too neurotic for my own good

ha! there’s nothing accidental about that author of the New Yorker profile of Sally Rooney comparing her to Michel Houellebecq

imagine an existence where, like, a loose tap at your mom’s house isn’t a life-destroying metaphor

I mean I will always be more inclined towards affect theorizing than I should (formative tumblr 2008 -> 2013 how could I not??)

but even I recognize its entire lack of … everything
(life -> now)

rgr-pop:

even in light of every point I’m about to make, I found that little interview interesting and thoughtful, worth a read. I especially found the examples of “emotional labor” as recently defined in the press to be very jarring and illuminating. I’m not pedantic about social science terms (or like, I’m trying to not be, because pedantry is a form of incorrectness, and it’s important to be correct) and I know it can’t count as scholarship if we aren’t reworking concepts. but yeah, in the past I’ve tended to land very much on the side of “that’s absolutely not what those words mean,” and in the case of “emotional labor” the misuses are really wild. at the same time, I think that what’s going on is not really even exactly “concept creep” (imo) and, more importantly, I think “concept creep” is a bad concept that we shouldn’t use. above all of my political issues with its new mobilization, it’s a term coming out of psychology and I think it’s fundamentally unsuited for talking about a social-political phenomenon taking place in a content-producing economy. the application is like, extremely I Want to Fuck The Concept Of Social Sciences, which makes it sort of funny given the argument at hand! is our endgame here to make sure we run every idea by a panel of five tenured social scientists before we make a claim? or are we trying to be more precise, and get to the heart of a problem? (the answer is neither: we are trying to sell the shiniest new trickle-down social theory! and then, the shiniest new social theory patch. our goal is to produce more and more short posts that talk about how we need to be more precise! only that.)

I’m going to test something out here, an idea I’ve come to after reading some thoughts from other labor historians I “know” (am mutuals with on twitter/whose work I read), as well as other stuff: I’m not sure “emotional labor” as hochshild imagined it is either a great framework or the framework we really need right now. or, rather, I know it’s not the framework we need, the term we’re looking for. I more tentatively think it’s maybe not that workable even on its own terms. 

one thing I find pretty interesting about her interview there is that she herself seems to be making a “creep” away from some of her earlier stakes. the managed heart doesn’t exactly argue that “emotional labor” is always paid, nor that it is always as necessarily operating only formally. just look at her interview definition vs. the definition in the introduction of the book:

Emotional labor, as I introduced the term in The Managed Heart, is the work, for which you’re paid, which centrally involves trying to feel the right feeling for the job. This involves evoking and suppressing feelings. 

(2018)

[Emotional labor] requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others–in [the case of flight attendants], the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place. This kind of labor calls for the coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to our individuality. 

Beneath the difference between physical and emotional labor there lies a similarity in the possible cost of doing the work: the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self–either the body or the margins of the soul–that is used to do the work.

(1979)

two things stuck out to me about this interview. in it, she suggests that “emotional labor” was always intended to describe paid, public labor, but she also suggests that she is newly imagining it to describe the management of others’ emotions, especially domestically. this is pretty interesting to me because the management of others’ emotions–the production of an emotional response in service industry consumers–was always and is very obviously central to the managed heart. at the same time, much of the book is about non-paid emotional management (or at least, it deals with unpaid emotional labor in order to pull out ideas about its commercialization.)

I feel a couple of ways about what she is doing above with “feeling the right feeling.” on one hand, I feel like she has recently been overemphasizing the affective experiential component of what made her original argument good. on the other hand, looking back at that book, the feeling of emotional labor is so much more central to the argument than I think is even workable, maybe.

so, yes, I mean, I’m not just pointing out that what she is saying about her own work is itself her own new interpretation of her own work, because..that’s actually good scholarship. but pulling this up now I’m also reminded that many of the “emotional labor isn’t x, it’s actually blah blah” stuff on tumblr has not really been correct! it’s funny, we’re dealing with “this concept belongs only to this book and the scholar who wrote it” and it’s not even a long book and people can’t even get it right! but that’s whatever, I don’t actually care about that part. I just think it’s no longer a matter of who is right about “emotional labor,” but what if we consider whether “emotional labor” is a good theory.

she does talk about some things, in this interview, that get to the heart of (one of) the problems with what she was doing with the managed heart, look at this:

Beck: Is it emotional labor when you try to say your ideas in a meeting in a nonthreatening way?
Hochschild: Not unless it is experienced as anxiety-provoking or fear-evoking to you.

the managed heart was, additionally, always about the human toll of alienation (and explaining a new form of alienation produced in a then-arguably-new system of production), but the above exchange has me asking… is this good? do we like and agree with that? do we think it’s useful to classify exploitation like this? (”alienation” in marx as “a feeling,” for one, commodifiication only as commodification if it produces alienation as an affective experience.) (to answer for you: I myself don’t think this is going to do anything useful for us.)

so this gets at some of the best and the worst of the project, in my opinion. one dated and silly thing I like about the work is its concern with the “commercialization” of emotion in a new service economy–I want to untangle that more (close reading probably, ugh), and I think that’s one part of the puzzle that is more useful to us now. but one of the most questionable parts of the project is also the one she seems most wedded to, which is also dated in kind of a sweet way, but is something we should be more critical about, which is that she argues (she believes) that there is a “self” that needs protecting from commodification, and that the toll of emotional labor is not just psychological, it concerns the fate of an authentic humanity. the truth about the managed heart that I don’t think people want to hear is that it’s a book of social-psychology, not a book of [good] labor theory. I don’t think it’s going to help us! so it’s striking to me to watch people call everything they don’t like “emotional labor” then see other people accuse those people of being individualistic, while pointing to this book that is…as far as I can tell, often criticized from the left for being a text on individualism. I dunno how I feel about that part of it, but I do think the text itself leaves me wanting more in that regard.

(also her use of “mental labor” in the interview is weird.)

Anonymous asked: Omfg Brassed Off?!? That Brassed Off is even an option makes me so happy right now, you have no idea!!! Usually no one ever knows about that movie. I love that movie 😍. Even if it won't win (and I don't think it will) I hope that maybe one day you will write a Brassed Off AU for Ian and Mickey. You are brilliant at those movie AU's.

loftec:

WE ARE NOT ALONE!

I’ve had it planned out for a long time and it will happen one day, my friend, I promise you this! I’m so excited that there’s interest in a Brassed Off au, who would have thought?

holy fuck I was just talking about this movie yesterday. never ever could I have imagined that such a thing might exist!!!! may Pete Postlethwaite (rest in power) bless this post!!!!!!!

1.

How might photographs bear witness to the Great Leap Forward and Famine (1958-1962), and how can we explain the abundance of harvest images and absence of famine images?  This talk traces the photographic practices and discourses of the Great Leap era by drawing on photography magazines from the period. Rather than totalitarian control over all cameras, both professional photojournalism and amateur photography proliferated as China began producing domestic brands. Yet patriotic rejection of the imperialist gaze of a “backward” China and the ideological disciplining of photographers at all levels inhibited the documentation of catastrophe.  Photos served not only to record, but also to mobilize the masses to implement a utopian blueprint.  Both inspiring and coercive in spreading ideological orthodoxy, photographic image and practice shaped people’s worldviews and influenced their behaviour. Not merely “fake” or “lies,” the period’s photographs were visualizations of projected hopes that were so brutally trampled with tens of millions of lives. [source]

2.

On a plane a few days later, I sat next to Evgeny, a fiftysomething photojournalist from Chita, near the Manchurian border. I told him about the time capsule. Suddenly, he said: ‘I regret my part in destroying the USSR.’ Had he been on the barricades in 1991? No, he replied. ‘But at some point in the 1980s, I began to take honest photographs. Empty shop counters, that kind of thing. Please understand, I wasn’t trying to exaggerate anything. But even so, had I known what it would all come to, I’d have kept them locked in my drawer.’ [source]

Less helpfully for her prospects, Abbott also showed no deference towards Labour leaders. In 1996, backbenchers were summoned in groups to see Blair, then the lauded premier-in-waiting. The former Labour minister Chris Mullin records in his diaries that Abbott “waltzed in 20 minutes late”, then told Blair that New Labour made people feel “talked at rather than listened to”, and was “losing sight of those who traditionally voted for us”. [source]

can’t wait for Corbyn-era tv movies about NuLabour to be updated to include the real MVPs

comradeocean:

I cut an orange from the branch so that I could taste Palestine, but Umm Hassan yelled, “No! It’s not for eating, it’s Palestine.” I was ashamed of myself and hung the branch on the wall of the sitting room in my house, and when you came to visit me and saw the mouldy fruit, you yelled, “What’s that smell?” And I told you the story and watched you explode in anger.
“You should have eaten the oranges,” you told me.
“But Umm Hassan stopped me and said they were from the homeland.”
“Umm Hassan’s senile,” you answered. “You should have eaten the oranges, because the homeland is something we have to eat, not let it eat us. We have to eat the oranges of Palestine, and we have to eat Palestine and Galilee.”
It came to me then that you were right, but the oranges were going bad. You went to the wall and pulled off the branch, and I took it from your hand and stood there confused, not knowing what to do with that bunch of decay.
“What are you going to do?” you asked.
“Bury it,” I said.
“Why bury it?” you asked.
“I’m not going to throw it away, because it’s from the homeland.”
You took the branch and threw it in the rubbish.
“What a scandal!” you said. “What are these old women’s superstitions? Before hanging the homeland up on the wall, it’d be better to knock down the wall and leave. We have to eat every orange in the world and not be afraid, because the homeland isn’t oranges. The homeland is us.”

– Gate of the Sun, Elias Khoury

[source]

there’s a person, she doesn’t exist anymore. maybe I got new glasses and new hair to try to help make that happen.

people wink in and out of existence all the time, in this weak sense of existence.

it should be ok.

I still have nail polish on though, from 9 weeks ago. and leg hairs just starting to grow back from when I shaved them 8 weeks ago. and unfinished overnight oats left in the fridge from 10 weeks ago. and streamers left hanging up from 15 weeks ago. and unfinished alcohol from 11 weeks ago. and I barely drink, both the person then, and the person now.

nail polish will chip off, the streamers will all fall, eventually. at some point I will finish cleaning the fridge.

I’ve been good this time. the time I live in is now. not in the time of a person who use to exist.

not old new China circa 1986
not Ridgewood, New Jersey, July 1998
not early June, Toronto, 2017
not the first week of May taking OC Transpo busses, 2002

I say Don’t look back Never look back. I think

Olive Wellwood told no stories about Goldthorpe, or the Gullfoss mine. She had packed away the slag-heaps and winding-gear, the little house in Morton Row, with its dark uninhabited parlour, its animated kitchen and pocket-sized garden, the ever-present stink of the ash pits across the yards, and the grime that floated onto the strips of lace curtain. She had packed it away in what she saw in her mind as a roped parcel, in oiled silk, with red wax seals on the knots, which a woman like and unlike herself carried perpetually over a windswept moor, sometimes on her head, sometimes held before her on two arms, like the cushion on which the regalia lie at coronations. This vision was not a story. The woman never arrived, and the parcel was never opened. The weather was grey and the air was turbulent.

I went on a deep dive in an external hard drive looking for pictures of a cat I met in Suzhou 2 years ago* and found 2500 words of an unfinished Maria Deluca-centric Roswell fic.

There are many ways of being a timeghost!!

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