Twentieth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

It’s entirely possible to watch all nine seasons of The Office without asking the obvious: Is Jim Halpert Looking at Me? The gaze hardly ever breaks the shell of our attention. The covert character of The Jim Halpert Gaze is in many ways the model of neo-liberalism itself. It’s covert, uniform, efficient, and repeatable. It’s a performance of constant, welcomed intrusion, which theatre abstracts into intentional technique: a break in the fourth wall. Something of a practical joke, the break in the fourth wall alerts the audience to the fact that both the actors and the audience are always playing socially determined roles. In The Office, however, that joke isn’t funny anymore. The fetish character of the Jim Halpert Gaze emerges. Jim Halpert is one of us; we are one of him. We care about Jim; he cares about us. We are, by the sentimentality of the American sitcom, reminded of our devotion to brotherhood, to family. By abolishing the individual and reinstalling it as an accident of a much larger phenomenological type—mankind, society, Christianity etc.—the liberal order mutilates interpersonal relationships into universal patterns of exchange. Jim’s gaze becomes a repeated intrusive thought. It repeats its solemn command and instructs us thus: the well-adjusted enlightened subject must become utterly resigned to revile those around it; to dismiss the naïve exertions of others as stupid and embarrassing; to find success in the image of the pitiless scientist, the capitalist boss, and the fascist father.