Week 11 – Labor Without Borders

This week’s readings bring up questions concerning the organization of new forms of labor in the age of global capital. How does the circulation of goods, ideas, and people encourage the emergence and new kinds of labors? Rather, how can we think about the subsumption of activities once surrounding ideas of “work,” and their implications in constructions of race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality? How do these new labors construct a new kind of “work,” but also a new kind of subject as well? All of this week’s readings explore how and why such labors emerge and the ways they become organized and governed.  In Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, Rhacel Parreñas and Eileen Boris the relationship between care and economy bring up issues and inequalities between gender, race, class and other power relations in global flows of capital, people and goods. In Maurizio Lazzarato’s 1996 essay, “Immaterial Labor”, intellectual and other immaterial activities have become subsumed under post-Fordist production. Both forms of labor speak to the global transformation of labor – from unproductive to productive, waged and unwaged, material and immaterial.  Both immaterial and intimate labors “produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself” (Lazzarato, 138).

In “Immaterial Labor,” the form of labor under post-Fordist production has fundamentally shifted into information-based production or one that is essentially “immaterial.” Lazzarato distinguishes two types of content that are tied to commodity production. The first is the informational content of the commodity, which refers to the skills and labors involved in the production of the material product, such as software and other technological products. The second aspect of the commodity under post-Fordist production is the cultural content. This includes the “activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and more strategically, public opinion” (Lazzarato, 135).  In economies of immaterial production, then, what becomes central is the production of knowledge in all processes. Put differently, work includes or subsumes activities outside of normally recognized work, such as intellectual production.

What also distinguishes immaterial labor from former conception of labor is that it redefines what constitutes as “work.”  Compared to the traditional characterization of “work” as a solely material production of commodities, immaterial labor concerns the social relations and activities of commodity production. With the expansion of “work,” into activities outside of “work,” immaterial labor also subsumes the space and time of the activities outside of work. Figuring into a picture of the “social factory,” productive labor pervades all aspects of life. What links Lazzarato’s theory of immaterial labor to other kinds of labor not normally considered “work,” such as those discussed in Intimate Labors, is the socialization of labor. However, where Lazzarato is interested in the subsumption of immaterial qualities in post-Fordist production, Intimate Labors explores the new kind of gendered and racialized labor that has entered global capitalism. If all activities fall into productive capabilities, then Intimate Labors takes it one step further by looking at the subsumption of daily personal activities such as intimacy. Intimate Labors argues that this daily experience becomes increasingly commodified in late capitalism. What makes Intimate Labors so productive is that the analytic framework that it provides allows for a look at the immaterial and material labors, both within and outside of the labor market, that mostly women engage in. The framework of intimate labors situates the expansion of “work” into both waged and unwaged spaces -- public and private. As Intimate Labors argues, the subsumption of the private space into systems of labor engenders and maintains economic and societal inequalities that affect ideological views on race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender. When intimate labor enters the marketplace, this labor represents the working conditions as well as the value of the worker themselves. If then, the work of intimate labor is considered to be a non-market activity such as domestic care, personal care, and sex work, which it assigns as a low economic value that should be done by lower classes or outsiders, the stigmatization of both the work and those that perform it constructs social hierarchies. Because Intimate Labors situates these labors within the global labor market, the ideological constructs surrounding the status of these labors. What is also at work in Intimate Labors is the governance and administration of life that intimate labors participates in on a daily basis. The caring of life, which is in itself performing a governance of life, falls outside of the productive and skilled labor in global capitalism.  Rhacel Parreñas argues that the status of the care often fall to “men and women of color and/or recent immigrant” (Intimate Labors, 11).

In A Grammar of the Multitude, Paulo Virno argues that it is the full realization of labor-power that late capitalism strives to achieve. Virno cites Marx in his definition of labor power as, "the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being" (Capital, Volume l: 270). Life becomes the center of politics as the living body “becomes an object to be governed not for its intrinsic value, but because it is the substratum of what really matters” (Virno, 84). What Intimate Labors questions are the labors and people engaged in the caring of life, even as they become stigmatized and marginalized.  Through the constant drive of capitalism for new markets, both on the side of consumers as well as producers of cheap labor, the emergence of new labors also relies on the incorporation of geopolitical regions, which have been formed outside capitalist mode of production. The issue of labor becomes particularly important to this course’s overall project because as many of these authors have argues, the systems of labor maintain and reflect the sociopolitical status as well as condition of the laborer. These readings not only look at the implications of new immaterial labor, but also how and in what ways this new laborer emerges. 

Week 14? – Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects

(Don't remember what we said about where this should go.)

In Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects, the emergence of illegal immigration as the central problem of American immigration policy constructed a new figure in immigration discourse – the “illegal alien.”  Beginning with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, Ngai traces immigration policy and the lines of illegal and legal status that have come to define not only immigration law, but also the development of twentieth-century American ideas and practices surrounding nationality, citizenship, and race. The implementation of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in 1924 is especially important to Ngai’s thesis in that it marks a shift from a previous era of open immigration from Europe to an era of immigration restriction. The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act set numerical quotas for immigrants entering the United States based on national origin, the first of its kind.  The restriction limitations that the law put in place also established a quota system that classified the world’s population (and immigrants) according to nationality and race. Ngai argues that although not fully explicit, the law essentially created a ranking of these populations “into a hierarchy of desirability for admission into the United States” (Ngai, 17). The use of numerical restrictions as well as the basis of these restrictions on nationality marked a shift in immigration policy from a previous policy of “regulation.”  The new immigration policy of “restriction” thus characterized a new comprehensive immigration law provided grounds for a legal racialization of certain immigrant groups, as discrimination against ethnic groups of certain nationalities were subject to greater levels of restriction. Two groups that were particularly affected by high levels of discrimination and restriction were Asian and Latino immigrant communities, which Ngai argues, were figured as “foreign and unassimilable” in American discourse (Ngai 8). Assimilation, a traditional tenet for liberal democratic society, became an impossibility for many of these marginalized communities, as they remained “alien” in the eyes of the “American identity”, regardless of legal citizenship. Going further, even as America increasingly defined itself based on the myth of “immigrant America,” immigrant populations of certain countries or racialization, existed outside of formal membership and belonging. Assimilation, which was posed as impossible for racialized immigrant groups would increasingly become an impossibility to “assimilate” to white society. Rather, American society was increasingly constructed around a racial identity of whiteness that defined lines of inclusion and exclusion based on race. Immigration policy, thus, became tied to a broader and more comprehensive “race policy” that no longer saw distinctions along black and white, but rather the inclusion of Mexicans from the south after World War I. The 1920s marked a shift not only in the “regulation” of immigrant populations, but also emergence of race and racial desirability as a factor in immigration policy. Ngai further writes, “modern racial ideology depended increasingly on the idea of complex cultural, national, and physical difference more than on simply biological hierarchy” (Ngai, 8).

            The role of difference, which became constructed not only along racial lines, but also cultural and national lines is important to my thesis not only in terms of its emergence and institutionalization in racial ideology, but also in terms of how it has become increasingly called upon for regulation in immigration policy.  The deployment of quota restrictions, for example, performs a similar organization of the immigrant into a statistical category. Once the immigrant is turned into a numerical figure, then the limits placed on these populations reduced to statistics becomes engaged in technologies of regulation.  What this quota system also produced was a system of visa controls and the subsequent documentation of legal status. Proper documentation, for example, visa, became the means for entrance. Because visas were taken as the means of entry, the allotment of quotas based on nation origin and arguably, racial desirability implicated technologies of tracking and documentation into a similar racial ideology. With the emergence of the “illegal alien,” the new policy of restriction demanded multiple technologies for its tracking and enforcement. These technologies included the tracking of quotas and the surveillance of border entry points. Because immigrant populations were increasingly restricted, the border as a site was coupled with the management of the immigrant in the interior, producing a comprehensive immigrant policy on a national scale.

Furthermore, with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, the creation of the Border Patrol happened within the same decade, functioning as “a scouting organization and a pursuit organization” (Ngai, 56). This kind of regulation and border enforcement would form what would become the policy of “apprehension.” The focus on the interior rather than at the site of borders, which would come to define modern border enforcement and immigration policy, was evident in the area that the Border Patrol occupied. Ngai notes that the Border Patrol “did not operate ‘on the border line’ but as far as one hundred mile ‘back of the line’”(Ngai, 56). However, the area of enforcement that was given to Border patrol constituted the points of entry along the border, but also the interior space of the nation-state, collapsing the two into an indistinguishable space of management. The point of exclusion that the border as a physical space represented became indistinguishable from the space of inclusion that the interior of the United States represented. This becomes important to both sites of management, as they have evolved into contemporary exclusionary and inclusionary immigration policies.  Furthermore, as Ngai notes, “the processes of defining and patrolling the border both encoded and generated racial ideas and practices which, in turn, produced different racialized spaces internal to the nation” ( 63-4). 

The comparative model of border enforcement that Ngai offers is productive in terms of mapping the technologies that have come to regulate and organize the border and those who cross, both legally and socially. The new immigration policy based on one of restriction fundamentally defined how the nation would be racially and spatially managed. For as much as the racial hierarchy of immigrants was present, the increase in territoriality of the United States along its border became of equal importance during this shift. This remapping marked an increased awareness and as a result, surveillance of the state’s land borders. What became important in these shifts, which speaks to the future militarization of the border are the consequences that the new regime of restriction produced. First, it “remapped the ethno-racial contours of the nation,” constructing American identity around whiteness. Secondly, the regime of restriction also “generated illegal immigration as the central problem in immigration law” (Ngai, 17). Thirdly, the policy of restriction called upon new technologies of governmentality that would be preoccupied with the management of the state at the level of population control.

A second line of inquiry that Ngai pursues in Impossible Subjects is based on a question that she poses in the beginning of her text:

 “What is it about the violation of the nation’s sovereign space that produces a different kind of illegal alien and a different valuation of the claims that he or she can make on society?”  (2).

In the real and imagined category of the illegal alien, the question of rights and what kinds of claims that are afforded to this new figure become paramount in current debates surrounding immigration policy. Whereas the spatial organization and management of the illegal alien was paramount in the policy of restriction, Ngai argues that perhaps the outmost point of exclusion from national membership can be found in the juridical boundary that faced the illegal alien. Even if the illegal alien crosses the territorial boundary in the United States, the rights and national membership that are/are not afforded to the illegal alien brings up the relationship between citizenship and rights in American immigration discourse. For example, the current debate surrounding the protection of non-citizens under Fourteenth Amendment has been particularly important in reading the discourse surrounding immigration. The Fourteenth Amendment, which provides equal protection under the law, protects both citizens and non-citizens in civil society. Other than matters of admission and expulsions, or outside of the immigration domain, the law protects the civil rights non-citizens. However, the call to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment by members of the Republican party, especially Tea Party members becomes especially revealing toward the attitudes toward the rights of illegal immigrants. Ngai argues that the increasing centrality of sovereignty in immigration policy has allowed Congress to create, “as even the Supreme Court described, ‘rules that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens’” (Ngai, 12). Here the relationship between the social and legal status of the illegal alien becomes particularly complex. The civil rights of the illegal alien, although protected under the Fourteenth Amendment, still become marginalized and limited under other measures and protections created by Congress suggesting that the actual recognition and protection of the rights of non-citizens create a subject that not only exists outside of citizenship, but who is also without rights.  

Week Ten - Journalism and the Border

This week’s readings take up the question of “reporting” in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border. Both texts come from academic institutions, although with very different approaches. The first text, Human Rights Along the U.S.-Mexico Border, focuses on the human rights violations, especially against women that have been implicitly promoted by US border enforcement and trade policy. The text takes up an analysis of the discourse that surround and frame discussions surrounding US border enforcement policy.  The second text, a cross-cultural project between two university journalism programs, takes up the issues surrounding the border through production, opening up multiple avenues of discussion through networked journalistic production. What this project also does is critically engage with the modes of reportage that characterize areas of crisis and conflict. The driving questions that frame this week’s reading concern the ways that the immigrant is figured in non-state discourse. The first text can be seen as performing a humanitarian intervention through an emphasis on the lack of such recognition on behalf of state actors. The second text can be seen as an intervention in the sense that it uses narrative devices as a means of bringing figures of humanity into political discussion and recognition. These two projects both engage in interventions at the level of humanity, by different means and with different implications. This week’s issues are fundamental to current conflicts surrounding U.S. border enforcement and the recognition of human rights along the border.

In Human Rights Along the U.S. Mexico Border, Kathleen Staudt et al. looks at the issue of gendered violence and exploitation as a means of opening up issues formerly unrecognized in nationalist rhetoric and politics. First, the text approaches the issue of violence against women in terms of statistical and testimonial evidence of “everyday violence.” Secondly, at the level of U.S.- Mexico policy, Staudt et al. look at the ways such policies have in fact promotes patriarchal oppressive institutions to the point of hyper-masculine political structures. Staudt further argues that the language surrounding the border is one of “security” and “invasion,” both terms marking a nationalist rhetoric that cover over issues of human rights to both citizens and immigrants. What is so productive about this work is that the authors are particularly concerning with how these discourses of “border threat” and “border security” are not only narrowly confined problems, but more importantly, these discourses rely on the criminalization of the immigrant through crime statistics. Because U.S. border enforcement policy uses crime statistics as the main defense of their policies, the problem of border security become one with equally very narrow set of solutions. Going further, Staudt sees the underlying motives behind such discourses as tied more toward economic interests, rather than criminality:

“’Border Security’ has become the watchword phrase of fear and of bureaucratic and bipartisan political campaign sloganeering, with a private industrial and commercial sector eagerly seeking contracts to work in public-private partnerships to ‘control’ the border” (2).

Because the narrowed problem of the border only allows for an equally narrow set of solutions, to approach the issue of human rights, especially in terms of gendered violence, require a broader framework.  For Staudt, the issue of gendered violence is something that does not even fit or count for “official” acts of human rights violations, let only enter into public discourse. To approach human rights violations along the U.S.-Mexico border from the perspective of women opens up not only the militarization of the border, but also the militarization of everyday life. Put differently, Staudt argues that the absence of discourse surrounding gendered violence is a result of militarized governance of everyday life along the border. In Human Rights Along the U.S. – Mexico Border, the tone of the book is in the style of investigative journalism, which transforms into a policy paper full of recommendations of border enforcement and human rights recognition from state actors. The book, then, can be seen as an intervention in discourse, as it speaks to the issues that border policy disavows through rhetorics of security.

            What makes the text’s argument so compelling is the voice that it carries throughout the first half of the book. Through an engagement with the construction of border policy debate as framed by the state, Staudt et al. analyze the dangerous implications of these current framing. By looking at the techniques of discourse, which Staudt et al. take up in the first half of the book, the work takes up issue of reportage as a central problematic. Through the creation or broadening of frameworks through which policy-makers and enforcement discuss border issues, the creation of new discourses allows new sites of discourses to surface, including that of gendered violence and the recognition of dignity to immigrants. This kind of engagement is what the 2010 “Beyond the Border” project takes up. Beyond the Border” is a cross-cultural collaboration between the University of Arizona’s School of Journalism and New York University’s Journalism Institute. The project brings NYU graduate students to the Arizona-Sonora border to report on a variety of issues surround the US-Mexico border including detention, violence, environmental degradation, and racial and ethnic conflicts. In an effort to open the debate on border policy and enforcement to a greater audience with a different perspective that those who live and report within or alongside the border, the project presents itself as one that is focused on the training of  “future journalists by giving students tools to report in cross-cultural settings, as well as to teach them how to create journalism that puts issues and events in historical, economic, social, and cultural contexts.”

I have chosen to focus on the “Beyond the Borders” project as a way to think through some of the questions concerning methodologies of reporting, which heavily use the form of narrative as a way of connecting policy norms to the ways they play out in the everyday live of men and women living along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This can be said of the project of journalism more generally. The narrative strategies that journalistic texts mobilize serve both as a device for compelling texts, but also because these texts are concerned with the “everyday” or the way of life for individuals. Journalism “objective” stance coupled with the reliance on narrative as a mode of reporting sets it apart from the kind of writing that humanitarian intervention often becomes involved with. The “human element” that journalism instead mobilizes through its use of narrative can be seen as a different kind of intervention at the level of humanity.  This mode of reporting uses the narratives of individuals as a means of entering their positions within a larger narrative whether it be detention centers, border enforcement, etc. What makes this project so textual rich, however, is the emphasis on the mode of pedagogy that the project hopes to produce. Because these modes of reporting take place within an academic framework, methodology is key. The focus of the project is just as much about the student’s experience as it is about what they report. “Beyond the Border” not only collects the stories created by journalism students, but also hopes to produce an educational video that speaks to the methodological approach of reporting in areas of conflict and trauma. The projects directors, Professors Latty and González de Bustamante documented students during their reporting experience, which will result in a first-of-its-kind video for journalism educators who teach reporting in areas of conflict and trauma. Looking at the process of these journalists, their positions enter into a complex relationship between representation and “bearing witness.” Because many of the stories varied in terms of subjects and story angles, there were no elemental approaches that ran across every text.  What the project more clearly relied on was the collaboration between students unfamiliar with border politics and University of Arizona journalism students who are more knowledgeable. While the potential difficulties of reporting “as an outsider” are present, the networked collaboration and production among the students of different academic institutions is something that is new and helps us to rethink modes of reporting. The desire for a new approach or “angle” that the NYU students arguably gathered as they reported on the situation, is in dialogue with the mode of persistence and endurance that journalism students at UA can been seen as being engaged in. The multivalent issues that were reported on as well as the collaborative approach between the two schools seem to produce a mode of reporting as a networked production.