Red Pill

by Hari Kunzru

  I have a friend whose relationship advice I used to take until I realized that he was a solipsist. If, for example, he told me that I ought not to have an affair, because it would be very destructive to my marriage, it was because just then he wanted to hear someone say that to him. Instead of addressing whatever issue I’d raised (which could have been something completely different) he was conducting an argument with himself, against some current impulse to cheat on his wife. When the Deuter Center accepted my proposal, and I was forced to reread it and consider it as a piece of work that might actually have to be executed, I realized that it had precisely this character. Deep down I had no real desire to understand how lyric poets had historically experienced their subjectivity. I wasn’t that interested. It was a piece of wishfulness, an expression of my own desire to be raised above the pleasures and pains of my life, to be free from the reigning coercions of a toddler, the relentless financial pressure of living in New York. I wanted to remain alone with myself as inwardness. I wanted, in short, to take a break.

  Rei had a demanding job, as a lawyer for a non-profit that worked on immigration and civil liberties. She’d not been thrilled at the idea of me spending so long away, in sublime contemplation of my expressive self, but she’d seen how hard it was for me to work. We lived in a small apartment, and since Nina came along, we’d been trying to save money, so I’d given up the office in Williamsburg, the little room with the skylight which I’d had as my own space since before we were married. I’d been trying to write at a table in the spare room, and the only quiet time I got was late at night. Mornings with a three-year-old always started punishingly early, so I spent my days surrounded by toys, trying to focus through a haze of tiredness. The less sleep I got, the worse the troubles of the world appeared. One evening Rei had come back from the office and found me crying over war videos on my laptop while Nina, unsupervised, decorated the kitchen with a bag of flour she’d found in the pantry.

  There are times when you know you’re being a pig, and you carry on anyway. Something compels you, a sort of self-destructive pettiness. I’d convinced myself that I was heroically trying not to impose my mood of panic on my family, but really I was doing the exact opposite. No one was ever allowed to forget it. We were all on edge. Me, Rei, Nina, Paulette the sitter. I needed to remove myself—from the domestic field of battle, from the world. So Rei set about making arrangements. The stipend would pay for some additional childcare, and Paulette said she was happy to work some weekends. Rei and I agreed that I owed her, and at some point in the future she would be free to take off and do something similar while I looked after the family. We both knew my book stood for something more than itself, some wider problem that I was having, and I was aware that I’d come to Berlin with the tacit agreement that I would return changed, that I would deal with it, whatever it was, and not drag it back home with me.

  I showered and changed, and took the elevator down to the lobby. I knocked on the door of the lodge and asked to be shown to my study. The porter had told me his name, but I’d failed to register it, and this was preoccupying me (Otto, Ulli, Uwe?) as he walked me through a large reception room hung with abstract paintings, descendants of the kind of work that used to be exhibited in West Berlin as evidence of American vigor and creative liberty. We passed a dining room with French windows giving out onto a snow-covered terrace. Beyond the dining room was a glass door which led to the annex I’d seen from the taxi, a large open space with desks and filing cabinets arranged in little irregular clusters, atolls of wood and metal on a sea of blue carpet tile. I assumed this was where the administrative staff worked, so I was surprised when the porter tapped his keycard on the door and gestured for me to step inside. The room was a glass box supported by a metal frame, an unornamented yet somehow fussy space designed by some suburban devotee of the International Style. The porter consulted a little chart and showed me to one of the desks.

  “Here,” he said. “You’ll find everything you need.”

  I told him I didn’t understand.

  “Your workstation. You have a high-speed internet connection. The password is in your welcome pack. If you need the use of a computer, it will be the pleasure of the IT department to supply one. The small key gives you access to a storeroom where you will find office supplies. Pens and files and paper and so.”

  He demonstrated the task light, which switched on and off with a wave of the hand. I looked around at the other desks, some of them clean and bare, others with the telltale signs of regular occupation—books and papers, family photos, coffee cups. A line of small plastic soldiers marched along the top of one monitor. A stack of wire in-trays was decorated with a sort of bunting made of colored paper. I don’t know what I’d expected—an oak-paneled carrel, an airy biomorphic pod—but the one constant to all my fantasies about my working life at the Deuter Center had been privacy. Seclusion and a lockable door. The porter must have noticed my stricken look, but he misread it.

  “Most of your colleagues are away right now. And of course it is the weekend. The place is much more friendly when everyone is here.”

  “Friendly.”

  “Also the chair can be altered to your preferences. Some people have problems at first, but it is very easy.”

  He bent down and began to show me how to raise and lower the seat, how to make the back recline, how to prevent it from doing so, how to adjust the armrests.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t work here. It’s just not possible. I need to be alone.”

  He looked blank.

  “I couldn’t concentrate, for one thing.”

  His blank expression crumbled into one of intense sympathy, as if I’d just announced that I’d been bereaved, or diagnosed with a serious illness.

  “Please don’t worry. It is always one hundred percent silent. The rules are very clear. It is strictly forbidden to talk. The atmosphere is of a library. If people must make phone calls or meetings, there is another space.”

  “But it’s…”

  I realized I was embarrassed by what I was trying to say. When I was younger, I’d worked in many public places, university libraries, coffee shops, even bars. The question of noise wasn’t at the heart of the creeping horror I felt at the idea of an open-plan office. The desk I’d been assigned was in the middle of the room. As I wrote, people would be moving around behind me, out of my view. Other “workstations” (the porter’s chilling word was already sticking to my mind like chewing gum to the sole of a shoe) were located nearby, in positions where I’d be able to see their occupants’ screens. My own screen would be visible to others, perhaps not close enough to read a piece of text, but certainly enough to judge whether it displayed a document or a video playing on a social media site. I would be visible from every angle. My body, my posture. I have developed a visceral dislike of being watched while I write, not just because the content might be private, but because all the things one does while writing that are not actually writing—stretching, looking out into space, browsing the internet—seem somehow shameful if they’re monitored by others. The feeling of being watched induces an intolerable self-consciousness.

  Somewhere in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the writer imagines himself as a peeping Tom in a darkened corridor, terrified by the sudden possibility that he’ll be caught, that The Other (that important Existential personage) will shine a flashlight on him and reveal his shame. As long as he feels he’s unobserved, his entire being is focused on what he’s doing. He is a pure consciousness, existentially free. As soon as there’s even the possibility of observation—a rustling sound, a footstep or the slight movement of a curtain—all his freedom vanishes. “Shame,” he writes, “is shame of self. It is the recognition that I am indeed that object which the Other is looking at and judging. I can be ashamed only as my freedom escapes me in order to become a given object….I am in a world which the Other has made alien to me.”

/>   Most people have working lives that include this kind of alienating surveillance as a matter of course. The police function of the open-plan office is not news to anyone who’s ever worked in one. In a call center or at a shipping warehouse, bathroom breaks are monitored, your work rate is rigorously quantified and penalties are imposed on those who fall behind. But surely none of this applied to me. I was a writer who had won a prestigious fellowship. An uncommon level of self-motivation could surely be taken for granted. I certainly didn’t need to be surveilled by The Other in order to ensure my productivity. The workstation was a kind of insult, an assault on my status. It was entirely unacceptable.

  I told the porter that I was sorry I’d forgotten his name but under no circumstances would I ever write a word in that space. I would speak to the program manager when she came in on Monday. There was no real problem. My room was very comfortable. I would be perfectly happy to work in there.

  “Of course you must do as you wish, but…”

  He trailed off unhappily.

  “Perhaps I can refer you to the statement of principle in the handbook, which you will find in your welcome pack. Herr Deuter’s philosophy is made clear.”

  Something about the phrase made me angry. I didn’t give a damn about “Herr Deuter’s philosophy.” I needed my privacy. I controlled my temper and assured him, with exaggerated formality, that I’d be sure to consult the welcome pack once I’d eaten. At the mention of food, he became solicitous again, and mentioned that a light supper had been prepared for me in the dining room.

  Somewhat mollified, I sat down in stately isolation at the head of one of the long tables, and ate salad and cold cuts under the eye of the founder, whose faintly expressionist portrait hung high on the end wall. He was a lean, clean-shaven man with a prominent forehead and dark hair with streaks of gray at the temples, his arms folded over the wide lapels of a double-breasted jacket. The picture had none of the macho colossus-bestriding-the-globe quality that most executives require when commissioning representations of themselves. His expression was pensive, even slightly uncertain. He looked sideways out of the frame, instead of meeting the viewer’s eye. Somehow the picture made the idea of its subject possessing a “philosophy” less pompous and absurd.

  Later, in my room, I lay on my bed and looked at the handbook. There were color pictures of the house and grounds, and portraits of a few distinguished past fellows—a middle-brow novelist, a famous painter whose work, I now realized, hung in the reception room. The brochure was illustrated with a lot of boilerplate about Deuter’s commitment to the values and ideals of openness, free markets and the sacredness of individual choice. Deuter’s hagiography took up several pages: the Wehrmacht officer who became a stalwart Christian Democrat, the young industrial chemist who had climbed through the rubble of his family home to retrieve a few things to sell for food, but within five years found investors to back him in a major project, repairing and recommissioning a plant to refine Titanium Dioxide, the ubiquitous white pigment that brought light into the darkness of Germany’s postwar domestic spaces. There were pictures of Deuter examining gleaming white bathroom tiles, white painted walls, white plastics, toothpaste, Deuter chatting to young women working at conveyor belts strewn with white tablets, conferring with technicians beside giant fractionating columns.

  He was picked out by the fledgling BRD government as a talent worth supporting, a necessary man, one of the conjurers of the Wirtschaftswunder, the national economic miracle. TiO2 white is prized for its optical brightness, I read. It is prized for its opacity.

  By 1960 Deuter had built a huge conglomerate, with divisions specializing in food, agriculture, pharmaceuticals and paint. From a standing start in 1946, it was an incredible feat. In 1962 he was pictured with Chancellor Adenauer, at the opening of a shipping terminal in Hamburg. In 1975 he addressed a meeting of the Confederation of German Industries, quoting Cicero: We are not born for ourselves alone, but our country claims a share of our being, and our friends a share; and since, as the Stoics hold, everything that the earth produces is created for man’s use; and as men, too, are born for the sake of men, that they may be able mutually to help one another; in this direction we ought to follow Nature as our guide, to contribute to the general good by an interchange of acts of kindness, by giving and receiving, and thus by our skill, our industry, and our talents to cement human society more closely together, man to man.

  In this period, Deuter gave many interviews and occasionally even wrote editorials expressing his belief in “cementing human society” through industry. He was photographed with liberal intellectuals, and was frequently quoted as saying that the royal road to the future lay in confronting the darkness of the past. The values of openness and transparency were the foundation of Deuter AG’s contributions to the “general good.”

  In 1977, during the so-called German Autumn, Deuter was sitting on the terrace of the villa reading a newspaper, when a young Red Army Faction terrorist, who gained entry by pretending to be delivering flowers, forced her way past the housekeeper and shot him three times with a handgun. The class enemy was hit in the leg and stomach, and spent several months in hospital. According to the handbook, he never fully recovered his health, and his death in 1985 was hastened by the injuries.

  The anonymous author of the handbook wrote that Herr Deuter’s encounter with terror reinforced his belief in the values of openness and transparency. “The Deuter Center was conceived,” according to the copywriter, “as a microcosm of the wider public sphere. Scholars at the Center contribute to the development of their own communal space, providing open access to their decision-making and research processes, sharing time and resources, negotiating among themselves and pooling their thoughts in the public labor of scholarship. The Center is thus an experimental community as well as a world-class center of excellence.”

  I assume that at some point in the application process I must have read this paragraph, but, focused as I had been on the offer of free accommodation and a stipend, I had failed to register the radical nature of the Center’s ambitions. All the same, I did not understand why my participation in the public sphere, microcosmic or otherwise, had to take place in that awful open-plan office. I skyped Rei to tell her that I’d arrived safely. How was it, she asked. Fine, I said. A little weird.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING I breakfasted alone in the dining room, looking out at the frozen lake and feeling like an off-season guest at a grand hotel. Would I care for eggs? The waiter introduced himself, a man in his thirties with the ripped-open smile of a nurse or a home help, someone whose personality had been formed by long hours of affective labor. We engaged in a short conversation, appropriate to two people who would be seeing each other every day for several months. He turned out to be a local history enthusiast, pointing out houses on the other side of the water that had once belonged to artists and actors, part of a summer colony that had made Wannsee into a fashionable resort in the years before the First World War. “And of course,” he said, lowering his voice as if someone were there to overhear us in that big empty dining room, “the gray villa next to the tall white building, the one half-hidden by trees, is the venue of the Wannsee Conference.” I nodded and said I had heard of it, but he felt the need to complete his explanation. “Where the final solution to the Jewish Question was planned in 1942.” Politely I looked in the direction he indicated. The house was too far away to see clearly.

  After breakfast, I went back to my room, which I found thoroughly clean and tidy. My three pairs of shoes stood in a row in front of the cupboard. Dirty clothes had been folded and put in a pile on the chair. I experienced the odd combination of shame and excitement that hotel housekeeping services always induces, the feeling that one’s privacy has been violated, but with such obsequiousness that it constitutes an invitation to discount the particular human existence of the violator, the one who has done the wiping and folding and lining up in r
ows.

  I locked the door on my neat room and went to meet the director of hospitality, who was in charge of my orientation. Frau Janowitz turned out to be a woman in her fifties with a tight ponytail and a ponderously hostile manner. After a few pleasantries I explained “my situation,” and she said I should, of course, do what was best for my work. That “of course” contained more than a hint of its opposite and it was clear that she intended me to understand that my objections were both absurd and inconvenient. Unfortunately, the process of orientation had several stages, and we were obliged to spend the morning together. We made pained small talk (she liked sailing and had previously worked for a hotel) and she took me to see various staff members who would be assisting me during my stay. I signed paperwork for the librarian and the accountant who was going to issue my per diem. Two shifty-looking men from the IT department issued me with a keycard and a fancy biometric ID. I felt uncomfortable sitting and staring into their iris scanner, distracted by the sleepy-eyed cartoon frog on the technician’s tee shirt as he adjusted the equipment. I considered objecting (“why is this necessary?”) but I couldn’t articulate my reasons and it seemed simplest to comply. They said some more stuff about openness and transparency and I nodded along while they droned on about logs and data retention. Finally, exhausted, I stood with Frau Janowitz as she knocked on the door of the executive director, Herr Doktor Weber. He was, she informed me, a very cultured man, a former career diplomat.