Having done temp work for three years, I can tell you that jobs are usually only about learning a set of actions. That is, they teach you the role and the routine, and if you stay long enough, eventually you might become conscious of what exactly it is you’re doing. Permanent staff with positions of authority have that consciousness – they understand what they are doing, but for many others it’s very much about following the routine.

In this manner, work is separated from achievement, and form is separated from content. The form is what you’re taught in your first day or week. The content is optional. In fact you may actually be discouraged from asking why you are doing such-and-such, that is, seeking out the content of your actions.

John Ralston Saul, writing in his 2008 book A Fair Country states

Increasingly our elites attempt to slip into the vacuum behind other people’s actions. Worse still, they attempt to imitate the surface appearance, not the reality, or other people’s actions. (p226)

This echoes his dissection of the separation of form from content in 1994’s Doubters Companion (‘White Bread’):

White Bread Post-modern urban individuals, who spend their days in offices, have taken to insisting that she or he is primarily a physical being equipped with the muscles of a work-horse and the clothes of a cowboy. The rejection of white bread in favor of loaves compacted with the sort of coarse, scarcely ground grains once consumed solely by the poor follows quite naturally.

White bread is the sophisticated product of a civilization taken to its ideological conclusion: essential goods originally limited by their use in daily life have been continually refined until all utility has been removed. Utility is vulgar. In this particular case, nutrition and fibre were the principal enemies of progress. With the disappearance of utility what remains is form, the highest quality of high civilizations.

And whenever form presides, it replaces ordinary content with logic and artifice. The North American loaf may be tasteless but remains eternally fresh thanks to the efficient use of chemicals. The French baguette turns into solidified sawdust within two hours of being baked, which creates the social excitement of having to eat it the moment it comes out of the oven. The Italians have introduced an intriguing mixture of tastes – hands towels on the inside and cardboard in the crust. The Spanish managed to give the impression of having replaced natural fibre with baked sand. There are dozens of other variations. The Greek. The Dutch. Even the world of international hotels has developed its own white roll.

In each case, to refine flour beyond utility is to become refined. This phenomenon is by no means limited to bread or even food. Our society is filled with success stories of high culture, from men’s ties to women’s shoes.

In his entry on Property Development, the last two definitions contain the same theme:

6. The managers who run the large deposit banks have a taste for big buildings. They have wasted large amounts of capital by constructing remarkable headquarter buildings and imitative towers in every financial centre around the world. The only function of these palaces is to warehouse a non-productive managerial class.

7.Every society needs housing and work space. A civilization mindful of its future makes sure that everyone has a bit of property. An evolved civilization attempt to ensure that both private and public buildings are of the highest possible quality. Architecture at this level is an ethical expression of the society at large. The sign today we are merely involved in speculation is that our buildings relate less and less to any primary use or need.

Inasmuch that postmodernism began as an architectural concept, I find Fredric Jameson’s suggestion (in his 1992 Postmodernism architecture chapter) that the architecture of the period seemed to be designed to be photographed relevant. Along with film, this enabled the conceptualization of form away from content. In short, we all began to perceive ourselves as actors within the movie of our lives. So Shakespeare’s ‘all the world’s a stage’ became for us an article of secular faith.

And from this follows the idea that we enact roles, and thus only need to be taught how to act the role. How to act the role of consumer, office worker, smoker, drinker, seducer … all lessons learned from the role-modeling provided by actors enacting roles with fashionable haircuts and fashionable clothes in movies and television. So, after almost sixty years of television, we all know how to embody stereotypes if we so chose. This is most remarkable in terms of music – the folksy crooner who dresses according to what Bob Dylan wore in the 1960s, the punk dressing according to late 1970s photographs, and of course the vast plaid marketing campaign that was Grunge.