SADIA SHIRAZI

An American Invention

Through her exhibition In Polite English One First Disagrees by Agreeing, Jessica Vaughn brings together the cubicle, an American invention, and what W. E. B. Du Bois referred to as “the problem of the color-line.”¹ Vaughn draws together the plan layout of the typical office, dictated by the U.S. government through publications such as the “Peach Book,” and prohibitions against racial discrimination in the workplace, dictated by affirmative action policies. It is only through legislation followed by enforcement that these “material” specifications are met, for both the office building and the racial composition of the office. While Vaughn’s investment in form and materiality recalls minimalist practices, she does not sever industrial materials from their means of production. Vaughn instead foregrounds neoliberal racial capitalism and the invisibilized specter of labor in the complex networks of industrial production and post-industrial office work.

When we discuss changes in office design, it is the cramped work spaces of middle managers and lower-level clerical staff that we talk about, not the executive’s office. The drab three-sided cubicle typical of office work today was originally designed in 1964 by the architect George Nelson and the inventor Robert Propst for the furniture company Herman Miller.² Their design was colorful, configurable, and afforded more privacy than the open-plan bullpen office of the 1950s.³ While the Action Office I met with rave reviews, it did not sell—its high-end materials were expensive and it was so flexible that it was difficult for users to configure. Over the next three years, Propst set about redesigning the furniture, this time without Nelson, to make it more standardized and cheaper to produce. The Action Office II, released in 1968, had fixed partition heights and the colorful tones of the earlier fabric-covered walls were replaced by lackluster tackboard, a surface that was now all the worker could control. The AO-II sold very well, inspiring other companies to produce copycat designs that were streamlined even further: the 120-degree angles of the walls in the AO-II were reduced to ninety degrees, the cubicle’s overall square footage shrank, and the materials were even cheaper. The knock-off cubicles could be laid down side to side and back to back in a grid, a setup made iconic in popular culture: the television show The Office (2001, 2005), for example, and films set in software companies and call centers including Office Space (1999), John & Jane (2005), and Sorry to Bother You (2018). Later in life, Propst mourned the “monolithic insanity” of the endless grid of cramped workspace cubicles based on his original design.⁴

The design of new prototypes for office furniture, such as the cubicle, occurred in tandem with technological advances in architecture during the federally funded postwar construction boom. The United Nations Secretariat Building and Lever House, both constructed in the 1950s in New York, were the first two buildings to use the new, lightweight, curtain-wall technology, which, along with advances in mechanical systems and electricity, freed the building plan from the constraints of maximizing air flow and access to natural light. The modern skyscraper’s impermeable glass-and-steel facade segregated its interior from the exterior environment, and its steel structural grid opened up floor space, unencumbered by load-bearing walls. The new floor plates consisted of open fields of thin column grids, with centralized service cores—staircases, elevators, mechanical services, restrooms—what the architect Rem Koolhaas calls the American invention of the “Typical Plan.” Koolhaas observes, “Typical Plan is minimalism for the masses . . . the utilitarian is refined as a sensuous science of coordination—column grids, facade modules, ceiling tiles, lighting fixtures, partitions, electrical outlets, flooring, furniture, color schemes, air-conditioning grills—that transcends the practical to emerge in a rarefied existential domain of pure objectivity.”⁵ What Koolhaas calls the typical plan’s “pure objectivity” is part of the calculus of American capitalist growth, which he celebrates while ignoring its imperial and racial dimensions.⁶ How is the typical plan inflected when it is seen as arising from the convergence of American racial segregation, free-market pragmatism, and the influence of modernist towers in postwar Europe?⁷ When Koolhaas asks “Did the plan without qualities create men without qualities?” and “Was the space of Typical Plan the incubator of the man in the gray flannel suit?,” it is the unmarked white man, in racially segregated postwar America, whom he centers.⁸

The Typical Office

The typical plan’s corollary is the typical office. If unfettered free-market capitalism produced the former, the federal government provided the blueprint for the latter. In 1971, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) produced a Building Systems Program (BSP) that laid out performance specifications, building-system standards, and step-by-step procurement processes for contractors bidding for federal office-building contracts.⁹ In its revised third edition, from 1975, what was referred to as the “Peach Book” (because of the color of its cover) expanded its scope to include an entire section on the new typology of office cubicles, referred to as “Space Dividers.”¹⁰ Along with diagrams of standardized configurations for the layout and height of cubicle partitions, the book contains calculations of optimal acoustic performance and of stain resistance for fabrics.

While the core of the Peach Book is a systems approach that expedites construction through time and cost-saving efforts, the user’s needs are central to the book’s rationale.¹¹ An employee’s performance, it was understood, was heavily impacted by his or her work environment, and there is no performance measurement without a specific building user’s needs in mind.¹² Who were the envisioned users of these office buildings? And around what kind of body were the building-system standard specifications designed? The de facto user for the GSA’s Peach Book, as for Koolhaas, was the unmarked (able-bodied) white man. The “marked” body emerges as a gendered difference, first in acoustic specifications, in relation to differing footfall-sound levels from male and female walkers,¹³ and then in disability access,¹⁴ in relation to “handicapped persons,” a result of the introduction of the accessible-design standard of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) A117.1 (1961) and the subsequent passage in Congress of the Architecture Barriers Act in 1968.¹⁵ The sound of the footfalls of able-bodied white men and women is a measurable part of compliance calculations, as is the accessibility granted to the presumably white disabled body. Race is nowhere and everywhere in the Peach Book.

During the second half of the twentieth century, when the typical plan, the cubicle, and the Peach Book emerged, racial segregation and discrimination were running rampant across housing, education, and employment. The transformations of America’s urban landscape in the 1960s were wrought through federally funded projects, and were set against a backdrop of police violence, civil-rights mobilization, anti–Vietnam War protests, deindustrialization, desegregation, white flight, “urban renewal,” the downsizing of blue-collar factory work, and the upsurge in white-collar work, for those who could get it. By the 1970s the downtown skyscraper was the icon of a nascent neoliberal project, with suburban home ownership its domestic anchor. In both areas, federal policies were providing avenues for class mobility limited to one subject: white American men (and their families).¹⁶ The construction boom, the new building technologies, and the partitioning of the open office with cubicles were synchronous with racial minorities demanding access to work in spaces that were neither designed nor designated for them. Whatever modifications and accessibility requirements women and disabled workers were granted in the Peach Book did not extend to people of color until and unless they were given access to these spaces.

Vanilla Nightmares: How Affirmative Action Became Neoliberal Diversity

What is called “affirmative action” began as a series of government statutes in the 1950s responding to the demands of Black and Latinx labor movements for access to federal construction contracts, particularly for buildings going up in their cities.¹⁷ These grassroots labor and civil rights movements¹⁸ formed the backdrop to the passage of President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 (1961),¹⁹ which mandated that government contractors take “affirmative action” to ensure their employment practices did not discriminate based on race, creed, color, or national origin. The order also required government contractors with complaints brought against them to document their adherence to affirmative action through what it called “compliance reports.” After Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed forward the Civil Rights Act of 1964, whose Title VII prohibits discrimination by employers on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in both federal contracts and employment at large. Since compliance with constitutional mandates against racial discrimination had no effect without enforcement, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established a year later to enforce anti-discrimination laws rather than simply overseeing compliance. Johnson also issued Executive Order 11246 (1965), which established concrete requirements for white businesses to increase their employment of underrepresented groups or face losing their government contracts; the order also required white contractors to furnish timetables and accountability plans for increasing employment of racial minorities.²⁰

Affirmative action’s successes were short-lived. The Supreme Court upheld the order in some cases but dealt it its first blow in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). In this case, a policy intended to eliminate racial discrimination and redistribute wealth to minority racial and ethnic groups was attacked for giving preferential treatment to minorities. Allan Bakke, a white veteran who was refused admission to medical school, attributed the rejection as discriminatory, claiming it favored people of color through admission quotas, at the expense of more “qualified” white people such as himself.²¹ In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan further undermined affirmative action through conservative court appointments and by cutting the budgets and staffs of enforcement agencies, even though antidiscrimination compliance cases were increasing in number.²² As a result, collective justice that acknowledged the generational legacies of slavery and racial discrimination rapidly gave way to a discourse of “diversity.” While affirmative action did bring some improvement to racial minorities in its first two decades, its biggest beneficiaries later on were and continue to be working white women.²³ Management remains a bastion of white men and, increasingly, white women, while lower-level work in government and corporate offices is where people of color are concentrated.

Adrian Piper’s Vanilla Nightmares #9 (1986) is drawn on the front page of the New York Times of Thursday, July 3, 1986. That page announced a Supreme Court decision that challenged Reagan’s policies against affirmative action, upholding “racial preferences” in hiring minorities, even potential employees who had not been the “identified victims” of prior racial discrimination, as a remedy for governmental employers’ past discrimination.²⁴ Using charcoal and oil crayon, Piper drew a group of oversize black figures with clenched fists and stern gazes, suggesting unconscious, atavistic projections from the minds of the paper’s white liberal readership, and those readers’ resistance to measures attempting to rectify the historical discrimination against Black people in the American workplace.²⁵ Above the Times headline “Affirmative Action Upheld by High Court as Remedy For Past Job Discrimination,” Piper’s prescient handwritten text reads “What if. . . ?”

The history of the cubicle, then, is also a hidden history of racial exclusion in America. If the Action Office was originally designed to enhance creativity and encourage spontaneity in a user-controlled reconfigurable space, its development into the fixed cubicle was justified through recourse to neoliberal discourses of optimization and efficiency. Similarly, affirmative action was intended as a structural redress for historic racial discrimination, and compliance with it was to be enforced through federal and state initiatives, but it, too, was replaced with the ambiguity of “diversity,” the ‘“neutral” free-market forces of capital being trusted to self-correct for racial discrimination while they in fact provided social and economic mobility almost exclusively to white people.

In Polite English One First Disagrees by Agreeing

The cubicles installed in Vaughn’s exhibition are produced by Steelcase, the world’s largest maker of office furniture (Herman Miller comes in second). They are repurposed from the workspaces of employees of the State Department of Education in Austin, Texas. The process by which the artist has procured the objects demonstrates a deftness in navigating the complex communication networks of large bureaucracies, a skill perhaps informed by her own experiences of clerical work in corporate offices. The reappropriated C-shaped partitions are American-made steel frames wrapped in a dull gray fabric that is slightly discolored from use, with almost imperceptible gaps in the self-healing tackboard where office workers may have collaged memos, memorabilia, and personal photographs.

The installation consists of rows of cubicles, with gaps between them that could fit one more. Perhaps a few people were let go and a few cubicles were removed, due to space reduction or downsizing.²⁶ These cubicles represent particular classed and raced bodies. Vaughn brings the history of of the typical plan, the cubicle, and the building technology that housed them together with the unacknowledged history they share, of racial discrimination and the decimation of affirmative action, revealing the invisibilized specter of racialized labor in the postindustrial office. The cubicle, for Vaughn, is the material accretion of these distinct threads of architecture, compliance, and racial discrimination.²⁷

The title of Vaughn’s exhibition, In Polite English One First Disagrees by Agreeing, is drawn from a directive the artist found in corporate diversity-training videos from the ’90s proposing best practices for hiring managers. A new video work of the artist’s includes cuts of women’s hands at work—moving the mouse of a computer, dialing a number on a phone, securing a man’s seat belt—the repetitive tasks of affective and immaterial labor that are part of postindustrial capitalism. Vaughn intersperses found and shot footage and overlays text drawn from managerial manuals extolling workers of color to be enterprising individuals, internalizing neoliberal edicts to produce value for exchange in the marketplace.²⁸ “Valuing differences is about productivity. When you learn to be bicultural you can succeed in the organization and maintain your own identity and integrity,” one video explicitly asserts.²⁹ Yet the devolution of compliance-enforced affirmative-action policies into self-regulated neoliberal diversity has resulted in the maintenance of the racial status quo, which we today call white supremacy.³⁰ The most “diverse” offices and classrooms are always only the ones found in these training videos.