Especially relevant in the era of Coronavirus and current labor movements in the U.S., Shirl Yang (postdoctoral researcher at Washington University of St. Louis) posits that novels set in empty offices undo a longstanding relation between narrative uncertainty and the 18th century notion of the work ethic. In her lecture on October 3, 2023, for the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, titled “A Labor Theory of Suspense,” Yang notes that the economic excitement of early capitalism was built upon the anxiety of spiritual predestination, reinforced by the stratification and desirability of both monetary and heavenly value. In tandem, the idea that a laborer should be passionate about – or even love – their job connects productivity to morality, even when the promise of climbing upward in status never materializes into access to the means of production. Using Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) as a springboard, Yang situates us in the setting of the empty office in suspense literature, where uncertainty is managed by a conduit of capitalism: the middle-management supervisor.
Contemporarily, a latent trend of “quiet quitting,” especially popular among young laborers in the current era of social media, has become a prominent refusal of exploitation, as workers have identified their own precarity at the crossroads of the rising costs of basic necessities, stagnating wages, and increased layoffs. At this intersection, as Yang notes, the social obligation of work is dissolved in laborers’ quest for a good life, as the worker disentangles ideological morality from productivity. In the act of “quiet quitting,” the laborer’s divestment from the notion of a work ethic signals that the inevitability of capitalism’s ends, profit and revenue, can no longer dispose of the position of the worker: the precarious worker harnesses apathy and disidentifies with the tenuousness of employment. Largely driven by young adults and proceeding from the entrepreneurial spirit of neoliberalism, the contemporary labor movement’s version of the work ethic is instead driven by self-determination. Refusal is the worker’s innate power and leverage in action.
Yang identifies the importance of linear time in the suspense literary genre and its relationship to the office novel. In keeping characters hostage by etiquette and lawfulness, the suspense author also captivates and controls their audience by the latent urgency of productivity’s demise, whether by supernatural events, such as apocalypses, or organizational events, such as consolidation. Whereas the predictability of time meant that workers would easily conform to the machinations of work lest they starve, when the office setting is emptied by emergency circumstances, the worker is no longer bound to linear time. Instead, the active worker is no longer occupied by productivity and returns to the status of an agentive individual in search of a fulfilling life outside of work. To the middle manager, worker nonconformity and apathy toward routine makes the manager incapable of supervisory control despite retaining control of the worker’s paycheck.
Returning to the disjunction of productivity and value, Yang connects the concept of nonproductive labor with managerial office work, in contrast to workers’ productive labor which produces the commodities upon which the office is built, insofar as the worker remains relegated to a positionality under the managerial class. The corporate accumulation of wealth depends on the exploitation of workers’ productivity; as well, the worker is confined to time in the office setting while also latently policed by administrative bureaucracy. As Yang notes, “The office [is not] a particularly valorized site of labor, but a very useful barometer for what happens when the health of a capitalist system changes.” Therefore, the empty (or emptying) office setting produces a sense of unreliable productivity and, contextualized in the era of COVID and labor strikes, may enable suspense as it anxiously begs to have its emptiness filled.
Yang cites Ed Park’s 2008 novel Personal Days as an example of such mysterious suspense. While workers speculate about the reasons for their colleagues’ lay-offs, they understand their disposability to be inevitable and try to control such outcomes by solving the mystery of their supervisor’s banal Post-it jottings. Park eventually reveals that the layoffs are not led by the supervisor but by an impersonator bitter about their own lay-off, the author thus dissolving the suspense with a disappointing lack of rationale. Still, Yang notes that it is perhaps the expectant waiting for knowledge at the root of suspense that makes the office novel compelling for the reader, who doesn’t necessarily need a protagonist to stay engaged in the story. Rather, the reader wishes to be convinced of the gravity of the mystery at hand. Significance is made impermanent as the reader does not necessarily identify with stakes concerning any singular character, but with the desire for water-cooler knowledge—here, solving the mystery of the lay-offs.
In the realm of televisual texts, Yang cites Severance (2022-), created by Dan Erickson and distributed on Apple TV+, as an example of the slow-burn demise of the worker’s self-determination within the constricting structure of the office. In this series, workers are programmed to alienate their “Innie” (in the office) and “Outie” (out of office) selves by severing the knowledge of what they do at work from their lives outside of the office. Instead of being able to explain what tasks they perform at the office, the workers are trained to “know” how to process data by intuition. In Severance, suspense is built in the space between the worker’s affective intuition and questioning how they know what they know, as well as in the disconnect between the worker’s labor and the profitable product. It is in this mysterious space that the stratified value of productivity is maintained.
Unlike Personal Days, the structured supervision of middle management in the office setting of Severance is intensified by the alienation and secrecy of Innie life, and the Outies’ desire to know the connection between production and value is subsumed by unexplainable injuries. As Innies and Outies begin to traverse their alienation, the suspense of potential discovery grows and becomes more sinister. Does the worker really want to know how they know what they know? The delay of time between workers’ mysterious intuition and knowledge of their own positionality in the corporate system is the crux of the suspense at the heart of the series, and it indicts the strict enforcement of timely structure and unquestioning loyalty crucial to the function of capitalism.
Connecting Yang’s analysis of these two texts to other examples of suspense is an easy task, insofar as the ideological force of the work ethic is enabled, not hampered, by a disjunction between one’s standing and the capacity to change it. During the Q&A, audience members jumped at the chance to offer Yang other relevant texts, such as AMC’s Mad Men (2007-2015), a contemporary interpretation of office stratification and the structural repetition meant to secure old, white, heterosexual masculinity at the top while alienating women, Black people, queer people, and other minoritized employees. In Bong Joon-ho’s post-apocalyptic 2013 film Snowpiercer, the social structure of a train carrying passengers on an uncertain voyage is stratified based on class and skill. With the most impoverished people at one end of the train growing more desperate to confront the administration, the film’s protagonist leads a resistance movement toward the front of the train, only to discover that the conductor orchestrated the pressure to cull the train’s population.
As well, Chantal Ackerman’s 3.5-hour film Jeanne Dielman (1975) offers an example of suspense when widowed mother Jeanne’s banal routine as a casual sex worker causes her to have an inexplicable meltdown with deathly consequences. Rewinding further, Jacques Tati’s 1967 film Playtime follows the frustrated Monsieur Hulot as he navigates a never-ending maze of office cubicles to reach his scheduled meeting. The film, like these other examples, satirizes mass production, managerial structure, and the square functionality characteristic of modernism, while the elderly main character literally seeks connection. Outside of literature and media, multi-level marketing schemes (MLMs), like the LulaRoe clothing brand and Scientology, manufacture desire in its workers by promising wealth and independence as workers are further entrenched in debt to the MLM.
In sum, Yang’s astute labor theory of suspense recognizes that the fate of the worker is not preordained in terms of spiritual destiny, but rather is predetermined by the structural hierarchies that make a managerial class possible. Such policing of workers and the working class enables the tension of latent and unpredictable violence within a meritocratic hierarchy beset by the remnants of religious belief. Yang’s literary novel and television series examples delineate the consequences that occur when workers have no power to determine their personal trajectories, confirming that, while capitalism converts crises into opportunities to exploit workers, white collar labor magnifies the colors of inequality.
