VERY BUSY JUST NOW: GLOBALIZATION AND HARRIEDNESS
IN ISHIGURO'S THE UNCONSOLED
READERS
OF Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day (1989) will have no trouble
remembering the novel’s case against professionalism. “Our professional duty
is not to our own foibles and sentiments,” the butler-protagonist tells Miss
Kenton, “but to the wishes of our employer.” Professionalism, the
explicit center of the butler’s belief-system, seems responsible both for his
personal sacrifice of love with Miss Kenton and for his moral failure in backing
his employer’s pro-Nazi diplomacy. Lord Darlington convenes a conference of
European diplomats at Darlington Hall in March 1923 in order to make “a strong
moral case for a relaxing of various aspects of the Versailles treaty,
emphasizing the great suffering he had himself witnessed in Germany.” In
the years and pages that follow, we see Lord Darlington as an open anti-Semite
whose efforts to stop the approaching war with Germany align him with the
fascists. In case we miss the point, the 1923 conference is also the moment when
the butler’s father, lying upstairs gravely ill, has a stroke and dies while
Stevens himself, who has been warned that the end is near, refuses to interrupt
his professional attentions to the diplomats downstairs. Told that his father
has passed away, he remarks that he is “very busy just now.”
It does not seem accidental that
Ishiguro’s case against professionalism, which leads the butler to serve Lord
Darlington’s ends so blindly, is simultaneously a case against
cosmopolitanism. Each is presented as an unnatural detachment from ordinary
emotions: erotic love, love of country. Each also offers substitute emotions,
re-attachments, and these substitute emotions are reciprocally reinforcing. Lord
Darlington’s cosmopolitanism, the novel suggests, stems from his aristocratic
status; rather than indifference, it expresses a positive solidarity with his
German fellow aristocrats that’s more compelling to him than the interests he
shares with fellow Englishmen of the lower orders. “‘He was my enemy,’”
Darlington observes of a German diplomat, “‘but he always behaved like a
gentleman. We treated each other decently over six months of shelling each
other. He was a gentleman doing his job and I bore him no malice.’” A
gentleman doing his job: skipping forward in time, one is tempted to say that
doing your job competently has become the modern equivalent of feudalism’s
pre-national gentility. For it too overrides the moral obligations of national
membership by conferring the moral privilege of trans-national membership: the
privilege of being treated decently despite shelling or other forms of
long-range aggression. One can speculate, in other words, that professionalism
has replaced aristocracy in providing a social glue and ethical grounding for
cosmopolitanism. This would explain why, for example, Alvin Gouldner sees his
“New Class,” a forerunner of the Ehrenreichs’ “professional-managerial
class” and Robert Reich’s “symbolic analysts,” as encouraging “a
cosmopolitan identity, transcending national limits and enhancing their autonomy
from local elites.” With its peculiar ability to produce bonds among
detached, institutionally scattered subjects, bonds that are suffused with
affect though not always created or sustained by the frequent face-to-face
engagements of the same-site work group, professionalism would seem well suited
to new trans-national demands for loyalty and solidarity at a distance, whether
corporate or quasi-governmental. The question is whether this is any cause for
celebration.
Common sense would suggest, with Ishiguro’s apparent blessing, that it is
anything but. In his book Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief
Industry in Africa, Alex de Waal strikes a representative note of cynicism when
he suggests that “the struggle against famine has become professionalized and
institutionalized.” It has been taken over, that is, by a
“cosmopolitan elite of relief workers, officials of donor agencies, consultant
academics and the like,” and these people are mainly concerned with
establishing “moral ownership of famine,” “widening the scope for
humanitarian and human rights organizations to intrude (in certain ways) into
the affairs of African nations.” Quoting Ivan Illich, who advocates the
abolition of schools and hospitals in the name of peasant self-sufficiency, de
Waal proposes that “‘to help [is] to interfere.’” He suggests that
“the intrusion of humanitarian institutions represents, in an insidious but
profound way, a disempowerment of the people directly engaged in the crisis,
which drains their capacity to find a solution . . . external involvement,
however well-intentioned, almost invariably damages the search for local
political solutions.”
People like ourselves tend to be ambivalent about professional activities,
including our own, and about any activities that cross national borders,
especially when they claim to serve purely humanitarian interests. Given the
inequality of access to trans-national mobility and to credentials, as well as
the many reasons to distrust those humanitarian, altruistic rationales that
cosmopolitanism and professionalism share, and given that warm affective ties
within the profession are no guarantee of its ethical value from the perspective
of those outside it, such ambivalence is probably on the whole a good and
necessary thing. Still, people like ourselves should also suspect the general
eagerness to view all professional claims to the “common good” as solely and
inevitably a devious form of self-interest. Consider what the model of
professionalism-as-disempowerment would suggest about such features of the
social welfare state as—to take a pertinent example—taxpayer-supported
public education. According to this model, public education would have to be
seen as a conspiracy of the Powers That Be to create teaching jobs for the
professional-managerial elite while also de-educating and mis-educating the
masses. It could not be seen, alternatively, as a political compromise arrived
at in large part because working class people demanded free public education for
their children and actively fought for it. It’s as if providing jobs for
middle-class teachers could only be a zero-sum game whereby working class
families lost out for each teacher hired.
This zero-sum logic does not seem any more persuasive when it is aimed at
humanitarian NGOs (non-governmental organizations) working transnationally,
whatever other critiques may apply. Thus the interesting doubling up of
anti-professionalism and anti-cosmopolitanism, whether in famine relief or in
Ishiguro, provides an occasion when common sense seems to stand in double need
of adjustment. That is the first hypothesis here. The second is that, thanks to
this same doubling or mutual reinforcement, ambivalence about work also
expresses ambivalence about globalization. In other words, the doubling is a
perceptual convenience making it possible to work through the meaning of the
latter in terms of the former.