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Excerpt from
The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning

Chapter One

The Bank Teller
The Experiential Origins of Hierarchy

Imagine a row of bank tellers serving customers in a typical American bank. Although all of them appear to be performing competently, taking and giving paper, opening and closing drawers, showing for the most part efficient politeness and a good mood to each person who approaches the window, we know that they are under a great deal of stress. We know this not primarily because we know the objective conditions that define their respective situations—that they must perform a repetitive series of manual operations very rapidly in order to keep their jobs, earn a subsistence wage, and so forth—but because we detect in each of them, simply from the vantage point of an onlooker, a continual artificiality. Each reveals in every word and gesture what we might call the attitude of being a bank teller. Each feels compelled to enact an "efficient politeness" and a "good mood." They feel this politeness and good mood not as spontaneous expression, but as a kind of role that is somehow superimposed on their being from an experiential "outside."

Thus we can detect that they feel somehow "outside" themselves and "inside" the enacted role of being-a-bank-teller. And we can detect that this is stressful to each of them precisely to the degree that it is artificial, that through being compelled to feel artificial in this way they feel at the same time unable to express themselves spontaneously. Neither we nor they can know what this spontaneous expression would look like exactly because both we and they feel it only as an absence.

A good way of measuring this absence is to notice that each gesture is a moment "behind" or "too late," and it is this fraction of delay time that reveals to us the gesture's enacted quality. We can see that they are perpetually acting as if they were bank tellers, and one way of measuring the gap between these as-if performances and the absent spontaneity that is somehow buried inside them is in the felt sense that if spontaneity were to somehow "break through" (as sometimes happens), the delay time would vanish, absorbed in the plenitude of total presence. A whole person would have momentarily erupted through the split being of the "bank teller"; through the split "between" the as-if performance and the absence that is immanently bound within it. In a milieu of as-if performances like those of the row of bank tellers, the absent spontaneity cannot be described positively, but only negatively as something "not there," although we would immediately recognize its positive incarnation if it were suddenly to appear—we would feel that that is what was missing or "not there" a moment before.

This feeling of being perpetually trapped within an as-if performance that seems to come from the outside is an experience of ontological passivity. By this I mean that in their very being these bank tellers feel a loss of agency in relation to their own movements. They feel compelled to enact a "self" that is somehow not their self but another self that seems to move through them in the form of a role and that leaves them feeling "other" to themselves and "other" to each of the others with whom they interact. Yet this feeling of "otherness" is not a feeling that descends on the tellers individually; it is rather a collective phenomenon that unites the tellers to one another in a perverse way. Thus a new teller, when she first arrives at the bank, will proceed to indoctrinate herself into her own passivity by taking cues from all the others in discovering how to act (or how to enact herself), and in so doing she will gradually come to feel "with" the others in an as-if way, in the sense that she will come to feel, as do each of the others, that they are all undergoing the same passive experience which establishes among them a social bond. But since this social bond is constituted as a feeling of being other-than-themselves-together, of being collectively trapped within the same role, it is simultaneously pervaded by a collective sense of universal isolation, since no one is capable of really making contact with any of the others spontaneously without violating the norms of being-a-bank-teller.

Ontological passivity is, therefore, a collective experience that simultaneously divides a group of people by an infinite distance and unites them in the false communion of being-other-than-themselves-together. The source of this collective passivity and impotence is to be found in the relation of the tellers to the bank as an institution. This "bank" has a double reality, or rather its singular reality must be understood simultaneously from two points of view. On the one hand, the bank is a functional organization of human labor that has a determinate relation to economic production, in that it serves to reproduce finance capital in what economists call an "efficient" way. There is a certain division of labor that corresponds to a certain level of technological development, and the functional organization of work that derives from this correspondence bears a definite relationship to a system of economic pressures (this bank must compete with other banks, and so forth). But this approach to defining what the bank is can tell us nothing about why the tellers behave and feel as they do, because it is an approach that turns the bank into a thing.

To understand the bank as a living milieu, we must attempt to grasp "the bank" from the inside, as it is experienced by the people who dwell "within it" and who thereby create it as a collective Gestalt. In this subjective sense, the institution of "the bank" is, as we shall see, an imaginary entity to which the tellers (as well as the other "bank personnel," the customers, and so forth) have given over their being by believing in "its" existence as a determining power. Precisely to the degree that the tellers feel a loss of agency in relation to themselves, they feel themselves to be agents of "the bank" as an imaginary entity, and they feel themselves to be united with one another or socially bonded in relation to this imaginary entity. It is not an economic method of explanation but rather a sociophenomenological method of description that can make "the bank" intelligible as a lived experience for the people who create and then "inhabit" it.

The first step in gaining access to this lived experience is to detach ourselves in a radical way from the social milieu that is generated through the communication of signs (spoken language, tone of voice, gestures, and so forth) within the bank. If we can manage to attain this hyperobjective viewpoint, we can observe something that is at once perfectly obvious and normally very difficult to see or "remember"—namely, that "the bank," for all of its pretense and style, consists of nothing more than a group of people in a room. From this position of hyperobjectivity through which the social interactions before us are stripped of their symbolic and signifying content, we do not experience "the bank" at all except perhaps as a kind of random fact about what they call this type of social gathering ("this is what they call `a bank'"). Yet to the people immersed within the socially communicated reality within the room, "the bank" has a ubiquitous presence—in fact, they cannot, except in very private and quasi-unconscious moments of distraction, escape from their absorption in "the bank" and see before them simply a roomful of people. This person who approaches the window is first of all a "customer," that person on the left is first of all a "teller like me," those velvet ropes are first of all not merely ropes but signs that "the bank" uses to "line up the customers," just as the adjacent machine with the green lights is first of all a "computer" that "the bank" uses to retrieve information about "customer accounts." Every object and person within the room, in other words, is always already layered over with a relatively impenetrable symbolic coating that seems to derive from this "bank," this entity that appears to allocate to each person a role and to each object a signifying power.

Yet from this subjective point of view, "the bank" is nowhere. It does not reside in the Board of Directors or in the President's office, or anywhere else except in the minds of those who believe in its existence as a kind of phantom presence that has vampirized their being and made them agents of its imaginary power. How does this collective internalization of "the bank" take place?

The answer to this question is to be found in a complex reciprocal relationship between the role of collective anxiety and the role of the bank hierarchy in shaping the internal experience of each of the bank's members. At a very deep and basic level, every person in the room feels that she is subject to both the physical and psychological power of other people, that if she fails to conform to the norms of expected behavior within the bank, she will be thrown out of the bank by force or be subject to psychological humiliation. If a "customer" fails to act like a "customer," he will be thrown out by a man with a gun; if a "teller" fails to act like a "teller," she will be fired or at least risk being socially ostracized; the same or similar sanctions are available for the "President" and even the "Chairman of the Board." This fear of dismissal in both the physical and the psychological sense is ever present at what we might call "the base" of everyone's experience, and it establishes the experiential ground for the transmutation of people's being that occurs through the internalization of the "bank," in the sense that if these conditions were not present, people might refuse to conform to what was expected of them and recover their spontaneity.

What is the source of this shared anxiety among the bank's members that each of them is in danger of being "dismissed" or humiliated by a dominant other? In part, this fear is a rational response to real inequalities of power in the bank, to the fact that many of the bank's workers must depend for their survival on owners who may be indifferent to them except as factors of production and who have the power to deprive them of both their income and their sense of social identity. But a deeper reason for the anxiety, and one that may even account for the persistence of the inequalities of economic power, is a contradiction that exists at the heart of everyone's experience. On the one hand, each person wants to connect with the others in a life-giving way, to make contact in a way that would produce a feeling of genuine recognition and mutual confirmation. This desire is fundamental to being a social person, and it animates all of us in every moment of our existence. Yet at the same time, everyone has learned to fear this very desire because its realization implies an openness to the other that leaves the self essentially vulnerable and risks a kind of total humiliation should the other respond with "disconfirmation," domination, or rejection. Since the experience of genuine connection and confirmation has been very rare for all the bank's members owing to the alienation and mistrust that pervades our social world, and since their desire for it is therefore associated with the anticipation of pain and loss, the very existence of others has become a source of ontological anxiety for them. Each person has learned to expect to be "dismissed," and so each seeks to avoid being fully present to the other by mediating his presence through a distancing persona and by making himself unconscious that this mediation has occurred.

The transmutation of each person's authentic being into a false or as-if self, therefore, occurs through a process of collective and reciprocal flight on the part of everyone from experiencing his or her own desire for real contact and the vulnerability this desire implies. By absorbing themselves in their role-performances and implicitly asserting (to themselves and others) that these performances constitute who they really are, the bank's members try to withdraw the immediacy of their social presence from their outward appearance, becoming anonymous "bank tellers," "customers," "Vice Presidents," and so on, whose artificiality makes them inaccessible to the threat of the other's gaze. The lack of agency that we earlier observed in the tellers' relationship to their own movements can now be understood as the outcome of an intentional effort to "empty" their role-performances of any signs of authorship or personal identity, and the delay time we observed in their gestures can now be seen as reflective of a chronic self-consciousness through which their outward expression is repeatedly uncoupled from its generative foundation. Yet we must ask ourselves why, if the desire for genuine connection is really a basic aspect of our being, do these tellers not find a way of resisting this perpetual flight that can only leave them continually threatened and isolated? The answer is that while they all feel the same unrealized desire, no one can ordinarily gain the confidence that the desire she feels within herself is also felt by those around her. From the point of view of her isolated position, each person always already experiences all the others as other-than-themselves, as participants in collective flight. And since the possibility of recovering one's authentic being can come only through being recognized as fully human by another, no one can normally find the strength to resist in a milieu where the possibility of such a recovery is reciprocally denied. Instead, each person feels compelled to become "one of the others" and participate in the collective flight that holds everyone's alienation in place.

The medium through which this collective flight is carried out is commonly called a hierarchy. The bank hierarchy, as I am using the term here, is a purely imaginary entity that is generated by the felt need of everyone to "identify" with "the bank," to establish the ontological basis for one's passivity as a false self by constituting an "other" before whom one can be recognized as false. This hierarchy bears no relation to the direct interpersonal relations through which real power is exercised in the bank, since real power is exercised not "from above" (there is no "above") but by one person acting directly upon another, by the subordination of one to another's will. The hierarchy is rather conjured up imaginatively as a way of escaping the universal sense of danger that I have described: it provides what we might call the imaginary vehicle through which everyone becomes able to find an imaginary and passive station in relation to everyone else. The hierarchy allows each person to substitute a legitimate authority, which is "the bank" itself as a subjectively constituted institution and which can serve as the relational agent for each person's self-falsification, for the illegitimate sense of humiliation that haunts each person's true being and true sense of what is going on in the room.

To see how the hierarchy comes into being, we need only look carefully at the reciprocal interaction that commonly takes place among two tellers and their so-called "supervisor." Let us suppose that the two tellers are called Jane and John, and that the supervisor is called Harold. Jane and John work side by side at their windows. Harold, who is otherwise engaged in a variety of lower-management clerical tasks, walks back and forth behind Jane and John and occasionally looks at them to see not only what they are doing, but who they are being. Jane discovers the contours of her as-if performance through watching John, as John does through watching Jane, and in this sense Jane and John "recognize" one another as "bank tellers." Both, in other words, take the position of "other" to the other and in so doing discover the way of becoming other to themselves. Yet because this relation of reciprocal otherness involves a loss of agency in relation to themselves and a sinking into ontological passivity that is measured by this loss of agency, both of them require an agent to ground their impoverished "identities." They must project into a third party the active power to establish the ontological basis for the series of performances that they experience as passive and lacking in any self-generated agency. Without such a third party, they could not "exist" as "bank tellers" because there would be no source for their being. This role is allocated to Harold, whom they perceive to be their authority (author-ity). And in together perceiving Harold as the source of their being, they also discover their own unification as "tellers-together," which is to say that they discover a social bond through their perception of how they believe Harold perceives them, and this bond reassures them to the degree that it compensates for the feeling of actual isolation that dwells within each of them. Harold allows them to feel the illusion of being "with" one another to the degree that each, in being "other" to each other and "other" to themselves, are "other-together" before Harold, as they perceive him. And because Harold must always remain with them as their relational "authority figure" in order for them to exist as tellers-together, they internalize him and "identify" with him as the one to whom they owe their own identities. Even in his absence, they know how to act because they have internalized his authoritative image and made it part of themselves.

Harold knows how to play his part through his empathic understanding of how tellers are supposed to be, and in fact he enacts his authority in all his relations with them, in his way of approaching them, advising them, and in criticizing their performances. Yet it is evident that this "Harold" we are describing is no more an actual person than are Jane and John. Harold merely plays the part of "supervisor," in that however "active" and "authoritative" he appears for John and Jane, he remains passive in relation to himself. He discovers his being-as-a-supervisor only through the reciprocal internalization of themselves-as-supervisors that characterizes the relations among the supervisors at his level in "the bank," relations that are pervaded by the same passivity that pervades the interrelations among the tellers. The supervisors, in enacting their authority in relation to the tellers, are also "other" to each other and "other" to themselves, and as a result they also require an agency outside themselves to activate and ground their own passivity. Harold finds this agency through his own supervisor, who is perhaps a "Vice President" and who performs for all of the supervisors at Harold's level the same ontological function that Harold performs for the tellers. Thus Harold discovers how to become a supervisor through watching and internalizing how the others at his level enact themselves as as-if authorities, while their actual experience of collective passivity is grounded for them by a superior whom they project and then internalize as the agent of their as-if selves. Thus, in the teller-supervisor-Vice-President relation we discover the ontological foundation of the hierarchy as a form of collective being, a form that I am calling imaginary because it creates the appearance, among people who are in fact simply people, of a top-down ordering that serves to establish each person's sense of his or her imaginary social place.

The paradox of the hierarchy, however, is that no one actually feels in command because the authority that the hierarchy distributes throughout itself is never more than the active role-complement of the universal passivity out of which the hierarchy is born as a projected-internalized, imaginary entity. If, for example, we reach the "top" of the hierarchy, we find a President who does not feel himself to be his own "author," because his authority is merely the as-if authority of a "President" in a "bank." He receives his authority, in other words, from the subjects who constitute him, and this requires of him that he find the basis of his own being outside himself in precisely the same fashion as the others. Yet there is no one "above" him; his ontological recourse is the Board of Directors, who are constituted as the "fiduciaries" of "the bank." In the realm of the imaginary, the "Board of Directors" is comparable to the modern "State," in that just as the State serves as the imaginary basis for the political unification of the "United States" and so establishes for each of us our imaginary identity as "Americans," so the Board of Directors is the incarnate representation of "the bank's" existence as a political organization (and this Board is itself enfranchised by the State, which establishes the political legitimacy of "the bank" as an entity that derives its existence ultimately from the democratic constitution of "the nation"). Thus the "President," like all the other bank personnel, finds his agency outside himself and shapes his being to the set of performances required of him by "the bank" as it is embodied for him through the Board to which he is "accountable" in an imaginary way. And since the Board members experience themselves as fiduciaries in the service of "the bank," we find that the ultimate source of authority within the hierarchy is "the bank" itself, as a phantom "other" to whom everyone "within the bank" owes their as-if existence. In this milieu of universal otherness, "the bank" is believed in as a kind of "God," an object of belief that is invested with authorship or authority for the group as a whole.

The relationship of "the bank" as an imaginary entity to the hierarchy as an imaginary ordering is, therefore, that the hierarchy is the vehicle that the group uses to bring "the bank" to themselves through a series of embodied human gazes. The underlying fear of domination and humiliation from which everyone flees is transmuted, through the constitution of "the bank" and the hierarchy through which it is concretely and intersubjectively mediated, into the shared submission of being-"other"-together before an imaginary object with whom everyone identifies as the active foundation of their passive and false selves. In and through this process, they recover an imaginary sense of being "with" one another as "of the bank," even as they are utterly lost and isolated from one another as real people who would know themselves as agents of their own collective activity.

The self that is produced within this hierarchical environment is, to borrow R. D. Laing's phrase, an ontologically divided one that has a rather complex organization. Each person experiences his or her authentic being as a privatized nonself that is denied recognition and that is therefore "invisible" or unconscious: it is known or comprehended only through the experienced bodily tension that derives from not being oneself and through a continual obsessive and preconscious fantasy life that reaches a dim awareness in moments of distraction (as in being vaguely aware of wanting to sleep with a customer, or in vaguely noticing that a shape on a wall resembles a wild dog). The "visible" or conscious self that is enacted in behavior is experienced as a "public" or "outer" synthesis of as-if performances, which is at once lived as passively undergone to the degree that it lacks any sense of its own agency and yet is "owned" to the degree that each person feels this self as "I." And corresponding to this ontologically passive public self is a projected-internalized active or authoritative "other" that serves as the passive self's agency and that generates within everyone the feeling that one's being is fashioned from the outside. This ontologically divided self-organization is the internalized residue of all forms of social organization within which people lack the actual power to express themselves freely in their practical activity together, which is to say virtually all forms of social life that have existed in human history and that exist today on earth.

Yet because each person's privatized and authentic being continually clamors for recognition in order to realize its desire and explode the false "outer" self that contains this desire, we must look more carefully at the interpersonal dynamic through which everyone's true needs are perpetually subdued in order to see how the clamoring of desire for genuine recognition by the other perpetually checks itself through being held in check by the other. The way to do this is to observe what happens in the event of a disturbance that reaches visibility, as when John begins to complain to the other tellers that he really hates his job, that it somehow makes him feel unreal and like an automaton. If John makes this complaint to Jane alone over a cup of coffee, there is no threat posed to the collective belief in "the bank" because coffee with a quasi friend (they work at adjacent windows) is sanctioned as a private space appropriate for passive commiseration, or in other words, the complaint remains sufficiently private to elicit a restorative concern.

But if John begins to "go public" with his dissatisfaction, he threatens to expose the imaginary nature of "the bank" as the vehicle of collective flight, producing within everyone an anxiety that the humiliation that everyone is fleeing from will be drawn to the surface and will occur for each of them. As a result, to the degree that John reveals himself publicly as being in pain, everyone will adopt toward him the position of the authoritative other through which their passive selves are secured. They will see themselves in John, see their own alienation from themselves and one another recognized through his affirmation of its existence, and so they will secure their own "otherness" to themselves and to one another by taking the position of the agent through whom their passivity is founded. They will act toward him, in other words, as if he is "crazy" and indicate to him that he ought not to be being this way. But in addressing him, they will actually be addressing themselves as they are revealed through him, simultaneously quelling their own anxiety and reestablishing their imaginary connection with one another as depersonalized "personnel," as "of the bank." In taking the position of the authoritative other, they secure a collective reassurance that is also a collective denial. And through this collective denial they perpetually suppress their true desire to recognize one another as fully human beings.

The clamoring for authentic recognition of which I speak is therefore held in check by the perpetual anticipation of this "reversal of voice" whereby the others adopt the attitude of the Other toward each other and themselves. And it is the perpetual conflict between the clamoring for recognition and the anticipation of rejection (for each person knows that he, too, would join the others in rejecting another) that produces collective despair and adaptation. But in order to guarantee that this reciprocal holding-in-check will not unravel, the "lines of authority" through which "the bank" is sustained as a totemic source of unification are usually externalized and represented in a "flowchart," which may appear in an office manual or may even be posted on a wall. This "flowchart" is nothing other than a "constitution" of the imaginary ordering in the hierarchy, and it is the institutional analogue to "the law" insofar as it attempts to legalize in an authoritative document the alienated relations that comprise "the bank" as an imaginary entity. Its image resides within the consciousness of everyone as something that can be pointed to in the event of a disruption, and its effect is to reify these alienated relations, to represent the collective experience of passivity and otherness as a timeless "fact" or "bank life." To the degree that the flowchart is internalized by everyone in this way, it establishes for everyone the basis of their abstract integration with all of the others, or in other words, it generates an appearance of social unification that contradicts the felt sense of isolation and disconnectedness that pervades each person's private experience of being in the room. As such it is both reassuring and compensatory insofar as it signifies to each person that she is "of the group" (that she is "part of something"), and repressive insofar as its abstract image of social integration is a denial of each person's concrete sense of the truth.

As a sign that is "pointed to" in the event of a disruption, the flowchart becomes an interpretive document that inscribes the necessity for both the passivity of the self, which is signified as an abstract "role" within each box, and the inevitability of reversal, which is represented in the lines linking the flowchart boxes from top to bottom. The chart is therefore a spatial representation of the temporal experience (for everyone) of being-in-the-bank, and because the spatial inscription appears as something fixed (instead of being merely the drawing that it actually is) it functions, insofar as it is internalized, as a social defense mechanism. It becomes, in other words, a shared internalized representation of "the group" that simultaneously inhibits everyone's genuine impulses for connection and recognition and partially gratifies these impulses in an imaginary way.

This, then, is a "bank" as it appears to the people who "inhabit" it. As a social institution, or an institutionalization of a particular way of being social, it is obviously not unique, but rather typical of virtually every social formation in contemporary society. Changing such institutions requires overcoming the alienation and fear that give rise to them. And this will not happen until we find a way of collectively gaining confidence that the desire we each secretly feel within ourselves exists with equal intensity in those around us, no matter how remote, threatening, or unreal they feel compelled to make themselves appear.

--From The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning, by Peter Gabel. © June 1, 2000 , Acada Books used by permission. Available through www.spdbooks.org in paperback or clothbound editions.