Sylvia Plath’s poem “Morning Song” ranks as one of the most unsettling work of literature I’ve read. I’ve always interpreted it as a reflection on a dissociative episode the poem’s speaker, a new mother, had recently experienced, brought on, perhaps, by postpartum depression. The speaker suggests little in the way of recognition of her new child’s humanity. Consider the first stanza. In it the speaker wastes no words establishing her theme:
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
I find myself hard-pressed to think of another poem that begins with such a tone of icy distance. A mechanical image (“fat gold watch”) cascades into an animal image (“bald cry”) that in turn tumbles into one of mere materiality (“place among the elements”). I can’t really say that Plath’s speaker’s attitude fills me with much pleasant regard for human reproduction.
Nor do I think Plath intended her speaker to do so. I have to say that I admire — if not exactly embrace — the unsentimentally existentialist spirit of “Morning Song,” which to my mind presents its reader with an example of a parallax (in the philosophical, not optical, sense). Popularized by the Slovenian Marxist theorist Slavoj Žižek (but actually conceived by the Japanese philosopher, Kojin Karatani), a parallax takes the form of an “observed difference [that] is not simply ‘subjective,’” as Žižek writes, but “is rather … an ‘epistemological’ shift in the subject’s point of view [which] always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the object itself.” In plainer language, that a certain object admits of different perceptions remains as much a property of that object as an effect of subjective perception. This shakes out in terms of Plath’s poem as an equal validity to the conventional attitude toward childbirth and the attitude adopted by the poem’s speaker. Childbirth can appear as both a blessed event as well as an unaccountable, troubling disruption without the latter necessarily falsifying or invalidating the latter, or vice versa.
A parallax view of the world seems a recipe for confusion, especially when one considers that Žižek recommends abandoning the desire to reconcile the gaps inherent in this view. One must, rather, recognize the resulting antinomies (a fancy term in philosophy for contradictory but equally valid assertions) and deal with them. The challenge becomes, then, negotiating contradictions without falling into confusion. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote,”The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Thus the parallax one could consider a sort of spiritual or character-building exercise — or in gloopy TV-talk-show parlance, an “opportunity for growth.” The human mind thus becomes a sort of parallax sponge, soaking up instances of ontological–epistemological discrepancy and expanding accordingly.
And the present economic predicament afflicting the entire globe certainly doesn’t lack such opportunities. Indeed, parallax gaps abound. One simply need open The New York Times to confirm this. Recent issues have presented a veritable parade of parallaxes. Indeed, recent weeks have seen the Times feature two particularly depressing articles. The first appeared in the October 21, 2009 edition. The article’s title pretty much sums it up: “$13 an Hour? 500 Sign Up, 1 Wins a Job.” Lest there linger any ambiguity in the reader’s mind, the accompanying article leaves no uncertainty in its depiction of the arduous interview process the eventual chosen applicant, one Tiffany Block, endured on her way to seizing the brass ring of a so-so hourly wage with limited benefits:
In the past, [Chris] Kelsey [director of C. R. England, the trucking school which advertised the position Tiffany Block secured] had mostly ad-libbed interviews, but this time he asked his company’s human resources department for help. They sent him a list of 13 questions, as well as an eight-page packet with 128 questions grouped under 50 “competencies.” He decided he would ask them all.
Indeed, Ms. Block could consider herself lucky; just making it to the point where she could submit to Mr. Kelsey’s interrogation meant that she embodied an adequately Goldilocks-like candidate — neither over- nor underqualified. “The overwhelming response astonished [Mr. Kelsey],” the October 21 Times story continues:
He asked Cheree Seawood, one of his current assistants, to go through the résumés and help pick out several to interview. To make the task easier, he decided they should be even more rigorous in ruling out anyone who appeared even slightly overqualified. Mr. Kelsey, an ardent New England Patriots fan, compared his personnel strategy to the team’s everyman approach.
His devotion to professional football obviously taught Mr. Kelsey a thing or two about making the most of home-field advantage. The October 21 Times story quotes him as saying, “‘We like to get the fair and middling talent that will work for the wages and groom them from within.’” Yet Mr. Kelsey astutely realizes that “in this [current economic] climate he could afford to be extra picky and require trucking industry experience.” Misery loves company, certainly; but it might also be said that a company loves misery.
Of course, $13 an hour, a wage the October 16 Times piece deems “decent,” even though it amounts to two dollars less than double the legislated minimum hourly wage of $7.25. But by what right do I say how much one should earn for a position like the administrative-assistant one Ms. block won, whose duties include “data entry, assembling paperwork and making copies,” as the October 21, 2009 Times story reports? Such things are best left to the market to decide.
Stay hungry: today's job applicants work for work.
Leaving the market to decide such things as wages surely has its advantages — especially for employers under conditions of unemployment (conservatively) estimated at north of 10 percent nation-wide. Such a labor reserve not even the most ruthless mill owner in the nineteenth-century English midlands could have imagined, allowing folks like Mr. Kelsey only the most lordly discretion and prerogative. Consider the final question, the last of a battery of some 150, and the one which put Ms. Block over the top:
Mr. Kelsey marched through many of his questions again. Then, trying to gauge her ability to be assertive among truck drivers, he added a new hypothetical: if she were in the stands at a baseball game and a foul ball came her way, would she stand up to try to catch it, or wait in her seat and hope it fell her way?
The other finalist had said she would wait. But Ms. Block said immediately that she would jump up to grab it.
Mr. Kelsey decided he had found his hire.
As grueling as Ms. Block’s ordeal, it pales in comparison to the hapless subjects of this second New York Times article, which appears in the November 27 edition. Entitled, “Hiring Is Rising in One Area: Low-Paid Interns,” the story gives one the sense that Ms. Block should count herself lucky to have landed a job — a paying job — when so many others work in a peculiar labor limbo: the unpaid internship. “In boom times, companies with too much work for existing employees — yet not enough work to justify another hire — may have turned to temporary workers,” the November 27 Times story reports: “But with the economy still in the doldrums, companies again are opting for unpaid or low-paid internships to get the extra work done.”
The companies that have taken advantage of eager interns see silver linings in even the blackest economic thunderheads. The November 27 Times story quotes one Drew McLellan, reigning eminence of McLellan Marketing Group in Des Moines, Iowa, who fairly sums up the fearful symmetry of the intern model: “It is a brilliant, recession-proof way to double your work force, said Drew McLellan…. “It’s more money to the bottom line for you.”
The Bottom Line, an angry and jealous god, must needs propitiating at any cost, it seems, So one might as well keep that cost at right around free. The internship, a time-honored résumé-burnishing institution, has undergone certain alterations of late; the ranks of such aspirants has swelled from fresh-faced university upperclassmen to include downsized, desperate thirty- and fortysomethings. Again the November 27 Times piece:
Internships have never been out of vogue, but the competition for positions is heating up, which is good news if you run a company needing economical, entry-level workers.
…
And internships are no longer just the province of college students. More unemployed professionals are seeking them — whether to test-drive a new career or simply to keep themselves occupied, according to internship placement services. [Steve] Rodems, of Fast Track Internships, said 10 percent of his clients were college graduates changing professions, compared with just 1 percent in 2008. And, he said, internships are increasingly running throughout the year, not just in the summer.
Michael Sabatino, 38, an equity analyst at Smith Barney in New York until he was laid off in 2008, is one of those professionals who sought an internship.
The song remains drearily the same: proletarianized young professionals, hoping to sell their labor power, can find only buyers who, instead of coin of the realm, offer payment of a new, evanescent sort — on-the-job experience — which these young professionals pray may yet prove fungible at some future date: a paycheck, like a woman’s promise to her lover, written on the wind and running water.
If the current recession has offered people any lesson, it has shown to what degree parallactic antinomies rule their lives. They must somehow hold in their mind rather massive contradictions. They must recognize, for instance, that from one point of view, that of most Establishment economists, capitalism, though imperfect, offers the best system for allocating scarce resources, thus bringing the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. And they must also recognize that capitalism immiserates untold numbers of people, subordinating them to a regime which cheats them of the fair value of their labor. (What, after all, does the perma-intern model accomplish beyond the outright theft of interns’ time and effort?) From one point of view, the former appears valid; from another, the latter. And they appear so because they are so — equally incontrovertibly, yet equally irresolvable in terms of the other.
But the recognition of these seemingly intransigent contradictions need not entail one’s passively suffering them. Žižek encourages those who find themselves ill at ease under the parallax gaps of capitalism to adopt what can only be described as an ascesis of imitatio Bartlebly. Bartleby, the titular character of Herman Melville’s immortal tale, is the pioneering figure of what Žižek deems is the most effective subjective positionality of resistance. The so-called “Bartleby-parallax” manages to avoid being caught up in the Hegelian pseudo-negations of counterhegemonic practices. And we must, Žižek warns, be as resistant to these pseudo-negations in our “preferring-not-to’s” as to the hegemonic ills the former are intended to redress. Because not to do so and to remain, rather, in the old dialectic of resorting to alternatives to dismaying hegemony, is to remain ensnared in the Foucauldian circuits of power that result in the eternal recursion and reinscription of prevailing sociopolitical relations. The parallactic Bartleby, however, disrupts the workings of ideological apparatuses by cultivating an inner disposition of refusal until, according to Žižek, there opens up possibilities which are not determined by the dialectic.
In short, Americans must as a body rise up and proclaim, “No longer shall we work for work! No longer shall we even work!,” and let the financial oligarchs and their toadies try to come to grips with this parallax.
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