This week I will examine Kalinda Vora’s “Call Center Agents: Commodified Affect and the Biocapital of Care” and Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora’s “The Surrogate Human Effects of Technoliberalism.” Strangely, these two texts reminded me of some of my own writing about my specific interests in Ethnicity, Race, & Migration, Human Rights, and Korean language studies. For example, I am motivated by the cultural production-- in the form of art, music, and family traditions-- of people around the world. I am especially interested in how humans, cultures, and communities are able to produce such beautiful testaments to their cultures while dealing with structural and systematic violence. I often think about what could emerge from people when they are liberated from the oppressive systems they currently contend with. I have been learning Korean for the past year, learning the language and familiarizing myself with the culture. In fact, I will be spending the upcoming school year abroad in Korea and for me, learning Korean, and any language I have learned in the past, is a commitment to understanding peoples’ cultures more intentionally and learning from them. It is a study rooted in others’ lived experiences and an opportunity to compare our cultural livelihoods. This is why I am so struck by the reasons Indian call center workers have to learn specific accents as they are so different from my reasons for learning languages and about cultures. In fact, these call center agents are some of the people at the core of my interests, i.e., I wonder what could emerge from call center agents if they were not call center agents, not forced to perform affective labor, and consequently not forced to learn about other cultural contexts in order to better perform this labor and increase their employer’s profits? What could happen if they were in my place, a student at a university, and learned languages and about cultures because they wanted to relate to others and form those interpersonal and intercommunal bonds rather than for the sake of value and profit? In “Call Center Agents,” Vora writes,
“[The call center agent] must become familiar with the cultural context of the customer in order to effectively soothe agitated callers and make the contracting corporation appear accessible and approachable. She must work to follow and respond to emotional and conversational cues and to maintain a polite, patient, and attentive demeanor during the conversation in a way that seems authentic. When the data form or the Indian agent is projected successfully, it produces value for the company employing the call center” (46).
I am struck by the fact that call center agents, and other workers who must employ intense levels of affective care, must become familiar with the cultural context of the customer in order to better connect with them in order to create value and serve and benefit the company. What if this education (if I can even call it that) could really be about the people and cross-cultural learning for everyone, instead of about money? In my context, I make an effort to become familiar with the cultural context of the people whose language I am learning in order to better connect with them in order to better understand them and engage with their language more intentionally and with more care and respect. There are a great deal of differences and power imbalances between me as a Yale student and call center agents, but even then our difference as it pertains to language and culture education is so striking and unsettling. One is a passion and self-motivated (because I have the privilege of being able to pursue this passion) and the other is necessary in order for the call center agent to earn income to sustain themselves. In their context, because of their employers and companies, language learning is subverted and perverted. I know that, in order to maintain a transnational approach when it comes to this analysis, I must consider the fact that there is a power imbalance between the united states and India and that the united states is extracting resources and labor from India at little to no benefit to India and Indians, thereby cheapening Indian service workers’ labor: “The transnational nature of the interactions between Indian agents and global customers means that the biopolitical territorialization of this work leads to accumulation outside the worker and [their] immediate community and results in a net flow of affective resources to consuming nations at the expense of producing nations like India” (44). Thus, I know this subversion and perversion benefits the nation-state I was born and raised in, and it only makes it further unsettling that a whole nation benefits from their suffering and from something that is undoubtedly exhausting for them but gets to be enriching and beautiful to me.
On the other hand, “The Surrogate Human Effects of Technoliberalism” relates to my scholarship and interests in the sense that it examines humans’, particularly working people’s capacity for creativity, or a lack thereof. In this text, Atanasoski and Vora write, “The article explains that within 20 years, half of current US workers will be out of jobs, and in a more distant future, even jobs that seem currently unthreatened (such as that of medical doctor) will be more efficiently---- and productively---- performed by robots and artificial intelligence. The author speculates about this future as one that can lead to more freedom, but also more suffering, for humans” (1). It’s interesting because part of my academic interests, like explained above, are what potential can exist for people and what time and space is available for them to create art, literature, culture, etc. if they were to be liberated from oppressive structures. So, if we were to examine the replacement of laborers with robots in a vacuum, this could theoretically allocate more space and time for humans, specifically the exploited working-class, to rest and then to create, and then to rest again. However, I know that Atanasoski and Vora write that the author of this article reckons that it could lead to more human suffering. I know this analysis cannot be made in a vacuum and replacing laborers with robots is not the solution so long as capitalism still exists. This would render them unemployed and they would face even more stigmatization from their community members and they would not receive any assistance from their local, state, and national governments. They will still remain the neglected members of their society, just with less access to resources and increased suffering. The only solution is to abandon capitalism.
Finally, I want to reflect a bit on this quote from this text that deeply resonated with me and my interests, “This is a revolution that is either celebrated as freeing humans to be less oppressed by the drudgery of wage labor, domestic and reproductive labor, the work of care, and even the work of waging war, or alternately feared as displacing humans as the masters of this world… The human-machine future thus envisions a white loss that philosophers, politicians, and engineers must address before it is too late” (2). Like I mentioned above, part of what I am interested and hope to contribute to is the freeing of humans from oppression in order to be free to live, to connect with themselves, others, and the earth, create, and do whatever they please. While I can imagine the fear of the displacement of humans with robots to be scary because of what I wrote in the last paragraph (they’d be further marginalized and neglected because their replacement as laborers would not necessarily abandon and replace capitalism), I never had read that some find it scary because then humans would not be the masters of this world. It really is a fear of white loss and it’s so frustrating because we see this fear today when it comes to public discourse surrounding Indigeneity, the earth, and climate. Rich elites cannot bear to imagine a world where they do not have control over and destroy other people, other living beings, and the earth. They cannot bear the thought of living with and caring for the land and having it care for them in return if it meant they had to relinquish their wealth and excess. It is incredibly devastating.
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