Byproductive labor

Introduction

References to affective or emotional labor are increasingly common in social and political philosophy as well as in popular critical discourse. ¹ The escalation of this conversation since 2000 has been catalyzed by Hardt and Negri’s advancement of the notion of affective labor to describe qualitative changes in the nature of work and global political economy, ² as well as by discussions in the humanities and social sciences about the feminization and coloniality of labor. ³ These discussions are preceded, and in some measure anticipated, by socialist feminist theories of reproductive labor whose popularity has otherwise waned after the 1980s, by a well-established literature in the social sciences on emotional labor which often attends to the feminized character of this work and is rarely substantially engaged by philosophers, and by scholarship on care work in both philosophy and the social sciences. As the affective turn changes the ways we theorize affect and emotion, the increasing economization of affect and emotion in post-Fordist political economy is changing the character and global politics of work and emotional life. Thus theorizing affective labor and the risks of exploitation unique to it in a way that builds bridges across these discourses is a pressing and timely project.

My aim in this paper is to introduce a theory of affective labor as byproductive, a concept I develop through analysis of concrete practices of affective labor in dialog with feminist scholarship, both on gendered and racialized labor, and on affect and emotion. I argue that in its embodied specificity, affective labor is not only the work of producing affects for others to consume or the reproductive work that rejuvenates and sustains labor power and social life, but also the work of metabolizing unwanted affects and affective byproducts. Thus, byproductive labor is a neologism I develop to bring into view an affective economy and indeed a political economy of affects to the side of the distinction between productive and reproductive labor in its paid and unpaid variants.

I make three central claims about the way this notion of byproductive labor offers a theory of affective labor. First, I argue that affective labor is always byproductive. Whether it is a labor of affect production or social reproduction or both, affective labor invariably creates byproducts in the embodied subjectivity of the worker. Second, I argue that some affective labor is neither productive nor reproductive, at least not successfully so, and yet still can be understood as byproductive, revealing a unique kind of affective expenditure that is a defining feature of affective labor not circumscribed by the productive–reproductive distinction. And third, I argue that the marginalized forms of subjectivity and depleted agency constituted through the intersections of this labor with hierarchies of gender, race, and migrant status or global class are themselves byproducts of affective labor. Thus, theorizing affective labor as byproductive captures the uniqueness of affective labor and the forms of exploitation unique to it, but also explains the interaction of affective labor with forms of power that operate through subjection and hierarchies of social status. While all affective labor, paid and unpaid, is byproductive in the sense that it invariably has constitutive effects on the subjectivity of the worker, the exploitation of affective labor that happens at its intersections with race and gender works by producing depleted embodied subjectivities: ones whose affects are diminished in their force as affections, constructed as non-intentional, non-agentic, or non-authoritative, and who thereby are constructed as affect disposals, sites of affect accumulation.

I proceed by first motivating my project in the context of literature on affective and emotional labor in philosophy and the social sciences, emphasizing feminist critiques. I then develop the theory of affective labor as byproductive by analyzing studies of different paradigm cases of affective labor from the social sciences, using feminist scholarship on affect and emotion as well as on gendered and racialized labor.

Affective labor and feminist politics

One watershed moment for discussions of affective labor falls in 1983, when Arlie Russell Hochschild published The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, her germinal study of the emotional labor of flight attendants as typifying production in the “pink collar” post-Fordist service economy. Flight attendants exemplify a new mode of production: an emotional labor that “requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (Hochschild 1983, 7). For Hochschild, the flight attendant’s work offers a paradigm of a distinctive kind of emotionally demanding labor that is primarily a matter of producing a profitable disposition of cheer and conviviality in passengers, and she does this by managing her own feeling in order to create an affect display that is effective at broadcasting affects to others. Hochschild saw this commercialization of emotional life as an encroachment of the market into private, interpersonal life, a colonization of the private self by public industry. Kathi Weeks offers a crucial corrective to this critical approach, writing that Hochschild assumes a separation of private and public spheres as well as a core self prior to estrangement, both assumptions that are belied by the radical implications of Hochschild’s own work (Weeks 2007, 236). ⁴

Another watershed moment for discussions of affective labor came in 1999 and 2000, when Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri introduced the notion of affective labor as one face of “immaterial labor,” a category whose provenance traces to Karl Marx by way of Maurizio Lazzarato’s 1998 critical adaptation of it. ⁵ As immaterial labor, Hardt and Negri’s concept of affective labor refers not only to a new mode of work, but to an entire biopolitical reorganization of political economy around the production of subjectivities and information rather than material commodities. The production of capital “cannot be limited to waged labor, but must refer to human creative capacities in their generality,” including “the manipulation of affects.” ⁶ The daily struggle of unemployed persons and the domestic toil of housewives no less than the waged worker are thus part of the production and reproduction of social life, and of the biopolitical growth of capital that valorizes information and subjectivities.

In both landmark analyses, affective labor involves the encroachment of the economic into the personal, undermining distinctions between the domains of home and workplace, private life and public life, as well as associated distinctions between work and play, labor time and leisure time. Hochschild drew attention to the commercialization of affective life such that paid work expanded into affective activities that had previously been understood as definitively off the market, private, and distinctive of personal life and of unpaid women’s work. By contrast, Hardt and Negri position affective labor as the exemplar of a historical dissolution of the boundary between work and life, commodity production and social reproduction. While these distinctions had defined labor and the separate spheres of production and reproduction in Marxist orthodoxy, they also track the traditional sexual division of labor and gendered domains of human life.

Hardt and Negri’s notion of affective labor has been received by feminist theorists with both interest and significant criticism. ⁷ Schultz, for example, writes that “despite its pervasive sense of itself as foundational, Empire almost entirely lacks an analysis of gender relations”; yet “the authors’ central focus is on biopolitics, affective labor and the transformations of the relationship between productive and reproductive labor—all questions for feminist theory” (2006, 77). Much of the specific contention concerns Hardt and Negri’s central claim that political economy has undergone a global biopolitical reorganization such that the production of capital has converged with the production and reproduction of social life. In contemporary capitalism, Hardt and Negri argue, there is no longer a distinction between productive and unproductive labor, or between material production and social reproduction: “The powers of production are…today entirely biopolitical, in other words, they run throughout and constitute directly not only production but also the entire realm of reproduction.” ⁸

Socialist feminists were the first to recognize the importance of the domain of social reproduction, with its devalued or unwaged labor that is not directly productive in the orthodox Marxist sense (producing surplus value through creating alienable commodities that can be circulated as exchange values); and they were the first to insist on the complexity of the relationship between material production and social reproduction. They appropriated and critically modified Marxist distinctions between productive and reproductive labor as they sought to expand the category of labor to include its feminized forms. ⁹

Scholars studying the feminization of labor in post-Fordist economies join theorists of affective and emotional labor in suggesting that the development of capital has shifted the paradigmatic parameters of labor itself away from that orthodox Marxist model, eroding distinctions between work time and leisure time, between work and personal life. For example, there is an increasing demand for one’s personality and affective life to be deployed in the service of one’s job—a demand that used to be reserved for women workers and characteristically feminized labor (like secretarial and nursing jobs), but that is now becoming part of the paradigm of work as such. ¹⁰ Thus “the feminization of labor” names not only the migration of women into the workplace, but also the migration of the world of work into personal life.

While the research on this tendency vindicates the socialist feminist focus on complicating the relation between production and reproduction, it also shifts the critical project dramatically. While the critical aim of socialist feminists of the 1970s was to expand notions of work and exploitation to include its feminized forms, in Nina Power’s provocative formulation, “all work is women’s work now” (2009). The shift in theoretical work toward an affective paradigm of labor expands labor as a category of analysis in a way that tracks the expansion of labor’s purchase on human life across gendered distinctions that used to exclude women and women’s work from capitalist production proper.

But when all work is women’s work, what becomes of women, and the usually unpaid, usually reproductive work that is traditionally assigned to us? And what becomes of racialized divisions of reproductive labor among women? ¹¹ While understanding affective labor in terms of the feminization of labor might seem to cast it as a homogenization that renders gender and the production–reproduction distinction less salient as a category of analysis, feminist theorists are arguing that post-Fordist economies are generating new forms of racialized and gendered exploitation, redeploying hierarchies of race, gender, and migrant status or global class in ways that interact anew with the history of the productive–reproductive distinction to disappear and devalue labor. ¹² These changes call for redeployments and revisions of our critical categories and frameworks.

Schultz points out that Hardt and Negri’s thesis of the dissolution of boundaries “makes it impossible to critique the hierarchies that are produced in the process of dividing paid from unpaid work” (2006, 81). Their approach disappears a discussion about how work such as unpaid housework, childcare, and emotional labor in personal relationships is allocated to women and devalued as gender expression rather than work; or about how paid housework and childcare is allocated to women of color and devalued and de-professionalized. This is an important critique: the literature on reproductive labor makes a convincing case that the gendering and racialization of this work interact to reproduce hierarchies of race and gender as well as labor in interlocking ways.

Glenn’s history of the racialized division of reproductive labor among women in the US demonstrates the intersectional production of racialized hierarchies of gender and labor among women (1992). ¹³ Not only was black women’s work in the post-slavery US devalued and underpaid labor in ways that drew on the feminization of this work, but also their performance of the “dirty work” aspects of feminized reproductive labor allowed white bourgeois women to divert the more abject aspects of feminized labor and femininity to women of color. This enabled white women to conform more closely to norms of feminine purity, spirituality, and refinement even as it distanced black women from those more valued and normative aspects of femininity—as well as distancing them from their own homes, children, and the context of social reproduction in their own relationships and communities (Glenn 1992, 8).

Bringing this tradition of feminist scholarship on the intersecting feminization and racialization of reproductive labor into conversation with the post-Marxist notion of affective labor raises significant questions about how intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, and global class or migrant status may be undergoing redeployment in new forms. ¹⁴ Hochschild’s flight attendants, for instance, do a form of affective labor that is feminized yet paid, but may be professionalized through its association with white or global bourgeois femininity—a status it receives through a racialized and global division of feminized work that devalues the “dirty work” or behind-the-scenes domestic work and childcare increasingly done by migrant women of color vis-à-vis more bourgeois and professionalized feminized work such as care work, direct contact emotional service, affect-producing performance, and brand ambassadorship. I will return to this intersectionality of affective labor later in the paper in the context of my theory of affective labor as byproductive.

In sum, if we want to do justice to claims that there is no separate sphere of reproduction, then we should “push the organization of the boundary between paid and unpaid labor in to the center of a critique of political economy—and this in order to comprehend the very shifts in this boundary” (Schultz 2006, 80). What is called for is not an analysis of the dissolution of boundaries between productive and reproductive labor, but rather an analysis of “the restructuring of reproductive labor along the categories ‘race, class, gender’ on an international level” (2006, 82).

Oksala (2016) advances the critique further, agreeing with Schultz that the productive–reproductive distinction is not obsolete, but also suggesting that in fact we need more finely grained distinctions, and that four categories from traditional Marxist analyses—or at least from traditional feminist Marxist analyses—are the place to start (290). Oksala notes that if we attend to specific practices of affective labor, we find that the affective toil of reproducing labor power and social life (e.g. care work) can be distinguished from that of producing affects (e.g. Hochschild’s flight attendants), and that instead of aligning with unwaged and valorized labor respectively, both have paid and unpaid variants.

It is possible that Oksala understates the extent to which the four categories she outlines already deviate from “traditional Marxist analysis” (290). As she notes, no doubt paid affect production usually realizes profit for a company. Yet it clearly does not (or does not always) do so through the mode of surplus value extraction that orthodox Marxism attributes to the capitalist mode of production: while the affective labor-power is commodified, usually no alienable commodity is produced, and the work instead involves the direct investment of affective energy from worker to consumer through some modality of contact. ¹⁵ Thus if production includes affect production, then it is no longer limited to the work of producing externalizable commodities that can be circulated as exchange values. And this is one of Hardt and Negri’s key claims: that productive labor “cannot be limited to waged labor” (2000, 105). Then again, this is arguably also a key claim of at least some schools of traditional Marxist feminist analysis—see for example Ferguson’s notion of sex/affective labor as a mode of production (1989). Insofar as Hardt and Negri suggest that we must consider the ways that capital’s means of exploitation realize profit not only from paid affective labor, but also its unpaid varieties, they owe an unacknowledged debt to the well-established tradition of socialist feminist and black feminist projects on gendered and racialized labor.

Thus on the one hand, as Oksala, Schultz, and other feminist scholars argue compellingly, the move to simply disappear these distinctions, and with it the body of scholarship that is the natural ancestor and interlocutor for this new notion of affective labor, does not serve the research well. On the other hand, the version of the productive–reproductive distinction that Oksala reintroduces is as much an acknowledgment that these categories of analysis need to be revised as it is a return to them. What we must do then is cultivate revised categories of analysis through dialog with the relevant feminist scholarship and through attending closely to the embodied and relational phenomenology of affective labor in both its new and well-established forms, especially where it interacts with hierarchies of gender, race, and migrant status or global class.

My notion of the byproductive character of affective labor answers this call for the development of critical categories developed through analysis of specific and concrete practices of affective labor and in dialog with feminist scholarship. In its embodied specificity, affective labor is not only the work of producing affects for others to consume, nor the reproductive work that rejuvenates and sustains life and labor power, but also the work of metabolizing unwanted affects and affective byproducts. To think about affective labor as byproductive is to reorient our understanding of it such that beneath or beside the work that concerns affective products and their consumption by a consumer we can see the work that concerns affective byproducts and their metabolization by a worker.

I make three central claims about how byproductive labor offers a theory of affective labor. First, I argue that affective labor is always byproductive, whether it is productive (in Oksala’s sense of producing affects) or reproductive. Whether it is otherwise describable as a labor of affect production or social reproduction or both, affective labor invariably creates byproducts in the embodied subjectivity of the worker. The products of affective labor are not alienable from the worker: they cannot be exchanged or used without remainder that accumulates in the worker. The metabolization of this affective surplus is part of the after-hours cost of affective labor (in both its paid and unpaid forms), and is central to its unique forms of exploitation. The analysis of this labor as byproductive articulates the work of this labor, what it costs the worker: the uniquely affective expenditure that this toil requires.

Second, I argue that some affective labor is neither productive nor reproductive, at least not successfully so, and yet still can be understood as byproductive—indeed, in some cases it may be all the more byproductive through its failure as productive and reproductive labor. Thus the notion of affective labor as byproductive interacts with these categories, but also cuts across and even exceeds them, revealing a definitive aspect of affective labor that is not circumscribed by the productive–reproductive distinction.

And third, I argue not only that the byproductive character of affective labor and its exploitation interact with hierarchies of gender, race, and migrant status or global class: the forms of subjectivity constituted at these intersections are in part the byproducts of affective labor. Thus, byproductive labor is a neologism I develop to bring into view an affective economy and indeed a political economy of affects to the side of the distinction between productive and reproductive labor in its paid and unpaid variants. Theorizing affective labor as byproductive captures the uniqueness of affective labor and the forms of exploitation unique to it, but also explains the interaction of affective labor with forms of power that operate through subjection and hierarchies of social status.

A corporeal and relational phenomenology of affect-producing labor in Hochschild’s flight attendants

Hochschild’s study takes flight attendants as her paradigm case of emotional labor, asking “what it is that ‘people jobs’ actually require of workers”; what is “the actual nature of this labor?” (1983, 10) Noting the premium placed on the genuineness of the flight attendants’ smiles in their training program, Hochschild concludes that “[t]he company lays claim not simply to [the flight attendant’s] physical motions—how she handles the food trays—but to her emotional actions and the way they show in the ease of a smile” (7–8). A 1980 report ranking in-flight service warns that passengers are “quick to detect strained or forced smiles, and they come about wanting to enjoy the flight” (6). Hochschild’s account of emotional labor focuses on the industry’s emphasis on this implied link between the warmly felt smile of the flight attendant and the enjoyment of the passenger. The report ranked Delta’s in-flight service first in the industry, crediting the enjoyment of Delta passengers to the cheerful “brightness” of its “stewardesses”; a brightness which remained “undiminished,” the report notes, even when “our inspectors tested [them] by being deliberately exacting” (6). This emphasis on the warmly felt smiles of its in-flight staff is still a staple of airline advertising.

While some of the post-Hochschild social sciences literature on emotional labor distinguishes managing one’s own feelings from making others feel a certain way as two different types of emotion work, the crucial contribution of Hochschild’s account is located in her emphasis on the intimate relationship between these. When Hochschild writes that “the product” of emotional labor “is a state of mind,” she is referring to the state of the passengers’ mind, not that of the flight attendant herself. Yet the former is produced through managing the latter. This is the labor of emotional labor, according to Hochschild: it is the labor of producing affects for the consumer, but one in which the worker must “induce or suppress [her own] feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mine in others—in this case, the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe space” (7). Not only her postures and gestures, but also her feeling must be managed if she is to create a convincing display. This is why “the flight attendant is obliged not only to smile but to try to work up some warmth behind it” (19).

The implication is that the affect of the emotional laborer functions, not as outward reflection of a spontaneous inward truth, but rather as an intracorporeal circulation: the “genuine” smile can grow from outside-in as well as from inside-out. Its warmth lies not in its spontaneity, but in the thickness of this intracorporeal connection between feeling and display—a thickness susceptible to cultivation, management. And through this intracorporeal circulation, affects can have an intercorporeal broadcasting power. The implicit phenomenology and ontology of emotion the industry is banking on here is intriguingly complex, aligning less with traditional behaviorist or cognitivist accounts of emotion than with anti-dualist accounts of embodiment and emotional expression such as Merleau-Ponty’s and Fanon’s account of the body schema; as well as with very recent work on the socially circulated and transmitted character of emotion such as Ahmed’s and Brennan’s, both of which are indebted to the Spinozist sense of affect that has gained purchase in the affective turn: affect as the interactive constitution of individuals’ desires and capacities. I will return to Ahmed and Brennan below.

Hochschild uses a dramaturgical model to understand emotional labor, and she makes a distinction between surface and deep acting: the flight attendant’s smile will most powerfully broadcast the profitable emotional tone to the passenger when it is not only skin-deep, but backed up by a more viscerally and kinesthetically felt cheerfulness. The surface smile does not have the broadcasting amplitude that the emotionally deep one does. The company is banking the exchange value of its services on the intercorporeal transmitting power of this intracorporeal circulation. Hochschild cites an advertising jingle that boasts, “[o]ur smiles are not just painted on” (4). The ad “goes on to promise not just smiles and service but a travel experience of real happiness and calm” (4). The product advertised is the passengers’ feeling, produced by way of the flight attendants’ feeling. The ad promises the passenger that she will really feel cheerful warmth and convivial comfort, and the guarantor of this is that the attendants will really feel it too. The emotional labor of the flight attendant may be an affect-producing labor, but the worker’s own affects are both the means of production and a byproduct of the work.

Metabolizing affective surplus

While Hochschild analyzes the techniques taught to flight attendants according to models of performance such as Stanislavsky’s Method, the attendants’ work accords not only with dramaturgical models of performance, but also with key aspects of Butlerian models of performativity. Like Butler’s performative acts, the affective laborer’s deep acting achieves the effect of expressing an interiority that seems to precede the performance, but in fact is cultivated by it; these performances also publish their effect such that it is compelling and influential for others. ¹⁶

Thus, though Hochschild criticizes the increasing instrumentalization of feeling management, the critical vocabulary of instrumentalization is inadequate here. This work requires “not just the use, but the production of subjectivity” (Weeks 2007, 241, emphasis mine). This is a reason to disagree, not only with Hochschild’s categories for understanding the nature of exploitation in affective labor, but also for understanding the labor itself. In particular, what is produced by this labor is not only the others’ state of mind, but the workers’ own dispositions and attitudes as byproducts. Thus Hochschild’s description of affective labor as managing feeling in order to maintain the countenance that produces a certain state of mind in others is a superficial description. There is another operation hidden in the byproductive effects of this work, and it is here that we find the central operative logic of affective labor, one that describes what is unique about this sort of labor and the forms of exploitation that are specific to it.

Hochschild cites a flight attendant who, having spent her working day manufacturing the posture and disposition of cheerfulness and upbeat energy, worries:

Sometimes I come off a long trip in a state of utter exhaustion, but I find I can’t relax. I giggle a lot, I chatter, I call friends. It’s as if I can’t release myself from an artificially created elation that kept me ‘up’ on the trip. I hope to be able to come down from it better as I get better at the job (1983, 4).

This is also why the Marxist conceptual vocabulary not only of alienation but also of valorization is ill-fitting: Gutierrez-Rodriguez notes that the Marxist categories of use-value and exchange-value are at best awkwardly applied to the production and circulation of affects (2010, 140). The products of affective labor are accumulated in circulation rather than used up, incorporated and amplified rather than exchanged. The flight attendant’s effectiveness as an affect producer can be correlated to how deeply the affect takes hold in her own posture and disposition. As Hochschild writes, “behind the most effective display is the feeling that fits it” (1983, 7).

Since the affect the flight attendant produces cannot be fully externalized and alienated from her through commodification, it cannot circulate as an exchange value; neither is it necessarily used up in its consumption by the intended recipient. So the results of affective labor are not externalized in commodity form, circulating as exchange values and accumulating surplus value in the ways that alienable commodities do. Yet there is an intracorporeal circulation of affect in the work (and, insofar as it is successfully productive, an intercorporeal circulation as well) which gives rise to a specifically affective sort of accumulation: an accumulated affective byproduct the worker is charged with metabolizing.

Sara Ahmed’s theory of affect suggests that it is a general feature of affect and emotion as such that it “is produced as an effect of its circulation” (2004a, 45). Affects thus are always “affective economies”: much like monetary values, they are never fully present in the signs and bodies that are their currency in a given exchange. Ahmed draws an analogy to the Marxist notion of surplus value accumulation to posit a notion of affects as fundamentally amplificatory in the sense that they tend to accumulate a surplus as they circulate. In this way, emotions “work as a form of capital” (45).

But unlike literal capital, this surplus is often undesirable. For Ahmed, this “accumulation of affective value” in the circulation of affective economies is also a materialization in Butler’s sense of “the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface,” an affective intensification that “shapes the surfaces of bodies and worlds” (2004b, 121). As affective economies interact with gendered and racialized hierarchies, affective surpluses “stick” to feminized and racialized bodies, immobilizing their participation in the economy of an affect even as they are burdened with the affective surplus that economy produces. While Ahmed does not discuss affective labor as such, viewing her account from the perspective of the theory of affective labor as byproductive suggests the conclusion that feminization and racialization are themselves an exploitative form of affective labor—one which can intersect dynamically with more formally economic types of exploitation, especially in the context of the increasing economization of affect.

Hardt and Negri join feminist thinkers like Cantillon and Lynch in suggesting that the resistance of affective work to commodification is a source of hope and liberatory potential. ¹⁷ Yet understanding the byproductive character of the work, especially as illuminated through Ahmed’s notion of the sticky surplus of affective economies, we see that the resistance of affective work to commodification is not necessarily a site of liberatory potential. When we understand the byproductive character of affective labor, we see how the worker is charged with metabolizing the noncommodified surplus of affective labor—a metabolization that Ahmed’s account would suggest is hindered by the immobilizing work of the affective economies intersecting with gendered and racialized hierarchies. The byproductive character of affective labor interacts with gendered and racialized hierarchies to stick affective surpluses to marginalized bodies and charge them with the metabolization of these surpluses even as it immobilizes their participation in the affective economies that produce these surpluses, rendering them indigestible. ¹⁸

Containing affective waste, producing depletion

The aimed-for product of emotional labor as Hochschild theorizes it is always a profitable “state of mind in others” (1983, 7). But as we know all too well, flights are often full of grumpy, disgruntled airline passengers. Does this mean that flight attendants are simply unsuccessful much of the time? If that were the case, it would be difficult to explain how the vocation persists, and why airlines continue to advertise passengers’ feelings by way of flight attendants’ smiles. In order to solve the puzzle, we have to relinquish Hochschild’s emphasis on emotional labor’s similarity with commodity production, and deepen our analysis of its byproductive character.

In the last section I suggested that the affect the laborer produces is not used up in its consumption by the intended recipient; that it always leaves an affective remainder. Now I want to suggest that it may not be used at all: that the flight attendants’ efforts may frequently be useless in the sense that they do not have the intended effect of making the passengers feel cheerful and cared-for. When the labor fails at the affect production in the consumer that it aims at, it is a waste, wasted—yet as I will demonstrate, it is not mere waste. Even when it is unproductive, and perhaps thereby, affective labor is byproductive: it is a toil of containing or quarantining affective waste. Even when it is not productive of affective replenishment in the consumer, it produces affective depletion in the worker.

We must expand the notion of affective labor as byproductive in order to make sense of this. Even when the flight attendant is not successful in infecting her passengers with the cheerful affect she conjures in her own body, this does not mean that no circulation is occurring in an intercorporeal affective field. Instead, often circulation is taking place in the other direction: from consumer to worker instead of the other way around. Even as one hidden task of the flight attendant’s job is to absorb the byproducts of her own feeling management, there is often a second hidden task: the flight attendant’s job is not only to produce affects for consumption by managing her own feeling, but also and thereby to absorb unwanted affects from others and contain them.

Thus, even where her productive labor is wasted, useless, it is no mere waste. That is because this second byproductive hidden task or “shadow labor” is extracted from the flight attendant through her obligation to perform the first task: the cheer and conviviality the flight attendant produces may or may not be successfully transmitted, but in either case, the process of feeling management and the emphasis on the genuine smile all serve to make the flight attendant herself available as a receptacle for affect disposal from her passengers. Recall the reviewers of Delta’s service that Hochschild cites: they praise the flight attendant, not only for making them feel comfortable, but for the preternatural unflappability of her cheer even in the face of the reviewers’ self-described “exacting” behavior (Hochschild 1983, 6). The unacknowledged implication is that this sort of labor makes workers vulnerable to a unique kind of abuse, in which the ostensibly productive labor they are charged with is in fact refused uptake, and taken thereby as an opportunity to be “exacting” to someone whose job is to grin and bear it. I suspect this is especially obvious to those of us who have worked so-called “service jobs”: a considerable part of your work and its cost involve smiling in the face of whatever affect customers choose to project. The two byproductive tasks are functionally related: the second makes use of the first. Indeed, it makes use of the task itself: the intercorporeal affective traffic restrictions generated by the labor process, regardless of its results.

I want us to hear the connotation of waste, excess, and even digestion/indigestion in the conceptual vocabulary of “byproducts.” The affects the worker produces that remain in her are not produced for their own sake, or for her own sake. They are byproducts, waste side-effects, excess to be thrown away; and yet they are also the visceral organs of this work in the worker: the affective offal created in one’s own body in the production process.

There is thus a second way in which the two hidden byproductive tasks are interconnected: the second task becomes the first one, since the introjected waste affects become a feeling management task for the worker. The exacting or abusive passenger’s contempt and impatience become the worker’s own irritation and anger, which she is obliged to contain and manage, and never to express or reciprocate. She is effectively charged with taking these affects out of circulation, quarantining them, swallowing them. When the worker is obliged to absorb whatever customers choose to project without returning anything except a cheerful smile, then the task of feeling management becomes the task of containing others’ waste affects in herself. When I claim that affective labor is byproductive rather than primarily productive labor, I am also suggesting a parallel with sanitation and waste disposal. The affective laborer is not only charged with metabolizing the byproducts of her own efforts at managing feeling. She is also and thereby charged with containing and metabolizing waste and unwanted affects that others dump on her. The two byproductive tasks are not only functionally but also generationally related: the second becomes the first.

Brennan analyzes the depleting effects of waste affect in her work on the transmission of affect. She offers a theory of affect as an “interactive energetic economy” (2000), arguing that affects are never fully contained within our bodies or psyches, but exert energetic influence that can be either revitalizing and “enhancing” or deadening and “depleting” (2004, 6). When we relieve ourselves of unwanted affects by projecting them outward, “in popular parlance, this is called ‘dumping’” (6). As unwanted affects are “dumped” or disposed of in the bodies of marginalized others, social identities “are constituted in relation to the other through an energetic exchange” (42). Indeed, for Brennan this economy of affective waste disposal is the primary mechanism of marginalization: “the self-contained Western identity…[is a] construction [that] depends on projecting outside of ourselves unwanted affects such as anxiety and depression in a process commonly known as ‘othering’” (2004, 12). Like Ahmed, Brennan argues that affects are fundamentally intercorporeal; yet affective economies exist that produce experiences of affective impermeability for privileged subjects at the cost of burdening marginalized others with the depleting and immobilizing struggle to contain or metabolize unwanted affections.

For Brennan, projection is not merely attribution; it is a material affection that can mobilize or immobilize us, increasing or diminishing energies and capacities. Thus depleting economies of affect transmission are a central means of social subordination as well as a material exploitation of vital energy. This energetic economy of affect transmission is not necessarily zero-sum: the depleting and deadening effects of colonial racist or misogynist affect transmissions, while they sustain a structure of domination, do not necessarily correlate to affective enhancement for others. Affective economies, for Brennan, do not necessarily produce and redistribute life; they may also produce death and depletion.

This feature of affective economies interacts for Brennan with the necropolitical structure she finds in capitalist political economy. ¹⁹ Because the capitalist mode of production, she argues, is characterized by “the continuous overconsumption of nature,” capital is invested in “producing a more complete and final form of death” (2000, 2). [T]he production of commodities,” Brennan writes, “binds nature more and more in forms that are not biodegradable, forms incapable of re-entering the lifecycles via the reproduction of their own kind or their organic decay” (5). On this view, even where it is productive, capital is byproductive: its products are already byproducts, accumulating natural resources and binding them in ways that remove them from organic circulation. Brennan argues for an exacerbating connection between the affective economies of Western subject formation and this capitalist political economy that produces indigestible waste, depletion, and death.

While Brennan does not discuss affective labor as such, her notion of the depleting patterns of affect transmission that marginalize bodies through “dumping” unwanted affect in them is a crucial resource for understanding the byproductive character of affective labor as the labor of containing affective waste and producing depletion. When considered in light of my theory of affective labor as byproductive, Brennan’s analysis of the necropolitics of capital suggests the possibility that the increasing economization of affect is a means of what Mbembe has called the invention of new forms of “death-in-life” (2008, 161).

The intersectionality of byproductive labor ²⁰

Gutierrez-Rodriguez’s study of the domestic labor of migrant women of color analyzes this work, which often involves the mundane physical labor of sanitizing domestic spaces, as being more fundamentally a labor of affective sanitation, absorption, and revitalization (2014, 2010). Citing Brennan, she writes that “[i]n the encounter between domestic workers and their employers, more than an exchange of reproductive tasks or emotional labor occurs. In fact, what shapes these encounters is the transmission of affects” (2010, 6). She writes that “employing a domestic worker carries the promise of infusing the household with the positive vital forces of animation” (2010, 7). This revitalization is a matter of cleansing the domestic space of affective emptiness when it is unlived in, or the stress of clutter, or the disgust of “filth” or abject objects. In “touching personal things and rearranging…the space,” the domestic worker “leave[s] the presence of another person, connecting the household with another social space brought in by the domestic worker,” and thereby reproducing her employer’s home “as a space of potential conviviality” (131). Gutierrez-Rodriguez analyzes her interviews with migrant women domestic workers, finding that this affect waste management in domestic environments leaves “affective traces” or byproducts in the worker that she struggles to “digest…emotionally and bodily” (128): stress, fatigue, humiliation, and projected disgust and contempt (137, 135). When we understand affective labor as byproductive, it is clear why migrant domestic worker’s labor should be understood as affective labor: “[T]he domestic worker takes on the negative affective burden ingrained in this work” (2014, 48), absorbing the “depleting feelings” associated with the abject filth she disposes of, as well as those associated with her own devalued status both through association with this work and through racialization and immigrant status.

When Gutierrez-Rodriguez writes that domestic work involves “more than an exchange of reproductive tasks or emotional labor” (6), she is emphasizing the distance between the affective labor of the domestic worker from the cases that have usually been taken as paradigmatic of feminized or emotional labor: the more conspicuously reproductive care work that is “directly linked to the taking care of a person” (131–132). Gutierrez-Rodriguez warns against using the umbrella of reproductive labor to capture both domestic work and care work. Care is often personal service, professionalized, and coded not only feminine but also white and bourgeois; while domestic work is often de-professionalized and abjected as “dirty work” involving the disposal of filth and bodily detritus (2014, 46, 49), and associated with black and brown women.

This distance between domestic work and care work reflects the racialized division of reproductive work among women that Glenn documents (1992). Women of color are tasked with the de-personalized, de-professionalized, and abject dirty work of sanitizing and revitalizing domestic spaces, work that happens behind the scenes of the domestic social drama, disappearing the domestic worker in order to set the domestic stage instead for more principal actors. ²¹ One of the domestic workers in Gutierrez-Rodriguez’s study notes feeling “totally invisible and also completely worthless because there…is no thank you, no, ah, there you are again, you feel like a ghost” (2010, 1). The domestic worker is disappeared along with the filth she disposes of. This is indeed a stark contrast to the hypervisible emotional labor of Hochschild’s flight attendants, whose work centrally involves dramatic performances designed to transmit affects to consumers through direct contact. ²² The hidden affective expenditure of the work for the domestic worker involves containing and metabolizing the affective burden of being herself taken out with the trash: being made “invisible” and “worthless” through association with the dirt she removes. To dispose of the literal household filth is to absorb abject affects from the household members by becoming herself a container for them. The work is racialized through existing abject affects about people of color, but at the same time, racialized abjection of black and brown bodies is sustained through the delegation of this work to women of color.

Gutierrez-Rodriguez finds that this work often involves a racialized transmission of affect among women that is depleting for the workers and potentially rejuvenating for their white women employers. The white or bourgeois European women who employ the domestic workers in Gutierrez-Rodriguez’s study tend to discuss “the affective quality of time and life gained through the employment of a domestic worker” (134). For the employers, the presence of the domestic workers alleviates revulsion and fear around the prospect of being reduced to “the cleaning woman, the nursemaid,” of being stuck in the house (135)—one employer exclaims: “I would get sick of the sight of these four walls.” Gutierrez-Rodriguez observes among employers a tendency to link “happiness with the ability to be a professional woman” (135). Yet, as Gutierrez-Rodriguez is quick to point out, this enacts an “unhappiness…[that is] displaced onto another woman’s body” (135). Insofar as it revitalizes the white or bourgeois women employers, this is not only through actual gains in vital energy and time, but also through affirming their claim to the status and subjectivity of modern bourgeois professional woman, an affirmation that functions through a disavowal of the “old-fashioned” and devalued feminine identity of the housewife. ²³ The disavowal in turn functions through a projection of the devalued status of “cleaning woman” and “nursemaid” onto the migrant women of color who are paid to absorb it for the women who employ them—along with the affective waste that accompanies it.

On the one hand, analyzing both Hochschild’s flight attendants and Gutierrez-Rodriguez’s migrant domestic workers through the theory of affective labor as byproductive allows us to see that they can both be understood as byproductive affective laborers: both cases share a uniquely byproductive type of affective expenditure. Though the flight attendants work in the spotlight rather than behind the scenes, directly investing affective energy and attention into passengers, the analysis of this labor as byproductive makes conspicuous the backstage, after-hours affective expenditure of this work as the metabolization of affective surplus. And it illuminates a sense in which the flight attendant’s affective labor, despite its professionalized status and its race and class coding as white and bourgeois, still involves a kind of “dirty work” insofar as it involves the containment of depleting affective waste.

On the other hand, analyzing both cases through the theory of affective labor as byproductive allows us to contrast the byproductive aspects of both cases. Both the flight attendant and the domestic worker must metabolize affective surplus and contain depleting affective waste, but examining the byproductive aspect of the migrant domestic worker’s toil exposes a racialized division of affective labor among women. This tracks the racialized division of reproductive labor in which white women do direct contact emotional service and care work, while women of color do behind-the-scenes dirty work like cleaning and cooking. But viewed in terms of its byproductive character, this racialized division of labor involves a racialized affective economy among women that redistributes affective waste and the work of metabolizing and containing it. This work is part of a global redeployment of the division between paid and unpaid labor through a racialized and global hierarchy of affective labor. Feminized forms of labor that are coded white and bourgeois are professionalized, while domestic work and other feminized labor delegated to migrant women and women of color is not only devalued but also de-professionalized. In this way, the affective byproducts of the devaluation of feminized work itself are redistributed: the white or global upper class woman can distance herself from the devalued status of unpaid feminized reproductive labor as a “homemaker” or “housewife” by hiring a domestic worker.

Domestic work exploits the affective economy of migration and displacement itself in a way that places the depleting or deadening potential of byproductive labor for the migrant domestic worker close to the very nature of her toil. While flight attendants are encouraged to take their home to work with them by imagining that the airplane cabin is their own living room and the passenger a guest in their home, ²⁴ migrant domestic workers are literally displaced from their own homes and the social milieu of reproduction in their own lives and loved ones and placed in someone else’s home. Both are asked to put in the service of their work affective resources that come from their own social and domestic environments. But in the case of the flight attendant, her displacement from home and unpaid reproductive labor is part of the valuation of her work as professionalized: by being a flight attendant, she gets out of the home and distances herself from the devalued “housewife,” and positions herself instead as a professional hostess. In the case of the racialized migrant woman domestic worker, her displacement from home and unpaid reproductive labor is also the situation of being cut off or displaced from her own circumstance of social reproduction, the relationships and social milieu that sustains her. And this depleting displacement is leveraged in service of another’s home. Her ambivalent status as both a “migrant” and a “domestic” makes her an ideal receptacle for affective waste disposal, the “fairy” in the house that is in it but not of it. ²⁵ The worker who says she feels “invisible…worthless…like a ghost” (1) is describing her experience of her own ambivalent presence in her work situation as one of haunting: living death. ²⁶ And the affective byproducts of migration may themselves be exploited in service of the work: Ehrenreich and Hochschild offer an analysis of migrant women nannies’ displacement that suggests that the painful separation from their own families and children that they endure is itself an affective resource that is redistributed to white or global upper class children and families they care for: tenderness and empathy for the children in their care may itself be fueled by the pain of separation from their own children. ²⁷

Marginalized subjectivities and depleted affective agency as byproducts of affective labor

In her chapter on gender and status in affective labor, Hochschild finds that at the intersection of emotional labor with low status in the social hierarchy of gender the character of the work varies to include a unique set of demands: it is one sort of job for a man, and another for a woman. While women flight attendants reported significant effort spent soothing abusive passengers and absorbing aggressive affect, men reported far less of this work; meanwhile men flight attendants reported being called upon—often by women colleagues—to intervene with unruly passengers and invoke a tone of authority (1983, 164–165, 174–181). Here Hochschild’s account comes closest to acknowledging what I call the byproductive character of affective labor. “Females were expected to ‘take it’ better, it being more their role to absorb an expression of displeasure and less their role to put a stop to it” (178); less a task of changing displeasure to pleasure and more a task of absorbing and containing it, taking it out of circulation.

Hochschild observes that this feminized “shadow labor” functions as a task of status confirmation: affirming the privileged status of the consumer (167). She accounts for this feminized hidden task by appealing to gender as a pre-existing hierarchy of status: the pre-existing social status of men flight attendants as higher in a gendered hierarchy functions as a “shield” (177) from the brunt of the work of absorbing unwanted affect from passengers, in part through giving them access to a more authoritative affect or “tone.”

This is possible insofar as gender is already an affective hierarchy: affective authority or agency is afforded differently according to gender. Hochschild considers studies on gendered associations with anger: while men’s expressions of anger tend to be perceived as reasonable or understandable, a valid response to an angering situation rather than a reflection of personal instability; women’s anger tends to be perceived less as “a response to real events” and more as a reflection of us as “more emotional,” as “‘emotional’ women” (1983, 173). This empirical work has been repeated more recently, and demonstrates the persistence of gender’s function as an affective hierarchy. One study found that “Whereas women’s emotional reactions were attributed to internal characteristics (e.g., ‘she is an angry person’), men’s emotional reactions were attributed to external circumstances” (Brescoll and Uhlmann 2008, 268). Another study found that angry affect in men enhances the influence of their arguments over others, while angry affect in women decreases their influence on others—even when making the same arguments (Salerno and Peter-Hagene 2015).

Not only are certain dispositions or attitudes gendered; gender is itself already an intercorporeal affect script that affords agency and intercorporeal force to persons’ affects discriminately. ²⁸ In the affective hierarchy of gender, men’s affects tend to be perceived as intentionally engaged with the external world and thus rendered authoritative or agentic. They are granted uptake by others, and are more effective at mobilizing others to align with them. Yet women’s affects tend to be perceived as “dumb” bodily responses lacking in cognitive content, merely auto-affective. In turn, they are denied uptake, and rendered non-authoritative or non-agentic: less effective (or counter-effective) at moving others to align with us. This muting of affective intentionality is a tendency to receive women’s affects as always already being an excess, an outburst. And as such the agency of our affects is muted: their effectiveness as affections is diminished, as is their ability to move others to act with us, to orient them toward our projects or bring our own perspective and priorities compellingly into view, to produce a desired state of mind in them.

But I think Hochschild fails to appreciate the way that the intersection of affective labor and gender is dynamic and interactive, actually contributing to producing and sustaining the social hierarchy of gender rather than merely inertly crossing paths with it. This is part of what is at stake in taking seriously that affective labor is not only the production of affects, but of forms of subjectivity. Once we understand the byproductive character of affective labor and its intersections with gender and race, we can appreciate that its byproducts are not only isolated dispositions and attitudes, but a broader intercorporeal affect script: a form of subjectivity that may be used as a disposal ground for unwanted affects.

Ward’s study of the affective labor femmes ²⁹ do in intimate relationships with transmen to “bolster…gender authenticity” (2010, 79) ³⁰ offers an interesting case for considering, not only the way in which gender as such already functions as an affective hierarchy before that is deployed in the service of paid affective labor, but also the way that gendered affective hierarchy can itself be understood as the byproduct of the unpaid affective labor that is the performance of femininity. “Gender is itself a form of labor” (79), an affective labor, and this labor is feminized: “[g]ender labor, like other forms of caring, weighs down most heavily on feminine subjects, the people for whom ‘labors of love’ are naturalized, expected, or forced” (81). Ward identifies one part of the gender labor of a feminine-identified partner in a relationship with a transman as “the labor of being ‘the girl’”: she may be expected to perform her own femininity as a kind of affective labor that in turn “gives gender” (79) to her partner, bolstering his masculine subject status. Ward’s focus on relationships that involve non-normative or transgressive gender makes conspicuous the way in which the burden of this labor can stick to femininity, even in queer relationships that involve non-normative gender identity and expression. Her study offers us an opportunity to analyze feminized emotional labor in intimate relationships such that instead of framing this work as reproductive labor or producing useful care and nurturance, it is the production of forms of subjectivity—and not only for the worker: one’s gendered subjectivity is not only a “labor of the self” (79) but relies on the affective labor of intimate others (usually feminized). This analysis of gender as affective labor is helpfully analyzed through the notion of byproductive labor: the feminized form of subjectivity the worker/partner cultivates for herself is both the means of production and the byproduct of this labor.

As I pointed out above in my discussion of the intersectionality of byproductive labor, there are also racialized depletions of affective agency, and they intersect with gendered ones. Gutierrez-Rodriguez’s study supports the claim that there is a uniquely racialized diminishing of affective agency at stake in racialized affective labor. She invokes Ngai’s study of animatedness as racialized affect. ³¹ Ngai excavates a cultural archive of attributing to racialized persons an affective animatedness that is also constructed as automatism or ventriloquism, possession by an outside force (2005, 89–125). This racialized affect of animatedness is an excessive liveliness that is not one’s own life: not an expression the affective agency of the racialized individual, but a magical, capricious, or superstitious force that takes possession of her body and animates her. Just so, Gutierrez-Rodriguez argues, the racialized migrant woman domestic worker is positioned as a source of affective vitality, and thus capable of reanimating or revitalizing a domestic space; yet this affective vitality, like the space she is tasked with revitalizing, as always already dispossessed, constructed as not her own.

Even as the flight attendant’s apparent task is to produce the feeling of being cared for in her passengers, and the migrant domestic worker’s apparent task is to clean her employer’s home, the laboring process of this work insofar as it intersects with gender and race is one in which the affective worker functions as a container for waste affects even as her own affects’ agency is muted. Gendered and racialized affective hierarchy is sustained and redeployed through this laboring process. The pre-existing affective hierarchies of gender and race are redeployed as new forms of professionalized (flight attendant) or de-professionalized (domestic worker) feminized and racialized subjection.

While all affective labor, paid and unpaid, is byproductive in the sense that it invariably has constitutive effects on the subjectivity of the worker, the exploitation of affective labor that happens at its intersections with race and gender works by producing marginalized subjectivities: ones whose affective agency is diminished as non-intentional or non-authoritative, and who thereby are positioned as affect disposals, sites of affect accumulation.

Conclusion

My aim in this paper has been to make a case for a theory of affective labor as byproductive. Attempts to theorize affective labor as the dissolution of a boundary between production and reproduction are not adequate to understanding the way that marginalized forms of subjectivity in which people are made into sites of affect depletion are a significant and even paradigmatic product of this type of labor and the form of exploitation unique to it. But simply reintroducing amended forms of the productive–reproductive distinction will also not be adequate. We need new categories, ones that attend to the concrete specificity and intercorporeal phenomenology of this toil and its interactions with hierarchies of race, gender, and class or migrant status. My notion of byproductive labor aims to address this need.

Going forward, we need to theorize the affective economies revealed in this byproductive activity on their own terms, theorizing the unique forms of exploitation characteristic of them, and their interaction with marginalization and subjection. Insofar as marginalization and subjection are produced in affective economies, this raises the question of uniquely affective forms of privilege and oppression—some that may be well established, and others that may be emerging in the context of the increasing economization of affect.

One question my theory of affective labor as byproductive raises for me appears in the distance between my analysis of affective labor as byproductive and an analysis of it as reproductive. Insofar as my theory of affective labor emphasizes the metabolization of depleting affective surplus and the containment of abject or deadening affective waste, it represents a significant shift from the all too easy association of affective labor with reproductive labor: life-giving care and useful nurturance. I think Brennan’s necropolitical reading of capitalism (see earlier section “Containing affective waste, producing depletion”) is troubling but suggestive here. Is the appropriate framework for understanding the political economy of affective labor not biopolitical, but necropolitical?

As we develop theories of this uniquely affective modality of power, the way that it constitutes and exploits new (and old) forms of subjectivity and sociality, this can offer a vantage point on a world whose institutions are changing under our feet—changing, as Ehrenreich writes, “in a more violent and cataclysmic fashion than we had any reason to expect” (1995, 270).