middle-classed subjects whose notions of the good life
had come under threat. To be clear, I am not suggesting that coworking necessarily aims to
propagate inequality, or that the fear of dislocation is strictly phenomenological. However,
coworking does address and shift a number of middle-classed values that indicate an attempt to
recuperate a vision of the possible good life through one’s labor. And in being deeply focused on
the act of improving work, coworking also propagates the ethos of a passionate laboring
subjectivity.
These arguments are made through fieldwork and interviews, as well as a discourse
analysis of media articles and forums on coworking. In 2016, I spent six months visiting and
working in coworking spaces across the Californian region. During this time, I observed the
interactions of coworkers within the space, the designs of the interiors, and interviewed five
space operators and hosts, and seven coworking members. I also had the opportunity to
participate in the Global Coworking Unconference Conference, the major coworking conference,
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held in Los Angeles in 2016. The data collected there supplemented other materials of analysis,
including (i) ten books that either addressed coworking or which were published by coworking
space operators advancing the values that the movement supports, (ii) media articles published
from 2014 to 2016 that had the keyword “coworking,” (iii) the conversations in public
coworking Google Group in that same period of time, (iv) examined videos and webinars
produced by coworking business, and (v) the blog posts of Alex Hillman, the founder of
Indyhall, one of the most prominent members of the movement.
The chapter is organized in the following manner: first, I present an overview of the
coworking movement, and argue that it is tied to changes in labor arrangements - especially
towards one which is more contingent and precarious. Given this context, coworking is
especially intent on identifying itself as an affective business, making specific moves to distance
itself from business centers (businesses which offer corporate rental space) that existed before. In
presenting itself as a novel movement, coworking also had to construct its own narrativized
origins. I examine this history, highlighting the relationship between neoliberalism, passion, and
coworking within that narrative. By emphasizing certain narratives and not others, I argue that
coworking had specifically aligned its values to contemporary ideals of neoliberalism, which is
also undergirded by an affective tenor of passion.
The discourse of passion built in coworking, however, does not just ignore the real
precarious conditions of coworkers. In it, coworking serves two important discursive function.
First, it appropriates the general view that the underbelly of freedom is a condition of loneliness,
and positions coworking as the solution. However, I argue that loneliness is a more complex
affect tied to precarity and its simplification through coworking limits its articulation. Second,
coworking admits to the reality of declined work prospects, but suggests that middle-classed
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happiness may yet be found in a new orientation to work. Using my observations and interviews,
I show how this new route to happiness is made material through coworking. Finally, I highlight
how coworking had ignited contemporary optimism in work, and the problems that this may
entail.
“A Happiness Business”
As the term suggests, coworking involves having people of different professional affiliations
working together in one space, rented from a coworking space operator. These coworking
businesses are made up of a variety of brand names. Some are larger and span across multiple
cities, like WeWork, NextSpace, and The Hub, while the majority are smaller businesses catered
to singular cities and locations. The users of coworking are also varied - ranging from freelancers
and small business owners to entrepreneurs and startup teams - specializing in fields like
programming, accountancy, writing, consultancy, marketing, and law (Deskmag, 2016). Though
some coworking spaces exercise exclusive memberships or admit only workers of a particular
industry, most offer no restrictions and coworkers usually only share the similarity of being a
burgeoning category of information workers untethered to a fixed worksite, and unaffiliated to a
specific corporation.
The kinds of workers inhabiting the space suggests at how the coworking is aligned to the
contemporary organization of labor. Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork, one of the largest
coworking space operators, highlights the cultural currency of the trend by describing the recent
recession as a boon for the coworking business. Speaking of the 2008 Great Recession, he
explains that contrary to common opinion, his coworking business actually experienced a surge
in demand during the crisis: “some people are gonna get laid off; they’re gonna start new
businesses; some companies are gonna wanna downsize.” Whether this is true for coworking
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businesses in general, Neumann’s statement indicates how coworking is a response to a crisis of
the labor market, an infrastructure designed to accommodate changes to work as traditional
employment is being dismantled, and where livelihoods are turning towards forms that are more
contingent, precarious, and risky (de Peuter, 2011).
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Although it is unclear how many contingent workers there actually are - numbers by the
US Bureau of Labour Statistics vary depending on the definitions applied - there is general sense
that contingent workers now constitute an important component of the workforce (Osnowitz,
2010). A survey commissioned by Upwork in 2015, the major digital freelancing platform,
indicated that 34% of workers have done freelance work in the past year, and that 36% of this
group completely rely on freelance gigs for their income. Some of these contingent workers
might have the status of what Jody Miller and Matt Miller (2012) call “supertemps,” “top
managers and professionals… who’ve been trained at top schools and companies and choose to
pursue project-based careers independent of any major firm,” but the majority grapple with
issues related to an unstable salary, low wages, the absence of insurance, and the stressful need
to be constantly reskilled and adept at self-branding (Cohen, 2012, de Peuter, 2011; Osnowitz,
2010).
As the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco reports, the jobs created from the period
2008-2012 are skewed towards those lower-wage professions, resulting in a squeeze of the
middle-class (Plumer, 2013). This trend has reversed somewhat from 2013 to 2015 (Faber,
2013), but the long term prognosis is clear: middle-class jobs are facing the strongest rates of
depletion through technological advancement (White, 2016). This may have incentivized more to

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A recent survey does indicate that coworking spaces are starting to function like satellite work locations - spaces
where employees of established firms can work at (Deskmag, 2016). This is partly a cost-cutting measure (rent at
coworking spaces tend to be cheaper), and also a way of tapping into the “synergies” of coworking sites.
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try freelancing, but even then, work is not guaranteed. Sara Horowitz and Tony Sciarra Poynter
(2012) of the Freelancers Union write that 79% of those surveyed reported to have insufficient
freelance work in 2010, many of whom had to dip into savings or chalk credit card debt.
The conditions of contingent work may explain why most coworking businesses refuse to
describe themselves as space rental businesses, and elect instead, to position themselves through
more affective propositions of value. Alex Hillman, the founder of Indyhall and one of the most
prominent leaders of the movement, states simply: “I am definitely not in the desk rental
business, I am in the happiness business” (Good Life Project, 2014). This is not just simple sales
talk: proponents of coworking often make this distinction by distancing themselves from Regus,
a global giant which sells office rental space. For instance, Brad Neuberg, widely regarded as the
pioneer of the coworking movement, describes Regus as the antithesis of coworking. Interviewed
by Deskmag, a digital magazine dedicated to reporting on coworking, Neuberg explains that
Regus was only interested to provide “shared utilities” to save costs; it was unconcerned about
the wellbeing of its inhabitants (Dullroy, 2012). His time in Regus was “utterly non-social” and
that it “had a very corporate drone feel to it” (Dullroy, 2012). John Battelle (2015), also makes
this point when he compares images of Regus and WeWork. While the corporate photos of the
former show empty sterile white-gray rooms, the latter shows groups of people mixing and
working together in trendy settings. This, he offers, indicates how Regus lacks the inspiring
“culture” present in WeWork, which makes its service feel like “corporate bullshit.”
Similarly, in a discussion at a coworking Facebook group, space operators
overwhelmingly leaned towards describing coworking in affective terms, as a “hospitality,”
“connecting,” and “happiness” business, as opposed to a “space” or “real estate” one. Liz Elam,
the founder of Link Coworking and the organizer of coworking conferences, even deliberately
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omits the word “space” in her sales pitch, stressing instead that she sells “work-life balance,
happiness, inspiration… [and] human contact” (Clark, 2015) This was also my personal
experience in coworking spaces. Though hosts of coworking spaces do detail the different
options of space available in their businesses, they also often sell their spaces by telling me about
their “community,” the coworkers residing in the space, and the networking sessions that can
help connect me to the workers within. Hillman told me in an email conversation that “space is
the red herring in the larger motif of coworking”:
Most of the people in coworking spaces don't need space. They could work from
anywhere, often for free or close to it. Yet they choose to pay. This is the biggest clue
that coworking has very little to do with space (in the long term), and more to do with the
verb of coworking, which I define as the intentional choice to work around other people
instead of alone.”
Coworking thus represents a cultural attempt to transform the experience of work: to make it
more authentic, intimate, and exhilarating. Towards this end, coworking spaces highlight a
number of different aspects to their service including their space’s tasteful interiors, the
community and serendipitous connections that workers can cultivate within, the reliable flow of
good coffee and networked connectivity, and the prestige of being located in an exclusive,
branded space. These aspects, the coworking community believe, address the needs of a
contemporary worker, who is no longer interested to simply find a place to work. Instead, the
space itself must offer something of additional value; it needs to be able to encourage workers to
work at their “creative, innovative, and productive best” (Coonerty & Neuner, 2013). And such a
quality of coworking, the community asserts, does not just result in increased productivity; as a
survey by Deskmag (2016) tells us, 72% of coworkers are “happier at work.” And so the answer
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to “why coworking” appears self-explanatory: because “coworking makes you happy”
(MyTurnstone, 2016).
These propositions have caught on to popular consciousness. As of 2015, there have been
over 7800 coworking locations reported globally, and over half a million registered coworking
members (Foertsch, 2015). In California, the large majority of spaces charge an approximate
monthly fee of $300 for hotdesk options, and $500 a month for a dedicated desk. Though most
coworking businesses rely on personal funds, coworking is also made popular because of how
fast its most popular representative - WeWork - had grown. The business had increased to a value
$16 billion in five years, and is operating in more 15 locations internationally (Kessler, 2016).
The movement has also since developed its own wiki and hosted several global conferences
annually, committing to “better places to work and as a result, a better way to work.”
Neoliberalism and the Origins of Coworking
This ideology is incorporated into the narrativized history of coworking, which frames the roots
of the movement in a story of transformation and self-discovery. Brad Neuberg, the figure
frequently pointed to as the pioneer of coworking, epitomizes the model subject of post-Fordist
capital. Neuberg is risk-taking, creative, entrepreneurial, adverse towards corporate bureaucracy,
and importantly, genuinely committed to finding passion in his career (de Peuter, 2011).
Speaking at a coworking conference, Neuberg (2015) describes his frustration at a traditional job
in 2001, citing a yearning to get “outside the system,” which he believes will give him the
satisfaction he desires. After leaving the job, he travelled extensively, living and working in
“alternative living communities” in California, Thailand and Vietnam.
Like young, white countercultural youths of the late 19th century (Turner, 2006),
Neuberg (2015) believed that he would be able to find his passion by living “outside the system,”
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but when happiness remained elusive despite these attempts, he was left “confused.” He found
the travels meaningful, but it also made him feel lonely and it was costly lifestyle to maintain.
The two divergent historical routes to happiness, the traditional notion of a stable job, and that of
a countercultural bohemian lifestyle, were both found to be unsatisfactory in his case. After
returning to California for work, Neuberg (2015) sought out a life coach to answer the questions
of “how do I create happiness for myself” and “how do I make work work for me?” Together
with his coach, Neuberg pieced together his answer in 2005 when he left a startup company to
create, supposedly, the world’s first coworking space, an arrangement which combined the
benefits of being “outside the system,” which gave him “freedom and independence,” with the
perks of being “in the system,” which provided him with the “structure and community of a job.”
This finally provided Neuberg with the satisfaction he desired, and it formed the narrativized
bedrock of the coworking movement.
Neuberg is resolute in his belief of passionate work and relentless in his pursuit of it. The
experimentations along the way and the resulting narrative of dissatisfaction to satisfaction,
describe passion as a constant possibility even when previous routes to happiness fail. This,
however, is made contingent on a flexible subject willing to take risks revise his or her own
circumstances to find the happiness desired (Neff, 2012; Ross, 2008). Neuberg never references
the economy or social issues in his interviews and talks. Rather, his story makes passion a matter
of self-discovery and transformation. In this way, even as coworking aims to build an
infrastructure for passion, it also lays the burden of reinstating the fantasy of the good life on the
individual subject, and reframes the disappointment of structural conditions as a personal issue
that the subject needs to creatively overcome. Issues related to inequality and a problematic
economic system is solved through an entrepreneurial ethos, an infrastructural hack which
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provides subjects with the “company-like amenities” that enables them to find their own
happiness (Neuberg, 2015).
The transposition of the structural to the personal opens the question of whose
unhappiness counts, and whose solution to unhappiness is deemed to be legitimate. As Ahmed
(2010) points out, fantasies of happiness - even if they are fantasies - are unequal in their social
availability. Neuberg’s possession of family resources, his freedom of relational ties, and his Ivy
League education, had given him the opportunity to make self-discovery and self-transformation
his journey for happiness. Others may have different journeys for happiness, but not all might be
valued similarly. Laura Johnson’s (2003) account of a coworking initiative organized by the
Toronto government to meet the needs of women teleworkers in 2003, highlights how the
movement’s history could have had a longer, more diverse, origin story –this initiative embarked
in 2003 dates earlier than Neuberg’s first effort in 2005. But despite having many similar
qualities, this early initiative was never mentioned as part of the movement’s history.
Isabell Lorey (2015) notes that though precarity is frequently described as a new
economic condition, most workers have been historically been precarious. The domestic work of
women has especially been historically economically insecure and perceived to lack social and
economic value (Morini, 2007). Even in the present, teleworkers are more likely to be women
because flexible labor arrangements are deemed to accommodate the double responsibilities of
work in the household and the corporation (Johnson, 2003). The downsides to these
arrangements: typically a lower pay, and an increased difficulty in advancement, is viewed as a
compromise for such freedoms (Gregg, 2011). The subjects of this history do not have the same
relationship to notions of labor and the good life. Women, by virtue of their expected
domesticity, are assumed to welcome contingency, flexibility, and accept its compromises. Thus,
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their complaints of telework - namely, that they may lack motivation to work in the home or that
they may not have the resource to create a good working environment in the house (Johnson,
2003) - are also deemed as the acceptable challenges of an exchange that already caters to the
needs of women.
While there are coworking spaces that continue to be built specifically for a woman
clientele, the omission of Johnson’s (2003) account as an origin story highlights the political
economy of happiness. If coworking is indeed a “happiness business” then whose happiness are
they concerned with, and what shape does that happiness take? The choice of narrative to situate
as coworking’s history, I argue, is non-trivial because it illustrates the movement’s ideology;
though coworking does position itself as a business that is aimed at fulfilling the needs of
workers, its main purpose is to encourage a passionate laboring subjectivity. While the women
teleworkers in Johnson’s (2003) narrative use coworking to find balance in their commitments,
Neuberg (2015) describes his inspiration for coworking in context of a higher purpose. His
question of “how do I create happiness for myself” is situated in relation to the aspiration for
passionate work, “how do I make work work for me.” And that thirst for passionate work is spun
around a neoliberal ethos, focused on the entrepreneurial efforts to create conditions for
happiness rather than using the infrastructure built by the state, as is the case of the Toronto
initiative.
In this sense, Neuberg’s contribution to coworking is not just historical; rather, by
proclaiming what coworking had “originally” sought to fulfill, he had legitimized and set the
direction of the core values of the business, while limiting alternatives of what coworking can
become. Over time, this narrative then becomes a naturalized history of passion for a business
whose “heart” involves connecting “people with meaningful work and a life they love” (Johnson,
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2016). Consider, for instance, the continuity of this history in WeWork’s origin story which
Neumann likens to a religious conversion. He recalls that he was once attached only to lucre, but
his now-wife Rebekah Neumann and a practitioner of Kabbalah started to question his focus,
asking him, “What’s your intention? What’s your meaning behind what you do?” (Cadwalladr,
2016). These questions gradually led him to a new philosophy to entrepeurship: that every
business require a deeper goal behind it. As he sagely offers, “When there is actual meaning
behind your work, and when you truly love it, success will follow, money will follow, and
happiness will be a part of it” (Rice, 2015).
Such ideals are unexceptional in movement. Collective Agency is one of the many spaces
that aspire to be “a cozy place to work alongside people doing work they’re passionate about and
committed to.” When I applying for membership at Impact Hub, a coworking space that is
catered to “socially conscious entrepreneurs,” I was asked to present my passions so that the
hosts can help me with my venture. And interviews of coworkers by Gretchen Spreitzer and his
colleagues (2015) led them to write in the Harvard Business Review that people “thrive” in
coworking spaces because those “who use coworking spaces see their work as meaningful.”
These beliefs are held to the extent that space operators can feel frustrated when people
hold differing views about what work is meant to fulfill. Susan Dorsch (2014) of Office Nomads
made the following complaint in a coworking Google Group when space operators were
discussing how they might articulate their “higher purpose” to their members:
Words can only do so much when faced with people's own desires & expectations when
they walk in the door... sometimes you can explain yourself and your community until
you're blue in the face and you are still met with ‘OK well I'm still just going to pay you
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to use your meeting room. If I have to become a “member” or whatever to do that then
fine.’ [facepalm]
This frustration reflects the consensus of passion and the normativity that underlies a passionate
subjectivity: people should strive to make their work meaningful rather than just treat it as
something that they have to do. Attempt to treat coworking as a purely infrastructural resource (a
“meeting room”) is met with disappointment - an indication that the member does not understand
how fulfilling work can be. This is one of the reasons why there has been much contention
amongst space operators about the dash in the term “co-working.” In a highly discussed post in a
Google Group, space operators expressed that though the term “co-working” is true to
Associated Press style guide, it invokes an idea of a “co-worker,” a person who is simply
working next to you, as opposed to the deep collaborative relationships that coworking prides
itself for (Sophie, 2011). Central to this debate is an attempt to clarify what the brand of
coworking stands for: a passionate workplace as opposed to one that simply affords the sharing
of space.
In being passionate about passion, coworking attracts people who share a similar vision
of work. In fact, the mere act of trying to find a coworking space, Janet, a host of a space, tells
me, already shows that the individual is passionate about work. People have the “freedom to
choose where they want to work,” she said, and “actively searching for a space means you are
actually thinking about your personal happiness, and taking it seriously.” This applies to a
particular demographic: most coworkers that I have encountered in Los Angeles are white men
in their early twenties to early forties. There are also some white women, but in general, women
and especially racial minorities are underrepresented in coworking spaces. This observation
coincides with surveys which note a similar skew towards young, educated, white men
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(Deskmag, 2016) - the middle-classed group who are historically privileged in their choice and
experience of work (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Lorey, 2015).
Certainly, not all space operators are equally committed to the ethos of passionate work,
and not all members yearn for this ideal, but the evangelical efforts of the community’s
outspoken members had enabled the movement to coalesce around passion as a shared mission -
an act which furthers the ideological vision of work as route to the good life. As a manifesto for a
coworking conference in Los Angeles proclaims, the aim of coworking is to help people “better
connect their work with their passions”:
Maybe in this century, we will have the opportunity to shift our relationships with work
to one which is viewed as a necessary drudgery done for someone else to an exciting
opportunity to realize one’s potential... The nature of the work that faces us is a race in
the decades ahead is going to require more than just showing up. It is going to require our
complete creative faculties and our hearts and our souls. Coworking is providing a path to
a way of approaching work that supports that (GCUC Radio, 2015)
Tony Bacigalupo, the founder of New Work Cities and the writer of the manifesto, presents this
revolution with conviction. However, since coworking mainly attracts contingent workers, this
push for passion happens at the same moment when the outlook for work is getting increasingly
dismal. Therefore, if passion is the goal, how does coworking foster passionate work for this
historic bloc, whose beliefs about the good life has come under threat? We might seek to
understand this by first situating coworking in two broad discourses: the “crisis” of loneliness
and the newfound values of the creative class. Both discourses acknowledge the precarity of the
present, but presenting coworking as solution, thereby retaining work as a placeholder to the
good life even as its traditional objects of optimism fade.
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Freelance Loneliness and the Social
Even though freelancing is frequently applauded for affording subjects freedom in the choice of
projects and schedules, this benefit is often presented as accompanied by a threat of isolation.
The Guardian calls freelancing a “lonely business” (Parry, 2014), websites are replete with tips
on how freelancing “can feel less lonely” (Spencer, 2013), and Quartz even tells us why
loneliness can “make us physically ill” (Giang, 2015). With this, it is not surprising that
coworking is considered, Bloomberg proposes, as “an expensive cure for loneliness” (Clark,
2015). “About one fourth of stay-at-home employees report high levels of loneliness,”
Metropolis reports, and freelancers are turning to coworking to “avoid feelings of isolation”
(Cozier, 2015). In fact, loneliness is considered to be so pervasive amongst freelancers that
Hillman (2014) advises advocates of coworking to describe the movement not in terms of what it
offers, but what it wards off. He found that coworking was clearest to explain when he narrates
“the feelings that I had when I was all alone and working from coffee shops. And when you
describe those feelings, anybody who has had those same feelings instantly “gets it.””
But what exactly do people get in Hillman’s story of loneliness? After all, loneliness is
described by Arendt (1948/1979) as "one of the fundamental experience of every human life.”
Our want for connectedness will not always be met, and loneliness is a condition that will affect
us at different points of our lives (Carroll, 2013). Hillman (2014) describes frustrated interactions
in a cafes where he was surrounded by “bodies” but not “people”: “if you turned to the stranger
sitting next to you in a cafe and asked for help with a project you’re working on…or to celebrate
a small win…or to share in frustrations…you’d most likely be met with a raised eyebrow.” In
one aspect, this narrative reveals a romantic longing for what Ray Oldenburg (1999) calls a
“third place,” a space which supports an informal sociality amongst the familiar and strange.
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Yet, at the same time, implied in Hillman’s account is a warning about the professional
need for sociality, the absence of networks where one may get advice or help from (Gandini,
2015). Horowitz and Poynter (2012) point out that success in freelancing especially “depends on
connecting with people” to build a reputation. Since freelancers do not have colleagues, these
professional exchanges are important in displaying one’s “knowledge, reliability, and
commitment to high standards,” which improves one’s occupational reputation and prospects for
referrals of future work (Osnowitz, 2010, p. 121). Furthermore, the “most important source of
value” in post-Fordist informational capitalism, Arvidsson (2006) argues, comes “the ability to
appropriate an externality” (p. 9), that is, to draw on inspiration, knowledge and resources from
one’s social networks and environments (Storper & Venables, 2004; Terranova, 2013).
Freelancers deemed to be most competent usually do not only have expertise in one field; they
know who to turn to if they need help for more complicated projects (Horowitz & Poynter,
2012).
Key to the discourse of loneliness is also a perceived absence of emotional support.
Space operators interviewed echo Hillman in telling me that freelancers can easily feel lonely
because such work lacks the guarantees typical of employed work. They cite a long list of
potential problems: without support, freelancers can get easily anxious when gigs are slow in
coming, or burn themselves out when they take on too much. They can be overwhelmed or
distracted by household tasks and be unproductive. They can have nobody to vent to when they
feel frustrated, to share ideas with when they are inspired, or even to be encouraged by when
those ideas are realized.
The traditional corporation with its compulsory sociality or a nine-to-five circadian
rhythm may feel distasteful, but at least its regular paychecks, appraisals, promotional schemes
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ensure that middle-classed workers feel in sync with the conventional rhythms of capitalism.
Jonathan, a host of a space, tells me that freelancers and solo entrepreneurs do not just suffer
from an insecure paycheck, they “don’t even have the usual experience of encouragement.
Nobody lets you know that you have done a good job.” And without a support structure,
coworkers may find it easier to lose their focus, develop unhealthy sleep patterns, and be less
confident in their work (Foertsch, 2012a; Neuberg, 2015; Spreitzer, Bacevice, & Garrett, 2015).
These states highlight how loneliness is a feeling and symptom; loneliness may be unpleasant,
but freelancers are told to be alert to loneliness also because it can damage their professional
interests, leading them to be unproductive, uncreative, stressed, outdated, and ultimately, a
failure in their career.
We need to read such accounts of loneliness critically because as Melissa Carroll (2013)
points out, loneliness can manifest as an instrument of governmentality: “What strikes me about
this formula, where loneliness = unhappiness, and happiness exists in opposition to loneliness…
is the fact that one assumes the opposite of loneliness to be unloneliness - the condition of not
being lonely” (pp. 9-10). When the loneliness is deemed to be the nemesis of happiness,
loneliness is no longer situated as an ordinary affect (Stewart, 2007), but a bad emotion that
needs control, a feeling that is a threat to conventional forms of productive intimacies. The
imputation of loneliness thus carries the implication of deviation, a movement away from the
safe confines of normative happiness because one lacks the “right” kinds of intimacies to ensure
professional success. By bringing up the threat of loneliness, one may then instruct populations
on the right socialities to cultivate.
We can return to Arendt (1948/1979) to understand loneliness in those terms. A person
experiences loneliness, she writes, "if he is no longer recognized as homo faber but treated as an
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animal laborans whose necessary "metabolism with nature" is of concern to no one” (p. 475)
Loneliness differs from the experience of solitude and isolation because the latter is
characterized by a distance from others, but the former comes about “only when the most
elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one's own to the
common world, is destroyed.” Although Arendt’s understanding of loneliness has an important
historical context - she was writing at the close of the Second World War and was concerned
with loneliness being a precursor to totalitarianism - her theorization leads us to see an important
relationship between loneliness and labor. For Arendt (1948/1979), loneliness involves a sense of
displacement from the sensual world because of a perceived worthlessness of one’s labor. A
person is truly lonely not when they are isolated but when they feel “superfluous” (p. 475).
Remarking on the writings of Marx in Endnotes, Nick Dyer-Witheford (2015) describes
superfluousness as the very quality of the proletariat, an individual who is “economically
speaking, nothing other than ‘wage labourer’, the man who produces and valorizes ‘capital’, and
is thrown out onto the street as soon as he is superfluous to the need for valorization” (Marx,
1977, cited in Dyer-Witheford, 2015, p. 12). This conveys the precarious position that
freelancers are caught in – these people have nothing to sell other than their labor, and it
becomes incumbent on them to maintain their position within corporate systems of value, lest
they lose their footing and fall out of normative middle class worth.
What I am suggesting with these accounts is that loneliness is not just a feeling but a
disciplinary measure - an affect that is imputed onto the bodies of those whose labor is made
valueless. And since loneliness is part of a common condition, a potentiality that is always
dormant and readily experienced in the home and cafe (Hillman, 2014; Kwiatkowski &
Buczynski, 2011), it encourages individuals to monitor their emotional states to create distance
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between themselves and the models of failed personhood. Adopting rather than challenging this
discourse, coworking externalizes the many abstract anxieties of modern capitalism and
problematizes them as an issue of bad relating. In doing so, loneliness becomes the placeholder
for the variegated fears of middle-class slippage. We are told that lonely people are less
productive (Cozier, 2015), less inspired (Solman, 2015), unable to grow their business contacts
which can improve their earnings (Suarez, 2014), and more likely to have their startups fail
(Chan, 2014). In summarizing the many problems of structure to a single affect, workers are also
told that their problems are easily resolvable. All they have to do is to turn to productive forms of
sociality, namely, the readymade communities found in coworking spaces.
This is made especially pertinent because, left unresolved, loneliness can bring about
tragic consequences. Angel Kwiatkowski (2016) of Cohere struck a chord when she posted
notice of a coworker’s suicide in a coworking Google Group. Offering that the member’s battle
with depression was only known by two individuals, she urged space operators to build stronger,
more supportive communities so that such tragedies may be avoided in the future. “Weave a tight
web among yourselves that is unbreakable even by the worst depression,” she writes, continuing
that since the tragedy, other people have come to share their struggles with depression, which
matters because “we can tighten the net for them” by providing them with more care
(Kwiatkowski, 2016).
Such expressions of care has led Janet Merkel (2015) to describe coworking as an
“emancipatory practice challenging the current neoliberal politics of individualisation” (pp. 124).
Space operators, she writes, create “new work-related and social experiences in the city” by
assembling and arranging human and non-human actors to foster the values of sharing,
collaboration, and care (p. 131) - values which encourage socialities that oppose the formation of
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self-absorbed, individualistic subjects. Kwiatkowski and Buczynski (2011), for instance, tell us
that people who work alone are absent of their “tribe”: “You didn't know it at the time, but you
NEED people around you. Coworking fills that need." And in seeking to fill that need,
coworking adopts a more sustainable philosophy of the laboring self where workers are treated
as “renewable resources” rather than something “to be used and then discarded” (Coonerty &
Neuner, 2013).
While I recognize the value in the initiatives proposed by Kwiatkowski, it is crucial to
note the normative structures involved in the care that Merkel (2015) applauds. In particular,
loneliness is presented in coworking as a problem of bad relating that necessitates middle-classed
values of care and wellness. The independencies developed in coworking spaces, which Merkel
(2015) describes as challenging the “current neoliberal politics of individualisation” are still built
on the goal of restoring an independent, functioning subject. Loneliness is framed as a condition
to be rehabilitated from; a lonely person is a misfit that needs therapy to veer back to a “healthy”
individuality. The stigma attached to loneliness means that subjects are told to be emotionally
reflexive (Illouz, 2012), to monitor themselves for feelings of loneliness such that it may arrested
through corrective form of neoliberal sociality that stress on productive, instrumental relations
(Correll, 2013).
Indeed, one of the selling points of coworking is that people can find like-minded
individuals to propel them forward (Chan, 2014). Freelance subjects are not told to relate to
everybody, only those who share a similar professional ethic within coworking support groups.
Coworkers I interviewed often talked about their want for sociality in instrumental terms. Nick
explained recently leaving a coworking space because “nobody there was from my industry,”
and networking did not make professional sense. Grace also opined that it is important to
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consider the “quality” of people in coworking spaces - “can they help your business, are they
useful as networks.” When I asked them about the importance of building relationships to fight
loneliness, Nick replied saying that this rationale might be “important for some people but most
people I know are there to work, not to hear sad stories about your life.” He added that people do
make “small talk,” or “joke around” - standard forms of sociality - but he felt that it would be
“weird if someone opened up to me” in a way that was more intimate. In fact, “most people
already have their own group of close friends… coworkers are good for a chat if you need to take
a break,” but it is improbable to expect “something deep.”
Given the variety of coworking spaces and social relationships, it is not possible to
narrow all coworking relationships to a single experience. But these statements indicate how
professional impressions require particular forms of controlled self-discourse, and that relating
one’s vulnerabilities may despoil an image of the rational, professional self (Illouz, 2008). And
while coworking may encourage the development of support, the solution is situated in middle
classed frame of instrumental therapy as opposed to a more radical inquiry into our social
spheres. Instead of questioning our normative socialities - for instance, our reluctance to interact
across class differences or our over reliance on familial and romantic relationships for social
satisfaction (Halberstam, 2011) - we are told to return to relations of therapy which do not
address the fundamental problem of sociality.
But the socialities advanced through coworking also involve another kind of politics that
is made evident through the controversies that surround working conditions in WeWork. In June
2015, there was a protest by WeWork janitorial staff in New York branches. At that time,
WeWork janitors were paid an average of $11 an hour, less than half the average wage of
unionized New York janitorial staff. When the WeWork staff tried to unionize, it was reported
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that the company threatened to have them fired (Lewis, 2015). Demanding higher pay, benefits,
and vacation time, the signs held in this protest - “wework here too” - raises an issue of the shape
that coworking sociality takes, and costs that accompany its manifestation. As O’Connor (2015)
critiques, though Neumann refers to people in WeWork as the “We Generation,” not all within its
space are a part of this circle, and not all kinds of socialities are encouraged. Janitors who wish to
unionize - a type of professional social relations - are prevented from doing so.
But even those who fit within the definition of the “We Generation” may be exploited, as
in the case of Tara Zoumer, an associate community manager of WeWork, who was fired after
she refused to sign a new arbitration agreement from the company. Zoumer related to the New
York Times that her salary was too low to support her in Berkeley where she worked, and her
long hours which should warrant her overtime pay, was dismissed by WeWork as part of her job
as a “brand ambassador” (Silver-Greenberg & Corkery, 2016). Emotional labor, as the author of
The Coworking Handbook informs us, is crucial towards ensuring the “the right atmosphere in
the community” (Suarez, 2014). Hosts of the space have “to be always ‘on’” to to put tenants at
ease and to develop the connections they have with each other. But emotional labor is not just
hard. As the case of Zoumer highlights, emotional labor may also serve as grounds for the
legitimation of the borderless nature of work and the denial of overtime pay.
Who loses out in this care for loneliness, and what connections are we told to build to
stem our feelings of isolation? As Correll (2013) writes, loneliness presents an opportunity for us
to recognize our shared condition of precarity, and the deep interdependence of the social: “It is
in fact because of loneliness’s sheer indifference to bodies, boundaries, and borders that being
lonely is potentially the most ethical way to relate to one another” (p. 9). There is a degree of
disempowerment common to the janitor, the community associate, and the lonely tenant of
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WeWork, but when loneliness is presented as an absence of productive, instrumental
relationships, the chance to forge political and affective consciousness is curtailed. Instead,
coworkers are more likely to see individuals in terms of their labor value: the janitor ensures the
cleanliness of the setting, the community associate makes the tenant feel good, and the tenant is
encouraged to build collaborative relations that can facilitate middle-class advancement. These
socially ordered relations might be reassuring but it leaves loneliness unpoliticized and affords
the continued exploitation of people across different professional classes.
Reorienting the Good Life
In this section, I develop on another aspect to the therapeutic discourse that underlie coworking.
While coworking is often discursively marketed as a service to restore workers to healthy
sociality, it also aspires to present an idealized impression of work. As previously mentioned,
coworking is ultimately aimed at a higher purpose that seeks to produce workers who are
passionate and happy in their circumstance. How does coworking manifest this ideal? In
Architecture and Utopia, Manfredo Tafuri (1976) highlights how architecture can function as
“symbols of the American longing for something other than itself, terms of reference for a
society continually terrified by the processes it has itself set in motion and indeed considers
irreversible.” (pp. 36-7). The qualities of an architectural marvel, he remarks, can bring about “a
sublimation of real phenomena,” and redeem “the misery and impoverishment” of city life with
an image of liberation (p. 46).
This has a historical basis in corporate architecture: large postwar American businesses,
for instance, had designed what Louise Mozingo (2011) called a “pastoral” corporate landscape,
bucolic office parks and corporate campuses in the suburbia in reaction to the deteriorating living
conditions of the city. Although this development is no longer in trend, the attempt to craft
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spaces of utopia in cities is well alive. Technology companies are known for locating themselves
in busy cities, and for providing a broad range of amenities for its workers within their campuses.
As Alexandra Lange (2012) remarks, “Where once the capitalist ideal was pastoral, today it has
become urbanised. Status accrues to urban brands, and the more sustainable urban lifestyle.”
Such urbanism propagates “an inward-looking, hermetic, heterotopic corporate world. An
architecturally distinguished, technologically advanced retreat from the city, one complete
enough to include its own ground, its own restaurant, its own artworks, its own store, its own
bowling alley and its own clubs” (Lange, 2012). But this heteropia comes with its own cost.
Deploying culture in service of productivity, these developments appropriate ideas of the urban -
its grit, vibrancy and authenticity - while detaching itself from the ethics of occupied space,
usually resulting in gentrification, securitization, and the expulsion of economically vulnerable
minorities (Zukin, 2010).
There are a number of similarities between coworking and this model of Silicon Valley
urbanism. This comes about partly because technology companies like Google have been used as
a role model for coworking (Jones, 2015; Miller, Casey & Konchar, 2014). This is unsurprising
because of the fame of the Googleplex and the free amenities that Google employees enjoy
(Lindzon, 2014). Neuburg (2015), for instance, explains that coworking should aspire to realize
the goal of producing the “benefit of working for Google without having to work for Google.”
This is presented by Miguel McKelvey, co-founder and chief creative officer of WeWork, as a
right: “having a nice office is not just something for cool tech companies like Google” (Spreitzer,
2016). Taking Google as a model, coworking embraces a similar ideology of space. This is
manifested in the aesthetics and the trendy values that coworking promotes - like community,
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sharing, and accelerated serendipity - which reflect a similar impulse to construct a material
utopia detached from the conditions of the city (Gandini, 2015; Lange, 2012).
Yet, few coworkers are Google employees, and many fall short from the status of this
group of esteemed workers. In this sense, the aspiration to experience the amenities of Google
reveals the gap between desire and reality, utopia and precarity. To understand the politics of the
gap, we will first need to situate coworking within a discourse of austerity propagated by ideas
on the “creative” and “sharing” economy (Florida, 2010; Botsman & Rogers, 2010). Alessandro
Gandini (2012) partially gets at this when he describes how coworking is similar in “vibe” to
Richard Florida’s thesis on the creative class. I agree that coworking needs to be read in relation
to the neoliberal urban development of cities, which prioritize creativity, entrepreneurialism, and
a carefully curated image (Greenberg, 2008). But while Gandini (2015), following critics like
Jamie Peck (2005; 2009) and Andy Pratt (2008), takes aim at Florida for his gloss simplification
of the quality of creative jobs, and the unsustainable urban development that the “cult of urban
creativity” had propagated, I am more interested in how Florida describes a reorientation of
happiness as necessary to the happiness of the creative class.
This might sound like familiar argument. After all, Florida (2014) does premise his
argument for creative cities on the new desires of the creative class. In the Rise of the Creative
Class, for instance, he states that “my interview subjects recounted their desire and need to live
in places that offer stimulating, creative environments… People not only want to live near their
workplace, they want to like living there.” These words “want,” “desire,” and “need,” locate the
argument for creative cities in the natural desires of creatives themselves, as if such preferences
were founded in a social and biological inclination for creative, stimulating lifestyle.
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But in The Great Reset, the lesser-known book that follows his more widely read The
Rise of the Creative Class, Florida positions the reorientation of happiness as not only a demand,
but a necessary austere measure that responds to the economy. He makes the argument by
borrowing David Harvey’s (2001) concept of a “spatial fix.” But while Harvey (2001) deployed
the concept towards a criticism of capitalism, namely, how capitalism tends to overaccumulate in
regions only to eventually destroy it so as to make “openings for fresh accumulation in new
spaces and territories,” (p. 25), Florida (2010) presents spatial fixes as economic destiny,
mechanisms that work on boom-and-busts cycles. The Great Recession, he explains, have
triggered a need for spatial fixes that force cities to remodel their urban programs, producing “a
new economic landscape that is more closely in sync with the improved productive capabilities
of the underlying economy.” This represents the arrival of what he calls a “reset” that would
usher in “a whole new economic landscape” and “a whole new way of life.”
The distinction between natural and pragmatic desire, however, is less clearly defined in
the “new way of life” he presents. For instance, when Florida (2010) speaks against an
“ownership society” where people seek to possess houses and cars as signs of upward mobility,
he grounds his argument not in terms of what people want, but what is most economically
sensible:
“Owning your own home made sense when people could hope to hold a job for most or
all of their lives. But in an economy that revolves around mobility and flexibility, a house
that can't be sold becomes an economic trap, preventing people from moving freely to
economic opportunity."
This “new way of life” that refuses the purchase of expensive fixed items, like houses and cars -
but also air conditioners, dryers, and microwaves - is done out of pragmatic need for subjects to
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be mobile, “to move more quickly” to cities with more opportunities so that they might survive,
and shrink “the time it takes to move from crisis to enduring recovery.” Even the experiential
goods that Florida (2010) describes the creatives as enjoying are now framed, at least partially,
as the necessary objects that help craft a more employable self. He remarks that the expenditure
on houses and cars should be directed towards “new forms of personal development and new
experiences” so that creative workers will always be up to date. And while workers may brew
their own beer and start vegetable gardens as a method of self-expression, they may also do it “to
adopt a more sufficient do-it-yourself ethic.” Whether truly pragmatic, the “creative lifestyle” in
these statements are undergirded by a different instrumental purpose: to survive a period of
economic uncertainty and hardship.
Crucially though, Florida (2010) asserts that the route to true happiness is found in these
austere measures: subjects who practice them “recognize what psychologists of happiness have
shown: it’s not money per se that makes you happy but rather doing exciting work and having
fulfilling personal relationship.” What does it mean when a measure designed for your survival
becomes something that you desire instead because it lies closer to what “true” happiness is?
Florida (2010) endorses a different politics of proximity, offering that we may be happier and
even more passionate about our work despite worsening structural conditions because the
survival of hardship would make us proximate to the “true” objects of happiness, which lies in
fulfillment within work and community.
This line of thought is substantiated in Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’ (2010) book on
the sharing economy, What’s Mine is Yours. They write that “economic necessity has made
people more open to new ways of accessing what they need and how to go about getting it.” At
the same time, this need to share has made it opportune to recover “old virtues,” like “meaning
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and community in our lives.” Since sharing can only optimally function when people build
“anchors of commonality,” the excuse to share can actually provide permission for people to
know each other better and form new social bonds. Similarly, Horowitz and Poynter (2012) of
The Freelance Bible writes that “profit and community” are becoming indistinct because people
have realized that new economic conditions require collaboration. This has prompted the values
of what she calls “New Mutualism,” where people practice sharing and exchanging so as to make
ends meet. “New Mutualism isn’t just a feel-good thing. It’s a survival thing,” she explains,
adding that a loving community is the best defense against hardship: “How else can freelancers
hold the line against downward mobility through lower and lower pay” unless they learn to give,
share, and collaborate, to strengthen each other up as a community?
The discourse of survival built into the ideas on sharing, collaboration, and community,
highlights a process of reorientation, where the previous objects that structure the good life are
rescinded in favor of better, more pragmatic ones that provide newfound pleasures. Stephane
Kasriel (2015), the chief executive of Upwork, tells us that the priorities of workers will change
because the traditional elements of the good life is no longer a tenable prospect for many.
“Professional growth,” he explains, is getting harder for the middle-class: “their salaries aren’t
growing as much, and they aren’t getting as many promotions.” He continues, “And when
economic payoffs are less than desirable, they start optimizing around other factors, such as how
much they can learn, whether they have better work-life balance, or whether they can live
somewhere more pleasant for less.”
The grounds for happiness in work, as I have argued previously, is always prone to shifts
because of a fundamental challenge in expecting happiness from a capitalist system. When the
“traditional conception of the American Dream” grows more distant as a possibility, new means
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will be invented to reconcile the wish for satisfaction in work (Boyer, 2014). The hope invested
in the new trends, of course, do not mean an end to the aspiration for upward mobility, but it
does endorse a different perspective to the fulfillment that work can offer. Deteriorating
structural conditions are offset by a promise of stronger communities, deeper intimacies, a
trendier lifestyle, and a life more happily and ethically lived.
Right Spaces, Right Feelings
But returning to the question, how is the compromised vision of the good life manifested? In
considering the reorientation of happiness, we have to consider the various technologies involved
in making this cultural bargain plausible and attractive. Botsman and Rogers (2010)
acknowledges the challenges involved in promoting a culture of sharing. Sharing does not come
easily because we are culturally unaccustomed towards it. Thus they prescribe the solution in
something familiar: brand culture and consumerism. Using coworking spaces as example, they
offer that brands provide the “anchors of commonality,” the “appealing values... we need to draw
us into new behaviors and collaboration” (Botsman & Rogers, 2010).
The meanings embodied within the brand of coworking, I argue, is important towards
accounting for the relations between coworking, passionate work, and the good life. Brands
constitute a significant aspect of contemporary capitalism because they are more than
commodities; they represent an interface between the consumer and commodity, condensing an
association of meanings which influence the expected sensations that commodities are meant to
provide (Arvidsson, 2006; Lury, 2004; Banet-Weiser, 2012). Therefore, when one invokes the
term “coworking,” one does not just think about a place, but the possibilities of the
transformation that it entails, including that of happiness, business success, and intimate
relations. In this sense, brands involve the “capture or configurations of new worlds” (Thrift,
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2007). They provide the commodified contexts to awaken desires and make possibilities in self-
fashioning appear plausible. This is especially relevant in an “experience economy,” where
“value increasingly arises not from what is but from what is not yet but can potentially become,
that is from the pull of the future, and from the new distributions of the sensible that can arise
from that change” (Thrift, 2007).
I continue the analysis began in the previous section by situating coworking as an
important apparatus that makes the reorientation of happiness possible. Architecture, as Anna
Klingmann (2007) writes, is increasingly built in accordance to the logic of the brand, which
focuses less on “actual use and exchange value” and more on its ability to “incite symbolic
meaning (project/identity) to act as a catalyst (experience/transformation)” (pp. 6-7). Such a
shift, Reinhold Martin (2015) emphasizes, implies that architecture does not only represent
ideology, but it also shapes it and makes it experientially, visibly real. He writes, “aesthetic life
partially constitutes (rather than simply derives from) economic life.” In this regard, as we
understand coworking to be a “production of possibilities” (Lazzarato, 2004, p. 198), spaces
where subjectivities can be favorably moulded and transformed in service of capitalist
accumulation and reproduction (p. 198), we need to account for the aesthetic values that make
this possibility possible and luminous. How is it that by building a designed space, complete with
its own mission, community, interior aesthetics, and amenities, can coworking ignite the
optimism of the good life that work can offer?
During my fieldwork, I noticed that coworking has transformed the key rhetoric of
neoliberal labor and freelancing - the idea of freedom - into a material and experiential
consumable object. Space operators, for instance, often likened the choice of coworking spaces
to the “freedom” that freelancers have in choosing gigs and projects. “Unlike a traditional
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worker, who has to go to the office the company dictates, you have to choose your coworking
spot,” space operator Randy said, adding that “our space is not for everybody, and I encourage
people to try different spaces to find out what they like.” Randy expressed that he is in the midst
of forging an “alliance” with other operators to have potential coworkers try out different spaces
before they make their choice on where is best for them. Indeed, most major cities house enough
coworking spaces to provide people with a range of options. In Los Angeles, where I did my
fieldwork, one may find a different coworking space just miles away from another, and since
most provide free day passes to newcomers, it is not unusual for people to come in to try out the
space for a day.
The experimentation of spaces, which Randy also describes as “shopping around,”
overlaps the pleasures of consumption with the freedom that workers have in adopting the
nontraditional arrangements of labor. Most coworkers I have spoken to have been tenants of
more than one coworking space. Jessie who was from WeWork explained that the monthly
membership had allowed her to relocate easily: “I didn’t like how isolated I felt at WeWork and
having been there, I had a better idea of what I wanted.” After trying “about three other places
and working at cafes,” Jessie finally made her choice to situate herself in the current space: “this
place is much closer to my home and has a friendlier community.” When I asked if she had ever
felt pressured to stay at a location, she expressed that she had never had a negative experience
leaving, and “perhaps if I do, then it’s a good sign I should go.” These statements highlight how
coworking is structured to have workers experience work like a consumer: by reducing the
challenges involved in the “freedom” to experiment, and by emphasizing on personal fit, workers
are taught to evaluate their working space like a purchase - a reminder of how they have a choice
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about where they want to work based on the space’s appearance, location, amenities, and people
within as freelancers (Jones, 2015).
The notion of freedom is also ideologically built into the layout of the space. Almost all
coworking spaces I visited share the same approximate layout, with divisions between lounging
and working areas. In Coloft, a Santa Monica coworking site, for instance, there was a lounge
area populated with beautiful homely set of red and gray couches, resting on a geometric
patterned carpet. Steps away is the work area with standard brown desks, Herman Miller Aeron
chairs, and a neutral beige flooring. I have also observed other uses of space. Places like
BlankSpaces include alternate sitting/standing arrangements, such as bar-top counters with stools
instead of chairs, or hanging tables that is built for workers who prefer to stand. Others have
leisure areas, with arcade machines or a miniature golf set. These different demarcation of space,
space operator Janet tells me, serves the instrumental purpose of giving coworkers “freedom to
move around and to be at where it is most suitable for them at that point in time. If they want to
socialize they can go to couch, or they can go all the way to the back of room if they do not want
to be disturbed.”
While I had thought of this more as a sales pitch when I first heard it - people can (and
do) talk at desks and lounges and soft lighting make for excellent photos to market spaces - I
gradually noticed that the different allocations of space had actually communicated something
more important: that coworkers are encouraged to move around which reinstates an experience
of the freedom characteristic to the occupation of the freelancer. Unlike a library or a cafe, where
people are hesitant to move because seats are limited and that they are surrounded by strangers,
coworking spaces create an atmosphere where people feel free to move, stretch, get coffee, or

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Figure 13. Lounge area in Coloft

Figure 14. Work area in Coloft

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Figure 15. Stool sitting positions in Kleverdog
Figure 16. Miniature golf putting set at BlankSpaces
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head to the restroom. One coworker describes this as a nontrivial benefit, citing an absence of
“distractibility”:
This is a real problem. When I was at the cafe… I was always distracted… there were the
people buying things, but also those moments where you need to go to the restroom, and
there is no restroom in the place, or you have to pack everything up [to go to the toilet],
or if it’s really crowded and you feel bad taking up a seat… It occupies your mind, and it
is hard to concentrate. Here you can just leave. I leave my things on the desk and I know
it’s safe. (Harold)
By encouraging a norm of movement, coworking reduces the anxiety and hesitations that
people have in treating their occupied space like a home. The Style of Coworking, a book on the
design of coworking interiors remarks that “there is no unified style and look of coworking”
(Davies & Tollervey, 2013, p. 7). But a closer look reveals similarities to what these spaces want
to achieve and avoid: all try to avoid a “corporate feel” by building more personable, informal,
intimate spaces (p. 143). This sense of spatial comfort is also important when coworkers feel
stressed or stuck. I have observed coworkers who leave their desks to move to the couch, or to
take a break to grab some food or coffee after a difficult phone call. Nick recalled how difficult it
was for him to “unwind” at his previous workplace where there was an expectation that “you are
expected to be at your table”: “here, there is no pressure… when I have a hard day, I can go to
the gym (he has a membership at a place a few blocks away) and come back when I feel better.”
Coworking channels this ideological notion of freedom, stretching its positive
dimensions, and suppressing its negative ones. As Peter Bacevice (2014) writes in Times, most
coworking spaces aim to build “just right” communities, “that is, just right in that they involve
newcomers as much or as little as they want, without any pressure.” In a similar way, space
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operators inform me that coworking provide a “no-pressure” or “no-strings-attached”
socialization, meaning that “you can be social as you want, when you want it,” and the design of
the interiors encourages this dynamic. Having a desk nearby, coworker Amita says, means that
“you always have an excuse to return to your table” by saying that you have a “deadline to rush
or a call you need to make.” She tells me that this makes people feel “in control” of the sociality
that takes place within; if they wish to talk, they can work nearer to the pantry or at the lounge,
but they do not want to disturbed, they can put their headphones on.
This was also the view of coworker Doug who tells me that coworking makes
socialization “less scary, less intimidating.” He describes himself as being more of an
“introvert,” and that the space allows him to make small talk without feeling “awkward”: “I think
that talking while you are on your laptop is useful because it makes the silences less stressful,
and the conversation can start organically and then just end without me having to say ‘bye’ or
making some excuse which sounds... contrite.” When I inquired further, he explained that
freelancing requires you to be “in charge of everything,” and this means being responsible for
networking as well. So this space “eases the difficulty” of building connections, and “helps me
enjoy the jobs I am given.” These quotes highlight the ways in which spaces can reduce the
anxiety of freedom, and make its benefits more experientially real to its tenants.
We can think of this through what Steven Miles (2010) theorizes as “complicit
communality,” “a sense of communality that is deemed by the individual to be communal
enough” (p. 15). He uses this concept to explicate the overlap between individuality and
collectivity in commodified spaces. The public atmosphere promoted in these commodified
spaces, he writes, facilitates “an alternative form of communal, one in which you retain your
individuality, whilst exploring communal alternative through physical opportunities that
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consumption provides” (Miles, 2010, p. 15). Such sociality is designed, like in coworking
spaces, to be unthreatening and therapeutic. The norms of the space - its use of headphones and
shared desks - allows for coworkers to realize their need for sociality while allowing them to
remain entirely comfortable to the degree they wish to be social.
In fact, the most common complaint of coworking spaces is also its most social: noise. As
Deskmag reports, one in four coworkers are uncomfortable with the noise levels in spaces
(Foertsch, 2012b). “Some people appeared to show off their important phone conversations by
speaking as loudly as possible,” complained Campbell (2014) in a New York Times article of
coworking spaces: “even those who thought they were sharing an idea with their small teams
managed to broadcast across the whole room.” Indeed, most space operators tell me that it is
difficult to ensure the comfort of all members given that the tolerance for sound is “subjective.”
Still, they have tried to cater to all tenants by building soundproof phone booths so that the noise
in the space may be reduced.
Miles (2010) does not assume that complicit communality is necessarily detrimental. The
logics of consumption may manifest as a means for individuals to feel empowered, as if they are
taking "possession of the neoliberal city rather than being possessed by it" (Miles, 2012, p. 225).
In a similar way, coworking spaces offer a means to absolve some of the anxieties involved in
crafting a neoliberal personhood; as in Doug’s case, it provides potential for making light
professional connections while minimizing stress in the encounter. The paid membership also
legitimates - at least to a point - the view that customers should have a right to a comfortable
workplace and can make demands when the sociality of the place crosses their degree of
comfort. But in this, consumerism also transforms notions of communality and public identity. It
promotes an individualised culture that actually makes it harder for individuals to see radical
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commonalities - for instance, that the anxiety involved in networking is a shared political
condition, and that negotiating and dealing with the messiness of the social is necessary to public
life (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Miles, 2010). The ordered nature of consumption mutes this potential
even as it opens an alternative set of pleasurable freedoms.
The attempt to create a positive affective atmosphere extends also to the more aesthetic aspects
of interior design. WeWork, one of the most designed spaces that I have been to, makes a
conscientious effort to engage in what Neumann calls “floor psychology” (Rice, 2015). Framed
slogans and multimedia motivational messages are found everywhere in WeWork spaces. At the
Berkeley branch, I was greeted with a flat-screen monitor at the entrance with a quote from
Thomas Edison. Within, on a pillar next to foosball table, are framed slogans: “just keep
making,” “good work takes hard work,” and “never settle ever.” On the side of a pantry wall,
next to black mugs with “do what you love” embossed on them, are stylized art and photographs
produced by the Student for a Democratic Society (SDS) movement in countercultural sixties.
“We really focus on how the space and how it makes people feel,” a WeWork community
associate told me. When I asked about the ideological incongruency of the SDS art piece, she
told me that this has a “historical basis” in the area and that they were really focused on
communicating “a vibe.”
Although few of the other coworking spaces I visited are as elaborate in their design,
most do take effort to produce a similar positive atmosphere. Many are crammed with slogans
and wall art. Some, like NextSpace, have boards where they list photos of members and their
recent achievements. Others, like Impact Hub, have chalkboard walls or posts-it notes where
members write positive messages about why they like coworking. There are sometimes also little
gadgets or fixtures that suggest at how the space is unique - for instance, a place in Los Angeles
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Figure 17. Entrance to WeWork Berkeley
Figure 18. SDS photo at WeWork Berkeley
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Figure 19. Member board at Impact Hub
Figure 20. Outdoor sitting area at EpicSpaces
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Figure 21. Nap room at MakerSpace
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had soft toys littered all over the space, and a miniature sand garden placed on a high table next
to the window.
Besides aiming to personalize the space, the attention paid to design highlights how
brands and architecture are increasingly focused on the sensate quality of spaces (Klingmann,
2007). At the 2016 Los Angeles coworking conference, there were several keynote speakers who
talked about the science of the senses and why they matter to the coworking business. Melissa
March, the founder of PLASTARC, an architecture firm which merges “social data” with
“design,” tells attendees to be sensitive to “multisensory design,” namely, how sight, sound,
touch, taste, and smell, can improve the productivity of workers and make them “happier.”
Central to the senses is a feeling of “delight,” she explains, and mastering it can help coworkers
have a better work experience. March supplies a variety of terms and suggestions: for smell, for
instance, she tells operators to create a variety of experiences, even “whiffs” which can
“intrigue” individuals through technologies like coffee, flowers, candles, and air fresheners. For
taste, she tells operators to consider infused waters, and mix up a variety of flavors, like
mintiness or vibrant fruitiness. Color, textures, and music, are also discussed to address the
senses of sight, touch, and sound.
The attention to the relations between design and the sensate qualities of body describe
how coworking prescribes not only an ideated notion of the good life. During my time at
coworking spaces, I was treated to mouthwash dispensers in toilets, bamboo plants on tables,
outdoor seating arrangements next to a barbeque pit, carpets that mimic grass in “nap rooms”,
infused water, and flavors of branded coffee and tea. As Alan Liu (2004) theorizes, postindustrial
capitalism had positioned “leisure within work,” and shifted objects of the good life away from
the large things like annual vacations towards “micro-leisure”:
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The ergonomic chair that injects small doses of comfort throughout the day; the rounded
corners and muted colors of a cubicle evoking something like a transient rest home for
the chronically overworked; the advanced photocopy machine that collates and staples
automatically so that we may have a brief, vacuous respite staring into space (pp. 163-4)
Liu (2004) highlights how technological pleasures been intertwined with the everyday nature of
work, and how coolness and hipness has become abstracted into the little things that
compensates for fatigue and mental dullness at work. Yet, the sensate qualities of coworking
function less as instruments of relief, and more as objects that remind us of how pleasurable
work is or can be. Framed signs like “do what you love,” “if you don’t build your dreams,
someone would build it for you,” and mural art that speak of love and creativity contextualize the
senate environment in a discourse of passion, which seeks to ignite a “sense of purpose” in
workers (Carr, 2016).
I offer that one way to think about this discourse of passion is to understand it not as a
zealous drive, but a feeling of rightness, a sense of being in-sync with the rhythms of capitalism.
As Thrift (2007) offers, the sensory configurations of time/space may be used to foreground a
particular sense of "rightness", "an attempt to capture and work into successful moments, often
described as an attunement or a sense of being at ease in a situation.” The word “attunement”
connotes an adjustment to harmony; it means that one is able to identify and realign a feeling of
“wrongness” to one that feels “right.” Understanding passion as a desire for rightness means
understanding it as an everyday form of diffused affect, where bodies get moulded to normative
capitalist rhythms so that pleasures through work might be more easily experienced, and negative
affects more easily controlled (Potts, 2010).
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When I asked coworkers if they felt more driven in the space, most mentioned to some
extent the “energy” involved in having people around them. This energy, Harold tells me, is
particularly useful when “when I do something I dislike, like my accounts.” Harold explains that
the presence of coworkers and the capacity to o move around makes the banal task more
bearable. The sense of freedom I have explained earlier presents a means to control and modulate
a feeling of boredom; workers find relief from the tedium of work by making quick
conversations or by leaving their desks momentarily to take some coffee, knowing also that the
scene of others still working would compel them to return quickly. As Dan explains, being
surrounded by others who are working keeps him on track when he feels like procrastinating:
“when there people next to you, you have the extra push to continue because you feel bad if you
stopped... You get the impression that if they can concentrate so can you.” The sign of others
around working makes concentration normative and encourages everyone to devote the same
degree of attention to their work.
The arrangement of human and nonhuman actors in coworking spaces create opportunity
for this sense of attunement, a harmonization with the work rhythms of capital. And this
implicates more than just a state of productivity. As Jessie tells me, there is a sense of rightness
that comes with coworking: “I think most people are still not used to working alone, even though
it is now getting common. You can feel lonely and lose track of the value in what you are
doing.” Indeed, I was initially surprised by the low levels of interaction in many of the spaces I
visited; most of the time, people are working rather than socializing. However, over time, I
recognized that even with minimal interaction, coworking had an ambiance that facilitates a
particular affective quality to work. Jessie tells me that she is not looking for personal validation
to know the value of her work, but having people around makes it “more substantial”: “it
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communicates that I am serious about my work and I am confident about it… it makes it more
meaningful.”
As Charles Taylor (2004) points out, the mutual presence of individuals can “help build a
common mood or tone that will color everyone's action” (p. 168). Even though people may be
acting by themselves or in small groups, “it matters to each of us that others are there, as
witnesses of what we are doing and thus as codeterminers of the meaning of our action” (p. 168).
Further, the affective quality to the place is not just constructed by humans but the technologies
around - banners, signs, background conversations - that produce the codes which influence
sense-making (Amin, 2015).
The “meaningfulness” that Jessie relates therefore applies less to a single factor, but a
combination of things: amongst others, the experience of freedom, the solidarity of working
alongside others, the shared values coalesced under a brand, and of course, the cool furniture,
coffee, and powerful wifi. This creates conditions that make work seem meaningful and even,
possibly weighty. As someone relates of the WeWork space, “They have really discovered the
secret sauce on how to make this place feel hip, feel new, feel innovative. Having guests come
into this environment actually adds a real sense of, hey, we’re a larger company than we actually
are” (Solman, 2015). In like manner, a survey by Deskmag found that over 90% of those
interviewed expressed feeling more “self-confident” after they joined a coworking space
(Foertsch, 2012a). This indicates how coworking has created the setting where individuals can
feel happy about their new circumstances. This is reflected in a quote of a freelancer presented
by Coonerty and Neuner (2013), founders of NextSpace:
Yeah, I don’t have $10 million in the bank. But because I have this freedom, it’s almost
the same as being wealthy. If you have the freedom and you can do what you want with
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your day, then that’s worth a lot. I still sometimes feel that I can’t believe I’m getting
away with this.”"
The feeling of rightness created in a coworking space produce a possibility for middle-
classed happiness, even as opportunities for economic advancement recede. Deploying the
shared agencies of human and non-human actors, coworking replaces and augments the want for
social mobility with an experience of personal contentment in the contemporary. WeWork, for
instance, states to be a place where “we’re redefining success measured by personal fulfillment,
not just the bottom line.” NextSpace claims to help “you make a living and a life on your terms.”
Opodz writes in its mission that “we want this space to work for you” and that it welcomes
suggestions on “seating arrangement to chair types to lighting to coffee brands,” anything that
can help people “feel motivated and excited to be here every day to work on achieving your
goals.” These mission statements highlight how passion has become the guiding principle of
coworking spaces. Spread across the urban landscape, these infrastructural objects retain work
as a placeholder to the good life even as its traditional objects of optimism fade.
Space for Thought
A good coworking space is comfortable and can improve one’s capacity for work. But as I
visited coworking sites across California, I was struck by the distinctions between the coworking
interiors and their immediate outside. This was clearest at the Hollywood branch of WeWork in
Los Angeles, where I had to navigate through a long row of hustlers and tourists before I got to
the place. The beautiful interiors provide a striking contrast to the chaotic world I just
transversed. WeWork had an atmosphere of controlled busyness; the smell of coffee was the air,
most people were plugged into their headphones and staring at their laptops, the associate at the
counter greeted me with a warm smile. At the ground level of WeWork, the scene of Hollywood
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boulevard is carefully controlled. A wallpaper is pasted over the transparent glass to block
tenants from the distractions of the street and to prevent others from looking in. Working out of
this temperature controlled, hip place with high speed wifi, ergonomic furniture, and good
coffee, one may forget the hustle of the streets - though coworkers within are hustling too.
The atmospheres of the places we interpret, Ahmed (2010) reminds us, are always
angled. Or in other words, what we think is a vibe of a place represents not only the atmosphere
of something that is external, but it is mediated through our social expectations and wants. The
conditions of the coworking space makes optimisms in work to feel material; freelancers may
experience less lonely by being a member of a community and their work may indeed feel more
passionate in a space that built for a positive relation between work and meaning. And
coworking reminds us that passion is not only a feeling, but a model goal in contemporary
capital. As I have argued through the book, the discourse of passion assures not only good
feelings, but good outcomes as well. The affective condition creates occasion for a particular
channel of potentiality: in being passionate, coworkers may become more entrepreneurial,
productive, inspired, socially connected and therefore, more financially successful or capable of
coping with contemporary insecure labor conditions.
Still, it is necessary to ask: what does coworking forsake in guiding us to feel right? As
Thrift (2007) points out, affective technologies that harness potential would have to divert from
the possibilities of other potential: “the necessarily formulaic nature of this technology is bound
to mean that certain sensings of potential are diminished or even go missing.” In creating a
reassuring space of smiles, coworking would also have to necessarily suppress the existence of
unhappy circumstances.
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Though the chapter, I have shown how coworking supports and permits a neoliberal
fantasy: a belief that decline of the middle-classed good life can be stymied through self-
transformations afforded by an infrastructural object. A common retort by space operators to
questions of precarity are that freelancing or entrepreneurship is less precarious because it is
harder to lose all sources of income if you possess different gigs to support you. As Osnowitz
(2010) had also found through interviews with freelancers, individuals can feel more confident
maintaining employment as freelancers when they see companies shrinking their manpower. But
this assumption stands on a configuration of a particular neoliberal subject: one who perfected
the art of the hustle, a subject who has perfect knowledge of untapped markets and who is
capable of moulding his or skills to do them. Further, it also assumes a resilient freelance market
which is always pregnant with jobs. But surveys have shown that most freelancers are incapable
of support themselves during an economic downturn (Horowitz & Poynter, 2011).
Coworking suppresses the reality of those problems, emphasizing that it can accelerate
serendipity, or the creation of networks that can increase collaboration or the possibility of
business prospects. While I do not deny such a possibility, it is crucial to note how this idea of
collaboration also contributes to a fantasy: coworking spaces, for instance, advise members to
avoid treating each other as competitors so it can create a nurturing environment of collaborators.
But this particular instantiation of collaboration also suppresses the reality of inequality: that
labor markets are fundamentally limited, and good gigs are limited. What this process of
collaboration does is to narrow good gigs to networks which also denies others of good jobs;
instead of producing the inequality of individuals, it produces the inequality of networks. And
whether people are able to get access to those valuable networks, coworking perpetuates an
internalization of blame - it suggests, as operators tell me - that everyone has their own
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specialities and that they should compete against themselves instead of others, which also places
the burden of failure on the self (Scharff, in press).
In these ways, coworking reproduces the idealisms embodied in early virtual
communities: its informality, low cost of entry and exit, its capacity of building niches, personal
intimacies, and its relationship to economic gain. But as Mike Crang (2000) critiques, these
communities have also been insular, prioritizing the interests of their private groups over that of
public, and placing personal and group gains over that of social responsibility. The utopic quality
to cyber-relations has the tendency of erasing troublesome, uncomfortable social relations in the
real world (Skeates, 1997). Coworking relations are often not virtual, but its norms - its reliance
on a comfortable context, a sociality that is manageable, and its attempt to absolve loneliness -
makes coworking relations feel virtual at times. And by having those same values, coworking
skirts around the broader social responsibilities that it is positioned to address.
One of my previous arguments has been that coworking to perpetuate political and
classed divisions as they seek to reinstate the middle-classed norms of the good life. Yet the
individualistic solution of coworking does not only continue structural problems, it also provides
a frame to the problems of structure. By presenting care as a business opportunity, coworking
legitimates a neoliberal ideology which absolves the state of welfare responsibilities, favoring
the privatization of important life providing facilities. This means that people unable or unwilling
to pay for coworking would be denied of entry to the space even though they might need it.
This is not to say that coworking operators are entirely sold in thinking of their offering
as a business. Johnson (2016), for instance, wrote about how she felt that a recent coworking
conference held Los Angeles was “hijacked” by people who are more interested “expanding their
business center empires,” rather than “strengthening their community connections or opening a
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coworking space in a small town.” Her discomfort was primarily directed towards Frank Cottle’s
view of office spaces. A consultant on business real estate, Cottle expressed in a keynote lecture
that coworking spaces are like business centers, and that the “community” was a “product” that
coworking space operators offered. This sat uneasily with a number of attendees, including
Johnson, and Bacigalupo returned with a spiritual twist to that quib: “community is a product
like a soul is a body part.”
But what does the association of “community” to “soul,” and “product” to “body part”
achieve in material terms? Despite their best intentions, coworking operators are unable to
conceive of a language that allows them to bypass the ideologies of entrepreneurialism and
neoliberalism. After all, not all people are equally prized; not all may be likened to the “soul” or
be a part of the community of coworking. Only those who may be converted to a product –
potential customers – will be welcome in the coworking community.
As David Harvey (2000) tells us, limitations in our imaginations of utopia relate to the
dearth of the "processes mobilized to materialize them." He reminds us that utopia needs to face
up with relations of power at every turn, and it is more productive to find out ways in which this
can be encouraged and developed. Part of this process then, requires us to confront the idealisms
of work. Instead of trying to deny optimisms in work, however, it may be more productive to
build spaces where idealisms may be experimented with, dismantled, and possibly rebuilt. In
other words, it may be more productive to construct what Davina Cooper (2014) calls “everyday
utopias,” “places from which to think and about which to think” (p. 18). These spaces afford not
“static perfection,” but concrete acts of striving, which are critical, dynamic and changing in
relation to a future that is also always in process of being remade (p. 25). Survival here then, may
take on a more important role: for it speaks no longer to a continuation of middle-class norms,
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but an actual effort to sustain oneself as those norms are challenged with a better world in mind.
Coworking is not without its possibilities, but their affordances - their means of offering a respite
- needs to be taken more literally as a respite from contemporary capital instead of being
shrouded by ideological utopianism. Can we perhaps then think of developing coworking along
the lines of Cooper (2014) advises? From there, perhaps, a different means of understanding
labor can proceed.

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Conclusion: Passionate Openings
Passionate work is often understood as a privilege, an idealism available to those who have the
fortune of escaping ‘real’ work – the mundane, dreary waged labor that has to be done to pay the
bills. As the Gallup polls tell us, the majority of Americans – 68% of them – are ‘unengaged’ at
work (Adkins, 2015). It would seem that it is more common to experience work as tiring and
emotionally draining rather than invigorating. Under such conditions, it is not surprising that
those who are passionate about their work are sometimes described as ‘lucky’. And to the extent
that luck is subject to a disparity in resources and power, the critique of passionate work is often
passed as a critique of middle-classed idealism. Its classic subjects are the college-educated,
loan-burdened students, populations who are privileged enough to have the resources and skills
to chase their passions, but who are yet absent of a buffer to protect them from the uncertainties
and exploitative tendencies of capital.
But if passionate work is a privilege, it is also a privilege that is now being democratized,
debated, and refracted through many different faces, institutions, and discourses. In my
dissertation, I have argued that passionate work is better understood as an orientation, and that
the cultures of passionate work had become particularly relevant to populations who were
traditionally not expected to be passionate in the wake of the recession. In light of this, it is
unproductive to think of the critique of passionate work solely in terms of an unfair exchange: a
trade between the assumed Fordist ideals of wages, security, and upward mobility, for the
autonomy, pleasure and riskiness of post-Fordist neoliberal livelihoods. This lens is problematic
not only because it romanticizes Fordism and assumes a Fordist ideal we can return to (Lorey,
2015) - it is also a critique that is repeatedly absorbed by corporate discourse itself. Consider
Simon Sinek’s (2016) interview titled The Millennial Question, where he criticizes a generation
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for understanding “purpose” in superficial terms. Millennials, he argues, lack perseverance and
are made to believe that they can leave an instant impact in the world. Impatient for success, they
leave their employers before they can actualize the meaningful work that they hope to do. The
solution to the problem? Corporations, or specifically, the development of good leadership in
corporations that could guide youths towards producing the impact and purpose they wish to
have.
This millennial question can at least be traced a century back. In the first chapter, From
Happiness to Passion, I described how disappointments in passionate work is often critiqued and
recuperated through new styles of management. The disappointment of the good life is
positioned not as a problem of how we understand the good life, but a fault of people,
technology, leadership, corporations, circumstances, and so on. Like the management theorists of
the mid twentieth century, Sinek (2016) places the blame on everything but the political
economy, the low self-esteem of millennials, their addiction to the instant gratification provided
through social media, and the absence of corporate mentors. Avoiding the critique of a normative
work society, management theorists and gurus have through the century repudiated corporations
for failing to tap into the potentials of individuals, causing unhappiness and frustrated dreams.
And as solution, they have embarked on tweaks, believing that work may eventually reach a
utopic point where everyone finds their labor validated and fulfilling.
Identifying the problem of passionate work as an issue of unfair exchange locks us into a
similar cycle where better corporations, technologies, and wages remain the answer to relief of
frustrated dreams. It is not that the exploitation of passionate work is wrong or false, but situating
the problem in these terms risk recapitulating the same discourse that management favors. This is
not simply a question of intellectual orientation, of whether a remedy is radical or conservative.
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Here, we are discussing the stifling of an imaginary horizon which keeps us in an impasse, a
situation where lines of flight remain limited. Capital is not afraid of critiques of passion. It is
only concerned when those lines involve revolutionary potential.
The cultures of passionate work maintains its relevance by appropriating the openings
which Berardi (2009) has laid out for the political work of the Left. Foreseeing that the Great
Recession will lead to a period of disenchantment, Berardi (2009) advises that the Left ready
“zones of human resistance” that adopt “a language that is more therapeutic than political” (p.
219). The call to therapy is made on grounds that affect is central to post-recessionary politics.
Disenchantment provides an opening to draw in those worn out by the failed promises of capital.
And the therapy in these spaces allow for experimentations in new forms of optimism,
formulating the new political horizons needed for change.
Discourses of passionate work fail to provide the radical political horizons to therapy.
While they do involve the invention of alternate visions of the good life, these formulaic
frameworks lead individuals back to investing energies and hopes in work. The only difference,
as I have argued, is that these cultures involve a strong slant toward individualistic resilience;
they aim to construct zones of zones of survival for the populations they address, without
changing how power operates in these spaces. Optimism, therefore, is placed on happy or non-
traumatic survival; subjects are flattered for their capacity of endurance and creative ways of
making do. Like what Silva (2015) had noted of working-class young adults, self-transformation
and resilience are represented here as the wages of passionate work. Survival becomes a source
of pride.
But if survival is a source of pride, who is given access to this pride? We need to be
aware of the privilege that is in survival. In explaining the dynamics of passionate work cultures,
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I have also highlighted its exclusions. Even as passionate work becomes more pervasive, it
remains modelled after a particular subject. I have spoken of this as a classed struggle, a struggle
in the question of who can speak for what people want, and what is recognized as the legitimate
outcomes of survival. The identification of the suffering of work as ‘disengagement’,
‘depression’, ‘loneliness’, or ‘boredom’, and the description of passion as a desire of everyone,
indicates a transposition of historical classed desire, or specifically, a naming of middle-class
desire as general desire. In this process, other manifestations of gendered, raced, and classed
desire are also erased and devalued. The complicated relationships that link oppressions to desire
are left unconsidered, and leaving optimism towards work the only attitude that is permissible
and laudatory.
In the final sections, I draw from social reproduction theory to point towards the openings
that these cultures evince. Developed from the heterogeneous perspectives of socialist,
autonomist and Marxist feminism, social reproduction theory broadly refers to a study of the
social institutions involved in the biological reproduction of the human species and the
reproduction of commodified labor-power (Bakker & Gill, 2003). In this aspect, the analytic has
traditionally been centred on women. Much of the reproductive biological processes involved –
pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation – are specific to women, and women have largely been the
subjects relegated to the domestic sphere, responsible for labor of maintaining the household
through care and domestic work (Vogel, 2013). However, as a theory, social reproduction
addresses a broader concern which encapsulates a wider range of populations and processes. Its
focus includes all “institutions, processes and social relations associated with the creation and
maintenance of communities – and upon which, ultimately, all production and exchange rests”
(Bakker & Gill, 2003, p. 16).
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Why think about reproduction rather than production if passionate work is about
commodifying labor power? There are two reasons for this. First, social reproduction is an
important lens to consider if we are to conjure any sustainable post-work imaginary. Given the
centrality of the wage to survival, a post-work imaginary will seriously need to contend with
producing alternate social relationships and institutions where wages can made of lesser import.
As Silvia Federici (2012) relates, her awakening to the importance of social reproduction
happened in the Italian Operaist (workist) struggles in 1966 when Mario Tronti provided the
provocative concept of the “social factory,” to indicate how social relationships are increasingly
made subordinate to capital accumulation. While the (male) autonomists were concerned with
the encroachment of formal logics of production into the socius, the autonomist feminists sensed
a different relations at work:
To us [the automonist feminists], it was immediately clear that the circuit of capitalist
production, and the “social factory” it produced, began and was centered above all in the
kitchen, the bedroom, the home—insofar as these were the centers for the production of
labor-power—and from there it moved on to the factory, passing through the school, the
office, the lab (Federici, 2012, pp. 7-8).
Federici and other feminists autonomist grasped the crucial role played by reproductive
labor. Though often unwaged and devalued, the labor of care and reproduction is crucial towards
reproducing and sustaining the cohort of working-class laborers; without such labor, there would
be no laborers for capital to tap into. Therefore, the focus on the spheres of reproduction isn’t
just a specific feminist goal; they understood that politicizing reproduction is crucial towards
destabilizing capitalism (Federci, 2012).
Second, the cultures of passionate work are directly related to the processes of
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reproduction. The therapeutic discourses evinced within career guides, gamification, and
coworking, reflect what Nancy Fraser (2016) has called “care deficits” (p. 100) Care deficit is a
term used by Fraser (2016) to describe the crisis in social reproduction in the contemporary,
especially as represented in the growing number of elderly, children, and infants, who are
without support as women leave the domestic sphere in the United States. In a similar trajectory
that she mentions, I have highlighted how the recession has also revealed a need for ongoing
affective care. Normalized conditions of unemployment, the increasing number of people forced
into banal jobs, and the fear of class slippage by the middle-classes, produce states of anxieties
that are attended to through commodified forms of therapy as represented in career guides,
gamification, and coworking.
While the therapeutic processes found in passionate work are problematic, they reveal an
undercurrent of desire for the very things that can make up a political horizon. The processes of
suspension that I have suggested in gamification, for instance, reveal the attraction and political
potential of solidarity. In Crowds and Party, Jodi Dean (2016) makes an argument against Sherry
Turkle who reads pervasive social media use as a form of addiction. Turkle’s point of discomfort
- that compulsive social media use reflects an addiction to the suspended self-consciousness
related to feelings of flow – is inverted by Dean as a sign of political potential. While the
“infinite distraction” of social media use may signal at a desire for escapism and an abandonment
of political duties (Pettman, 2016), Dean argues that it also indicates a deep longing for
collectivity and the power of crowd:
We may be coming to prefer the crowd, the presence of many that opens us to collectivity
and relieves us of anxiety. One-on-one conversations may feel too constraining insofar as
they enclose us back in an individual form… The experience of flow that overwhelms the
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conscious experience of self that Turkle finds so threatening, then, might also be
understood as a breaking out of the illusion that the individual is and can be a subject of
action (rather than a form of enclosure and containment) and a giving-over to a crowd.”
(pp. 43-4).
The cultures of passionate work reveal indications of a desire for collectivity, but which
is disciplined and set within fixed boundaries. Consider the cultures of normalized
unemployment. With unemployment becoming more common, there is an increasing need for
people to be interdependent and to rely on one another for survival. Therefore, families and
friends are advised to support each other; people are told to head to coworking spaces to find
camaraderie. But the advice stops there. While people are told to support one another, this
support is ultimately directed towards something familiar: the competition for jobs and gigs, and
the processes of self-branding. The instrumental purpose then encourages individuals to
discriminate potential networks based on the value that they can offer.
Can passionate work cultures be rearticulated in some form to encourage resilience that is
also critical and transformative? Where people are able and willing to think differently; to
experience perhaps uncomfortable social relations, but yet be willing to work jointly to evince
different futures? One route might be think through cultures of repair, the ways people are
coming together to recycle, remake, and repurpose used or discarded objects, to reduce the
reliance on a wage for survival (Graziano & Trogal, 2017).
In Singapore, there are a group of women that assemble together weekly to repair and
recycle used wheelchairs for the elderly who are unable to afford buying their own (Chia, 2016).
The name of group, Kampung Senang, invokes older nostalgic ideas of village relational ties
centred on care and intimacy, and the simplicity of village life. While the group is recognized as
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a charitable organization, their efforts has since developed other initiatives including building a
group who are interested in the repair of everyday household objects. Besides enabling a
community, these repair groups are specifically social in orientation, directed towards the repair
of not just their own objects, but the possessions of others as well.
Repair allows for a particular relationship with labor that may offer a potential of
understanding passionate work differently. There are other forms of activism that might be more
expressly political, but the craftsmanship involved in repair groups allow for a different
community to take shape around precarious working and middle class populations, without
necessarily having the same forms of exclusion. As a form of care directed towards others
produced through reproductive labor, repair provides the potential of forging affective solidarity
in the everyday; it allows people to think about the potentials of their labor, and to feel good
about the exercise of their creativity while contributing to the reduced reliance on a wage. We
need to find different directions to passionate work; especially one that can enable therapy,
survival, and politics. The exact shape of these activisms will require experiments, but the
utopianism of labor provides an opening for us also to reimagine how such experiments can
begin and take shape.

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308
APPENDIX
Management texts analysed
1920-1949
1. Elton Mayo. (1933/1960). The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization.
Introduction by F. J. Roethlisberger. New York: Viking Press.
2. R. O. Beckman. (1944). How to train superviors: Manual and Outlines for Determinate
Discussion. 3rd Edition. New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers.
3. George D. Halsey (1938) How to be a Leader. New York and London: Harper &
Brothers Publishers.
4. Erwin Haskell Schell (1942) The technique of Executive Control. (5th edition, originally,
1924). New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
5. Erwin Haskell Schell and Frank Forester Gilmore (1939). Manual for Executives and
Foremen. (First Ed.). New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
6. Carl Heyel (1939). Human-Relations Manual for Executives. New York and London:
McGraw-Hill Book Company.
7. Ordway Tead (1935) The Art of Leadership. New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book
Company.
8. Mary Cushing Howard Niles (1941/1949) Middle Management: The Job of the Junior
Administrator. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers.
9. Everett B. Wilson. (1937). Getting things done in Business. New York and London:
McGraw-Hill Book Company.
10. Donald A. Laird. (1925/1937) The Psychology of Selecting Employees. Third Edition.
New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Co.
309
11. J. David Houser (1938). What People Want From Business. New York and London:
McGraw-Hill Book Company.
12. Ordway Tead (1929/1977). Human Nature and Management. Arno Press: New York
13. Chester I. Barnard (1938/1953) The Functions of the Executive. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
14. Charles Reitell (1937). How to be a Good Foreman. New York: Ronald Press Company.
15. Eliot D Chapple & Edmond F. Wright (1946). A Guide for Supervisors on How to
Understand People and Control Their Behavior. New York: National Foreman Institute.
16. Alfred M. Cooper. (1942). Employee Training. New York: McGraw-Hill.
1950-1969
1. Frederick Herzberg, Bernard Mausner and Barbara B. Snyderman (1959). The
Motivation to Work. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
2. Victor H. Vroom. (1964) Work and Motivation. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
3. Marshall E. Dimock. (1958) A Philosophy of Administration: Toward Creative Growth.
New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers
4. Douglas McGregor (1960). The Human Side of Enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill
5. Thomas G. Spates. (1960). Human Values Where People Work. New York: Harper &
Brothers.
6. Peter F. Drucker. (1954). The Practice of Management. New York: Harper & Row.
7. Lynde C. Steckle (1958) The Man in Management: A Manual for Managers. New York:
Harper and Brothers.
8. Willaim F. Whyte (1959). Man and Organization: Three Problems in Human Relations in
Industry. Illinois: Richard D. Irwin.
310
9. Abraham H. Maslow. (1954/1970). Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper &
Row.
10. Vince Packard (1957/1980). The Hidden Persuaders. New York: Ig Publishing.
11. Charles R. Walker and Robert H Guest (1952). The Man on the Assembly Line.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
12. Chris Argyris (1957) Personality and Organization: The Conflict Between System and
the Individual. New York: Harper and Brothers.
13. Daniel Bell (1956). Work and its Discontents. Boston: Beacon Press.
14. Whyte, William. H. (1956). The organization man. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
1970-
1. Harold L. Sheppard and Neal Q. Herrick. (1972). Where have all the Robots Gone?
Worker Dissatisfaction in the '70s. New York: The Free Press.
2. James O'Toole, Elisabeth Hansot, William Herman, Neal Herrick, Elliot Liebow, Bruce
Lusignan, Harold Richman, Harold Sheppard, Ben Shephansky, James Wright. (Eds.)
(1973/1974). Work in America. Cambridge: MIT Press.
3. Studs Terkel (1972). Working. New York: Avon Books
4. Kenneth Lasson. (1971) The Workers: Portraits of Nine American Jobholders. New
York: Grossman Publishers.
5. Shigeru Kobayashi (1971). Creative Management. American Management Association.
6. Thomas F. Stroh. (1971). Managing the New Generation in Business. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
311
7. William A Westley and Margaret W. Westley. (1971). The Emerging Worker: Equality
and Conflict in the Mass Consumption Society. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University
Press.
8. Judson Gooding. (1972) The Job Revolution. New York: Collier Books.
9. Auren Uris and Marjorie Noppel. (1970). The Turned-on Executive: Building Your Skills
for the Management. New York: McGraw-Hill.
10. Sar A. Levitan & William B. Johnston. (1973). Work is Here to Stay, Alas. Utah:
Olympus Publishing.
11. The Conference Board. (1971). Job Design for Motivation. New York: The Conference
Board
12. Lawrence A. Appley. (1974) Formula for Success: A Core Concept of Management. New
York: AMACOM.
13. Richard K. Irish. (1976). If Things Don't Improve Soon I May Ask You to Fire Me: The
Management Book For Everyone Who Works. New York: Anchor Books.
14. Bernard Haldane. (1974) Career Satisfaction and Success: A Guide to Job Freedom. New
York: AMACOM.
15. Donald H. Sweet. (1973). The Modern Employment Function. Massachusetts: Addison-
Wesley.
16. Clair F. Vough. (1975) Tapping the Human Resource: A Strategy for Productivity. New
York: AMACOM.
17. Louis E. Davis and Albert B. Cherns. (1975). The Quality of Working Life volume 1:
Problems, Prospects and the State of the Art. New York: The Free Press.

312
List of career guides analyzed
1. Paul Hill. (2010). The panic free job search: Unleash the power of the web and social
networking to get hired. Pompton Plains: The Career Press.
2. Mark Emery Bolles and Richard Nelson Bolles (2011). "What color is your parachute?
Guide to job-hunting online (6th ed). Berkeley: Ten Speed Press.
3. Jay Conrad Levinson & David E. Perry (2011). Guerrilla marketing for Job Hunters 3.0.
New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Inc.
4. Martha I. Finney. (2009) Rebound: A Proven Plan For Starting Over After Job Loss. New
Jersey: FT Press.
5. James S. Kunen. (2012). Diary of a company man: Losing a job, finding a life. Guilford,
Connecticut: Lyons Press.
6. Jean Baur (2011). Eliminated! Now what? Indianapolis, Jist Works.
7. Brad Schepp & Debra Schepp (2nd ed.). How to find a job on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter
and Google+. New York: McGraw Hill.
8. Wayne Breitbarth (2011). The power formula for LinkedIn Success: Kickstart your
business, brand, and job search. Austin, Texas: Greenleaf Book Press.
9. Dan Sherman. (2013) Maximum success with LinkedIn: Dominate your market, build a
global brand, and create the career of your dreams. New York: McGraw Hill.
10. Michael Froehls (2011). The gift of job loss: A practical guide to realizing the most
rewarding time of your life. Texas: Peitho Publishing.
11. Martin Yate. (2013). Knock 'em Dead: The A-Z of cutting-edge job search tactics. Avon,
Massachusetts: Adams Media.
12. Dan Miller. (2010). 48 days to the work you love. Tennessee: B&H Publishing Group
313
13. Steve Dalton. (2012). The 2-Hour Job Search: Using Technology to get the Right Job
Faster. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press.
14. Jon Acuff (2011). Quitter: Closing the gap between your day job & your dream job.
Brentwood, Tennessee: Lampo Press.
15. Timothy Ferriss. (2009). The four-hour workweek: Escape 9-5, live anywhere, and join the
new rich. New York: Crown Publisher.
16. Richard N Bolles. What Color is Your Parachute: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and
Career-Changers. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press.
17. Cal Newport. (2012). So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the
Quest for Work You Love. New York: Business Plus.
18. Dan Schawbel. (2013). Promote yourself: the new rules for career success. New York: St
Martin's Press.
19. Jon Acuff. (2015) Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent your Work and Never Get Stuck.
New York: Portfolio/Penguin.
20. Skip Freeman & Michael Garee. (2016) Headhunter Hiring Secrets 2.0: The Rules of the
Hiring Game Have Changed… Forever.
21. Robert L. Leahy. (2014). Keeping your Head after Losing your Job: How to survive
Unemployment. USA: Behler Publications.
22. Michal Fisher (2013). Finding Your Career Path Without Losing Your Mind. Amazon
Digital Services
23. Nicholas Lore. (2012) The Pathfinder: How to choose or change your career for a lifetime
of satisfaction and success. New York: Touchstone.
314
24. Paul D. Tieger, Barbara Barron and Kelly Tieger. (2014). Do what you are: Discover the
perfect career for you through the secrets of personality type. New York: Little, Brown and
Company.
25. Kary Oberbrunner. (2014). Day Job to Dream Job: Practical Steps for Turning Your
Passion into a Full-Time Gig. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.
26. Angela Duckworth (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. New York:
Scribner.
27. Rick Gillis (2012) Job! Learn How to Find Your Next Job In 1 Day. Richmond TX: The
Really Useful Job Search Company LLC.
28. Kerry Hannon. (2015). Love Your Job: The New Rules for Career Happiness. New Jersey:
John Wiley & Sons
29. Kitty Martini and Candice Reed. (2010) Thank you for firing me! How to Catch the Net
Wave of Success After you Lose Your Job. New York: Sterling.
30. Scott Adams (2013). How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My
Life. London: Portfolio Penguin.
31. Tony Beshara (2012). The job search solution: The Ultimate System for finding a job now.
New York: AMACOM
32. Timothy Butler. (2010) Getting Unstuck: A Guide to Discovering Your Next Career Path.
Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Press.

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Creator Hong, Renyi (author)

Core Title Passionate work and the good life: survival and affect after the recession

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 05/31/2019

Defense Date 05/10/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

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Advisor Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee chair), Ananny, Mike (committee member), Gross, Larry (committee member), Jenkins, Henry (committee member)

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