Baixuan Chen, Eunji Song, Jiwon Song, Pauline Stumpf, Saicheng Chen, Yiming Wang, Yiyuan Zhang
If Michel Foucault's discourse on the "disciplinary society" characterized "not allowed" and "cannot" as a form of the other's negation, then in today's "achievement society," where the emphasis is on maximizing productivity, the focus shifts to "I can" and "I am able." Forced labor has disappeared, and the subject encouraging the individual to realize their full potential has become ourselves, thereby transforming into a form of self-affirmation. What neoliberalism brings is not liberation or free will, but rather, a new form of constraint. It manifests as the relentless self-compulsion aimed at achieving "self-realization" in a competitive environment.
In an information-overloaded society, everything around us seems to be accelerating at double speed. Rationality drives us to habitually assign value to every task on our to-do list. We lack the patience to finish reading an entire book, TikToks get shorter and shorter, and coffee is consumed not for enjoyment but for stimulation. Eight-minute relationships are formed through value matching on dating apps. Rationality has a divisive power—it distances individuals from others, causing relationships between people to become increasingly distant. Loneliness and exhaustion now form new compartments, shaping the current state of our mental landscape.
However, the evolution of the office seems to be a history of the exploitation of the working class. From the early counting rooms to later structures like the Larkin Building, while the office landscape has seemingly been improved and optimized, it has not resolved the internal contradictions of work or employees' emotional states. In fact, the office doesn’t have to represent boredom; it can become a space of escape, a space filled with imagination, a place for deep contemplation, and a space where one can sense the needs of the body and life. Room 0C34 is a community kitchen transformed from a meeting room, offering us the possibility of shifting identities. Perhaps it is through these repeated, differentiated transformations that the work emerges in moments of serendipity. It is not a purposeful mechanical repetition—something may have happened, or perhaps nothing at all.