The value of attention: Affective labor in the fashion modeling industry.

摘要

This dissertation seeks to address postmodern, Marxist, and feminist debates about emerging relationships between images, bodies, and work. To that end, it outlines a theory of affective labor, labor in which the body's energy is picked up and circulated via images. This theory represents an attempt to grapple with two waves of technological advances that have raised questions about the very foundations of social theorizing. On the one hand, medical technology, bioengineering, biomedical imaging, and the mapping of the human genome, have brought with them questions regarding the integrity of the body, its functionality, and even what it means to be human (raced, gendered, or otherwise). On the other hand, advances in computer technology have transformed many areas of production to the point where some theorists have posited a qualitative shift in the nature of work, from the material working up of raw materials by physical labor to the immaterial labor of manipulating ideas, feelings, desires, emotions, passions, and other forms of bodily energy.; Affective labor is the work to stir up or arouse the flow of bodily energy expressed in the form of affects during interpersonal contact or proximity, in either the actual or virtual sense. Theorizing that fashion modeling involves work to produce virtual human contact via images, I explored the idea of affective labor in the modeling industry in an ethnographic investigation of modeling work. Through participant observation, and 54 in-depth interviews with models and their coworkers, I found that modeling work, narrowly conceived as emotional labor, misses its broader effect as the work to stimulate and modulate flows of attention and energy within an affective economy. Particularly important was what I called the event-ness of affective production, in which the unknown, and unpredictable, are becoming an essential element of the production process. Capitalism's dependence on capturing the unpredictable quality of innovation, human contact, and creativity via information networks such as television, and computers, raises questions about the boundaries of work in postmodern economies, and the viability of capitalism's dependence on processes and capacities that it cannot fully capture or control.