No Way To Make A Living » technology

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.

In the Orbit of the Tomato

Mark Harvey — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:37:55 +0000

After my father died, I discovered a film he had directed in 1938 for the historically famous GPO (General Post Office) film unit. It was called The Islanders, and in it, to my amazement, was a short section about Guernsey and the once-renowned Guernsey tomato. The film shows how tomatoes were grown in sterilised soil and glasshouses, heated by coal and how tomatoes were graded and standardised, to be shipped to mainland wholesale markets. You can see the boxes with names of traders in Manchester and Birmingham. There is an incredibly snooty trader, acting as intermediary between the growers and the English market, taking and making orders daily and hourly by phone. The tomatoes are then shipped to the mainland and taken by train, in return for an inflow of Kellogg’s Cornflakes, Lyons Cakes, timber to make the boxes for the tomatoes, and coal.

The Islanders (1939) dir Maurice Harvey. Permission of Royal Mail Film Archive.

In Exploring the Tomato: transformations of nature, economy and society (Mark Harvey, Steve Quilley and Huw Beynon, 2002), there is a chapter called ‘Broken Glass’, describing the extraordinary economic and social organisation of small growers (including part-time postmen), the Guernsey Tomato Marketing Board, and glasshouses made from the skeleton-frames of up-turned boats. It told of the system of English wholesale markets, and how the Guernsey ‘Potentate’ tomato (a powerful hybrid) had to endure a clunky two-week journey from grower to consumer, and of the standardisation and ‘process of qualification’ of tomatoes for mass consumer markets. This transitory world was shattered by the twin forces of competition from Dutch, North Sea Gas-warmed tomatoes and the growth of supermarket chains in the UK. The book was written nearly five years before I discovered the film – but could there have been some subliminal connection? A transmission of a kind of interest in the world?

The film transports us into a world as seen 65 years ago. One of many in a revolutionary genre of documentary films — Night Mail being the most famous — The Islanders shows how the world was made rather than consumed. Social realist vision uncovers the work of world-making. So we see mostly men, mostly smoking, engaged in manual labour of producing, lifting and transporting tomatoes; the work of picking and grading; the work of making sales, of intermediating, and regulating. We are told only that restaurants demand regular, middle-sized, good-coloured tomatoes. The consumer as such is an absent figure. Further, this and many of the films from the GPO stable, unsurprisingly present a communications revolution, economies now made possible by radio and telephone, worlds connected, ships at sea rescued, letters delivered, telegrams sent, undersea cables laid. As today, the sense of a world being transformed by then revolutionary technologies of communication, wired social and economic organisation, is tangibly and visually exciting. The work of communication, of creating the infrastructures, occasionally at risk to working lives, is explored through stark and resolutely modernist imagery. The island dissolves into the planet, the planet into the universe, the film ends.

Orbiting the tomato: A door to a hidden-to-me dimension of my father. A refracting prism of past and present worlds. A society of proud production, now disappeared from visual representation (a genre documentary now dead) and buried by new forms of supermarket-dominated, consumer-oriented social and economic organisation. Work losing its core sociological reputation, and attempts to recover and re-visualise the tomato in the round, through its multiple presences. Such a simple fruit.

References

Harvey, M., Quilley, S. and Beynon, H. (2002) Exploring the Tomato: Transformations of Nature, Economy and Society Edward Elgar.

The Letter and the Parcel and the Eternity of the Postman’s Job

Lynne Pettinger — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:59:57 +0000

There are forms of work which are unamenable to technological change. The question of technology replacing labour is an ongoing story in the study of work (see Braverman on deskilling, or Sennett on the loss of craft skills). Some accounts of service work suggest that these are the least ‘vulnerable’ to replacement, although researchers at Saitama University is developing robots to provide elder care (Kobayashi et al, 2009). Against this tale of decline and alienation might be a story which celebrates technological replacement of manual effort. The washing machine and the vacuum, for example, may produce More Work for Mother (Schwartz Cowan, 1989), but they do save me the drudgery of dolly tub and posser that my Grandma dealt with, to my intense pleasure. This entry is on a theme of unreplaceable labour, and I refer to the postman.

photography by Lynne Pettinger

The idea of post — something that comes directly to your doormat for 39p that someone else pays — is pretty amazing. We used to get milk and eggs on the doorstep, maybe dusters and cleaning equipment courtesy of the travelling salesman. Now though, its only the post that arrives like this. It is a daily triumph that the post comes to me direct (even as I get mostly bills, marketing and letters to families who have long since moved out of my house).

The postman’s job is unreplaceable, but it is affected by technologies. The bicycle and the delivery van; the rubber band, the sack and the street storage boxes; the uniform and the letter box in my front door are all parts of this. And that is without thinking about the technologies of collection, sorting and movement. The fundamental job of the postman, though, is to move from door to door, up my street and down yours. It requires body work and an engagement with the material cultures of people’s homes and their private and public messages. There is no way of not having a postman if the post is to be delivered. So thank you postman. I think you have a romantic job.

Though booming internet shopping might keep some postmen in work, even as Royal Mail loses the contract to deliver Amazon parcels, his job isn’t quite as romantic as once it was. Gone are the days of daily letters or postcards, and even bills are now delivered online. That seems like a loss to me, I like getting and sending postcards. So please send me a letter. Send me the pillow you dream on. Send in the clowns. Send me birthday cards, sympathy cars, a postcard from your holiday and a thank you for dinner. Let the postman make me happy.

References

Braverman, H. (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital; the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York, Monthly Review Press.
Kobayashi, Y., Kuno, Y., Niwa, H., Akiya, N., Okada, M. Yamazaki, K. and Yamazaki, A. (2009) ‘Assisted-Care Robot Initiation of Communication in Multiparty Settings’. Chi 2009 conference, Boston MA.
Schwartz Cowan, R. (1989) More Work for Mother: the Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. London: Free Association.
Sennett, R. (2008) The Craftsman. London : Allen Lane.

Who is Responsible for the Photocopier?

Lynne Pettinger — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:24:32 +0000

The nurse tells the receptionist there’s no toner left in the photocopier. The receptionist asks admin who says she doesn’t know, she’ll ask Michelle, but she knows that Carol’s good with the photocopier. The receptionist calls Michelle, but Michelle’s not there until the afternoon and the receptionist is due to leave at 12.30, so the message needs passing on. Who knows where Carol’s got to? No-one can sort it, no-one feels like they’re good with machines. They are nurses, not technicians after all.