Abstract
This essay uses autoethnography to illuminate the shifting conditions of global creative and academic labor. By reflecting on my experiences during a 2014 research trip to Manila, the Philippines, I, as a U.S. scholar, consider the different experiences of precarity in transnational cultural production, as academic and creative labor are both shaped by neoliberal structural forces. Through production autoethnography, I argue we may build forms of solidarity between cultural studies scholars and creative workers. Attending to the broader political changes that have occurred over the last several years, I conclude that as neoliberalism has lost its hegemonic authority, cultural producers, including cultural studies scholars, have the opportunity to help forge something better.
Keywords
Two years before Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte brought their authoritarian personalities and politics to national leadership, I boarded a flight to Manila at one in the morning on February 14, 2014. Quickly checking my email one final time from JFK Airport, I found a new newsletter from the organizers behind a transmedia project examining the street art scene in the Philippines. One of the artists, whom I’ll refer to as N, whom I would have otherwise met during the following week, had passed away. In the coming days, I would learn from his fellow artists that he had been enveloped in work, barely sleeping for at least a year, and was consuming four energy drinks a day to keep pace. He suffered a heart attack at the age of 26 in a Jeepney, the iconic Jeeps with their backs cut off that, left over from the U.S. military since the Second World War, serve as a crowded but cheap form of transit. Typically painted in bright colors, drawing on the aesthetics of street art, pop art, and graffiti, they are an icon of a modern city that has long been at the interstices of capital, culture, and empire. While I would have my passport readily stamped upon arrival at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, with literally no questions asked, N had stressed about the massive amount of paperwork necessary to leave his country after being invited by Converse to paint their offices in Shanghai.
The newsletter also announced my anticipated arrival, claiming that I would be “thrown into the fire.” Having not truly slept in 36 hr and fighting the jet lag from a 13-hr time shift, I had been. I sat outside the terminal in a two-deck crowded waiting area, filled with people and fast food joints, hoping to find my hosts, A and K. When they eventually arrive, they guide me on a tour through the sprawling urban labyrinth to A via five forms of transportation to A’s aunt’s home in Antipolo, a city at the northern edge of Metro Manila, where I would be staying for the next eight days.
A is a U.S.-born, half-Filipino man, and K is a White woman from upstate New York with a MFA in film studies; both—in their 20s—were the Program Director and the Producer of a project. They had invited me, after viewing my faculty webpage, to attend a fundraiser in Syracuse in August 2013. Having just moved closer to the Syracuse area that week because of my spouse’s new contingent faculty position, I attended the event and upped the ante. I asked if I could accompany them to Manila where they would be shooting their documentary about the emerging street art scene.
I drafted a proposal and received a newly established International Faculty Travel grant, aimed at encouraging faculty at my teaching-focused institution to bring global perspectives from Asia, Africa, or Latin America into the classroom. I planned my trip to meet K and A during my week-long break from teaching in mid-February. While there, I met members of two street art collectives based in Cavite, a city adjacent to the south of increasingly sprawling Metro Manila, as well as visiting artists from a collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
We—A, K, the artists, and I—were all working toward building our portfolios (or in my case, vita), funded through a combination of grants, art sales, donations, and paid labor for other work, with no direct remuneration for the labor—documentary making, painting, or research and publication—being performed in that particular setting. I soon realized that my trip represented the convergence of various forms of what Kathleen Kuehn and Thomas Corrigan (2013) term “hope labor” in the cultural economy. Hope labor refers to the ways in which social production is performed for free, or with little compensation, with the hope that it will lead to financial rewards down the road. As Kuehn and Corrigan explain, this is often via social media outlets such as Google, Facebook, and corporate-owned blogs that look to harness “social production to serve their commercial ends.” This work “arguably benefits the commercial firms that facilitate and harness it, rather than the users who create underlying value” (p. 9).
Despite having secured a tenure-track position with opportunities for funded global travel, I remained on the academic job market for multiple reasons. But the primary reason, the reason I knew I couldn’t rest at my institution, is my “two body problem”—the extreme unlikelihood that my academic spouse will also secure stable, full-time employment in a remote part of upstate New York. Although she taught at a prestigious institution, a mere 80-min drive away through the icy hills, she is on a temporary visiting contract. Her contingency is my own, as I wait anxiously from the other side of the planet to hear about a position in New York City—a place with options and possibilities, where even if we didn’t both have academic jobs, we might still enjoy life. Having been waiting, perhaps impatiently, after a phone interview for more than a month, the search chair told me she was just waiting for the dean’s approval to contact candidates . . . I should hear something soon. That was 2 weeks ago.
When we arrive at A’s aunt’s house in a gated community on a busy, multilane thoroughfare, I learn that there are other visitors who were still occupying what was to be my bedroom. Exhausted with nowhere to put my body, I wait in the living room and check my email. I learn that two close colleagues have been invited to campus visits. For me, I’ve heard nothing.
Feeling crushed, K and A eventually lead me to a hotel across the highway. I check in for the night. Tomorrow, the work continues.
___
In this essay, I use autoethnography to illuminate the shifting conditions of global creative and academic labor. By reflecting on my experiences during a research trip in Manila, the Philippines, I, as a U.S. scholar, consider the different experiences of precarity in transnational cultural production. In particular, I examine how “hope labor”—as a global phenomenon that connects the structural realities of late neoliberalism’s labor market to affect—produces forms of both alienation and solidarity.
Neoliberal economic policies across the globe have aimed to spur economic growth by relying on financial power rather than productivity, while dramatically driving down labor costs since the 1970s, producing a global “reserve army of labor”—the unemployed or underemployed on whom capital depends to drive down the wages of the formally employed workforce—of approximately 2.4 billion people, approximately 70% larger than the International Labour Organization’s (ILO’s) estimated size of the active labor army of 1.4 billion (McChesney & Foster, 2012, p. 144). Perhaps, no sector of the economy has been better at ensuring a precariously employed and willingly exploited labor pool than the creative industries, which aim to profit from everyday social production enabled by new technologies. This has been a key strategy for growth in the face of stagnation, as capital aims to develop modes of accumulation. The pervasive discourse around the “creative economy,” which Toby Miller (2012) suggests originated with Governor Ronald Reagan in the 1960s (p. 72), has served ideological ends, making precarious forms of employment seem to be a matter of choice and perhaps even socially progressive given their flexibility.
Although classic ethnographies of media production, such as Gaye Tuchman’s (1978) study of newsrooms and Todd Gitlin’s (1983/2000) study of network television entertainment, examine the role of professional, above-the-line labor, they “unwittingly captured an end of an era” as new technologies facilitated more efficient modes of production for the sector (Lotz, 2009, p. 33). In recent years, an expanding number of critical perspectives (see, for example, Andrejevic, 2004; Cohen, 2016; Palm, 2017) have emerged to conceptualize the productive dimensions of nonprofessional labor in the media and communication sectors as “[boundaries collapse] between producers’ identities as workers, the representations they created, and the audiences they served” (Mayer, 2011, p. 17; pp. 14-15).
Although Christian Fuchs (2012) has theorized these transformations in media labor by building on the work of Dallas Smythe (1977), highlighting the productive work media consumers do in the digital age (see also Cohen, 2008; Dolber, 2016; Lee, 2011; Manzerolle, 2010; McGuigan, 2012), others have sought to explore the fluidity between consumer and producer and the diversification of forms of accumulation within media industries through ethnographic methods. Such scholarship (e.g., Mayer, Banks, & Caldwell, 2009) “[looks] up and down the food chains of production hierarchies, to understand how people work through professional organizations and informal networks to form communities of shared practices, languages, and cultural understandings of the world” (p. 4). What is important here is not necessarily how media are made but rather how media production is a site of the “reproduction of social hierarchies and inequalities at the level of daily interaction” (Mayer et al., 2009, p. 4).
I seek to examine these dynamics through what I term production autoethnography—autoethnography that explores the terrain of cultural production, including academic research itself—to illuminate the lived experience of creative labor within what Sarah Banet-Weiser (2011) terms “convergence.” Although this term is widely used to refer to the merging of technologies and platforms, Banet-Weiser argues that “convergence” may connote the ways that political, economic, cultural, and historical transitions blur boundaries between the commercial and the “authentic,” qualities from which the creative industries derive value as they are mobilized toward “revitalizing and transforming place and space” (Banet-Weiser, 2011, p. 642).
Banet-Weiser argues that street art has emerged “as an important element of contemporary convergence culture” and can highlight the ways in which power and ideologies structure and facilitate particular convergences over others, how new technological forms are accompanied by attendant new configurations of labour and labour practices, and how cultural dynamics of aesthetics and creativity in public and private spaces become imbricated in new economic convergences.
By attending to these dynamics, she demonstrates that dominant understandings of convergence often obscure “the economic role that commercial culture plays.” Although the “relationship between creative practices and commercial culture is often considered as a cooperation,” Banet-Weiser argues it is, in fact, “a kind of competition in which some creative practices are obscured at the expense of others” (p. 644).
The outcomes of such competition are shaped, if not determined, by the “massively stratified labor markets for the production of culture” (Miller, 2012, p. 82). Using Richard Florida’s (2002) Rise of the Creative Class as a manual for urban development, state and corporate actors have aimed to reconstruct urban spaces as the locus for a new class of workers without the social stigma or radical proclivities of the classic proletariat. As such, Rosalind Gill (2014) notes that a growing body of scholarship sees cultural workers as the “poster children of precarity,” characterized by their lack of certainty as to “how they will survive beyond the end of the next project, and living in a mode that requires constant attentiveness and vigilance to the possibility of future work” (p. 14) Hope labor then functions as a strategy within this competition among the creative precariat.
In developing methodologies to understand these phenomena, it is important to remember that the institutions academics inhabit have also been restructured in accordance with neoliberal principles. Although higher education blossomed alongside the Keynesian welfare state, predicated on producing research to benefit U.S. Cold War goals and a middle class of consumers, students are now compelled to go into increasing amounts of debt to finance the possibility of attaining a middle-class lifestyle on the other side. Thus, there are growing pressures to deliver measurable outcomes—the likelihood of economic success and security following graduation—at lower costs. Gill (2014) argues that academic workers now experience “precariousness, time pressure, and surveillance” in ways that are characteristic of the creative industries (p. 18) and suggests that we consider academic labor “a species of cultural work.” Noting that “hope labor stretches across the labor market,” into the academy, Kuehn and Corrigan (2013) call for “[r]esearch that reflexively engages higher education’s role in institutionalizing hope labor” (p. 20). More specifically, Gill (2014) points to the need for a “politicised language for thinking about the labouring experience of academics and ‘creatives’” (p. 26).
Production autoethnography has the potential to help develop such a language. Rather than rendering my own experiences as a precarious worker invisible, this method helps me answer questions about the lived conditions of the contemporary global political economy. As Gill (2014) cautions, the aim here “is not to disavow the privilege of academic workers, but it is to raise questions about how we might think about both privilege and exploitation- and hold these together” (p. 26). Through my reflections in this essay, I interrogate my own relationship to the creative industry as part of the broader dynamics of global capitalism in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Autoethnography is useful, according to Christina Ceisel (2018), “not because it privileges the personal, but because it universalizes the individual” (p. 10). Its explanatory power is its ability to locate individualized experiences within a complex social matrix rife with commonalities, contradictions, and inequities. By taking a “Cubist approach,” performance autoethnography, in particular, highlights the myriad ways knowledge is produced and the myriad perspectives that demand consideration, decentering the scholar and raising epistemological questions.
Through this endeavor, autoethnography emphasizes “relational over autonomous patterns, interconnectedness over independence, translucence over transparency, and dialogue and performance over monologue and reading” (Tedlock, 2008, p. 152). Thus, it helps develop “a caring relation” that “assumes a sense of connected knowing, a knowing that ‘carries with it an intimacy that presumes a sharing of Self and Other, a felt relation between knower and known’” (Ceglowski, 2002, p. 15; citing Helle, 1991, p. 54). As Ceisel and Salvo (2018) put it, autoethnography “explores a particular type of being-with . . . that of an intimacy.” By “[rehumanizing] the abstract speaking position of the political subject,” autoethnography can reconsider politics’ reductive tendencies and forge relationships that might be politicized, with new insights into how social structures operate. When applied to studies of cultural production, it can help foster new forms of solidarity across the global creative industries in an effort to transform them.
I develop this methodology to contribute to the broader project of cultural studies as envisioned by Stuart Hall. In his “Encoding/Decoding” essay, Hall (1980) argued that media representations are read in a variety of ways—dominant, negotiated, and resistant. These readings are informed (although not determined) by the social position of the audience. As such, the essay provided a cornerstone for the building of audience studies scholarship, challenging the positivist paradigm that placed primacy on understanding “effects.”
However, Hall’s work has not been equally influential in making sense of media production, wherein the dialectical tensions between agency and structure are also consequential. Hall understood that encoding, like its counterpart, is shaped by the technical infrastructure, the relations of production, and frameworks of knowledge. Studying this complicated process is crucial not simply because it might allow us to understand ways in which hegemonic and counterhegemonic meanings become imbued in media texts; it also facilitates scholarly engagement with cultural production as part of a broader project aimed at social transformation.
Such possibilities are greatest in moments of conjunctural crisis, when hegemony is not solidified. This occurs, as Gramsci suggested, when “different forces . . . come together to create the new terrain on which a different politics must form up” (Hall, 1988, p. 163). In these moments, production ethnography may illuminate the conditions within modes of production that are as wildly in flux as the meanings they create. For critical scholars, this should be seen as a strategic political undertaking. As Hall (1981/2006) put it, popular culture is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture—already fully formed—might be simply expressed. But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why “popular culture” matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it. (p. 487)
Production autoethnography can move this one step further. The self-reflexive researcher sees themselves as part of the same mode of production as those with whom they collaborate. This enables them to encode scholarly work with radical perspectives while developing social relationships that challenge dominant modes of cultural production.
In this exercise, I draw from my experience between February 14, 2014, the day I departed for Manila, and February 23, 2014, when I returned to New York. Although some of this research has been presented at several conferences, it has taken me over 4 years to complete this piece. In recounting my experiences and my conversations with the participants in K’s and A’s project, I rely on a combination of field notes and memory shaped by time and historical transformation. I have moved between coasts, jobs, and institutions. The political landscape in both the United States and the Philippines have been dramatically altered. Although people I met in 2014 readily agreed to let me write about them, I cannot say with certainty that they would give me the same permission now, as the Philippines has taken a turn toward the authoritarian. As such, names have been changed, and I avoid giving any identifying information about the artists and activists I met. Rather than offering objective snapshots of my time in Manila, I use this essay to explore the varied experiences of hope labor I encountered, as I have reflected upon them over the years.
Leave the Academy!
I woke up in Cavite, a city on the southern edge of Metro Manila, having slept on the floor of a small bedroom alongside two of the Bay Area street artists. I had gone there with K and A, as they documented the painting of several murals dedicated to N prior to a memorial service. Still exhausted from jet lag and my 20-hr flight, I wanted to talk to my wife. Given the 12-hr time difference, I knew I only had a few hours to try to contact her via Skype, FaceTime, Facebook, or Google Chat—whichever application would work best. I took my iPhone and left the apartment, played human Frogger against six lanes of traffic, and tried to get a WiFi signal from the large mall—the embodiment of the convergence of public–private space that dominates the Mega Manila. Upon logging into my Facebook account, I found an op-ed from the New York Times sent to me by an old friend from high school posted on my wall, with the comment: Leave the academy!
In the article, which would be widely circulated and criticized in the coming days, Nicholas Kristof (2014) chided professors for not taking full advantage of online technologies to circulate their work and make it relevant for the public. I apparently was not working hard enough to make the case that my work was of social use and deserving of social support. Ironically, this labor would have to consist of contributing to the profits of private corporations like Facebook, which persistently undermine the notion of a public commons.
I am not alone. Over the course of the week, K—who had recently completed her MFA—and I talked repeatedly about the challenges of being a graduate student, teaching, and the pros and cons of an academic career. Even though she identified much more as a media maker than an academic worker, these roles had largely converged. K had taught as an adjunct instructor at the university where she earned her MFA. One aspect of the transmedia endeavor was what she and A termed “The Imagination Project” where they shot footage to be sent to students to be cut and made into web videos. Although this aspect of the project was essential for FSAP to secure funding, she and A received no pay for their contributions to a college course.
Reliable employment within these academic disciplines has not expanded in spite of this growth. My home department at a state college relies heavily on adjunct faculty to teach production-oriented courses that aim to deliver skills in accordance with an increasingly competitive job market in the media industry. The Imagination Project serves as yet another mechanism to develop marketable media skills with little cost to the university. K and A were performing international hope labor to produce a new generation of hope laborers.
The art world and the academic world converge. R, a close friend and collaborator of N, also works as a college art instructor. Having met briefly in Cavite, we have plans to meet up at the Starbucks inside a mall near the University of Manila before he teaches on Tuesday morning. I take my first trip into Manila without my hosts. It’s a longer-than-expected 2-hr trek on jeepney, foot, train, and taxi. I’m exhausted, hot, and late. I wait for another hour for his class to end. We sit in a booth.
“When I was still in college,” he tells me, “I already made up my mind that I was going to be a teacher. I know that I have something to say and I want to be able to do that. Most [Filipinos] are conditioned to migrate . . . get a degree and leave. We are suffering from brain drain. It does more harm. It’s not a long-term solution to a problem.”
R’s income from teaching allows him to sustain his artwork while contributing to his national community. By developing basic art skills, R believes that his students may be able to work in the Philippines’ growing private sector with its links to the creative economy. But he also understands the creative pressures that such developments put on artists. He tells me that a major developer who owns megamalls had approached R and N not long ago: They wanted us to paint on their building. But they simply wanted us to replicate that design. For a while I considered it, because I have a budget, but it’s very inconsiderate for us because we do creative works. We’re not just replicating. So the project did not go through. That’s how corporations view the artists, they view us as painting houses . . . It’s not effective because it does not provoke attention.
In addition to losing control over their creativity, R notes the economic strain companies are putting on artists through the expectation of hope labor. “We have this very disappointing meeting with an ad agency,” he tells me, “They invited young practicing artists who are relatively on the rise. They wanted us to paint for a TV commercial for [a large conglomerate involved in real estate development and malls] and they told us that we will not get paid. They wanted us to do it for free, just so we’ll get exposure. They said our work will be printed on calendars, there will be movie commercial.”
While R asked about payment “in a very nice manner,” he was saddened his colleagues did not bat an eye about working for free. R saw this as part of the Philippines’ view of its own culture as subservient and deferential, following years of imperial rule and exploitation. In addition, he sees it being perpetuated through a media and consumer culture of distraction, fueled by a growing discourse of national arrival and technological advancement. Although R notes that social media have been essential for the promotion of street art in the Philippines, he says most Filipinos “can’t focus on one thing . . .”
“We are happy to the point that we ignore what’s happening.”
What Is Happening?
In the two decades prior to my trip, Metro Manila grew from 8 million to 12 million people. Surrounding Metro Manila is Mega Manila, adding an additional 13 million people to the megapolis. While my own country sought to recover from the 2008 financial meltdown, the Philippines experienced the highest unemployment rate in Southeast Asia, at 7.3% in 2013 (Santos, 2014). As U.S. millennials faced the rising cost of education, student loan debt, and the inability to afford home mortgages, 48.8% of jobless Filipinos were 15 to 24 years old, whereas those between 25 to 34 years old accounted for 30% in 2013 (Philippine Statistics Authority, 2013).
But while the U.S. economy was stagnant, the Philippines’ gross domestic product (GDP) grew between 6% and 7.5%, in some quarters exceeding the pace of China and all other countries in Southeast Asia (Ratanjee & Leong, 2014). In addition, although 8.5% of the Philippines’ GDP in 2014 came from international remittances, where Filipinos in diaspora send earnings back in U.S. dollars and other more valuable currencies, the Aquino administration prioritized attracting foreign direct investment to compete with other Southeast Asian countries (Lowe, 2013; “Philippines: Remittances,” 2015).
The contradictions of unemployment and growth are visible as I walk along Manila’s pedestrian unfriendly sidewalks. I notice postings announcing the availability of call center jobs, as well as for classes in English proficiency that promise entry into this sector. These are ubiquitous throughout the growing areas of the city where malls and high-rise condo buildings sprout. Condominium prices have increased by 36.4% (18.9% inflation-adjusted) between the third-quarter of 2010 and the first-quarter of 2014. By this point, property prices had more than doubled, or increased by one-third in real terms, over the prior decade. In 2013, Philippine property experienced the fifth highest price rise in the world (“Slowdown in residential,” 2014). In neighborhoods like Cubao, where images of Che Guevara decorate bars and restaurants, developers brand new projects as spaces where a growing bourgeoisie may realize their cosmopolitan dreams.
The years since the financial crisis have also seen assaults on democracy and journalism. In 2009, the Maguindanao massacre saw the death of 34 Filipino journalists, making the country the second most deadly country for reporters (Committee to Protect Journalists, 2014). In the United States, the Obama administration pursues a record number of cases against whistleblowers, while newspapers close their doors and lay off reporters in the wake of the financial crisis.
With blind eyes turned, states become increasingly brutal. In the United States, Obama deports 2 million undocumented immigrants and expands Bush’s war on terror; in the Philippines, tensions grow between the government and the Muslim minority in the south. In the northern province of Luzon, agricultural policies impoverished peasants. While U.S. policies enable extreme carbon extraction in the face of extreme weather such as Hurricane Sandy, 9,000 Filipinos die in typhoons, including 6,000 when Yolanda (or Haiyan) ripped through the Visayas just months before my arrival. As Saskia Sassen (2014) notes, such displacement and death are indicative of a broader trend—“expulsions”—that characterizes our current stage of capitalism.
It’s More Fun in Makati
At the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Tourism Forum in Malaysia in February 2014, the Philippines’ booth—“usually one of the ones considered to be more modest in tourism fairs the world over”—promoted the country with an open bar, paid entertainment. In one of the largest displays at the conference, they launched their new slogan, “It’s More Fun in the Philippines,” while aiming to downplay the impact of the typhoon (“Philippines shows,” 2014). As a video of Filipinos dancing to the pop hit “Happy” by Pharrell Williams went viral, the trade press reported: “Hurting from Haiyan? The Philippines, without a doubt, is not” (Mussett, 2014; “Philippines shows,” 2014).
Metro Manila’s financial district Makati has become the primary signifier of the Philippines’ “arrival.” Revealing itself as a major node within the networks of cultural and capital flows, Makati was dubbed the “selfie capital of the world” in 2013, with the most photos tagged #selfie on Instagram, outpacing New York and Miami (Forgione, 2013). But despite this global connectedness, Makati functions as a bubble, in two senses of the term, as the influx of capital shields residents from the surrounding communities.
The district is home to a vibrant and growing food, art, and culture scene. I attend a corporate-sponsored art show, with free wine, hors d’oeuvres, and ping-pong tables, and hobnob with an international set of artists and scenesters.
“Where are you staying?”
“Antipolo.”
(Blank stare)
“It’s at the northern edge of the city,” I explained, having seemingly traversed the megapolis in the last 4 days more than the permanent residents ever had. To them, Makati was Manila. Manila was on the move; it was a hot place to be.
The first time I visit the district, I accompany K and A on a tuk tuk. They wear their gear on their backs as we speed through the streets helmetless and arrive at a moderately rundown apartment building. We go up the elevator, and meet D, an artist and prominent scenester born in the San Francisco Bay Area of half-Filipino ancestry. I chat with him as we enter his apartment while K and A set up their gear in the living room to prepare to interview him for their documentary.
D tells me that he had lived for a while in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, a major site of gentrification where I had spent the summer of 2011 following the completion of my PhD. We briefly discuss the local bar, whose beer garden had been right beneath my window, and the lamb burgers they served at the adjacent hipster bistro. But when I began my tenure-track position in the foothills of the Catskills, D had already moved to Japan. While visiting the Philippines in March 2011, the Fukushima disaster happened. D opted to move to Manila permanently upon witnessing “the birth of a scene,” where his rent, he tells me, is less than his phone bill had been in the United States.
K conducts the interview. I quietly observe from off to the side of A’s camera.
“Cities are hiring street artists to paint murals,” D explains. “[Companies such as] SM, Globe and Smart are tapping young creatives to do campaigns and even consult. It’s a good way to see it evolving organically and also people who love it for the passion and are getting paid for it. They move into the mainstream. It’s really cool to see.” Rather than inhibiting his creativity, D believes he can leverage such corporate strategies for his own artistic ambitions. He is “connected with a lot of people who own resorts” and thinks these might provide creative opportunities. “You can’t complain about waking up to clear blue waters and spreading the art, which is what every artist wants to do.”
D embraces precarity as his “sporadic, random, creative” lifestyle, as he shapes a vibrant scene and makes connections between the worlds of art, food, fashion, and tourism. At the same time, he wants artists to reap the rewards of their labor: “I want to see a bunch of artists’ lofts, and studios, whole neighborhoods painted, walls painted. A lot of times the artists get left out . . . We’re setting the tone of the city. Pay your artists, we are giving ourselves to what we do.”
“I feel blessed to be here . . . It’s a fun place to be in the know about. There are so many levels of entertainment and so much creativity that you can tap into. There’s something I can’t really explain. I like not knowing what I’m going to do next week. I want to bring in more creative musicians and artists and give Manila and the Filipino people what they deserve. I think 2014 has a lot in store. So many people want to expand businesses, do shows here, come and create here. . .The Philippines is on the cusp of that.”
But being an artist, particularly a street artist, is ultimately about risk. “We don’t have the money to pay for billboards, or wall space. One of the roots of graffiti was to get fame and get their name known. At the end of the day it’s street art, you’ve got to take the precautions and punishments.”
The interview wraps up, and the four of us—D, K, A, and I—head out for artisanal tacos. Having spent the last decade in three college towns, each one smaller than the next, I am enjoying experiencing contemporary cosmopolitan culture, of feeling part of a “scene,” if only in a very ancillary way and for a brief period of time.
Devastated by the job prospects back home, I ask, what is this for? If we have all been connected to Manila through the circuits of hope labor, then perhaps this is my wage—I get to travel to the other side of the planet for some tasty tacos in a restaurant adorned with images of Frida Kahlo.
D invites us to an event where he’ll be painting that Friday, at a trendy art and music space where they sell vinyl comic book-inspired figures.
Is this the best we can hope for?
From Internships to Activism
K, A, and I make our way to the campus of University of the Philippines Diliman (UP-Diliman). One of the only public institutions in the country’s mostly private higher education system, UP-Diliman has been a site of controversy as it has restructured its academic calendar. Classes now end in the summer so that students will be compelled to take internships for an array of companies. As at my home institution, where administrators and many of my colleagues emphasize our need to provide students with “marketable skills” by substituting classroom learning with “real world experience” for academic credit, this is a pedagogy of precarity.
K and A introduce me to L, an activist with a radical Filipino youth organization. The organization is fighting against the internship program. L tells me it is an attack on their education, part of a broader neocolonial effort that damages Filipino’s independence by integrating students into capitalist labor relations. Rather than padding their resumes, L and his organization have built their own media center to engage in political struggle.
“We want to spark something in the Philippines,” says L: The mainstream media is not really delivering or telling the truth. They are manipulating facts . . . They want to privatize all the basic services of the government. They want to put a price on everything. That is not the truth. We don’t want to sound righteous; we just want people to know what the truth is.
L believes that media can serve as more than information; rather, he wants to use the organization’s center as a locus of media production to foster an engaged, radicalized community: Some will be pissed. some of my friends do art for nothing. They just do art because they want to. There’s a purpose for art. Effect on what’s happening in society. There should be something done. The Europeans have great artists because they depicted the history of their times. In the Philippines it’s like canned goods. It’s for money. Ching Ching.
Activists, though, are different. “When it comes to activists,” L says, “they don’t sell it . . . They are collecting the thoughts of everyone and putting it in art.”
One such artist-activist is B. His wheat pastes—a medium far cheaper than spray paint—depict the struggles of the peasantry in the countryside. B subsists on a few dollars a week and has been taking clear political risks as an organizer in a repressive environment. K and A spent much of the time during my visit trying to get an interview with him; he had been unreachable for weeks, having just returned from the provinces where he had been organizing peasants being forcibly relocated from their land.
As K and A told me, B’s political commitments were increasingly distancing him from the artistic community. L argues that B’s art differs from many of the others in Manila because of its explicit political content: “He shows police smashing a grandmom or a child. It’s the truth.”
Such modes of expression exist within the context of late capitalist media culture. “The youth nowadays doesn’t have a long attention span,” says L. “We don’t have time to view a long film. When you see street art it only takes you three or four seconds, then you have a thought.”
All of this occurs, like hope labor, under conditions we don’t choose. “Artists must compromise individual style,” L tells me. As Chairman Mao said, art is like two factors, form and intent. What is important is the intent. As an activist, B is thinking that way. He’s not into “this is my individual expression of society.”
“It’s bigger than him.”
Democracy . . . Now?
I’ve moved from A’s aunt’s home back into a small room at the hotel across the road from the gated community where I had already stayed. I had tried to return to the home late at night after attending an indie rock show. Uncertain of the home address, I spent about 2 hr searching for the home in the gated community maze, before surrendering to exhaustion and frustration. The gated community is just one example of the high level of security I’ve noticed over the last few days. At Manila’s malls and metro stations, gender-segregated lines form as armed officers guard entrances. The neoliberal and the authoritarian are never really that far removed from each other.
I lay in bed and stream the U.S.-based public affairs program, Democracy Now! on my laptop . . .
We turn now to Venezuela, where at least six people have died in recent days during a series of anti-government protests. On Wednesday, a local beauty queen died of a gunshot wound. The protests come less than a year after the death of Hugo Chávez and present the biggest challenge to Venezuela’s new president, Nicolás Maduro. Earlier this week, right-wing opposition leader Leopoldo López turned himself in to the National Guard after authorities issued a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of inciting deadly clashes. On Monday, Maduro ordered the expulsion of three U.S. consular officials while claiming the United States has sided with the opposition.
Well, to find out more, we go to Philadelphia to speak with George Ciccariello-Maher, author of We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution. He teaches political science at Drexel University in Philadelphia, previously taught at the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas.
What is happening in Venezuela today?
Well, there’s a great deal happening, and I think you’ve got your finger on the fact that this is a crucial test for the Maduro government. And I think it’s our obligation to put it in its broad historical context to understand who’s acting. And I think there’s a tendency—there’s an unfortunate tendency, if you follow Twitter or if you’re on the Internet, that, you know, in this sort of post-Occupy moment and in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, every time we see—every time we see protesters in the streets, we start retweeting it, and we start to sort of, you know, feel sympathetic, without necessarily knowing what the back story is. And I think we’re obligated to do that here. And once we look into this back story, what we see is yet another attempt in a long string of attempts of the Venezuelan opposition to oust a democratically elected government, this time taking advantage of student mobilizations against—you know, ostensibly against insecurity and against economic difficulties to do that (“Venezuelan Protests,” 2014).
How do we respond? We must address social issues. We must make art for the people because that’s what street art is. It’s giving art back to the people. It’s giving them access. We have a lot of distractions—internet, tv, movies, billboards . . . We might not wait for the zombie apocalypse, it’s already here. Most of us have lost the ability to think critically. I think street art promotes the idea that we must think critically. When we see something we are not quite familiar with it triggers me, “what is it about”?
K and A have told me that B, the artist-activist, has finally gotten in touch with them.
We may be able to arrange a meeting that day, back at the Diliman campus.
I can come with them.
I can talk to some other student activists while they conduct their interview.
But given B’s underground organizing work, I probably should not be there.
Tomorrow, I go home.
Coda
2015
K and A have returned from the Philippines and are living in the Bay Area working at tech companies. While in the postproduction stages of their project, they visit my campus and talk to my students about transmedia production. I coordinate the event, “closing the loop” on my grant and bringing international perspectives to my campus.
Although I have failed to secure an escape plan, my spouse is offered a job at a public university in southern California. On June 16, Donald Trump declares his candidacy for the presidency . . . “They’re rapists, they’re murderers, some I assume are good people.” On June 17, Dylan Roof kills nine worshippers at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
That day, we begin our 2-week trip to Los Angeles, the heart of the hope economy. But rather than being able to negotiate the coveted spousal hire that so many of my mentors had enjoyed, I am told, “join the adjunct pool.” Relying on grad school connections in the region, I secure three courses—two in media studies, one in oral communication—at a very small, private college.
But at such a small institution, the need for courses to be taught two semesters in a row is limited. With no work guaranteed for the spring semester, I thought, with my PhD in hand and after 4 years on the tenure track, “maybe I could be an Uber driver?”
2016
I ring in the New Year driving my first shift for Uber. But I wouldn’t be just and Uber driver. I’d write about my experience and revitalize my career. And where better to do this than Los Angeles—than Hollywood!—where thousands of service workers trying to scrape by, when really they are actors, writers, directors, musicians.
One month later, I begin a job as a research for the hotel workers union I complete my book manuscript—a history of Jewish socialist media in the U.S. based on my dissertation. I send the final draft off to the publisher at 5 a.m., before heading to work at the hotel workers union, where I’ve taken a job in their research department. For my 10 years of work on the project, I am paid US$815.
June 23, Brexit is approved.
June 30, Rodrigo Duterte takes the office of President of the Philippines, launching a brutal “war on drugs.”
Frustrated with the lack of autonomy I had become used to in the academy, I secure teaching gigs for the fall, one of them at a campus 2 hr south in San Diego County. I attend the lecturer orientation and the faculty retreat, where I learn they will be making a hire in media policy for the 2017-2018 year . . .
November 8, Donald Trump is elected President of the United States.
2017-2018
January 20, Trump takes office. I have an interview on Zoom for the media policy position.
By March, I have been given a tenure-track job offer. Tenure-track. I begin in the fall.
August 12, Charlottesville.
The next week, I begin my new job and return to working on this essay, but its subject feels distanced. Although I have seemingly insulated myself from the conditions of precarity—I have a tenure-track job in the same region as my spouse! I’ve won the academic jackpot!—existence itself feels increasingly precarious. The neoliberal conditions that I had struggled against, personally and collectively, throughout my adult life, are morphing rapidly as reactionary nationalism takes hold across the globe.
On December 31, George Cicariello-Maher, the associate professor who had explained the situation in Venezuela to me, resigns his position from Drexel University. Having been suspended from his campus for critiquing the right-wing’s myth of “white genocide” on Twitter, he now finds maintaining his tenured position “unsustainable” in the face of death threats by White supremacists (Gray, 2017).
By summer 2018, I have nearly completed my essay. But what about the artists? Where are they now, in our new authoritarian age? Do they still, like Shepard Fairey asked us to, have hope?
Through Google Arts and Culture—a project K and A had discussed partnering with—I can find much of the work from the artists I had met. It’s all 4 years old. Through Facebook, I see that K and A are now married and traveling through Eastern Europe. I search for any indication that their project ever came to fruition; the last posts on their Tumblr were from 4 years ago. They appear to have fallen just shy of their fundraising goals. I don’t think they ever finished their film.
As Kuehn and Corrigan (2013) demonstrate, hope labor operates ideologically. We rationalize unpaid work as “a legitimate avenue for securing future employment,” while denying the “fundamental uncertainty” of whether or not the investment will pay off. Further, that uncertainty is justified through a belief that the system is meritocratic—that those who are most talented or who are the hardest working will be those who ultimately succeed. As I have worked to demonstrate, hope labor occurs in a transnational casino, the odds unknown, the tables slanted in ways that benefit some over others but that ensure ultimately that the house always wins. With each roll of the dice, our hope, to varying degrees, fades.
As Nancy Fraser (2017) argues, neoliberalism has lost its hegemonic authority. Its economic and political structures may remain, but world events since 2016 demonstrate that they lack popular consent, necessitating authoritarian force. In this interregnum, cultural producers, including cultural studies scholars, have the opportunity to help forge something better. We must labor, sometimes for free, not for the promise of more work but for the ability to remake culture itself.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to Christina Ceisel for her enormous assistance in developing the methodology and insights in this article. I also thank my hosts and the many artists and activists I met during my week in Manila. This essay would not exist without their collaboration.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This essay with written with the generous support of the International Faculty Travel Grant, awarded by SUNY College at Oneonta.