#affective labor

When building a spear, what matters: you, building or the spear?

We may well be seeing a response to all this in the rising approval of the unmanaged heart, the greater virtue now attached to what is "natural" or spontaneous. Ironically, the person like Rousseau's Noble Savage, who only smiles "naturally," without ulterior purpose, is a poor prospect for the job of waiter, hotel manager, or flight attendant. The high regard for "natural feeling," then, may coincide with the culturally imposed need to develop the precise opposite—an instrumental stance toward feeling. We treat spontaneous feeling, for this reason, as if it were scarce and precious; we raise it up as a virtue. It may not be too much to suggest that we are witnessing a call for the conservation of "inner resources," a call to save another wilderness from corporate use and keep it "forever wild." With the growing celebration of spontaneity have come the robot jokes. Robot humor plays with the tension between being human—that is to say, having feeling—and being a cog in a socioeconomic machine. The charm of the little robot R2-D2, in the film Star Wars, is that he seems so human. Films like this bring us the familiar in reverse: every day, outside the movie house, we see human beings whose show of feeling has a robot quality. The ambiguities are funny now. Both the growing celebration of spontaneity and the jokes we tell about being robots suggest that in the realm of feeling, Orwell's 1984 came in disguise several years ago, leaving behind a laugh and perhaps the idea of a private way out.

Stany Skupienia (Plenum Osób Opiekujących Się)

Plenum Meminarium #4 (nie)możliwe praktyki troski

“Oh fuck! I've got a beheading!” he blurted out. A slightly older colleague in a black hoodie casually turned around in his chair. “Oh,” he said, “which one?” At that moment Swearingen decided he did not want to become a connoisseur of beheading videos. “I didn't want to look back and say I became so blasé to watching people have these really horrible things happen to them that I'm ironic or jokey about it,” says Swearingen, now the social media editor at Atlantic Media. (Swearingen was also an intern at WIRED in 2007.)

We must also ask how to support each other as financialisation and austerity attack our structures of social reproduction, shifting the work of care onto overburdened grandmothers, daughters, friends and sisters. Capital not only offloads its accumulation anxiety onto us, but also its unwillingness to pay for the reproduction of our labour power or ensure the stability of conditions under which it can occur. Our labouring activities are recoded and feminised to justify non-remuneration, as seen in the gospel of all of us ‘doing what we love’, being a flexible worker, or the idea of rolling up one’s sleeves and getting stuck in, simply because the job has to be done. Meanwhile, budgets are slashed for healthcare and education as the state withdraws even further from the public sector, leaving a gap that is quickly exploited by private capital for financial gain made off the back of unpaid reproductive work. Austerity disproportionately hits women who therefore are literally picking up the tab for capitalism’s crisis.