Pushing Paper

Tags:: amateurs,; ambition,; getting paid,; labor,; office work,; tedium

Which leads me to wonder: why is there so little solidarity among all of us paperworkers? Why do we so often feel sorry for ourselves, so burdened by paperwork of one kind or another, while having so little sympathy for others—the dean who signs off on a clumsy sentence, the secretary who misaddresses an envelope, the paralegal who misses a deadline, the insurance agent who misfiles a claims form?

The reason, I think, is that paperwork has never fit comfortably into our idea of what work means, or what it means to work. This might explain, for example, why paperwork has so few heroes in mythology, literature, cinema, real life. There is no John Henry or Mighty Casey or Casey Jones or Rosie the Riveter inspiring us to work better or harder. The sweaty iron worker is an erotic figure; the sweaty insurance salesman a figure of derision. Even when it’s most of what we do, it’s not what we think of as what we really do. “I am a professor who also happens to write memos, reimbursement requests, self-evaluations, letters of recommendation, grant applications, conference budgets, procedural-revision plans, reports to the accreditation committee.” Not “I am a writer of memos, reimbursement requests, self-evaluations, letters of recommendation, grant applications, conference budgets, procedural-revision plans, reports to accreditation committees who also happens to be a professor.”

In an influential essay from 1977, Barbara and John Ehrenreich attempted to identify the class of people who spend most of their time this way. They called it “the professional-managerial class” and gave it a nifty abbreviation. The PMC was not the proletariat nor the petty bourgeoise nor the bourgeoisie proper. Nor would “middle class” do, since it was clearly an ideological ploy, intended to obscure objective antagonisms within and between classes. “We define the professional-managerial class as consisting of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” This is 1970s speak for a class of people who reproduce things rather than produce them, who keep things going or keep things up or keep things interesting while generally keeping things from getting out of control. Working in a less Marxist idiom, the French philosophical team of Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari called this “the production of production.”

Sounds interesting, right? The problem is that all this paperwork is actually kind of tedious. Even when things go wrong, they tend to go wrong tediously. There are relatively few paperwork emergencies: you might find yourself calling 311, but never 911. If you find yourself short of breath, it’s more likely a heart condition than any sense of exhilaration. One effect of this tedium is that we routinely grow bored, distracted, alienated at work. Our minds wander toward sex and credit-card bills. We spend hours surfing the web, which turns out to be much less challenging and enjoyable than the verb makes it sound. Our backs ache, our carpal tunnels throb, our vision blurs. We begin to suffer from other, less localizable complaints. And then even after a long, tiresome day we have trouble falling asleep, trouble staying there. We go to the gym, which helps a little, but it’s hard to escape the idea that our minds, like our legs, are always racing on treadmills, going nowhere fast. It’s like that scene in Modern Times where Charlie Chaplin continues twitching and turning his wrenches even after the assembly line has come to a halt, except in this case the muscle memory is in our brains.

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The Underwriter's Bedside Book,published by Lloyd's of London Press in 1987 is an anthology of writing given over to the paperwork laden-world of insurance. It contains many contributions from the highly literate whose lives took them into this line of work, eg Conrad, Kafka and James M Cain to name but a few.

Posted by Sam Ignarski on Fri 18 Mar 2011
And the world just keeps getting more and more this way, Kafka, et al, as "[mirrors] of tomorrow. http://learnmeproject.com/

Posted by JRD on Sun 3 Apr 2011
I would prefer not to comment.

Posted by Mike Cope on Mon 4 Apr 2011
Check out Jose Saramago's "All the Names," a quiet novel (in contrast to his tour de force "Blindness") about a bureaucrat who works in the central records office. The building is so massive and full of records that it is almost perpetually being expanded. A great account of paperwork and love. Yep.

@Mike Cope: Ha!

Posted by John Ryan on Mon 4 Apr 2011
"The man whose life is devoted to paperwork has lost the initiative. He is dealing with things that are brought to his notice, having ceased to notice anything for himself."
-- C. Northcote Parkinson

Posted by The Sanity Inspector on Mon 4 Apr 2011
The Faber Book of Office Life explores more of the nuances of white collar tedium drawing on a wide range of literary sources.

Posted by shane cahill on Mon 4 Apr 2011
Similar misgivings about paperwork can be found in Banjo Patterson's Australian classic poem "Clancy of the Overflow" http://www.the-rathouse.com/ClancyoftheOverflow.html

Posted by Figgles on Mon 4 Apr 2011
Your article reminds me of a Doonesbury strip in which a war veteran writes his memoir of military office work during World War II: "Hell in Triplicate: A Company Clerk Remembers."

The heroes of paperwork are not those who do the work, but those who figure out how to reduce the need for it or, at least, the time needed to finish it. These heroes, perhaps, are guys like David Allen of "Getting Things Done" fame or Timothy Ferriss of "The 4-Hour Workweek". You don't know paperwork reductionists are your heroes until you realize how much time they've saved you.

Posted by Mr. Poet on Tue 5 Apr 2011
Mr. Kafka,

An interesting piece on an ostensibly tedious subject. Another worthy addition to the modest canon you describe is Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat," a long-ish short story worthy of any shortlist of essential Russian literature. Gogol tells the story of a lowly civil servant (a copyist!) and his quest to procure a new overcoat in the harsh Russian winter. Akaky Akakievich's peers at "the department" make cruel sport of him for still being a lowly copyist even after years of service to the Tsar. However, Akaky isn't humiliated. He takes pride in his diligent work and revels in the marvelous letter-shapes he reproduces; something like a mediaeval monk. There's a good deal more to the story; highly recommended.

Posted by Misha D. on Wed 6 Apr 2011