Monday, March 27, 2006
(10:18 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Job
One thing's for sure -- I've got it "together." I am "on the ball." At least that's the impression I give people. Part of it is just a matter of focus. Most notably: I have fully intended to be a college professor since I was a senior in high school. As it turns out, I might have been better off if I had fully intended to be a computer engineer, but there are certain benefits to having made such a decision already, just as a structural matter. For the moment, there are none of those nights lying awake wondering what I will do with my life.While I am well aware that my place in the future professoriate is far from assured, I don't expect that there will be much occupational soul-searching if I fall between the cracks. On the one hand, I am already assembling a somewhat decent professional resume from which my PhD can easily be omitted, with the market research and now editing work -- I can go into interview and just say that while I liked the freedom of freelance work for a few years, now I'm really ready to settle down in one company. On the other hand, if I don't get the career I've been aiming for, everything else will be completely indifferent -- none of this stress about whether it's "really what I want to do," because I'll know for a fact: it's not. I would just need to be paid enough to make my student loan payments and lead my quiet life.
This complete identification with a career path is one of my favorite things about 24: Jack Bauer is the job. He is the ultimate exemplar of professional ethics, that is to say, the ethics of effectiveness. The fact that it's tied up in his case with "national security" or something is little more than a coincidence -- he has no patience for more abstract, metaphysical conceptions of national security (in which, for example, a terrorist attack might serve to increase national security in the long run), and he's seen more than enough to get past the "my country right or wrong" mindset. For him it's not even loyalty to CTU as an organization: it's The Job. (Thus, when we meet him again after the "symbolic death" of last season, he is working as a day laborer -- and when the boss doesn't take him that day, he clearly could not care less.)
Isn't this the only possible ethical stance in our time -- at least the only ethical stance that people could recognize as such? Think of Magnolia, for instance (another one of my favorite cultural products -- forgive me, please, for being so shallow and so led astray by faux-"depth," forgive me for enjoying a film made by an American director other than David Lynch): think of how many of the ethical decisions are made in the context of work, of the contrast between the ethical triumph of Philip Seymour Hoffman's nurse character and the lawyer who fails to help Julianne Moore's trophy-wife character. Or think of the cop -- his greatest failure is not his divorce, not his lack of a dating life, but the loss of his gun, which makes him a "bad cop"; the cokehead Claudia instinctively feels that this admission is the sign of a genuine vulnerability. The family is a broken institution, marriage no longer functions, much less romantic love -- it takes a literal miracle to bring either to the point of minimal functionality. In the day-to-day, The Job is the horizon of meaning, at least for certain people of a certain class. "Mine," for example.
It's not just in that movie, either -- what about that moment in American Psycho when he shoots the homeless guy after telling him to "get a fucking job"? Did you laugh? I'm pretty sure I did, at least the first time I saw it, and I wasn't the only one -- laughing in the shock of identification with a murderer, in the cathartic release of the instinctive aggression toward the down-and-out men asking for money in the street. The lack of a job established that homeless man as -- Lord, please forgive me -- homo sacer. He might as well have said, "get some fucking human rights." The bum is killable, and even if the whole murderous rampage turns out to be a fantasy, it's telling that it never even occurs to him that the pushover detective would come asking after the murder of a homeless man.
So in a sense, only Jack Bauer as a man who embodies The Job can save America, time and time again, because only a man like Jack Bauer can any longer serve as the face of America's much-vaunted "moral superiority." His moral superiority does not depend on the reference to extraneous factors such as love and family -- Jack Bauer does not embody the ethics of noble sacrifice. No, here we have a man who enjoys doing his duty, a man whose only horizon of meaning is The Job. He is all too able to keep "working" even when The Job impinges on his family life; his true loyalties lie within the field generated by his work (Tony, President Palmer, etc.). The Job is simply identical to his moral superiority. He is morally superior precisely insofar as he is a ruthless torturer and killer.
If we can assign an ideological function to 24, it can only be to testify to this last refuge of ethics -- to contribute to the creation of a situation in which the problem is not the government's torture policy as such, but the fact that it's been so astoundingly ineffective. What we need is a few more Jack Bauers to replace these hick reservists with their pathetic hazing rituals! And they are precisely that: pathetic. It is shameful to engage in those bizarre sexualized abuses, to take pictures as if posing for the latest installment of Girls Gone Wild -- what is needed is cold, ruthless professionalism. Once torture is admitted, once the overriding "War on Terror" is regarded as legitimate, once "the gloves are off," the horizon changes -- the loss of moral authority that certain pundits fear in the wake of the various torture scandals is not based in the torture as such, but in the haphazardness, in the sheer hick-ified atmosphere, a bunch of American bumpkins abroad, killing ants with a magnifying glass. It's a matter of what class of people is going to represent America, whether we're going to have a professional military professionally torturing and killing -- because if we don't, if we lose that professionalism, then and only then does the credibility fall apart.
This evacuation of ethics into The Job thus structures our political space: the Republicans as the point of identification for reckless enjoyment of violence, the Democrats as the party of professionalized technocracy. I have no doubt that if Kerry were elected, he would have been able to cultivate a much more competent, professional, and above all discrete corps of torturers, a much more orderly and well-planned scheme of imperial aggression. The machine is heading in a certain direction no matter what -- we've lost any possible way of even contemplating what it might mean to turn it around or stop it. The choice is how you want the machine to be run -- professionally or recklessly.
