A Remote Life? The End of Office Work

Despite widespread efforts to restore a pre-pandemic status quo, the office – understood as a physical site dedicated to labor and, more specifically, to intellectual labor – has not returned to its former state after enduring two successive waves of Covid-19. Embedded in the industrial city’s temporal logic and shaped by a social order structured around the coils of an all-embracing factory, the service sector, and the welfare systems of the twentieth century, office buildings – once filled with employees engaged in interrelated tasks, operating within rigidly scheduled working hours – stood empty for what seemed an endless span of two years. For the first time, these spaces, synchronized with the temporal grids of both metropolitan and provincial life, found themselves devoid of human presence.

De-humanized, the office ceased to perform its fundamental Foucaultian function: to enclose a collective of men and women within a single space, subjecting them to the rules and surveillance of a corporate entity that, like all total institutions, imposes a closed and regulated regime, appropriating fragments of its employees’ time and existential energies in exchange for compensation. The cluttered desks, the rooms packed with personal computers, printers, phones and fax machines, the stacks of files and binders, the open-plan offices illuminated by cold white neon lights and partitioned by plastic dividers, the endless carpeted corridors – these were the defining images of a globalized workforce, sustained by bureaucratic inertia and predicated on the normalization of alienation. Until the 2010s, these environments stood as material manifestations of a world structured around work, heirs to a lineage of literary figures that includes Bartleby the Scrivener (the emblematic, passive antagonist of bureaucratic modernity), but also its parodic descendants in cross-media culture: hapless accountant Fantozzi, manager Michael Scott, and the ensemble of employees at Dunder Mifflin.

Yet, from the perspective of ethnomethodology, organizational sociology, and semiotics, these humanized spaces had already begun to lose their original function: they no longer served as mediators of social interaction through material artifacts – furniture, equipment, architectural structures – which had traditionally allowed the ‘social body’ to realize itself through what Bruno Latour has described as an exchange of properties between human and non-human actors. Thus, when the global lockdowns brought life on Earth to a halt, offices did not merely empty – they were revealed, perhaps for the first time, to be structurally devoid of (any) meaning. No longer endowed with the spatial and material markers that once anchored professional practices within a relational network of human and non-human agents, the office space lost its operative significance. And yet, labor itself persisted, reconfiguring itself into a new, de-territorialized, de-materialized domain. As, while workers were absent, office work did not cease: enabled by digital infrastructures that had been in place for over a decade, supported by ever-expanding and increasingly stable networks, remote work demonstrated the obsolescence of the office as a fixed spatial entity. The necessity of assembling employees within a single location from nine to five, five days a week, was exposed as a mere artifact of organizational inertia rather than an inherent requirement of productivity.

Beyond signaling the decline of office-based Fordism in favor of the rise of a distributed desk, the dissolution of the office as a fixed site has also generated a profound temporal shift. While the mechanisms of surveillance and control that once operated within physical offices are easily – and even more pervasively – replicated in digital workspaces, the elimination of in-person attendance theoretically liberates hours previously lost to commuting, hours that might now be reclaimed for personal life, leisure, or rest. A recent literary prototype of this transformation is Pietro Paladini in Caos Calmo, who relocates his office to a park bench outside his daughter’s school, choosing to remain physically present for – and close to – her in a moment of personal crisis. Paladini’s decision, however, is an individual one, shaped by trauma (the sudden death of his wife) and enabled by his privileged status as a senior executive. Today’s remote workers, by contrast, are not engaged in acts of personal resistance; they are part of a systemic reconfiguration of labor, one that extends beyond individual agency to encompass the restructuring of bureaucratic hierarchies, professional classifications, and the very texture of working life. If, in the early 2000s, the instability of precarious labor within a globalized economy came to define the existential horizon of a generation (as explored, in Italy, in the works by Bajani, Nove, Murgia, and De Marchi), the question now is how Generation Z, as they enter the workforce, and older generations, already – precariously – employed, perceive this new transformation. Do they take it as a given? Do they view it as beneficial? And how are literature, cinema, and the arts representing and interpreting this shift toward remote work and an ostensibly agile existence? If a café table or a kitchen counter can now serve as a ‘permanent work-station,’ are we witnessing yet another insidious expansion of capitalism into private life – one that transforms the home into a ‘non-place,’ in Marc Augé’s terms, reducing it to nothing more than a transient node between logging in and logging out of the corporate network? If so, does the contemporary longing for spatial stability and personal freedom merely function as a nostalgic smokescreen, disguising an even more pervasive, digitally convergent apparatus of power and control?

The monographic dossier of Testo e Senso, issue 29-2025, invites scholars to engage with these questions, situating contemporary narratives of remote, de-materialized, and de-territorialized labor within a broader historical and theoretical framework. How has the disappearance – or rather, the radical expansion – of the office reshaped the terrain of ‘remote life,’ generating a space where professional and personal dimensions are no longer separate, but instead collide in complex and often problematic ways? As always, the journal welcomes interdisciplinary contributions from the fields of comparative literature, literary theory, cultural studies, semiotics, intermediality, linguistics, anthropology, and cognitive sciences.

Submissions for the Dossier, as well as for the journal’s other standing sections (Other Criticism, Digital Humanities, Narrative Medicine and Neuronarratology, Art Comparison, Gender Studies), shall be submitted to the editorial board by August 31, 2025, following the guidelines available on this website.

Issue 29-2025 is due in December.