Fugazi

Does the carpenter, plumber, and electrician, who are skilled craftsmen and artisans, bemoan the tribulations of the job market–unemployment, loss of earnings, the dwindling of prospects–the same way white-collar workers do?

If for whatever reason the artisan can’t find work, short of the reason being a crippling injury to himself, does he not have his craft to fall back on–mentally speaking, as a cornerstone of his selfhood–even when it fails to pay his bills?

In contrast, what does the white-collar worker have for consolation when the institutions onto which he’d anchored his identity can no longer support it–a piece of paper?

The financial anxieties the white-collar worker will experience as result of such setbacks are similar to the artisan’s, but that’s where the similarities end. The WCW had invested a lot of his time and energy–an investment tantamount to religious faith–in a collective fiction, that of the professional-managerial class, which includes everything that members of the PMC set out for themselves: their roles in society, the remuneration and perks they deserve for those roles, their lifestyles, what it is they actually do, etcetera.

When an individual WCW fails to achieve one of his professional goals (a goal typically amounting to maintaining membership in the PMC or doing so while moving up to a bigger office with more sophisticated fictions attached to it), then the psychological injury he’ll sustain is proportional to his failure to uphold and take part in the collective PMC fiction.

The bigger office this WCW desires is like a watch box worthy only of a Rolex, a prestigious piece which keeps good time and whose surfaces are beautifully polished. When the WCW expresses his desire in occupying that box, he’s signaling that he is a genuine Rolex (whether he believes himself to be one varies from time to time).

When the arbiters of who occupies which box tell him that no, he cannot occupy this one, not right now, maybe not ever, the WCW is stumped. He doesn’t know, internally, how to react. The arbiters of box occupancy (themselves advanced WCWs and purveyors of industry-grade PMC fiction) will never tell him, flat-out, that he’s not genuine (they don’t even know if they themselves are, to be fair), so he has only himself to ask in the aftermath of such rejections: Am I actually a Rolex?

In my view, the question posed by the rejection isn’t whether our bereaved WCW is genuine and Swiss-made, per se, but whether he’s a good enough replica. There are about five genuine Rolexes, if any, in every white-collar industry and about a hundred boxes to fill, so our disgruntled WCW, by the laws of probability, is no Rolex. He knows this. The arbiters know it too.

But if he had come out and said as much out loud, told the arbiters that he’s an equally reliable wristwatch, less polished but keeps good time just the same, then he’d have had a snowball’s chance in hell of occupying that box.

And there lies his quandary. On the one hand, he’s sad that his fiction wasn’t good enough, that the arbiters could not suspend their disbelief long enough to see him in harmony with that box. On the other hand, he’s also sad–ashamed, really–that he even tried to pass himself off as a Rolex in the first place, when normally, he’s content to be a Seiko.