No Way To Make A Living » Lynne Pettinger

In the Eyes

Lynne Pettinger — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:26:29 +0000

The opening scene of Confluence (Akram Khan and Nitin Sawney, Sadlers Wells 2010) is a story about having your passport taken away for checking. The border guards watch you, their eyes contain the power of the state. You watch your passport leave the room, you hope it reappears. Akram Khan and Nitin Sawney, the dancer and the musician, are in perfect unison of words and gestures as they perform this. Although it’s Khan’s story, the tandem presentation by Sawney means it could be anyone’s. The eyes have power, they contain control, says Khan.

Here’s the trailer, though you can’t hear the exchange about passports.

At the UK border there are signs remarking on (not apologising for) the delays in passing through border control. These signs invite you, the good citizen, to celebrate the stricter checks for blocking incomers, they normalise and institutitonalise your fear of the other. The eyes of the border guard needn’t worry you, red passport holder, you’re allowed through. But they’re sharp eyes, nonetheless and you might still flinch at the gaze of power.

So when the border guard is staring down the queue, not at the person in front of her, you wonder what, who she’s looking for. But she’s got soft eyes, that’s unexpected. She’s looking for the crying baby, and stands up to go and bring the baby’s family to the front of the queue. There’s a moment of care in amongst the regime of control.

I wonder if jobs that are made up of looking are tedious because they require repetitive glances at bland faces, or exciting because there is always something to see – someone new. I wonder also what it’s like to look for the shock, the unexpected, the wrong, the absent, the abnormal. It’s a difficult mental process, I guess. And I wonder also at the pleasures of power.

Frying Tonight

Lynne Pettinger — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 08:49:51 +0000

This sign has been on the door of my local chip shop for 9 months now:

I suspect it wont be reopening any time soon. Nowaytomakealiving is taking a break too, we’ll be back in August.

Sex at the Job Centre

Lynne Pettinger — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:47:21 +0000

You can find all sorts of jobs at Jobcentre Plus, the statutory agency that helps the unemployed back into work: it’s the place to look if you fancy a working as a driver, check-out assistant, nanny or adult model. Yes, that does say adult model. You could also find work as a ‘webcam performer’. “Duties include performing to a web cam for clients or customers fantasies” and require the performer to be nude (http://jobseekers.direct.gov.uk/ search term ‘webcam performer’ accessed 6th July 2010).

It seems commercial sex in a striptease culture (McNair, 2002) is mainstream. The liberalisation of sexual behaviour reflects a particular conceptualisation of modern subjectivity as individualised and commodified (Livingston, 1998). This perspective acts as a powerful moral pull in favour of the normalisation of the right to a range of sexual behaviours that might formerly have lain in the domain of the abject. This liberalisation, even a compulsion to speak of sex, retains a hint edge of moral taint, though. In the case of commercial sex, from the everyday erotic labour of bar staff (Boyle, 2007) to market exchange of sexual intercourse, there is a tension between tolerance and taint. On one hand is a powerful drive towards tolerating or accepting sexual practices where those who engage are seen as making legitimate choices as agents in modern society. On the other are arguments that such practices are invariably degrading and inappropriate, either because sex – like other intimacies – ought not be marketised, or because those selling sex cannot make a ‘free’ choice to self-exploit (Barry, 1995). And even those who feel empowered by a (postfeminist) right to speak and act as a sexual subject are, for McRobbie, being interpellated into a dominated subject position (McRobbie, 2009).

What sort of work is this webcam performing? Well, such Live Sex Acts (Chapkis, 1997) might be ways in which workers can maximise the returns from what Hakim calls ‘erotic capital’ (2010): sex appeal, charm, social skills and all-round phwoarness. Prostitution, classically understood is not advertised by JobCentre plus. It is morally outside the pale as it involves the transgression of corporeal boundaries. The webcam performer, however, though their corporeality is central, seems to escape this outsiderdom. They and the customer (the webcam wanker) are engaged in a cyborg reality of sex work. Sight and sound are the senses that matter, not touch and smell and taste. The body is seen and heard; consumed like a tv programme, not consumed like a cake.

The ad says that the job involves “explicit sexual dialogue which may cause embarrassment to some people”. This interests me: the nudity is present in a matter of fact way, it’s the talk that is problematic and may provoke an emotional response. In the exhibition at Tate Modern Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera there are several photographs that explore dimensions of the sex industry. Susan Meiselas’s pictures of strippers and Cammie Toloui’s remind us that there is nothing passive, nothing safe, nothing disembodied about ‘just looking’.

References

Barry, K. (1995) The Prostitution of Sexuality. New York: New York University Press.
Boyle, K. (2007) ‘The mobilisation of sexuality: an ethnography of the sexualised labour process in the style bar industry.’ Paper presented to the 25th International Labour Process Conference.
Chapkis, W. (1997) Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labour Routledge.
Hakim, C. (2010) ‘Erotic Capital’ European Sociological Review doi:10.1093/esr/jcq014 .
Livingston, J. (1998) Modern subjectivity and consumer culture, in Strasser, S., McGovern, C. & Judt, M. Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the 20th Century: 413–430. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McNair, N (2002) Striptease Culture: Sex, Media, and the Democratization of Desire. London: Routledge.
McRobbie, A. (2009) The Aftermath of Feminism Sage.

The Emergency Budget: Fewer Jobs But More Work

Lynne Pettinger — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:41:23 +0000

In Britain, Chancellor George Osborne has just presented his first budget, announcing 25% cuts to most government departments. Last week, proposed government investment in leisure, social services and manufacturing was removed. A visitor’s centre at Stonehenge, a healthcare centre in Leeds, and financial support for the Forgemasters plant in Sheffield were some of a number of projects knocked on the head in the quest to reduce the budget deficit. I read a lot of commentary about the coalition government’s failure to support production and the northern (post)-industrial lands, none more moving than this piece by Ian McMillan (hey, I’m from Yorkshire. Just saying the phrase ‘brass band’ can bring tears to my eyes).

Enormous reductions in public sector spending produce unemployment. And unemployment makes for poverty, misery, hopelessness, illness and anomie. Some of the cuts to public sector spending will remove work from society: Forgemasters’ employees will join the queues outside Sheffield job centres, looking for jobs that don’t exist, living on the benefit breadline, sinking into depression, needing care.

Other public sector cuts will not remove work, but transfer it from public sphere to private sphere, from commodity form to non-commodity form. Children, the infirm elderly and the sick will carry on needing care (and social care isn’t part of the NHS ringfencing). Someone will have to step in when budget cuts mean fewer care assistants or fewer public nursery spaces. This might sound like Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ in action: neighbours helping because the fat state is ought to slim down. But care that is contingently gifted like that leaves the recipient at risk, even assuming that the needy are known and noticed (which might not be the case if layers of administration are removed). And it leaves the caregiver exhausted by the double burden of paid work and care.

It is often the case that unpaid care is done by women (see the Women’s Budget Group analysis), and, though the ideological conservatism that drives the desire for a small state is not quite the same conservatism that essentialises gender divisions and wants women to be placed in the home, married and looking after children, the coincidence might be felt to be fortuitous by some. At nowaytoamakealiving, we are always angered by the failures of imagination and empathy that generate policies intended to increase inequality and worsen lives.

Women Drivers

Lynne Pettinger — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 15:24:50 +0000

One of my favourite flickr groups is ‘Taxis of the world from inside’. I like the glimpses of the city in these shots, and the confusion between the outside spaces and the mobile indoors of the car. The car in the city represents a supermodernity (Augé, 2009), a non-place, neither public, nor private, fluid without being free. Taxi drivers are sometimes mythologised as an emblem of the city “The New York City cabdriver personifies the energy and zeal of the world’s greatest city” (Hodges, 2007: 1), or as an opportunity for the privileged to access an ‘authentic’ ‘cab spun wisdom’, with all the class overtones that carries; although recent events in the UK point to the danger of the loner-driver (I’m thinking here of Jon Worboys, the ‘black cab rapist’ and Derrick Bird who recently shot dead 12 people and injured 11 in Cumbria).

The set of photos by Suzanne Lee/Panos London, of women taxi drivers in Delhi gives lie to the hypertheorising of supermodernity. Here, an older story of gender, family and work is on display. Diya Chaudhri’s text describes women’s discovery of freedom and subject status through their entry into taxi driving. For Meenu Vadera, director of the Azad Foundation which trains women to become taxi drivers, this is a way of giving women citizenship: the driving license is a document which proves existence.

Photo by Suzanne Lee for Panos London

One of the women interviewed, Ekta , says “I feel empowered, as if I have my own identity other than a wife and mother.” There is extensive research to show how paid work provides empowerment and connection and freedom, but taxi driving differs from other work. For Sheller and Urry (2006), mobility is a way of gaining subjectivity, of becoming a person; though they don’t give that much of a sense of whether it matters what the mobility is for, is it just to be prized for its own sake?

It seems here that it is work as much as mobility, that offers this subject status, and mobilities research should take work seriously. The female taxi driver challenges the norms of the city as a gendered space because she works and well as because she moves. Running a taxi, of course, is not merely a process of learning how to negotiate those city streets with that machine, but of negotiating the internal space of the car. Chaudhri notes the challenge the women taxi drivers provide to other drivers on Delhi’s streets, but the only customers she considers are other women, who will feel safer if driven by a woman. I wonder and worry about the dangerous customers. However empowering it is to learn to drive, being at the vanguard of gender equality and working as a driver is a risky place.

References

Augé, M. (2009) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso.
Hodges, G. R G. (2007) Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006) ‘The new mobilities paradigm’. Environment and Planning A 2006, volume 38, pp 207–226.

Closing Down

Lynne Pettinger — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:27:19 +0000

Two signs photographed in a department store that’s about to close.

taken with camera phone

To the left, big, bold letters and colours: the store is closing down and everything must go, “step right up, bargains galore”. Thrill at 20% off a new kettle. Take home a pottery owl, only £42.99 (down from £59.00). It’s an exciting chance, you consumer monkey. Be seduced by these prices.

taken with camera phone

The second is a different appearance of emotion in capitalism; this is not the capitalism of the romanticised commodity exchange discussed above (Illouz, 1997), nor quite the cold intimacy of managed emotion in capitalism (Illouz, 2007). It’s the organisation appealing to sentiment, to empathy, to feeling and not sensation. Fevre (2000) suggests this is rare, arguing that the triumph of ‘common sense’ as a form of reasoning means that rationality is imposed in places where it ought not be. That is, an organisation might easily fail to make the case for care, seeing the job losses that result from the store closing as merely the inevitable outcome of recession: there’s no use crying over spilled economic inevitabilities. After all, it’s common sense that unemployment rises in recession, but never mind, there’ll be a recovery eventually. Certainly, it seems that some of the customers have to be reminded to see past this, to connect the bargain to the pain. I can’t help thinking that there’s a few people making decisions about cutting the budget deficit who could do with a copy of this sign in their office.

References

Fevre, R. W. (2000) The Demoralization of Western Culture . Continuum, London.
Illouz, E. (1997) Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism . Berkeley: University of California Press.
Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press, London.

The Poet

Lynne Pettinger — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:09:44 +0000

Early in the film of Blake Morrison’s memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father (dir Anand Tucker, 2007), Blake (Colin Firth) accepts an award for his poetry (it might be that the definition of ‘real’ work is that it’s the sort of activity you’d never attend an award ceremony to mark).

At the risk of getting sentimental, I’d like to say thank-you to my wife, Kathy. Not only for all her support
and encouragement, but because she asked me to mention her.

My dad always used to say, and I’m sure he’ll say it again before the night’s out,

“Being a writer, in particular a poet, is all well and good. But it’s no way to make a living.”

Of course, as in most other things, he’s absolutely right.

Routine and Creativity

Lynne Pettinger — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:16:26 +0000

Routinisation is usually seen as deskilling, as alienating, as the opposite of creativity (Braverman, 1998; Leidner, 1993). Austrin and West (2005) suggest that the routinisation of how casino staff manipulate cards acts as mechanism for surveillance. Standardising and controlling how staff hold their thumb and fingers limits the chances for them to cheat.

Routines are supposed to feel demeaning, to destroy our imaginations. I like routine, perhaps because whatever routines I have are not imposed by anyone else. In Ways of the Hand David Sudnow (1993) reflects on learning to play jazz piano. The routine of practice gives him a baseline from which being creative becomes possible. His fingers learn where they need to be to make certain chord shapes, and that means they know where they need to go next to make certain sounds. Unpredictability — new sounds — relies on this knowing. It’s a process that becomes un-thought, and once it is un-thought, Sudnow says creativity is possible.

Nick Dunn is a freelance shoe designer.He draws shoe after shoe after shoe, tiny variations, maybe 50 at a time.Then he takes a few of the best and refines them. It’s someone else’s job to build a prototype, to make them real. There is joy in seeing the prototype, sure, especially as the trainer moves from the page into three-dimensionality, and Nick is fully engaged in the conversations that make this happen. But the biggest pleasure of his work is in the routine, the repetition and the refinement of the sketches. Nick describes drawing as therapeutic, occupying a calm space beyond thought. Creativity needs the routine; creativity is in the routine; the routine permits flow.

In the sketches, this flow is present in the pencil lines that outline the shape of the trainer, and that mark the details. I didn’t expect from Nick’s description that each idea comes in three sketches, showing the left side, back and top. Whilst he draws on flat, seemingly translucent, paper, the three dimensional trainer that ends up on your foot is already in his imagination. It’s not that routines end up with creativity; to say that would be to viciously misrepresent the experience of controlled, routinised work such as that portrayed in Pravda. It’s that creativity is not well-conceived when it’s seen as a product of free-floating inspiration produced by a romantically starving artist. It stems from practice, skill and routine.

References

1. Austrin, T and West, J (2005) ‘Skills and surveillance in casino gaming: work, consumption and regulation’. Work Employment and Society. 19 (2) 305–326.
2. Braverman, Harry. (1998) Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York : Monthly Review Press.
3. Leidner, R. (1993) Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
4. Sudnow, D. (1993) Ways of the hand: the organization of improvised conduct. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

The Offices of State

Lynne Pettinger — Wed, 19 May 2010 11:43:59 +0000

In these photos taken by Martin Argles for the Guardian, we see Gordon Brown and his team preparing to leave Downing Street. These photos interest me for what they show about the spaces and experience of work.

Martin Argles/Guardian: Downing St political staff

In the first photograph, there are three members of staff huddled round one phone. Argles tells us they are listening in as Brown speaks to Nick Clegg, leader of the Lib Dems. “Nick, Nick, I can’t hold on any longer. Nick, I’ve got to go to the palace”, Argles reports hearing (Guardian, 13th May 2010: 21). I’m fascinated by that huddle, it speaks of the hunger, urge and delight to be in on the moment that characterises the political aides and correspondents I’ve met. They are seduced by an everyday proximity to power to imagine that nothing else matters as much, and that hearing things second hand is almost worse than not hearing them at all. Look at the woman hovering behind, one ear turned inwards and her own mobile in hand: it matters so much to be there, to be listening in on an event that matters for just this moment.

I like the ordinariness of the rest of the scene: the big metal cupboard with its fire safety certificate, the Downing Street screensaver on the right of the shot, and at the back, the colleague involved in a very different sort of phone call.

Martin Argles/Guardian: The war room in Downing Street

In the second shot, we see a wider perspective, a layered modernity. Chandeliers, wood panelling and a fireplace point to a Victorian refurbishment of the original Downing Street building, although the lights are now electric and the fireplace is surrounded by desks. Confronting this past is the detritus of the modern office: screens, wires and swivel chairs; coffee cups, iphones, and men in ties. The carousel of MDF desks are paper-free, though an enormous briefcase in the centre of the shot has a wadge of documents shoved in it: this is the last day of work, and this room will soon come to be taken for granted by a different sort of political animal.

Trust, Honesty and the Politician’s CV

Lynne Pettinger — Wed, 12 May 2010 15:40:56 +0000

Nowaytomakealiving is collectively intrigued by today’s appointment of Iain Duncan Smith as Work and Pensions Secretary in the bodge-job coalition which now runs Britain. Formerly leader of the Conservative party, and sometime novelist (his book, The Devil’s Tune is currently 212,689 on Amazon bestseller list), the ‘quiet man’ is a provocative choice for the concerned employer.

After all, he’s the man who faked his CV, laying claim to having studied at the University of Perugia, when really he’d attended the (fabulously named) ‘Universita per Stranieri’, a language school. He also did a few in-house nightschool courses at GEC Marconi, though these were spun as having attended “Dunchurch College of Management” on his CV. Is this legitimate creativity to produce distinction in an overcrowded labour market?

Although in Brilliant CV by Bright and Earl, potential employees are reminded that “lying about any aspect of your life during recruitment can be grounds for dismissal if uncovered” (2001: 246), it’s possible that under the new Duncan Smith regime there’ll be more scope for potential recruits to creatively embellish their job applications. After all, if the man at the top can do it…

References

Bright, J. And Earl, J. (2001) Brilliant CV: What Employers Want to See and How to Say it. Prentice Hall.