No urban ambiance is as bleak as the office. It is an aesthetic and temporal void, the corporate acme of anti-human modernity, an all-grey capitalist cumstain where time goes viscous, where we, mere humans, have been dragged from out of our idyllic forests and fields to instead fester in front of computer screens – hunchbacked, pixel-eyed and lobotomy-brained.
Yet, despite the cognitive retrograde induced by and the absence of visual pleasure inherent to the office space, it is experiencing a humble moment in artistic and Internet production. The latest addition to this cultural collage is FKA Twigs’ video for her rave-inspired ode to ecstasy “Eusexua”, in which she invades the office’s lifeless arena with a hoard of hypnagogic dancers, twitching like rabid animals shown water.
“Officecore” has also affected fashion with this year’s bubbling of corpcore (an ode to office wear in the form of ‘archival Calvin Klein, Dolce & Gabbana, Prada and Gucci,’ and brought to the runway in Miu Miu’s recent shows); into social media jargon with the emergence of the “office siren” archetype; and even before Twigs in the audiovisual realm, through Yseult’s office-based video to her amorphous “BITCH YOU COULD NEVER” and through a couple brief frames in Charli XCX’s bratty “360” short film.
Genealogically, cultural interest in the office is nothing new. The enduring mediatic impact of The Office aside (as well as of a subsequent wave of TV shows that took the sitcom out of the family home and into the workplace, e.g. Parks and Rec), the office’s status as a modernist ecosystem structured by rules and regulations – disciplinary norms, elaborate power structures, social taboos – has made it perennially ripe for transgressive artistic expression. This has manifested anywhere from the soft pseudo-feminism of Britney Spears’s Womanizer music video in the Y2Ks to the pornographic rebellion of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Man in Polyester Suit two decades prior.
Our contemporary fixation, to a degree, is an attempt to evoke the halcyon nostalgia of these earlier cultural artefacts. The office space’s revival in artistic-cultural capital is arriving at a time when the 2000s and 2010s are looping back into style. This means – even if only subconsciously – not only a psychological excavation of the decade when The Office was at its cultural apex, but also of a decade when the music video, with the office as one of its recurrent motifs, was at its peak. There was Spears’ aforementioned Womanizer (2008) certainly, but also Marianas Trench’s All To Myself (2009), The Lonely Island’s Like A Boss (2009), The Saturdays’ Notorious (2011), and Avicii’s I Could To Be the One (2012).
In each, the purpose of the office is juxtapositional: the banal boredom of its capitalist slog contrasting to the liberated hedonism of recession-pop partying. Indie sleaze’s return is similarly seeing mens’ officewear being repurposed inside this broader cultural moment, most emphatically in the omnipresence of The Dare’s scruffy suits, lending credence to the thesis that the office’s cultural moment is part of the ouroboros-like lifespan of fashion trends.
Yet, the office’s re-entry to the cultural imaginary is also taking place within a specific historic moment in which the office is an epicentre of socio-cultural discourse: that of the post-COVID-19 return to work. After a collective reconditioning of the worker’s psyche in the wake of lockdowns and work-from-home orders, a young generation of blue-collar labourers – including those who are entering the working world for their first time following COVID-19’s digital shift – have grown recalcitrant toward ye olde office culture. Employers are, as a result, increasingly being forced to offer flexible work and to concede autonomy of place to employees, who now see offices as relics of a bygone past.
Perhaps this explains the absurdist hues found in much of this current office moment. What is often happening in these cultural objects is an invasion of the workspace by an out-of-place element: Yseult and her dominatrix heels, Twigs and her flash mob, the Ancient Greek siren in the office. (Lest we also leave out TikTok’s viral ‘Armor Girl’, a 22-year-old employee in New York who gained Internet attention for going to her job in Middle Ages chainmail and knight suits). If the office is increasingly being rejected by a young generation of workers as an absurd concept, these videos and fashion performances lay this absurdity bare, while also reclaiming the bold individuality that corporate capitalism attempts to leech from its labouring bodies.
There is also a feminist tone to all these examples, in which women reclaim the traditionally male-dominated and misogyny-rife office space as either places of female dominance (Twigs, Yseult) or, in the case of the office siren, spaces in which female sexuality can be reclaimed, especially from the male gaze’s systematic fetishisation of women at work. To invert the office’s normally patriarchal structure and place women at its top – even in a post-Me Too world – remains a revolutionary act.
I guess the footnote on such transgressiveness would be how such cultural representations fail to escape from the capitalist imaginary, the capitalist realist mode. Capitalism realism, a term coined by cultural critic Mark Fisher, describes our inability to imagine a world beyond capitalism, encompassed best in the Žižekian mantra ‘it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.’ We can no longer dream beyond it, Fisher says, like the great political or artistic minds of yesteryear and, failing to envision brighter futures, we resign ourselves to regurgitating our own histories. This most often materialises in a nostalgia politics as art, unable to offer new possibilities, becomes entangle in a feedback loop of re-presenting the past, hence the Y2K vibe so coded into officecore.
Thus incapable of dreaming an alternative to capitalism, even when we can recognise its obsolesce and absurdities, we are forced to reproduce its banal motifs and mottos, its offices and corporate attire. “Officecore”, in essence, concedes the lifeblood importance, albeit with an ironic and subversive tinge, of corporate-capitalist systems and resigns to being contained within them: go to work, but simply do so in a silly outfit, or while imaging girlboss daydreams of its transformation into your queendom, dancers and all.
I am reminded here of anthropologist Alexei Yurchak’s observations on Russia’s ‘Last Soviet Generation’, those youth who grew up as the communist world system death-spiralled into collapse. In his book, the 2006 tome Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, Yurchak offers that, as early as the 1970s, the general Soviet public knew that their world was failing them but could no longer imagine an alternative to its status quo. Its ideology and signifiers had, to repeat his term, become ‘hypernormalised’, too ubiquitous to do away with even when it was common knowledge they were obsolete. This led to strange quirks in Russian youth culture: kids who would digest those symbols of everyday Soviet life then vomit them back out– through jokes, public performances, films, and photographs – as an ironic, ritualised, and performative aesthetic, cosplays of Soviet citizenship that both submitted to its ideological codes and poked fun at its ridiculous cues.
Such cultural actors, per Yurchak, had genuinely absorbed Soviet ideology that the empire will be forever before stopping halfway, simultaneously recognising the absurdity, the impossibility, of a system that simply was not working anymore. Hopefully I do not have to point out how this resonates with our contemporary moment, when a new generation of workers are simultaneously giving into the inevitably of the capitalist hustle and grind while performing their worker identities, irony-tinged, on Instagram and TikTok, rebirthing corporate capitalism’s aesthetic nothingness as an aesthetic mode, repackaged to maximise its algorithmic vitality. The office has become hypernormalised: we know it is archaic, yet it is almost too ubiquitous to if not imagine then inhabit a world beyond it. Perhaps then, to speculate for a moment, all this absurdity and irony and performativity in core-ing the office, like the Last Soviet Generation core-d the communist, is a symptom, a divination that we are the Last Corporate Generation. Perhaps our office obsessions are a sign that the office’s empire will too soon crumble.