Temporary Expert Week 1 - Affective Labor

• Affective labor is any labor that has to do with the “creation and manipulation of affects” (Hardt 95). It makes up a significant portion of the work that happens in the service economy. The reference example would be the emotional work nurses have to do when dealing with patients. But affective labor is not tied to a specific profession or sector; it is “spread throughout the entire workforce and throughout all laboring tasks” (Hardt 97).

• Every office job involves some degree of human contact and affect management. Call center workers reassuring distressed customers is affective labor (“I understand your frustration”). Having to start a professional email with weather smalltalk to not be rude is affective labor. Putting funny GIFs in your slides to make information more digestible is affective labor. Stroking the ego of your boss is affective labor.

• Affective labor is understudied and undervalued (or unvalued in the context of domestic/familial work). The market is better at rewarding workers who are good at manipulating information than workers who are good at manipulating affect.

• One of the most striking things about living in America for foreigners like me is the sheer amount of affective labor performed by service workers in this country. I’m not sure whether it’s due to the tipping system / lack of livable wages, or due to some general “pro-social” national disposition. American niceness makes me feel good but it also unsettles me. I get so used to it that I visit home in Athens I’m flabbergasted at how rude everyone seems to be.

• Looking at discussions on Twitter, affective labor seems to have become a catch-all term in humanities circles for all unacknowledged social effort involved in various aspects of daily life.

• Hardt’s essay on affective labor, which seems to be the most cited one on the topic, ends on a vague call-to-action tone, stating that “the production of affects […] presents an enormous potential for autonomous circuits of valorization, and perhaps for liberation.” (Hardt 100) Would pretending to understand what this means constitute affective labor?

References

Hardt, M. (1999) ‘Affective labor’, Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 89
/100.