mission | archive | zine | manifestos | weblog | links | contact

February 24, 2001, 11:23 p.m. || it won't hurt when i stumble to sleep

reading: Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity,  Allucquere Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the close of the Machanical Age

Reminders to self -- Send 20 Slanders to Pander, 20 Race Riots to Wooden Shoe in Philly and 15 to Stickfigure in Atlanta. Finish draft of position paper by next Saturday, to start on conference presentation version of said paper. Write half-hour lecture for section about the politics of eugenics and sterilization abuse in the United States (note continued forced sterilization thirty-five years after Nuremberg Codes are passed). Call A to make an appointment with E about setting an orals date. Ditch Monday meeting with K to avoid mooching. Wash dirty shorn hair. Meet M on Tuesday for orals schedule. Go to Maximumrocknroll meeting Sunday night, set VCR for Mulder's return on X-Files. Go to more midnight shows organized by the secret East Bay underground of rep theater punks. Write "things to do" down before forgetting to avoid late-minute attempt to organize, like this.

10:54 p.m.

This is the total cheater entry in which some comments I've made previously were recycled into this month's Punk Planet column, which is now being recycled as an entry here, just to get me back in the swing of things. God knows I never remember what I've written before anyway. And that makes three Punk Planet columns I need to upload here, by the way. Ach. Oh, and Mark bought me a new set of Rapidographs, so many I'll even get around to inking me a website girl mascot.

The posters went up a year ago, wheatpasted onto street corner electrical boxes and the glass facades of what used to be the Walgreen's. They caught my wandering eye, though they blended with handbills for new albums and dot coms. It must have been the word "sweatshop," printed boldly across an otherwise familiar ad aesthetic. In one version an uncomfortable-looking white boy wears corduroys, a sweatshirt and a fleece sleeveless vest. Like an anatomical illustration his body is marked with arrows and explanations comparing retail prices to low wages, contrasting status-conscious leisure against sweatshop labor. In the other Chie Abad, a former sweatshop worker, wears a citrus-colored fleece vest and a determined stare. "Ask GAP to pay workers a living wage and treat them with dignity...Everybody hates sweatshops."

The commodity fetish (courtesy of Marx) describes the affective, magical process by which a product of labor is transformed and accumulates value in excess of its use; it is what makes a Nike tee shirt a status symbol (for some) over a plain one. We attach all kinds of meanings to our commodities and what usually disappears is the labor itself, and the conditions of that labor. The Global Exchange poster series and the broader North American anti-sweatshop movement endeavor to render visible those conditions -fifteen-hour workdays, poverty-level wages, et cetera-- to force a confrontation between potential consumer and the reality of production.

So when I first studied the posters, I thought, That's smart .

But I'm mindful of another flyer in a different store window. The KPFA crafts fair poster (the local Bay Area Pacifica radio station) featured a color photograph of the bent back of faceless South American "peasant," his poverty and social position visually signified by the bright, woven poncho and a canvas sack slung heavily over one shoulder. Presumably the crafts fair offered the chance to purchase the products of his labor - his non-industrialized, labor-intensive work easily crossing national borders (which, you might imagine, he cannot) and made available for sale.

No doubt the progressive radio station would rally behind any anti-sweatshop cause. But does visibility necessarily equal political power or social justice? What does it mean to make the fact of labor not only hypervisible - but part of the imagined charm of the thing?

Images of sweatshop workers in are increasingly a part of the political landscape. They are an integral component of anti-sweatshop material; they fill the pages of newspapers and newsletters with bent heads and backs, threading needles or sorting tags. The iconography usually involves picturing rows of unnamed women in industrial factories or second-story warehouses; a part of the anti-sweatshop agenda is emphasized in the disciplinary sight of humans as machines. [ed. -- Which can get really problematic in a whole different way, but that's another entry.] But images of the "fair trade" or "crafts" worker have entered popular circulation as well, as an imagined alternative source of goods with a boutique flare.

Anita Ruddick, the founder of the Body Shop and avid proponent of "Trade Not Aid," features photographs of herself smiling in khakis, embracing her Third World workers in American Express commercials, her autobiography and store displays - a white woman on safari. In the one-dollar brochure I bought at the counter of the "fair trade" shop run by Global Exchange, the craftspeople are also bent over their workstations and foot-treadle machines - less high-tech, perhaps, but nevertheless hard at work producing luxury goods for a First World market. A photograph is captioned, "At Archana Handicrafts in mountainous Srinagar, India, traditional artisans battle severe Kashmir winters, supply shortages and political instability to create paper-mache designs that will appeal to North American shoppers."

I imagine the pictured man at a bench, hands sore from cradling the paintbrush and working in delicate, calculated strokes, in a room with others doing the same. Perhaps it is well lit and comfortable, but I wouldn't know for certain because my vision is crowded with the afterimages of professional publicity photographs. I suspect that the reason why the photos featured in the Fair Trade Association brochure focus only on individuals is to lessen the effect of a less romantic factory atmosphere--?

In North Berkeley (a relatively wealthy and white neighborhood) there are a number of shops featuring an overwhelming amount of goods for sale made by Tibetans: mirrored handbags, prayer flags, long-sleeved shirts. In one boutique, looking for evidence, Chandra brings me a straw basket, filled with loosely-tied bundles of Tibetan twisted rope incense. The card reads, "$3.50, made by refugees." We roll our eyes. Some part of the appeal of these commodities has to do with the lack of industrial evidence - against the mass-produced goods of most sweatshop labor, the idea of a hand-crafted item is also a marker of "taste" and class distinction. But this card is the extra touch, the brief assurance that these were "made by refugees." The item accumulates value not because of anything intrinsic to rope incense but because of the conditions of production - i.e., the suffering and dire political and social reality signaled by the "made by refugees" label.

The tedium of their labor becomes a spectacle for postcards, ethnographies, and National Geographic, and this has a long history. It bears asking, who consumes photographs of others at hard labor -- tilling fields, welding car parts, et cetera? And how do you price authenticity? Is it in the calluses, the worsening eyesight or muscle spasms? In the specter of sweat dyed into the threads, mixed into the resins, clays and paints? Those everyday working aspects that are usually invisible-- that is, the material conditions of production and the "faces" of labor-- lurking in the shadow of the commodity are made visible, but what kind of visibility is this, that it becomes a kind of commodity in and of itself, tales to trade around the coffee table or cocktail party?