Week 4 Day 1

Week 4, Day 1 → Transnational Technologies and Media

    In season four of The Office, there is an episode where Michael Scott, the lovable yet quirky manager, moonlights as a telemarketer in a call center in order to afford his new girlfriend’s luxurious lifestyle. While working for the call center, which sells diet pills, Michael befriends top salesman Vikram. Vikram immigrated to the United States from India and worked as a surgeon before coming to the US. He is lauded for his sales abilities and offers Michael advice about how to improve his sales. While the focus of the episode is on the comedy of Michael’s financial situation, as he declares bankruptcy by literally declaring it to his colleagues, the depictions of the call center and Michael’s interactions with Vikram demonstrate the alienation that call center employees must undergo, the assumptions about cheap labor, and notions about surrogate humanity.

    After his boss at the call center chastises Michael for not making any sales, Vikram offers to share his dinner with Michael. It is during this interaction that Vikram reveals he used to be a surgeon when living in India. While he does not disclose why he moved to the United States, his demotion from physician to telemarketer illuminates the struggles immigrants face when trying to attain “skilled labor” jobs in the United States (as we read about during Week One of class). On top of this, Michael’s surprise at the fact that Vikram held a medical degree shows that the employees at the call center had little time for camaraderie. Due to the pressures to sell products, the employees spend their shifts chasing statistics instead of functioning how a “normal” office would. In fact, Michael soon gets in trouble for fraternizing with other call center employees instead of making more phone calls. As Kalindi Vora pointed out in chapter two of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor, the call center employee becomes alienated due to the demands of the job and the persona they must put on to interact with customers. As exemplified by A Terrible Beauty Is Born, call center worker John/Ashok learns of a coworker’s suicide moments before taking a call with an American customer, who is in the process of reacting to 9/11. As he takes this call, he becomes John, an African American man capable of helping this American through their struggles through unpaid affective labor. However, Ashok receives no return on the affective labor he produces as he is left to mourn his dead coworker on his own, and he is rendered nonexistent by his adoption of John. This alienation, Vora argues, along with John/Ashok’s reaction to his coworker’s suicide, “indicates something about how value produced by affect is carried or embodied in affective commodities and how it can be accumulated by some and lost by others,” (57). As John/Ashok represses any feelings about his coworker’s death, his affect given to his customer over the phone transforms care into company interest and profit. While we see little of Vikram, the stereotyped portrayal of an Indian call center employee allows us to assume that his work also does not allow for his calls to surpass the one-sided interaction Vora describes.

    In addition to describing the alienation call center employees experience at the hands of capitalism’s interests, Vora also outlines the assumptions about the low cost of living in India and how that enables an “international division of labor to extract and invest the value produced by Indian service workers into the lives of people living in the United States,” (44). While Vikram and Michael are both in the United States, The Office reproduces the notion that the cost of living is low in India by having Michael ask Vikram how much medical school costs, saying, “What’s the dollar worth in your land? Medical school must’ve cost, like, forty bucks or a donkey or something,” (The Office, “Money”). Vikram responds “No.” While this exchange was short, it perpetuates ideas about the cost of living in other countries and does so without questioning the correlation between cost of living, quality of life, or the use of laborers in other countries for work in the United States for the benefit of transnational corporations. In fact, Vora claims that due to this, “Indian lives are cheapened’ and the surplus value they produce is outsourced and removed from India via labor extraction (44).

    Due to Michael’s failure as a telemarketer, as well as the negative impacts moonlighting was having on his “real” job, he is forced to quit his job at the call center. As he walks out, he remarks, “But the good thing about the American Dream is that you can just go to sleep and try it all again the next night,” (The Office, “Money”). Michael fails to realize that the American Dream is not something that provides second chances for many people. Michael, a middle-class, white, male, American citizen with a good job, took on a second job to afford his girlfriend’s spending habits. Thus, he has, as he said, many more opportunities to live out the American Dream. However, there is a lack of a security net for Vikram, and others, if the American Dream does not work out the first time. As discussed in “The Surrogate Human Effects of Technoliberalism,” surrogate humans are those who exist in relation to the liberal subject, “whose freedom is possible only through the racial unfreedom of the surrogate,” (5). As provided in the reading, an example of this surrogate humanity is "invisibilized labor including indenture, immigration, and outsourcing," (6). The alienation of the call center employees allows them to fall into this category of surrogate humanity as it invisibilizes their labor; in addition, this labor is often outsourced, once again affirming the surrogate humanity of call center employees. Michael, although briefly a telemarketer, holds status as a white American man, which separates him from this class of surrogate humans, and reifies the notion that there is a distinction in the labor market, and in neoliberal capitalism more generally, between Michael and “the others” whose affective labor is undervalued, and who his freedoms are measured against. In this case, Michael is free to move from American Dream to American Dream, while there is a clear lack of this ability for others, such as Vikram.