Resistance and Intersections Post
I will be the first to admit I have never read anything by Foucault — nor do I intend to do so any time soon. It was dreary, thick, and almost purposefully pompous. It’s everything I despise about academia, and it quickly became something of a matter of personal challenge to get through all 18 pages of what I’m sure contains a good chunk of all words in the English language. After doing so, it was a distinct pleasure to take a break reminiscing about one of my favorite movies — Office Space.
So, in response to part of this assignment’s prompt:
Why would I assign Foucault and Office Space in the same week? What can Office Space teach us about resistance, discipline, and power?
I first offer this: the reason we were assigned Foucault and Office Space in the same breadth is so we might further appreciate the color in Office Space’s satirical-yet-grounded story after such a gray and hefty gulp of Foucault’s linguistics.
To put it more seriously, while digging through The Subject and Power [1], I found a lot of ties back to Office Space which helped me add imagery and relatability to Foucault’s narrative. The material is too dense to delicately deliver — I’ll just go through each point in my notes one at a time.
On p. 780, Foucault says (in essence) that studying the ways in which power is resisted will allow that power to be studied. This is certainly how the audience in Office Space is allowed to understand the main character’s plight — they are shown images of a dead-end job, walled on all sides by cubicle fabric and sat before an ambivalent computer screen, policed by an unpalatable authoritarian whose coffee-tainted breath and expensive aftershave practically slap audience members across the nose after just two or three masterful lines. It’s relatable. It’s resistable. When the main character starts to bite back at the power his employment has over him, we understand his motives and that power simultaneously. Foucault certainly has a point — understanding the resistances to a power can provide details about that power.
On p. 782, Foucault finished explaining various types of struggles with and against power, and he postulates present-day struggles deal with opposing subjugation (a more modern development) as well as (the more historical) struggles against domination and exploitation. In Office Space, nearly the entirety of the movie is about how subjugation to a power dulled life completely for the main character. It was only when he stopped struggling with the power of his employment (as with the second act of the movie), instead choosing to calmly dissent entirely, that he found peace with the power dynamic in his workplace. His employer, contrarily, met discord and struggle when our main character stopped subjecting himself to the demands of the job. I think Foucault was trying to explain the immense complexity in diagramming a power relationship, and in looking at the struggles involved with the characters in Office Space, complexity can emerge pretty quickly, yet this somehow starts to give shape to the power relationships at work.
This somewhat leads into the content of pages 783 and 784 — the explanations of the pastoral power. To be very direct with comparisons, Foucault thinks the pastoral power must (among other things) care for the whole of the individual as well as sacrifice for the good of the flock. The boss in Office Space does not do any of this. Perhaps this is why his power faults in the end — he was not pastoral enough for the modern working world. The pastoral description certainly allows us to paint the boss with ugly colors — a satisfying endeavor — as he embodies none of Foucault’s categories.
As a final note, on p. 788, Foucault delves into what “constitutes the specific nature of power”. He thinks power doesn’t exist until it’s put into action. In Office Space, viewers can certainly see this. The friends have no real terrifying power over each other until they commit their crime together. Once this act is performed, they all have power over one another — each can doom himself as well as the others. Foucault says “the relationship of power can be the result of a prior or permanent consent but is not by manifestation of a consensus”, and this we see at a similar time. The friends previously and unanimously consented to the action giving them power over one another, but afterward, that consensus evaporates as the consequences come into view.
In short, I think a good reason for assigning Foucault and Office Space in the same space would have been to give some life to the powerful-yet-painfully-dry ideas of Foucault. I’m not sure if this was the reason, but to me, it would certainly have been a good one. Without stopping every half-paragraph to find ties into Office Space, Foucault would have sunk in very little for me.
Words: 814
Sources
[1] Foucault, M. (1982). The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), summer, 777–795. Retrieved March 20, 2016.
[2] Office space [Motion picture]. (1999). United States: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.
