The Last Television: Trauma & Totality in The Chair Company

To speak of The Chair Company in the language of mere “entertainment” is already to surrender to the culture industry’s anaesthetic spell. Yet here, precisely within the belly of the administered spectacle, something ruptures. The series performs an act of negative dialectics so merciless that momentarily the commodity form itself begins to stutter.

In the gleaming non-places of late-capitalist administration (those open-plan purgatories where human time is pulverised into “synergy” and “deliverables”), The Chair Company refuses the consoling lie of critique-from-without. Instead it inhabits the totality so completely that the totality begins to vomit up its own contradictions. The chairs are never manufactured, never even described; they exist only as pure exchange-value, a spectral signifier whose absence organises every humiliation, every act of ritualised violence, every whispered threat of “wellness.” Herein lies the show’s merciless truth: the commodity has achieved its final triumph when its material substrate can be abolished altogether and the fetish remains, levitating, still extracting surplus affect from concussed wage-slaves.

“The commodity has achieved its final triumph when its material substrate can be abolished altogether and the fetish remains.”

Tim Robinson’s protagonist (David, the last subject who still mistakenly believes in the reality principle) is subjected to a passion play of reification. Each concussion is a fresh baptism into thinghood; the skull becomes filing cabinet, the ego becomes policy manual. Yet the genius of the work is that it withholds even the sentimental dignity of tragic consciousness. David never awakens; he merely accumulates more traumatic brain injuries, each one a further ratification of the administered world. The laughter this produces is not the laughter of liberation, but the involuntary bark of recognition: we, too, are already David, already bleeding quietly into the ergonomic headrest.

The supporting ensemble functions as a negative chorus of the totally integrated personality. Gregg, Ricky, the nameless middle managers: each is a monad of unfreedom so perfected that any residual trace of interiority has been cauterised. When Ricky achieves orgasm while screening his Alastair Sim–Scrooge pornography, the sequence is not (as the vulgar Marxist might claim) mere shock. It is the precise moment at which libido, fully colonised, reveals itself as nothing more than another department, another KPI, another quarterly report delivered in tears and semen.

And then there is Jim Downey’s Chairman: the return of the repressed in the form of a mummified patriarch who no longer needs to speak above a whisper because the law has become atmospheric. His very senescence is the final mockery of historical progress; the ancien régime simply refuses to die, merely grows quieter, more patient, more total.

What The Chair Company achieves, then, is the rarest of feats within the culture industry: a work whose form is its own unmasking. It does not plead for a better world; it demonstrates, with the cold hilarity, that the worse it gets, the more faithfully it mirrors the truth. In this sense it is not merely the finest television presently broadcast. It is the last possible television, the negative image of a medium that has otherwise completed its long suicide into algorithm and franchise. After The Chair Company, only silence—or revolution—remains thinkable.